WfJ1IIlE1IS ",1.",111' 25¢ No. 428 .':ii'-. X·S23 15 May 1987 All Roads Lead to the Contra in Chief

Grace/Newsweek Johnston/Washington Post Democratic Party-controlled committee to "investigate" Contragate is out to contain the damage" covering up Reagan's crimes ...and theirs. ea anae: emocras over "Live, from Washington, D.C., it's Adviser McFarlane said he'd written it not be done "in a way that suggests to one, all right-"intensely aware" of the the Iran/Contragate hearings." It's on a 3x5 card, which was returned with our adversaries that we are a nation secret contra aid, said Republican billed as high TV docudrama, elaborate­ expressions of presidential satisfaction divided." No indeed. Northand a couple Senator Cohen; "very knowledgeable," ly staged with soft cop/hard cop rou­ and pleasure. How did investigators of sidekicks now safely outside the said Inouye. And then ...nothing, be­ tines, Country I and Country 2 code discover "Reagan knew" about the Iran­ Reagan administration are being set up cause the "threat to the presidency" is names, "Follow the Money" and other contra. funds diversion? "They must as fall guys, pleading guilty to tax fraud too great. Who could -expect any trivial pursuits. All supposedly to track have found the memo," Lieutenant for having solicited contra arms money different? down the overt/covert funding of the Colonel Oliver North is said to have from wealthy right-wingers for ostensi­ Some of the key players willnaturally CIA's' contra mercenaries in contraven­ replied, remarking something to the bly tax-deductible "educational" pur­ stonewall. Conveniently for the admin­ tion of various Congressional prohibi­ effect that he must have "missed one" in poses. (Reagan says he thought the istration, William Casey's lipsare sealed tions, U.S. laws and other impediments. his "shredding party." In spite of the dough was for contra. commercials.) forever: the day before he was to testify "When did you tell the president about attempts at obliteration, it's clear that This is part of a plea bargain, not in before the Tower Commission, the ex­ this? And what did you tell him?" all roads lead to the Contra in Chief., return for their testimony against CIA chief had a seizure and had half his intoned Senate investigative committee But the TV "investigation" being higher-ups but in return for their:silence. brain removed, so he couldn't talk (or chief counsel Arthur Liman, tossing off played out by the Congressional Dem­ This is not going after Al Capone but mumble) to Congressional investiga­ his Watergate line he's been practicing ocrats is cover-up city. Committee after a pair of his capos on income tax tors; he expired the very day General for weeks. Former National Security chairman Inouye declared that it will charges. They'll show that Reagan's the continued on page 12

CIA's Contras Murder American Volunteer Salute Ben Linder On April 28 Benjamin Linder, an revolution that will put an end to American volunteer working in Nica­ Yankee imperialism and its bloody ragua, was executed by a contra hit crimes. Benjamin squad. He was the firstAmerican killed Ben Linder was a mechanical en­ Linder gineer working on hydroelectric proj­ working on by the counterrevolutionaries who have Nicaraguan slaughtered more than 15,000 Nicara­ ects in the mountains near the Hondu­ ~ere hydroelectric guans in their dirty war. Linder's ran border. Killed along with him project. murderers-armed, paid and directed two Nicaraguans, Paulo Rosales and by the United States government-are Sergio Hernandez from San Jose de NICA engaged in a last-ditch drive to loosen Bocay, who were helping Linder bring government killed my brother. The possibly two feet away or less. What I Congressional purse strings with an electricity to their village. In the last five contras killed my brother, and Reagan amtelling youistheyblew hisbrainsout orgy of bloodletting. Even as the contra years thousands of Nicaraguan peasants at gunpoint, thereas helaywounded at says he is a contra." the site." killers carried out their crime, Washing­ and workers have been killed by the This was cold-blooded murder. ton was undertaking the largest-ever contra cutthroats. Hundreds of teach­ Contra disinformation claimed Linder They did it by the book: this execution is war "maneuvers" in Central America, ers, doctors, technicians and profession­ was caught in a crossfire. But his father, a page taken straight from the CIA's targeting Sandinista Nicaragua. Ben­ als, including nine internacionalistas, David Linder, a pathologist, released a murder manual, which called for "neu­ jamin Linder gave his life in defense of have been assassinated. But it was medical examiner's report showing that tralizing" Sandinista officialsand devel­ the Nicaraguan Revolution. His heroic Linder's death at the hands of U.S.­ his son survived the initial barrage, opment workers. The FDN. contras example and internationalist commit­ directed mercenaries which has brought immobilized by rifle fire: vowed to continue the assassinations. ment must inspire class-conscious work­ the war home to many Americans. His "He wasthenkilled bya gunshotwound And the White House blamed Linder ers and militant youth to dedicate their older brother John denounced the to his head. The powderthen suggests for his own death, saying that he had put lives to the struggle for an American authors ofthecrime: "The United States that he was shot at very close range, continued on page 11 ----Bush in the Bushes?---- Bedroom'Snoops Sink Gary Hart

American politics is awash in sleaze. about everybody not born into the Gary Hart's forced withdrawal as the "Fortune 500." front-running Democratic presidential Is it an accident that this scandal contender-they're calling it "cam­ exploded just the daybefore the Iran­ paignus interruptus"-has the Repub­ gate-Contragate Congressional hear­ licans oozing glee. "I can't deny that it ings opened? For an administration in has been a great media diversion," what former CIA chief George Bush smirked president-ial spokesman Marlin would call "deep doodoo,' it couldn't . Fitzwater. They've had plenty of prob­ have come at a more convenient time. lems lately on their side of the aisle: the Talk about "dirty tricks": at Hart's vicious lying moron Reagan crippled fund-raiser kicking off the '88 campaign, and his whole crew of incompetent wild federal marshals came in and seized the men and contra murderers stonewalling funds (supposedly for back '84 debts). in Congress, Meese's dabbling in Wed­ Back in 1972 there was a group known tech, the Deaver and Donovan deals, as the "White House plumbers," who etc. It's a sign of these hypocritical brought us Watergate, a program of Moral Majority times that it only took a _sabotage, break-ins and smear jobs couple of well-placed "anonymous tips" against the Democrats. Interestingly, to set the entire press corps on Hart like part of the intention ofNixon's hatchet­ a pack of wolves. men was to ensure the nomination of It wasn't the National Enquirer that George McGovern, who they calculated did Hart·in. The Miami Herald's was seen as so far out the Democrats "Miami vice" act, turning its reporters were guaranteed to lose, as indeed into stakeout snoops hoping to catch happened. McGovern's campaign man­ Hart in the act, or at least in the presence ager: Gary Hart. of a leggy blonde model, was despicable. So now Gary Hart's been got. If it Carl Iwasaki The Washington Post got in a final Reagan's legion of indecency strikesagain, hounding Gary Hart for seeing wasn't G. Gordon Liddy, we wonder: blow, telling the beleaguered Hart model Donna Rice. Government, media snoops out of the bedroom! was there a Bush lurking in thebushes campaign it had its own '87-model outside that Washington townhouse? "Deep Throat," complete' with docu­ according to a Newsweek (18 May) poll, committed adultery?" For many past What tips did dirty trickster Nixon ments, ready to reveal a Hart liaison 70 percent of the American public is presidents, this was simply treated as a really give Reagan on how to handle with a Washington society lady. All the opposed to media spying, and two out of fact of life. Warren G. Harding, Frank­ Contragate? The New York Times titled "responsible" media smarmily defended three think Hart got a raw deal. lin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Ken­ a boxed chronology of Hart's political their prying into politicians' private lives It was a new low when a reporter nedy come to mind-Roosevelt even demise "Eight Days in May," an by claiming "public interest." But actually asked Hart, "Have you ever mobilized the Secret Service to ensure obvious takeoff on Seven Days in May, privacy for his meetings with his mis­ the movie about a secret generals' coup tress. It used to be they waited until plot against the U.S. government. they were dead before the "now it can be Whether or not Gary Hart "courted told" stuff came out-and they certainly danger," had a political "deathwish," or Fighting Fascism in France weren't about to sing about Jack was a "pantless chump" (in the words of Hitler's victory in Germany in 1933 arid Kennedy's affair with a Mafia moll. the London Guardian) is irrelevant. the world depression plunged France into As we've said many times, govern­ That he obviously felt himself suscepti­ social crisis. Mounting fascist terror gave ment has no business interfering in ble to this campaign of sexual blackmail rise to a bonapartistgo.vernment resting on private life, which means basically sex. by "anonymous" smear jobs abetted by the state and military bureaucracy. Radi­ The corollary is that the private life of the whorish media is a condemnation of calized workers moved to the left oftheir people in government should be the vicious hypocrisy of this society. Stalinist and social-democratic leader­ nobody's business either. Interesting, Why don't they just tell the witchhunters ships, who twisted their keenly felt need perhaps, but a little screwing around is to go to hell, as former Nixon flack for united-front action into a bureaucratic no crime against humanity, unlike the William Safire suggested? Because the vicious imperialist wars-both open Democrats have tried to out-Reagan TROTSKY straitjacket. From his precarious exile in LENIN France, Trotsky wrote: and secret-against everyone and every­ Reagan on' everything from the drug thing that interferes with capitalism's witchhunt to Meese's sex police (not to ... if the united front, assuring its rear and its flanks against the fascist bands, profits. As for Hart's "character," what mention voting for contra aid). Eight­ opens up a broad political offensive under the slogan ofconquest ofpower, it will we've got to say is he's' a dangerous plus years of "Moral Majority" cru­ awaken an echo so powerful as to exceed the most optimistic expectations.... "more bangfor the buck" Cold Warrior. sades, beginning under Jimmy "lust in There is no need of inventing means of struggle. They are provided by the whole Like every other Democratic and the heart" Carter, have created a climate history of the world working class movement. Republican candidate in a field scat­ of hysteria in which nobody's safe. Concentrated campaigns iii the working class press pounding steadily on the same tered with second-rate nonentities, What's next-mandatory chastity belts key; real socialist speeches from the tribune of parliament, not by tame deputies but certified fanatics, war criminals and for declared .candidates (to be removed by the leaders of the people; the utilization of every electoral campaign for CIA spies, Hart wants to preside over only for periodic.obligatory urine drug revolutionary purposes; repeated meetings to which the masses come not merely to . a system thatexploits and oppressesjust tests)?_ hear the speakers but to'get the slogans and directives of the hour; the creation and strengthening of the workers' militia; well-organized demonstrations driving the reactionary bands from the streets; protest strikes; an open campaign for the unification and enlargement of the trade union ranks under the banner of resolute class struggle; stubborn, carefully calculated activity to win the army over to the SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY cause of the' people; broader strikes; more powerful demonstrations; the general National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York. NY 10116. (212) 732-7860 strike of toilers of town and country; a general offensive against the Bonapartist government; for the workers' and peasants' power. Atlanta . Detroit Norfolk -Leon Trotsky, Whither France? (October 1934) Box 4012 Box 441794 Box 1972, Main PO Atlanta, GA 30302 Detroit, MI 48244 Norfolk, VA 23501 Boston Los Angeles Oakland . . '. Box 840, Central Sta. Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta. Box 32552 Cambridge, MA 02139 Los Angeles, CA 90029 Oakland, CA 94604 !!~'!c!!!o!'!1..f!!I.~!! ~ (617) 492-3928 (213) 380-8239 . (415) 839-0851 Chicago Madison San Francisco DIRECTOR OF PARTY PUBLICATIONS: Liz Gordon Box 6441, Main PO c/o SYL, Box 2074 Box 5712 EDITOR: Jan Norden Chicago, IL 60680 Madison, WI 53701 San Francisco, CA 94101 PRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah Wilner (312) 663~0715 (608) 257-8625 (415) 863-6963 CIRCULATION MANAGER: Jon Lawrence Cleveland New York Washington, D.C. EDITORIAL BOARD: Bonnie Brodie, Jon Brule, George Foster, Liz Gordon, Frank Hunter, Jan Norden, James Robertson, Reuben Samuels, Joseph Seymour, Box 91037 Box 444, Canal St. Sta. Box 75073 Alison Spencer, Marjorie Stamberg;Noah Wilner (Closing editor) Cleveland, OH 44101 New York, NY 10013 Washington, D.C. 20013 '#Workers Vanguard (USPS 098-770) published biweekly, except 2nd issue August and with 3-week interval Deeember, (216) 881-3700 (212) 267-1025 (202) 636-3537 by the Spartacist Publishing Co., 41 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007.Telephone: 732-7862 (Editorial), 732<7861 (Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. Domestic subscriptions: $5.cli,1,f4 issues. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Wo;kers Vaflguard,' Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. Toronto OPinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint. TROISKYIST LEAGUE. Box 7198, Station A OF CANADA Toronto, Ontario M5W 1X8 No. 428 15 May 1987 (416) 593-4138

2 WORKERS VANGUARD Franee; For Workers Action to Smash the Fascists! PARIS-A wave of racist attacks is ment's CRS riot police turned their tear tively posed in the form ofthe defense of "left" austerity program on the petty spreading around France as storm­ gas grenades against the immigrants, our immigrant class brothers and all bourgeoisie, but also from the anti­ troopers set out to "conquerthe streets." then launched their own racist anti­ those who the fascists consider as Soviet and anti-immigrant policies of In the space of a week thugs of the fascist immigrant riot. A few days later at 'degenerates' and 'subhumans' and want the Mitterrand government that ren­ National Front (FN) militarily occupied Vitrolles, near Marseille, a local leader to exterminate." dered his program of racist and anti­ the center of Marseille and terrorized a of the National Front fired his P-38 at a Communist terror increasingly re­ neighborhood in Lyon for hours, both Jewish youth-demonstrating again The Fascist Danger and spectable. Today he offers up his shock times under the protection of.the police that Arabs are not the only intended How to Fight It troops to the bourgeoisie as a spearhead of "Socialist" president Mitterrand and victims of the fascists' "program for In 1934 Trotsky characterized French of social reaction. Some members of conservative premier Chirac. On May 7, genocide. " fascism as follows: • Chirac's shaky parliamentary majority, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the In Lyon after another of Le Pen's "It is still too weak for the direct eager for revenge on the working class office of a Communist-led union in rallies a commando of 4Q. fascists struggle for power, but it is strong and frustrated by the government's Rouen. That same night a fascist invaded the. Croix-Rousse neighbor- enough to attempt to beat down the paralysis after the shock ofthe railway- commando sacked the offices of an organization of immigrant youth in Lyon and stole its membership list. They' left behind a portrait of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi "Butcher of Lyon" whose trial started May 11. In Paris, more than 10,000 National Front supporters marched on May 10, the day commemorating Joan of Arc Mitterrand's and a traditional rallying point for popular front paved way French reaction. In addition to saluting for fascist the FN Fuhrer Le Pen and launching his Le Pen (left)", candidacy for the 1988 presidential whose thugs election, they applauded the portrait of (right) beat Marshal Petain, leader of the Nazi­ immigrant collaborationist Vichy regime in World workers in War II. The next day, a bomb was . Marseille, thrown at an immigrant cultural center April 4. in Marseille, wounding three. Mean­ while, Barbie's trial has provoked the resurgence of tracts" peddling the Nazi Big Lie that the murder of six million hood on the night of AprillO-11, armed working class organizations bit by bit, men's strike, are beginning to take this Jews never happened. This proliferation with clubs, iron bars and pistols. For to temper its bands in its attacks, and to offer seriously. of fascist provocations and attacks is an spread dismay and lack of self­ two hours they attacked immigrants and confidence among the ranks of the . Today's reformist saboteurs of the. alarm signal for the entire working class. youth, besieging neighborhood resi­ workers.... Nothing increases the inso­ anti-fascist struggle, after having de­ Last December hundreds of thou­ dents in North African cafes and lence of fascists more than 'flabby cided to "ignore" the fascists as insignifi­ sands of workers joined students dem­ vandalizing the offices of community pacifism' on the part of the workers cant, now argue that the National Front onstrating in Paris alongside immigrant groups, a theater and mailboxes with organizations. Nothing destroys the has grown too strong to permit success­ confidence of the middle classes in the families and youth against -the racist Arab names. The Lyon FN gloried in working class as much as temporizing, ful workers mobilizations against these murder of Malik Oussekine. And in a this assault, calling on the populationto passivity, and the absence of the will to scum! But it is not too late to turn the strike wave this winter, the most drive out "leftist committees, gangs of struggle." situation around. powerful since May '68, French workers hoodlums and the foreigners that they -Whither France? On a small scale in Elbeuf, a working­ forced the reactionary government to organize." Croix-Rousse was not cho­ (October, 1934) class suburb of Rouen, a de facto united backtrack on a number of proposed sen by accident: it is well known for Fascism mobilizes and arms the lum­ front of .left organizations mobilized retrogressive social measures. Since being racially integrated and a center of penproletariat and petty bourgeoisie hit several dozen worker militants, includ­ then the proletariat has remained ready leftist activity. by'the economic crisis, and driven to a ing from the nearby Renault-Cleon for action. A working-class counter­ The Lyon local of the Ligue frenzy by the impotence of parliamen­ plant, against the fascist thugs. Their offensive to this escalation by the fas­ Trotskyste de France (LTF), section of tary democracy and the reformist action successfully prevented a repeat of cists is now a burning necessity. But it the international Spartacist tendency, . workers parties to resolve the crisis. the February 28 fascist attack on left has run up against the barrier of the issued a leaflet April 14 calling for Designating "Jewish capital," immi­ newspaper salesmen at the local market bureaucratic misleaders who hamstring mobilizing the power of the working grant workers and "communist agita­ in which a member of the Ligue Com­ any real workers mobilization with class in Lyon's industrial suburbs "to tors"as scapegoats,fascism aims at noth­ muniste Revolutionnaire (LCR) was their class-collaborationist politics. The protect this neighborhood by defense ing less than the physical destruction sent to the hospital. The LTF played an struggle against fascism is above -all a" groups based on the trade unions and of the organized workers movement, important role in this mobilization, as it struggle to forge a new revolutionary supported by neighborhood residents. and' the liquidation of all democratic is well known for having initiated the II leadership of the working class. The defense of the organized workers rights. December 1981 Rouen demonstration movement which Le Pen dreams of After 1981 Le Pen benefited not only under the slogan' "Stop the fascists!" Le Pen Gangsters in Action crushing under an iron heel is impera- from the impact of the popular front's which drew support from several trade On April 4 in Marseille, France's unions and other organizations, mobi­ "segregation city," Le Pen put himselfat lizing some 400 persons including a .the head of some 20,000 "demonstra­ number of trade unionists. Itis this kind tors" screaming racist insults; Their of workers action which is now needed goal-"recover the Canediere'<-was an on a much' wider scale to sweep the outright racist provocation. The Cane­ fascist scum off the streets. diere, the main avenue of Marseille, is But recent "protest" demonstrations adjacent to the predominantly North organized by the Communist Party African immigrant neighborhood of (PCF), the Socialist Party or "SOS Belsunce. In an earlier mass rally Le Pen Racisme," supported by the "far left," demanded "resistance against deca­ put the defense of the victims of racist dence and foreign occupation" as his terror in the hands ofthe class enemy by shock troops made ready to act on these calling on the cops to intervene! Work­ calls to racist murder. Unfortunately, ers and immigrants can only rely on they found only a few hundred combat­ their own strength, their own organiza­ ive immigrant youth and not thousands tion and their own mobilizations to of the city's dockers and railwaymen in defend themselves, their path: the CGT and CFDT trade­ The leadership of the main workers union federations (controlled respec­ party, the PCF; bears the main responsi­ tively by the Stalinists and the social bility for the lack of response to the democrats) refused to mobilize in fascist provocations. A leading PCF defense of Belsunce. " spokesman, Charles Fiterman [ex­ Le Pen's thugs went berserk, sending minister in the Mitterrand government], several anti-racist demonstrators or actually attempted to "unmask" Le Pen simple passers-by to the hospital. One as unpatriotic (!) for his support to the rabid fascist even fired a pistol shot at a Cochin/Keystone Common Market: "He is ready to window from which an anti-Le Pen Student strikes rocked France last winter, protested cop murder of immi­ liquidate French independence and slogan had been shouted! The govern- grant youth. continued on page 15 15 MAY 1987 3 Vi,ctory to Midwest Meatpackers Strikes! No More Hormel Betrayals!

CHICAGO-Two thousand five hun­ scabs!" As the march passed the 99­ dred packinghouse workers in Sioux year-old Cudahy packinghouse, union­ Falls, South Dakota honored a roving ists chanted "Scabs Out, Union In!" picket line on Friday, May 1, the P-40 hit the bricks January 3 after working-class holiday, and they've been rejecting Cudahy's demands for massive out on a sympathy strike ever since.The wage cuts, benefit reductions and work roving pickets were sent by Local 1142 rule changes. The company's arrogant of the United Food and Commercial demands are the final straw for P-40 Workers (UFCW) at the John Morrell members, who have already been & Co. plant in Sioux City, Iowa. Local through the concessions mill twice in the 1142 hit the street March 9, more than a last six years, losing over $3 per hour. month after Morrell unilaterally im­ . Unionism itself is on the chopping posed a contract "agreement" that block, as non-union outfits pop up and slashed wages by $1.25an hour-this on older companies try to give recalcitrant top of the more than $3-an-hour cut locals the "Hormel treatment," imitat­ ing the way. Hormel (and the UFCW forced on the 750 members of this local WV Photo three years ago. Up in Sioux Falls, International tops) wiped out the com­ Cudahy, Wisconsin: 3,OOO-strong labor rally backs striking meatpackers, Local 304-A members know what's at . bative Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota April 12. stake. "When they've crushed Sioux last year. A workers offensive must be City like a peanut, they're going to come mounted to organize the non-union until June 3! leading role in waging class struggle here," explained business agent Jim houses and win a decent uniform Cudahy bosses have exploited the against racist capitalism. . Lyons, adding, "good union people industrywide wage scale and benefits. desperation of blacks in Milwaukee, as the state unemployment office pro­ Dump the Bureaucrats- honor picket lines" (Des Moines Regis­ Labor can bring the packinghouse Break with the Democrats! ter, 2 May). bosses to their knees only by reviving vides scabs from the disproportion­ Across the Midwest during the last six the weapons of militant working-class ately black unemployed. In recent years, Both the UFCW International labor years packinghouse workers, particular­ solidarity-mass picket lines that no plant shutdowns and layoffs have hit traitors and their "progressive oppo­ ly in the pork industry, have beengrven one crosses, "hot-cargoing" (refusing to Milwaukee hard, and black Milwaukee nents" in the union (like the former P-9 the shaft with almost 20,000 jobs' handle) struck products, plant occupa­ hardest: the city's official unemploy­ leadership) are lined up behind the washed down the drain and wagescut to tions, and an industrywide meatpackers ment rate is 28 percent, second only to strikebreaking Democratic Party. Fea­ the bone-and then some. In addition to strike. Detroit (Milwaukee Journal, 16 Janu­ tured at the Cudahy rally was black the Morrell strikes, 850 members of ary). Meanwhile the capitalists and their Democrat Jesse Jackson, darling of the UFCW Local P-40 in Cudahy, Wiscon­ UFCW Tops-Labor Cops government have enforced a system of reformist left, which brought him to sin have been on strike for four months, The misleaders of the UFCW Inter­ metropolitan segregation with the Mil­ Austin during the Hormel strike. Jack­ as 700 scabs cross their lines. Iowa Beef national, who act as labor cops for the waukee ghetto surrounded by white son gave his now-familiar presidential Products (IBP), the notorious anti­ packers, have' sent one isolated local suburbs like the company town of campaign speech tailored to the mainly labor subsidiary of Occidental Petro- after another to the giveback kill floor. 'Cudahy. The significant number of white farm belt communities of the black P-40 members employed at the Midwest. He explicitly counterposed packinghouse face housing discrimina­ "economic violence" to racist terror as tion if they try to live in the city where the "real". issue in America today. they work. Cudahy is one of two dozen What's needed, he said, is a coalition to towns currently resisting a Milwaukee get rid of Reagan and bring about "new Board of Education lawsuit that would corporate behavior" based on "sound allow inner-city black students to trans­ economic morals." Preaching "morals" fer to suburban schools. Even this .to the class that takes food stamps from minimal integration measure is too the poor to pay for its anti-Soviet war much for the racists who killed busing. drive, that butchers thousands of The racial antagonisms fueled by workers from the kill floors of the the company's move to take hundreds Midwest to the coal mines of West of blacks across P-40's picket lines Virginia? Jackson, who pointedly 'met erupted in the second week of the strike, with the Cudahy bosses and scabs in the when, according to Local P-40 sec­ plant, went to Cudahy and Austin to retary-treasurer KeI\ Toepel, backward bury Class struggle by chaining the white pickets taunted the scabs with working class to the Democrats. racial slurs. This kind of disgusting The liberation of working people and racist crap has no pl~cepn a union oppressed minorities will only come National Guard broke militant Iowa Beef ProcessorS strike in 1982. picket line, and threatens the survival of about through a revolutionary struggle the integrated union! After the racist to overturn the decaying profit system, leum, meantime, is going all-out to When P-9 tried to fight back, UFCW slurs, the P-40 leadership dished out in which Wall Street barons pocket the smash a strike by UFCW Local b22at its chief William Wynn helped Hormel liberal lectures on the plight of the . billions they make ripping the industrial Dakota City, Nebraska beef slaughter­ smash the local and then organized the strikebreakers and ordered its pickets heart out of America, The only answer ing plant (just across the state line from . scabs into the union! Now the Interna­ not to interfere with them. Later, union to this imperialist rot is a nationalized Sioux City). tional uses the P-9defeat to peddle more spokesmen at the April 12 rally de­ planned economy administered by a IBP's union-busting is notorious: in betrayals-from Dakota City to Cuda­ nounced Cudahy and the capitalist press workers government. Worker militants the 1969, 1977and 1982strikes they ran hy. UFCW official Lewie Anderson for attempting to foster racial divisions must unchain labor and blacks through scabs into the plant under the guns of recently told the New York Times (18 in the strike. But it is the refusal of the a fight to oust the labor fakers from the state troopers or National Guardsmen. January), "We examined the Hormel pro-eapitalist labor bureaucracy to fight unions and build a class-struggle work­ Workers at the plant are slaughtered situation very carefully and we con­ this deeply racist system that allows the ers party. With Reagan on the skids, along with cattle, as over one-third of cluded that to follow the tactics that bourgeoisie to set up the working class now is the time for some good hard class the workforce is injured annually on the they did of putting large numbers of for race war. . struggle to rout the packinghouse bosses job. "The union says the lost workday people on the picket line to try and stop The disastrous conse;Iuences of let­ and their flunkeys! Victory to the rate was 43 percent higher than the scabs from working was a disaster." ting the bosses play the race card can be Cudahy, Morrell and IBP strikes!. average for the meatpacking industry, . This time, at Cudahy, the strike is seen in the decimation of the 1919 which is already one of the most being run by the UFCW tops-right Chicago meatpackers strike (see our dangerous manufacturing industries in into the ground. At the April 12 rally, review of the TV film The Killing Floor, the country.... In 1986alone, more than P-4O president Mark Rosenbaum at­ "Chicago 1919: Racism and Union­ Spartacist League 1,500employees quit work at the plant" tacked the courageous P-9 strikers for Busting," WV No. 422, 20 February). Public Offices (Los Angeles Times, 2 March). IBP has dividing the union! P-9 battled a "united ,What's needed now is integrated recruited 800 Cambodians, Laotians front" of cops, courts, National Guard, mass picketing to stop the scabs and ...,..MARXIST LlTERATURE­ and Vietnamese (out of a workforce of Democratic Party politicians and the shut Cudahy down tight-s-inextricably Bay Area 2,900), in an effort to find replacements UFCW tops. But their leaders 'diverted linked to putting the power of labor in Fri.: 5:00-8:00 p.m., Sat.: 3:00-6:00 p.m. 1634 Telegraph, 3rt! Floor (near 17th Street) for the workers it has maimed. strikers from the crucial fight to shut the vanguard of the fight against black Oakland, California Phone: (415) 839-0851 On April 12, three thousand un­ down the plant, and into a useless oppression. Union locals like P-4Omust ionists from southeastern Wisconsin consumer boycott to "Cram Your take the lead in organizing labor/black Chicago Tues.: 5:00-9:00 p.rn.. Sat: 11 :00 a.m.-2:00 p.m, converged on the Milwaukee suburb of Spam." It is the pro-Democratic Party power to break Gown the walls of 161 W Harrison st.. 10th Floor Cudahy to back the P-40 strikers. union tops who are setting up Cudahy segregation in education and housing; Chicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715 Leading the march was an integrated workers to be slaughtered, by placing against racist cop and Klan attacks, and , New York City motorcycle squadron organized by Al­ their faith in another toothless consum­ for 30 hours work for·4O hours pay to Tues.: 6:00-9:00 p.rn., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m. lied Industrial Workers Local 409 from er boycott and an unfair labor practice end unemployment at the bosses' 41 Warren St. (one block below Chambers St. near Church St.) the Harley-Davidson engine plant in charge against the company issued by expense. Black unionists as militant New York, N.Y. Phone: (212) 267-1025 Milwaukee. Black and white Milwttukee the National Labor Relations Board­ labor fighters linking up with the transit workers chanted "We hate with the next hearing not scheduled oppressed ghetto poor will play a 4 WORKERS VANGUARD New York on the Edge From. Howard Beach, Queens to Times or the tabloids. Columbia University, the racist terror­ And on April 20, racist homeowners ists are running wild in New York. in Flushing, Queens torched a house Attacks on blacks are mounting week by which the city had leased to house week and everyone knows the city could black and Latin foster care infants. blow up at any time. Black police (There's also been a violent backlash in commissioner Benjamin Ward warns the boros about setting tip shelters for about an "agenda for this'summer" with the homeless.) Unlike Columbia;where, "more taking to the streets and more Koch sent his cops wading into demon­ demonstrations." A New York Times strations, arresting black victims of the (19 March) editorial voices NYC rulers' racists, burning down a shelter for worry about a "long hot summer." minority babies was so socially explo­ Ward ought to know. For years it's been sive that the mayor went out to Flushing Mayor Ed Koch and the murderous to say he wouldn't stand for this NYPD whose "official" onslaught "terrorist act." But everyone remembers against blacks has whipped up the racist how he earlier called the Howard Beach bigots. And what is Koch's message to murder a "lynching," only to drop it the ghettos today? Under the new gg8 after getting the heat from his racist proposed city budget, 2,000 more killer BrOOklyn, April 11: 2,000 riot-equipped cops seal off Crown Heights. constituents in Queens. cops will be put on the street. The city is When they let off killer cop Sullivan, at the brink of a racial explosion and Now the people who run things in this token clerk James Grimes who the' the triggerman in the eviction-by-death city are going after Goetz, the Post there are sinister forces trying to push it Brooklyn D.A. and the. TA tried to of black grandmother Eleanor Bum.. over the edge. included, precisely because he's not a frame up for defending himself against a purs, the cops knew they had a green With New York already at the flash cop. Above all they're 'concerned to gang of muggers..T0 deny or ignore this light for racist terror. The day of the point, on April 27 the trial of Bernhard protect the state's monopoly of armed fundamental right is to leave blacks verdict, February 26, the Bronx court Goetz opened in Manhattan State Su­ force. As the trial began, Goetz' lawyer utterly defenseless in the face of criminal was turned into an armed camp, with preme Court. The skinny white bespec­ Slotnick leveled a barrage of racist filth and racist attacks and to push whites police cordons and dogs in the corri­ tacled electronics nerd made headlines against the black youths in court, railing into the arms of the racist mobs. dors, hundreds of cops ringing the about "savages" in suits. Outside the worldwide as the "subway vigilante" Racist Rampage block.sharpshooters on the rooftops, a when he shot four black teenagers trying court, assorted radicals and liberals police helicopter overhead and a veri­ to rip him off on the IRT downtown picketed on opening day with signs Since the Howard Beach lynching last table army camped out at .nearby express ori 22 December 1984. Goetz is reading "Racist Rambo" and "Bernhard December, when 23-year-old black Yankee Stadium. Two days later police Goetz/K'KK: Different Names, Same construction worker Michael Griffith executed black Muslim street vendor Game." In contrast, we have insisted was savagely beaten (along with two Nicholas Bartlett at 125th and Lenox in from the beginning that the Goetz case black companions) by a mob of white Harlem-now Morgenthau's grand jury is rent with contradictions. The man was thugs outside a pizza parlor and then has declared,that no cop will stand trial some kind of a law-and-order freak, "a murdered, there has been a wave of for this crime. In March, when the MTA loner turned vigilante," we wrote, yet he racist attacks in NYC. And the cops announced it would back minor perjury was also a walking "mark" who "bad have been leading the pack: witness the charges 'against one cop in the choke­ mug me written all over him." case of black transit worker Wajid hold ,murder of black artist Michael "Goetz certainly violated the formal police rules of engagement; by any Abdul-Salaam who died in a police humane standards he responded with holding pen February 12 after being excessiveviolence. Verypossibly a valid arrested and hogtied. On March 22,two defense would be temporary insanity, as dozen Columbia University football' a result of his previous mugging. On the jocks and frat rats screaming racist other hand, one of the youths is paralyzed for life, and his life presently epithets set upon any black male they hangs in the balance. That, too, counts could find (theNew York Times called it for us.'" a "brawl" between blacks and whites). -"NYC 'Subway Vigilante': On But these are only some of the most Contradiction," WV No. J71, 25 January 1985 publicized incidents-this spring there Francisco Gonzalez has been one racist attack after another. If Goetz' response was excessive, his Among the reported cases: WE ARE NEW YORKERS "Subway vigilante" Bernhatd Goetz fear was justified. His statement in the (left) and lawyer Slotnlk. • On March 9, at 3 a.m., Brooklyn LOOKING FOR New Hampshire police videotape that cops beat and arrested a pregnant black charged with four counts of attempted when somebody turns to you on a New ,woman and her mother outside their murder, assault, reckless endangerment York subway and says "How are your' "THE FINEST" home, then charged inside to club other ACareer Yiith excellent benefits and unlawful weapon possession in the this can be a"real threat" isflatly'true­ family members and another pregnant For additional information call: incident. Goetz was immediately hailed especially when they "ask" for $5!At tht: woman. 212·RECRUIT 212·732·7848 as the "IRT avenger" by forces of racist same time, the tape showed Goetz as a • On March 18,three black youths on reaction, such as Rupert Murdoch's real sociopath, a concentrated expres­ their way to play basketball were Post, out to fan the flames of vigilant­ sion of the social pathology of New attacked by six whites shouting "Re­ ism, while limousine liberals sermoniz­ York City, as are the menacing black member Howard Beach!" ing about gun control denounced him criminals who cornered him. While the • On March 20, Hispanic worker Al­ for "taking the law into his own hands." liberals and Take-radicals' close their berto Flores was clubbed senseiess by Manhattan D.A. Morgenthau initially eyes to it, lumpen crime isan ugly reality the cops on the Upper West Side; gave Goetz kid-glove treatment, but in New York, particularly for black unknown to the cops a neighbor had Newsday switched tack as the rulers realized people-which is why there was sub­ filmed the entire assault from his something had to be done to defuse stantial black support for Goetz. We From left: Black preachers Herbert apartment window-later thousands of Daughtry, Calvin Butts, Lawrence black outrage over police murders of stand for the right of armed self-defense, horrified New Yorkers watched the vid­ Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs. and actively defended black subway Lucas and Wendell Foster support eotaped beating and heard the screams racist mayor Koch's campaign to put as this graphic example of the cops' 2,000 more killer cops on the streets. standard M.O. was played on TV. • On March 12, white racists, one Stewart, while refusing to bring charges with a gun, surrounded three black men against ten other cops, a mob of 500 whose car had broken down in Canar­ armed transit police furiously swarmed sie. Luckily, one of the black men was a outside TA police headquarters. retired cop. "The only thing that saved Reagan Wants Race War , our lives was that I identified myself as an officer," he said. With this show of bonapartist cop 'The assaults have grown increasingly power, the police are itching for an ex­ bold. On the afternoon of April 13, at cuse to move in and use their murder­ the busy intersection of Avenue Nand ous arsenal. Repeatedly they have Utica in Canarsie, Brooklyn, a bus 'mobilized hordes of cops against dem­ crowded with mostly black passengers onstrators: at a March 10 protest at stopped to let off riders. Suddenly 20 Police Plaza over the killing of Bartlett, white punks charged the bus with ax cops everywhere, surrounding NYPD handles, baseball bats, spiked clubs and headquarters and City Hall as if pre­ tire irons. Screaming racial.epithets, the pared for an assault; on March 20 at the mob rocked the bus, smashed the UN, hundreds of police face off against window and almost ripped the door off. 300 demonstrators; on April 2, again The attack lasted for 15 minutes before , hundreds -of police on rooftops, in the thugs fled in pickup trucks and vans; unmarked vans, at a demo against "Dr. WV Photos no cops arrived. This story was reported Death," NYC 'coroner Elliot Gross. Spartacists, militant workers protest' hideous cop murder of Eleanor by Peter Noel in the Daily Challenge (24 But, ominously, there are forces which Bumpurs. Capitalist courts let killer cop Sullivan walk. April) but was not "fit to print" in the continued on page 14 15 MAY 1987 5 At the same time the BTs joined with their cohorts in Germany circulating a Garbage Doesn't Walk By Itself petition proclaiming that our German section had violated the "democratic rights" of one UIi Sandhausby expelling him as a dangerous proto-Nazi. This scum surrounded himself with the regalia of the Third Reich, like a steel What Makes BY Run? helmet with a swastika on it, and was drawn to the beat of fascist skinhead Here's something that is positively ences, you can stand shoulder to mindedly obsessed with us and devoted punk music. (By the way, BTer Ursula weird and getting weirder. It goes under shoulder as the cops decide it wouldn't .to our destruction. . once complained that people made too the heading of the Bolshevik Tendency be safe after all for the Klan to try Fraudulent Politics much of the Nazis' genocide against the (BT), which formerly styled itself the marching down this street today. Jews while presumably underplaying "External Tendency" of the Spartacist Not the BT. Whenever the SL has The BT continues to claim to hold their persecution of German 'social tendency. These people mainly individ­ engaged in the exemplary workthat our many positions in common with the democrats.) ually quit our organization during the members are proudest of, the BT was Spartacist League, like our opposition The following year the BT aided a . "Reagan years." When people quit an never there. But any time our party was to the Solidarnosc counterrevolution- bureaucratic union witchhunt against organization, jhey generally don't want under attack they were always there, to , ary power bid in Poland in 1981. This Stan Gow, at the time a member of the to have anything more to do with it; they add their own slanders and provoca­ should be anathema to the anti-Soviet executive board of the International have other fish to fry. But the ETjBT tions. And like a garbage dump attract­ swamp in which the BT mingles, where Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's has always pursued an unnatural obses­ ing flies, this outfit has predictably "Solidarity with Solidarity" is the sine Union (ILWU) and an SL supporter. sion with the SL. A BT forum to be held attracted only the most hostile, embit- qua non. But of course the British Keylor redbaited Gow and other mem­ in New York is devoted solely to the bers ofthe Militant Caucus. When local topic: "Spartacist League: From Trot­ ILWU bureaucrats put Gow on trial, skyism to Political Banditry." The BT Keylor stood aside when caucus sup­ has spent five years bewailing our porters were dragged out and the cops "degeneration." Are we that importanrl called in. Not according to the BT: in the pages of Over the past year the BT's activities its bulletins and its 1917 magazine, the have become more sinister. On Septem­ SL is "over the brink," on a "plunge ber 19, the BT staged a violent premedi­ toward political irrelevance," "can no tated attack on an SL forum at the longer be considered, in any sense, a University of California at Berkeley. revolutionary organization." . The campus cops, notorious for their To camouflage its obsession with us, Gestapo-style attacks on student pro­ the BT sought to pass itself off as testers, were on the scene in record having an orientation toward the SL. response time. Two months later the Mimicking historically familiar lan­ BT's.attempt to stage a larger version of guage, they put themselves forward as this provocation at an SL forum on the critical supporters of the international same campus was averted by ourchange Spartacist tendency, prior to its "degen­ of the meeting's locale. The Morenoite eration" of course. Thus, theyclaimed paper reported: "On November 21 the to be dissidents unjustly excluded, Spartacists are holding another event in external factionalists seeking to return WV Photos Berkeley. The BT is planning to form a the iSt to a correct course or, at least, Renegades' gallery: "Rat on the Waterfront" Howard Keylor chatting up bloc of different groups to 'teach the win its remaining healthy' elements to a' cop. Ex-Berkeley radical Bob Mandel feeHng "Big Chill"? BT heavy Fred Spartacists a lesson' at that forum" new group refounded upon former Ferguson. (Working Class Opposition, December principles. But this is transparently a 1986). in the latest issue of 1917 the BT fraudulent posture. Far from being tered ex-members and elements ex­ Workers Power group recently invited claims that the intention was simply to expelled, the BTs mainly quit, as a pelled for gross violations of proletarian the BT to participate in its propaganda engage in "a political debate." If that trickle of individuals, with relief, and morality. Talk about "degeneration"-. bloc of Trotskyoids. Because everyone was the case then why did a simple mainly admitting to long-standing this group has some genuine items. Knowsthat the B'T'spositions on Poland change of locale and a weapons search differences they hadn't fought for. Of course the SL has had some and Afghanistan, for example, are not dissuade them from attending? Why Subsequently, in every way imaginable, problems during the past ten years or so, seriously held. And that. is why the BT is didn't they come to the same forum the the BT has approached the SL in a because it hasn't been the easiest time to never excluded from any of the pro- next night in San Francisco? manner calculated to harden organiza­ be a communist; many-sided bourgeois . Democratic Party pop front meetings or tional lines and repel party members­ reaction has intimidated the workers demonstrations, like the April 25 Bloodthirstiness in and ex-members retaining the least and oppressed from undertaking strug­ "spring mobe" for which the BT mobi­ Whose Service? shred of loyalty to us or admiration for gles, increasing. the pressure on our lized so heavily. Compare this to the While the BT clearly stands to the our work. The BT sneers at everything small party of up-front American com­ treatment the rad-libs and reformists right ofus, on occasion they have struck iSt members hold dear. The most munists. We have neither been shattered have dished out to the st. a posture as anarcho-crazies grooving elementary tactics of critical support by internal crisis nor have we gone So here we have a very unusual on violence, reminiscent ·of the 1960s aimed at "setting the base against the forward toward our goals; most com­ situation: a group which continues. to Weathermen, in order to attack us from top" are exactly what the BT eschews. rades have stood at their posts while devote all its time and energies to the SL the "left." Thus they accused us of How would one express an orienta­ some weaker elements have dropped contrary to their own obvious political selling out to U.S. imperialism because tion toward an organization? Well, you away. History will no doubt show that interests of sucking up to the pro­ we didn't hail the senseless killing of find a supportable party campaign and the cadre has acquired some deforma­ Democratic popular front. And the 240-plus Marines in Lebanon in 1982 you support it. You get involved in the tions. And the BT is the degeneration . outfits the BT hangs around with do (many of whom were black and sent work, creating a sympathetic environ­ product of the SL, the quintessence of think it's weird. The Morenoites in a there in the first place because they were ment for pointing out to other cam­ every flinch and every deformation that 1985 article, "ET: Forget 'Home'," "expendable"). They claimed this was paigners how the party's inconsistencies these years have brought out, with urged BobMandel, Howard Keylor & an act of "anti-imperialism." But in undermine its best work, how the something sinister added that gives the Co. to renounce Spartacism root and Lebanon no side was fighting imperial­ bizarre or opportunist sides of the B'I' a pathology all its own. Craven, branch if they expected to make it as ism-as the sequel has amply and degenerated party are in contradiction virulently anti-Soviet, openly scornful opportunists (Working Class Opposi­ hideously shown (in the one case when to survivals of its revolutionary past. Of ofissues ofracial oppression, the BT has tion, July 1985). Now Mandel has there was an anti-imperialist stand, course you welcome the obligation to big points of similarity with garden­ apparently followed this advice and split when the Palestinians resisted the Israeli defend the party against victimizations. variety American popular-frontists. But from his BT comrades, seemingly blitzkrieg in Lebanon, the BT de­ And to share with its remaining decent whereas the latter wouldn't cross the reverting to his New Left adolescence. nounced us for hailing this resistance). supporters those emotionally charged street to spit on us unless we encroach But the BT goes right on with its main As we said in "Marxism and Blood­ moments when, despite your differ- upon their "turf," the BT is single- business: anti-Spartacist provocation. thirstiness" (WV No. 345, 6 January BT: A Profile of Provocation 1984): "We are for the victory ofjust . . causes...the shatteringofthe exploiting In 1982,'when the then-ET had come and oppressing classes and the-victory of together outside the SL as an"external" socialism. We are socialists not least "opposition," the reformists and rad­ because we are passionately opposed to libs were engaged in 11 frenzied "Big Lie" war, the gathering together of large violence-baiting campaign' against us. numbers of young workingmen to be At the same time, the Reaganites 'were slaughtered in the interests of the equating political opposition with "vio­ rulers." Why doesn't the BT also accuse lence" and "terrorism." Did the BT us of selling out to the Argentine junta defend- us against the imperialist' bour­ when we decried the sinking of the geoisie and its fake-left camp followers? Belgrano during the Falklandsj In fact, they were on the other side. In a Malvinas war,'a gratuitous act of mass provocation worthy of the FBI's COIN­ murder personally ordered by Britain's tELPRO, they ran an international Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher? petition campaign accusing us of as­ The BT has even argued that the SL saulting Mandel. This was a complete flinched. on the defense of the Soviet fabrication. The B'T's 'only "witness" Union because we were not happy that WV Photo said he'd seen no physical attack, just : the passengers aboard KAL 007 were BT journal 1917,a "political" fig leaf for-provocations like their bizarre stunts loud yelling. Months later Mandel killed in Reagan's Cold War spy at Oakland Geronimo Pratt rally (left). This Issue of 1917available from SL as admitted he had not been assaulted but provocation. The Soviets took the only No.4 of our "Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacist League" series. was worried that he might have been!' . continued on page 13 6 W.ORKERS VANGUARD Cuba, Nicaragua and the

Glinn/Magnum " UPI Castro's rebel army enters Havana, New Victorious Sandlnlsta guerrillas celebrate Year's Day 1959. Permanent In Managua, JUly 1979. . . Thefollowing article is adaptedfrom actively joined with the right-wing Le Bolchevik No. 73, May 1987. bourgeois parties against the petty­ bourgeois nationalist FSLN. The San­ More than 100,000 people 'poured dinistas' program for "national unity" into the streets of Managua on 19 July, with the nonexistent "patriotic" bour­ 1979 to celebrate their overthrow of the Revolution geoisie is not enough for them-they bloody Somozadictatorship in an want a "popular front" with the So­ insurrection led by the Sandinista mozaist National Guard! But then the National Liberation Front (FSLN). It PSN and PCN called the FSLN-led was the first victorious popular revolu­ lution is most like the Mexican Revolu­ workers to thwart these plans by sharp insurrection which toppled Somoza tion in Latin America since Fidel tion when it started." Even today, faced class struggle in the heart of U.S. "adventurist"! Castro's guerrilla army marched into with new threats of imperialist attack, imperialism. The latest ploy of this right opposi­ Havana 20 years earlier, and a serious the Sandinista regime is wedded to the tion to the Sandinistas was a February 5 defeat for Yankee imperialism. As in trinity of "political pluralism, mixed "Institutionalizing the document by the Liberals, Christian Cuba, a corrupt and universally hated economy and nonalignment," recently Revolution" Democrats and the PCN together with tyrant installed by the United States was codified in a new constitution (see"U.S. the "Democratic Coordinating Com­ replaced by radical nationalist guerrillas War Maneuvers Target Nicaragua," As the crisis-wracked Reagan admin­ mittee" formerly headed by CIA/State in power. The Carter administration WV No. 425, J April). istration tries to distract attention from Department contra "leader" Arturo worried that Nicaragua would "follow So if Castro and the Sandinistas (and Iran/Contragate by revving up its war Cruz, calling for a cease-fire, a general the Cuban model internally and also the Soviets) all agree that Nicaragua will machine and the contra scum prepare amnesty for all political crimes, new become a base for trying' to export not be a "second Cuba," what's Wash­ for one last try to lay waste to the elections at all levels, and a "permanent subversion to other parts of Central ington railing against? The rad-lib country, the battle over Nicaragua is process of national dialogue." This America and the Caribbean," in the "solidarity with Nicaragua" crowd, in­ coming to a head. Saner voices of U.S. would mean nothing lessthancalling off words of the Washington Post (25 July cluding a host. of self-styled socialists, imperialism, such as the New York the revolution, consolidating a bour­ 1979). Today, in Year Eight of the geois state, including the murderous Nicaraguan Revolution, with its out­ contra leaders, and capitulating to come hanging in the balance, the U.S. Washington. These people are indeed 'bourgeoisie is still haunted by the ready to "cry uncle," .as Reagan de­ spectre of "another Cuba." manded. The headline of the Sandinis­ Throughout the Reagan years, Wash­ tas' Barricada Internacional (12 Febru­ ington has linked Nicaragua with Cuba. ary),"Parties offer White House a Despite tactical differences, Democrats Castro helping hand," is right on target. Yet a and Republicans alike share the 1984 advises couple weeks later, Ortega expressed Kissinger Commission report's obses­ Sandinlsta willingness to discuss with otherCentral sion with the "use of Nicaragua as a base leaders American leaders the "peace plan" put for Soviet and Cuban efforts to pene­ Ramirez forward by Costa Rican president Arias and Ortega trate the rest of the Central American calling for the very same demands! isthmus." In opposing aid to Reagan's against following The only left opposition in the "contra" mercenaries last year, North National Assembly against the FSLN's Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan em­ the "Cuban road." constitution came from the twodeputies phasized: "I do not want another Cuba of the Marxist-Leninist Party (PML­ in this hemisphere. Ifthe Soviets were to formerly MAP-ML). MAP-ML won a decide, and the Nicaraguans were to certain following among workers and decide to accept, to move MIG fighters say it's simplya Reaganite red herring. Times (12 April), are seeking to tie down peasants through the active participa­ into Nicaragua, I would support a Yet the imperialists have made Central the Nicaraguan leadership with negotia­ tion of its militias in the struggle against blockade, I would support getting those America the front line of their anti­ tions, appealing to their "self-interests Somoza, and its leadership of land airstrips wiped off the faceof the map." Soviet war drive. For U.S. rulers, the that could breed restraint." The Sandi­ takeovers and strikes following the Yet the Sandinistas have never road to Moscow goes through Mana­ nista leadership, meanwhile, has sought victory (which landed them in Sandi­ claimed to be building a "second Cuba." gua. From the November 1981 NSC to codify its "middle road" in a new nista jails). In 1984, MAP ran in the And Fidel Castro himself advised them directive authorizing the CIA to set up constitution as part of "institutionaliza­ Assembly elections on a platform against following the "Cuban road," its contra army and plans for "a petro­ tion of the Revolution," as Daniel calling for a workers and peasants urging the FSLN to avoid "premature leum quarantine and/or retaliatory air Ortega declared in signing the document government. And last fall a PML radio frontal attacks on the bourgeoisie." The action against Cuban forces and instal­ before tens of thousands of supporters program declared that "the draft consti­ FSLN comandantes have taken Cas­ lations," to the current U.S. Caribbean in Revolution Plaza. And in an inter­ tution is a carbon copy of any liberal tro's advice. In an interview with Time maneuvers, including a "simulated view with the Cuban press agency bourgeois constitution, guaranteeing (11 August 1986), Daniel Ortega said of evacuation" of the American base at . Prensa Latina last July, reputed FSLN that capital continues exploiting and Nicaragua's future: "it's not going to be Guantanamo, Cubaas part of a scenario hardliner Tomas Borge stressed that oppressing the working people" (Prensa a Cuban model. We had elections five for a blockade, the Spartacist League "we have accepted the existence of a Proletaria, October 1986). years after our triumph. We have not has declared "Defense of Cuba, USSR mixed economy and political pluralism Yet while declaring that the Sandinis­ promoted state collectives.... The revo- Begins in Central America!" just as Norwegians have accepted the ta constitution represents the "juridical For the imperialists understand, even existence of low temperatures." birth of a bourgeoisstate," they call on ifthe reformists and nationalistsdo not, Yet while the FSLN isforever seeking workers "to demand a revolutionary that there is a global contest between an alliance with a "patriotic bourgeoi­ Constitution from the National Assem­ capitalism and socialism. The FSLN sie," the economy has gone to hell as the bly" As if this bourgeois-style parlia­ came to power on a program for a black market overwhelms the "official" ment, in which capitalist parties hold political revolution with social reforms. sector, capitalists refuse to invest and -almost a third of the seats, could be a But by overthrowing a one-family the hard-pressed working class is in vehicle for socialist revolution! In dictatorship they began, willy-nilly, a danger of dissolving, unable to make frequently contradictory terms, the social revolution. Today that revolution ends meet. The future of the Nicaraguan general orientation of these "Marxist­ is still stuck in midstream, its survival Revolution requires an authentically Leninists" has been to push the FSLN to threatened by the refusal of the Sandi­ communist vanguard to lead it forward the left. Thus PML deputy Carlos nistas to complete and extend the to socialist revolution. Yet two of the Cuadra said in an interview, "we have Nicaraguan Revolution. The contras small so-called leftist parties in the never raised the anti-Sandinista banner, and their masters in Washington are country-the Nicaraguan Socialist Par­ only the anti-bourgeeis one. We reject fomenting bloody counterrevolution ty (PSN) and Communist Party of theSandinista proposals to the extent WV Photo that would make the tyrant Somoza Nicaragua (PCN), both pro-Moscow that they are proposals for class concili­ Spartacists say: Defend, Complete, look like a "moderate authoritarian" Stalinists-are so wedded to the dogma ation" (Envio, November 1986). Extend the Nicaraguan Revolutionl indeed. It is the duty of American of "two-stage revolution" that they have continued on page 10 15 MAY 1987 7 Young Sparlacus Columbia University Drop All Charges Against Anti-Racist Protesters' "Ifyou don't move, I'm going to crack your fucking.head open," barked a New York City cop to an anti-racist protester at Columbia University. On April 21, for the first time since the 1968 Colum­ bia student strike, the NYPD was brought onto the campus in an effort to end through brute force protest by students, workers and Harlem residents. This year's protests at Columbia began in response to a vicious attack in the early hours of March 22, when a white lynch mob of 20 fraternity members shouting racial epithets assaulted Mike Jones, a black student, and chased eight blacks onto a busy street. It recalled the gruesome Howard Beach murder-only this time no one happened to be killed. Shortly thereafter, a Confederate flag was displayed from a dorm window and Ku Klux Klan pamphlets. appeared in classrooms. Racist cop and mob attacks at Columbia occur in a context of an ominous tide of provocations and assaults against blacks, gays, Jews and Mike Jones, leader of Columbia Asians on campuses across the country. student protest, mauled by burly Emboldened by a Klan-endorsed presi­ security chief and cop, April 21. dent whoseadministration iscommitted Campus workers' rally on May 4 to rolling back every gain of the civil protests administration/cop rights movement, sections of the white attacks on students. middle class whose own economic position has gone to hell with the rest of the American economy are lashing out of lying, and denouncing them for Columbia and a public supporter of the against the anti-racist protesters! Cops against minorities from Amherst to Ann failing to cooperate with this hoax of an black students, was hauled off to jail on offcampus! Abolish the administration! Arbor to Austin. This eruption of open, "investigation." Students responded by the say-so of Columbia security chief For student/teacher/worker control of raw racism on the campuses, has not chaining the doors to Hamilton Hall Dominick Moro. As word of the arrests the university! been seensincethe I920s,when the Klan shut and forming a human blockade spread across campus, dozens of Columbia students have reacted had five million members nationwide. outside the building. The Concerned shocked and angered studentsjoined the courageously to the university's coordi­ But today, every racist provocation has Black Students at Columbia (CBSC), an blockade. nated and cruel attacks on the victims of met immediate resistance by integrated ad hoc group formed in response to the ~y 8 p.m., the university had amassed racist violence. But it will take more student .mobilizations, indicating the racist attacks, challenged the universi­ 80 New York City cops on Amsterdam than courage alone to beat back the potential to crush the racist scum. ty's cover-up, announcing that they had Avenue and gave the go-ahead to racist attacks. What's necessary is The attacks at Columbia are fueled by word from a source in the "justice" Koch's cossacks to storm the blockade. militant, united strike action by stu­ the system of racist terror in New York system that university president Mi­ Students were pushed down the steps, dents, labor and the Harlem community City, from the murder of a black man in chael Sovern directly asked police choked, dragged and dropped repeated­ to shut down Columbia! Iflabor flexed the white Howard Beach enclave, to the commissioner Benjamin Ward notto lyon the concrete. Over 50 were busted. its muscles in defense of the black acquittal of the cop who blew away arrest the four fraternity members the' When the editor of the Columbia community, the "starsand bars"-waving black grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs, black students had identified and filed Spectator showed her press card to a frat boys would be history! President to "Gross the Ghoul," the city coroner charges against. cop, he said, "I'm press·too," and Sovern, who serves on Koch's task force who covers up every racist atrocity by By midday, 80students had joined the slammed his nightstick into her rib cage. for the homeless, might deepen his the NYPD. There iswidespread anger in blockade, and Sovern unleashed his One student spent 20 hours in jail and understanding of their plight if some of this city and a burning desire in the cops. In a deliberate move to decapitate sent a note out which read, "I've been the Harlem residents who've been ghettos and black working-class neigh­ the leadership of the protest, the cops kicked, bit, twisted and mangled. I've evicted by slumlord Columbia seized borhoods to avenge the victims of the singled out Mike Jones and several had handcuffs on so tight that my black Sovern's office and, backed by union­ racist onslaught. other prominent militants. Jones was skin is turning purple from blood clots." ists and students, turned him out on the On April 21, Columbia's administra­ dropped on his head on the pavement All arrested students face possible street for a few days! tion issued an outrageous whitewash and taken to the hospital in handcuffs to criminal prosecution by the state and The ingredients for such united action report on the March attack, charging be treated for an open gash on his disciplinary action, including expul­ are already apparent. Campus workers one anonymous frat rat with "verbal" forehead. Marcellus Blount, one of the sion, from the university. The Spartacus held a support rally on May 4 for the harassment, accusing the black students very few black faculty members at Youth Club demands: Drop the charges black students, noting the connection between Columbia's union-busting and institutionalized racism. Students have gone into Morningside Heights to protest Columbia's evictions and Har­ lem residents have corne to the campus .to take a stand in defense of the victimized students. But the social Cops Off Campus I power of labor, on campus and be­ yond, has yet to be mobilized on a

8 WORKERS VANGUARD e.g.) against leftist protests of the American invasion of Grenada, the U.S. Marine presence in Lebanon, and Not One Penn" Not· One Man military and CIA recruiters. Marxists never volunteer for the capitalist armed forces. In the absence of mass conscription, a. call to work for the Imperia/ist Arm,l from within the armed forces is akin to telling people to become world cops and gives direct "support to the anti-Soviet never been exposed to alternative war drive. In this regard, it is no accident Letter political thought. In addition, .the that Progressive Labor Party, which ROTC program offers working-class considers the Soviet Union ,a "fascist and black men a chance to become. state," calls on its members to join the officers. To take ROTCand others off [received 21 April 1987] army and the National Guard! A draft· of the campuses would be to completely army is different. We are not petty­ Dear Comrades, cut future officers off from these ideas, bourgeois pacifists who hide behind I have for a long time disagreed with leaving their political opinions to be . student deferments or otherspecialclass the Spartacist League's policy of at­ formed by their drill instructors. privileges, but stand with the working tempting to run ROTC and Marine In addition, mobilizations and con­ class, which does not have ready access recruiters off college campuses. frontations between young Com.munists to such advantages. Revolutionaries,if Given the servility of the mass media and ROTC men only hardens the drafted, bring an understanding of the and the barrage of propaganda coming ROTCers' anti-communist opinions. By class differentiation within the armed from the government, college campuses contrast, in my own experience I have forces that can win the soldier ranks are about the only place in this country found that on an individual basis (and even sympathetic officers) to the where ordinary people can be exposed fraternization can be extremely effective side of the workers and the oppressed. to left-wing thinking and left-wing in changing the political thinking of The real enemy is at home! . ideas. Any college student, no matter ROTC personnel. ROTC and other Army life magnifies the race and class how right-wing or privileged, cannot such programs give the left the unique oppression inherent in American capi­ attend a university in this country with­ chance to be able to familiarize army talist society. Today's army is dispro­ out gaining at least some awareness of personnel with our ideas. . portionately black and Hispanic youth American imperialism's crimes in Nica­ The Marines and the ROTC are not who join mainly out of sheer economic ragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, or the Kl<.K. Whereas mass mobilizations Young Spartacus desperation. In a combat situation this South Africa. . are the necessary tactic when dealing Spartacist youth activists protest represents the Achilles' heel of Ameri­ with the CIA or the KKK, when dealing ROTC at University of Wisconsin, As Trotsky said, a Communist party Madison. can imperialism, because minority fights not so much against the army as with ROTC or Marine recruiters they youth are not exactly gung-ho about for the army. Because of this it is very merely smack of gangsterism. "ROTC Off Campus!" became the slaughtering Cubans in black Angola, valuable indeed for future Army, Navy, I suggest that we follow Trotsky's rallying call for a generation of anti­ Nicaraguans or Russians for a govern­ and Marine officers to be exposed to advice and fight for the army instead of imperialist militants who targeted the ment that's deprived them of every left-wing ideas. Many of these young against it. military presence on campus to protest democratic right at home. Our policy is . men are not hardened reactionaries but Sincerely, America's genocidal war in Vietnam. to exploit this class differentiation merely middle-class students who have Glenn S. Well before these protests hit the between the enlisted men who are mainland, tens of thousands of youth at pushed out front and the predominantly the University of Puerto Rico mobilized white officer corps who stake out cushy Young Spartacus replies: For Marxists strengthening that apparatus. As Lenin against ROTC, understanding that they positions in the rear. there is a fundamental distinction wrote: had no interest in fighting a dirty war for The struggle to win the army is not between the rank-and-file soldier and "We are not in favour of a bourgeois their own colonial oppressor. Between simply or primarily a question of or­ the bourgeois officer corps, as well as a militia; we are in favour only of a 1967 and 1969, large-scale antiwar ganization within the army ranks. The proletarian militia. Therefore, 'not a distinction between the volunteer army penny, not a man,' not only for a protests drove ROTC off 100 college army is won to the side of the proletariat and an army of forced conscripts. In his standing army, but even for a bourgeois campuses and 141 out of 161 schools when the working class shows itself as a letter, Glenn S. overlooks this, mis­ militia, even in countries like the United with compulsory ROTC training were contender for power on the basis of its representing Trotsky's views and the States, or Switzerland, Norway, etc." forced to eliminate the program. own independent organizations. As -"The 'Disarmament' Slogan" ROTC is now returning to the cam­ 1905: necessary attitude of Marxists toward .(1916) Trotsky wrote in the armed fist of the bourgeois state. puses as part of the biggest "peacetime" "Only when the soldiers become con­ The armed forces are the core of the As Marxists we are opposed to military buildup in U.S. history and an vinced that the people have come out integral part of the anti-Soviet war into the streets for a life-and-death state, what Lenin called the "special working-class youth being used as struggle-hot to demonstrate against bodies of armed men" who are separat­ cannon fodder for imperialist war and drive. Today ROTC provides some 70 the government but to overthrow it­ ed from the population as a whole and oppose the direct use of the universities percent of the officer corps for the does it become psychologically possible constitute the main tool of suppression for military training and recruitment, imperialist army and trains for military for them to 'cross over to the side of the and control for the bourgeoisie. The which is what the Reserve Officer maneuvers to "roll back Communism" people'." armed forces are the international police Training Corps is all about. ROTC is from Sandinista Nicaragua and Soviet­ For American Trotskyists, the tasks force of U.S. imperialism, and have the government's main vehicle for backed governments ill preparation for of defending the Soviet Union and been deployed domestically as the front generating a killer elite: the top brass the big one, theUSSR.,Glenn S. argues fighting for black liberation are com­ line of defense of capitalist property and career "lifers" like Lieut. William that we should "expose" these junior pletely intertwined. Our job is to relations against striking workers, to Calley, the sadistic butcher of MyLai. butchers to left-wing ideas.rand outra­ mobilize youth against all forms of occupy the ghettos and barrios, and gun During the Vietnam War; fully half of geously charges students who mobilize militarism by the capitalist warmakers, down anti-Vietnam War and civil rights the officer corps came from ROTC. And against ROTC with "gangsterism." to build a party that will lead a protesters at Kent State and Jackson before these professional soldiers ever Today's ROTC represents militant anti­ proletarian army to victory over a State. Unless one entertains notions of saw combat, they were used by J. Edgar communism on American campuses. system which has brought only death reforming the army, one must oppose . Hoover as a direct conduit to the CIA They've not only been "exposed" to but and destruction from Harlem to the state's methods of building and for surveillance of antiwar militants. have actively mobilized (at Harvard, Hanoi._

class-struggle program. prayers, candlelight vigils, boycotting Aspiring black capitalist politicos like white businesses, voting Democrat, attorney C. Vernon Mason (a former liberal pleading with cops and adminis­ contender for the top-cop position of trators,calling on the state to "Ban the district attorney in this city) have Columbia Klan," confrontations with the cops cynically channeled the anti-racist University, when the relationship of forces is outrage into pointless appeals for action March 26: overwhelmingly in their favor, idealisti­ by the capitalist state. While the Mass protest cally ferreting out racism in our hearts, university is suing Mason for interfering against or any other backward and ineffective with "Columbia's right of property" by Ivy League strategies. What's needed is hard class defending evicted tenants, Mason has racists. struggle. What's needed is an under­ filed suit :to make Koch's cossacks Spartacists standing of who our friends and our "responsible" and "do what is required say: "Students enemies are. The administration, the Ally with Labor cops, the courts, and the political bosses of them." In this he's joined by the to Stop Racist demagogic nationalist reverends like Attacksl" who run them are the class enemy of Daughtry and Butts who are "all fired working people and the oppressed. up" to get black youth to join the racist Facing a particularly brutal, racist, police force! ' segregate the campus under the banner were thrashing a defenseless black man. capitalist society in decay, the struggle The CBSC has grossly capitulated to of the Confederate flag of slavery! Handcuffed and in the squad car, the for black liberation requires overcom­ these right-wing pseudo-nationalists, The Communist Party distributed a student was threatened by a racist cop ing the false program and dead end of undercutting the mass, integrated sup­ leaflet at Columbia which calls on the who pulled a noose out of the glove nationalism. Anti-racist militants must port evidenced in the first I,OOO-strong state to "Outlaw Racist Violence," compartment and said, "This is what be, won to the Marxist program of protest. At a rally on April 4, CBSC .premised on the same absurd notion we have for you niggers who fight revolutionary integrationism, to take spokesman Tanaquil Jones told anti­ that the ruling class can be persuaded to the police." This is the scum the ref­ their place alongside the working class racist whites to butt out and go "raise "give up" its plcist brutality. In late ormist Communist Party would have mobilized in struggle to smash racist consciousness" in the racist fraternities, April, a black" student from Medgar enforcing their new laws against racist terror at its root-the capitalist sys­ This separatist crap plays directly into Evers University was beaten by the violence! tem. Black liberation through socialist the hands of the racists who are trying to police after asking three cops why they Racist terror won't be stopped by revolution! • 15 MAY 1987' 9 Permanent Revolution ... (continued from page 7) The pro-Albania MAP/PML, which Left: Cuban has frequently been mislabeled Trotsky­ militia guards ist, calls for a "Nicaraguan proletarian former U.S. revolution," implicitly rejecting Stalin's 011 refinery, dogma of "two-stage revolution," at nationalized least at home. But they remain Stalinist, In 1960. still evidently believing in building Right: CIA "socialism in one country." Above all, terrorists blow 'the Russian question is the stumbling up 011 depots block for these ex-Maoists. The PML's at Corinto, Prensa Proletaria is silent on the class Nicaragua in 1983. character of the Soviet Union, referring only to Kremlin "revisionists" and elliptically to "the superpowers." Main­ ly, they try to duck the issue, to the point that they don't even mention where based on a national assembly of demo­ the exploited and oppressed masses. defenders of the conquests of the Octo­ Nicaragua's SAM missiles come from. cratically elected worker, peasant and But most noticeably absent from the ber Revolution. From Afghanistan to And they're virtually silent on Cuba. It "popular sector" delegates. PRT's programs is the key element for a Poland to Nicaragua, the Morenoites' is impossible to wage a genuinely revo­ The PRT pamphlet, however, refers successful proletarian revolution-the line can only lead to supportfor Yankee lutionary struggle in this front line of to the Sandinista government as a forging ofaTrotskyist party. In the 1986 imperialism. imperialism's global war drive without "bourgeois government" and as a "bo­ "Crossroads" document, this glaring having a clear position in defense of napartist regime sui generis" (of a omission becomes a positive program of Castroism or Trotskyism the Soviet Union and Cuba against unique type). This latter characteriza­ pressuring the Sandinistas. The PRT The Cuban Revolution was an acid imperialism. tion was used by Trotsky to refer to the concludes: test for Trotskyism. The British Healy­ Four years ago we asked, would the Cardenas government in Mexico, which "We are faced then with two major ites and French Lambertists denied the Sandinistas respond to Reagan's war as was indeed a bourgeois regime, albeit alternatives: either the FSLN advances, existence of a social revolution in Cuba. "Cuban Castroites or Spanish Loyal­ breaking all its political and economic one that sought the support of the ties to the bourgeoisie and imperial­ On the other hand, the American ists"? ("Defend Nicaragua, Complete workers and peasants in its conflict with ism ... ; or ultimately the bourgeois Socialist Workers Party's Joseph Han­ the Revolution!" WV No. 329, 6 May U.S. and British imperialism. In the counterrevolution can prevail, in one or sen declared Castro's Cuba a "workers 1983). As the Spanish workers valiantly Mexican case, a new capitalist state was another of "its variants.... and peasants government" which defended Madrid against Franco during indeed reconstituted following the "In Cuba, Fidel Castro was forced by the blockade and the pressure of impe­ evolved into a "healthy" workers state, the 1930s Civil War, they chanted "iNo defeat of the radical peasant forces of rialism to nationalize the principal albeit "not yet possessing the forms of pasaran!" (They shall not pass!), a Zapata and Villa in the civil war which means of production and to construct a workers democracy," and led by "the; favorite slogan in Nicaragua today. But saw the triumph ofa bourgeois "consti­ bureaucratic Workers State." unconscious Marxist, Fidel Castro." It the Francoists did pass, because Stalin tutionalist" army led by large landown­ Yet in Nicaragua, unlike Cuba, there was this support for the petty-bourgeois & Co. erected the Popular Front as a ers. That is precisely what hasn't was a large-scale insurrection that nationalist Castroites which provided barrier to proletarian revolution, in happened in Nicaragua, where the mobilized the urban masses to bring the basis forthe SWP's "reunification" order to "win the war" and "notfrighten Somozaist army was sent packing and down Somoza; today, there are 300,000 with Ernest Mandel, and the creation of the democratic bourgeoisie." The Popu­ the present Sandinista Army is firmly armed workers and peasants ready to the "United Secretariat." Contrary to lar Front of class collaboration, the controlled by the FSLN. The petty­ defend the revolution. And again unlike Moreno's self-serving claim of a "Cas­ consequence of Stalin's nationalist line bourgeois Nicaraguan regime is certain­ Cuba, in Nicaragua despite the FSLN's troite turn" under Hansen's epigone of "building socialism" in the USSR ly bonapartist, but it has not recon­ bureaucratic control, one can name Jack Barnes around 1979, the USec was alone, was proclaimed by the Kremlin in structed a bourgeois state, i.e., the numerous factories in which leftist wholeheartedly pro-Castro from its 1935, spelling the liquidation of the executive committee to enforce capital­ opposition parties are strong: F~NA­ inception. It is the international Sparta­ Communist International founded by ist class rule. Ifit had, the present contra TEX, METASA, IMEP, ENAVES, cist tendency (iSt) which has uniquely Lenin and Trotsky. It doomed the war wouldn't be taking place. TEXNICSA, plus various sugar mills, upheld the Trotskyist perspective of Spanish Revolution to defeat, as the state farms, etc. What is needed above permanent revolution in characterizing FSLN's trinity today threatens the all is revolutionary leadership to mobi­ Castro's Cuba as a bureaucratically survival of the Nicaraguan Revolution. lize the working masses to complete the deformed workers state. revolution and extend it. Already in 1961, the Revolutionary Morenoites for the Cuban Road Increasingly, the Morenoites have Tendency ofthe SWP, forerunner ofthe The other left tendency opposing the identified the fate of the Nicaraguan iSt, declared that "Taken as a whole, Sandinista constitution is the Partido Revolution with the Cuban "model." A the process going on today in -Cuba is Revolucionario de los Trabajadores resolution by Moreno's International that of the formation of a deformed (PRT-Revolutionary Workers Party), Workers League dated 19 July 1986 workers state-that is, the creation of a affiliated with the International Work­ speaks of "transforming Nicaragua into society like that which exists in the ers League of the recently deceased a new Cuba, that is to "say, into the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Nahuel Moreno. The Morenoites are second free territory of America." It China" (Minority resolution to the 1961 the largest ostensibly Trotskyist current goes on: "The Sandinista leadership isat YSA convention, reprinted in the in Latin America, and the PRT grew out a crossroads. Hopefully it will choose -Spartacist League's Marxist Bulletin of the Simon Bolivar Brigade, organized this road, the same taken by Fidel No.8, "Cuba and Marxist Theory"). by Moreno & Co., which rushed.to the Castro more than 25 years ago when his While hailing the revolutionary expro­ scene during the FSLN's final offensive country too was under attack by priations of both the imperialist and in 1979. The Brigade', which marched imperialism. Castro expropriated the Cuban capitalists, and defending Cuba under the Sandinistas' red-and-black bourgeoisie, converting Cuba into a against U.S. military and economic colors, was rounded up by the FSLN workers state. Thanks to this it was able aggression, the RT insisted on the need police shortly after the triumph when to resist the aggression. The best defense for a struggle for workers democracy arcelo Montecino of Nicaragua is to make it a new Cuba" they attempted to organize a workers Albania-line Stalinists of MAP/PML and an internationalist revolutionary demonstration in Managua demanding in Nicaragua call for "Workers and (Working Class Opposition, October policy against the bureaucratic and "Power to the proletariat." The non­ Peasants to Power," but refuse to 1986). And in one of his last documents nationalist straitjacket imposed by the Nicaraguans in the Brigade were ex­ defend the Soviet Union and Cuba published before his death Moreno Castro regime. Above all, it emphasized pelled to Panama where several were a~alnst Imperialism. wrote: "We must demand from the the need to forge "a mass revolutionary­ beaten by the police of nationalist Sandinistas that they carry out that Marxist party" in which the small Trot­ strongman Omar Torrijos, a Sandinista A year later, the PRT published a expropriation measure, indispensable skyist groups have a vital role to play in a~. ' second pamphlet, "The Revolution at for ending imperialist aggression" politically combatting the influence of On the sixth anniversary of the the Crossroads" (Cuadernos de EI (Working Class Opposition, December non-proletarian leaderships. revolution, the PRT published a bulle­ Socialista No.3, July 1986), containing 1986). Today, 25 years after Castro pro­ tin entitled "Where Is Nicaragua Go­ its presentation to the special constitu­ At various stages in his multicolored claimed 'the Cuban Revolution "so­ ing?" (Cuadernos de EI Socialista No. I, tional commission of the National career, Moreno masqueraded as a Pe­ cialist" following the U.S. Bay of Pigs July 1985) ending with an 18-point Assembly. The PRT representatives ronist, Maoist; Guevarist, black' na­ invasion, the social and economic "Program of Struggle Against Imperial­ called for a constitution "capable of tionalist, Sandinista, even a Khomeini­ achievements of Cuba, limited to a ism and the Capitalists." The program solving the concrete problems' of the ite, and recurrently on the Argentine single Caribbean island besieged by called for support for a military victory Nicaraguan revolution: to end the war terrain he flew the banner of social de­ Yankee imperialism, are a beacon to the of the FMLN guerrillas inEI Salvador, of aggression and solve the economic mocracy. Yet through all his gyrations poor and working people of all Latin opposition to the Contadora negotia­ crisis." A "Constitutional Motion of the and support for one Third World America. Cuba is the only country of the tions, for defeating imperialist aggres­ PRT" issued in September calls for strongman after another, Moreno's region where there are no festering sion through militant solidarity with the expropriating the imperialist-owned "anti-Stalinism" has really been anti­ slums and no one goes hungry, where workers of the world, "especially the companies, the large factories and Sovietism. The IWL's claim in its 1985 infant mortality has dropped to 15 per workers of the United States and the haciendas, arming the workers, and congress that there is a "Holy Alliance thousand live births, life expectancy at USSR," and for a revolutionary federa­ imposing workers control. Yet they of Washington, the Kremlin, the Vati­ birth is 74.2 years, 96 percent of all tion of Cuba and Nicaragua. The PRT present these demands to the parliament can" (Working Class Opposition, May adults have achieved at least a sixth­ called as well for workers control of of what they call a bourgeois govern­ 1985) could come from a "state capital­ grade equivalency, education is free, production and supply, nationalization ­ ment! Such demands can only be ist" group which denies any conflict and after graduation there are jobs for of the factories and haciendas, and a realized through the independent mo­ between the Soviet Union and imperial­ all. In Cuba, 37 percentofdie workforce workers and poor peasants government bilization of the workers at the head of ism. Authentic Trotskyists are the best are women, as are more than half the 10 WORKERS VANGUARD and he was trying to give them a little electricity. That's what he called the Ben "Linder... revolution, and .that's what they're (continued from page 1) trying to destroy." himself "in harm's way." But as Con­ In Washington, D.C. at the April 25 gress "investigates" the Contragate "peace" crawl, liberal Democrats called conspiracy that financed this Murder for a "negotiated solution" in Nicara­ Inc., David Linder pointed to the gua. But there is nothing to negotiate perpetrators ofhis son's death: "He was with the psychopathic killers who killed by someone, they were hired by murdered Linder along with thousands someone, and they were paid by of Nicaraguans..There will be no peace someone, and so on down the line to the in Central America until the contrasand President of the U.S." death squads are crushed, their capital­ Two weeks before he was killed, ist masters expropriated and their Benjamin Linder told. the Washington imperialist patrons driven out. Defense Post that he, and the other members of of Nicaragua means completing the his crew were on a contra death list. Two revolution and extending it throughout .$ Nicaraguans associated with such proj­ Garcia/AP the region. The example of courageous ects had been killed the previous month. Benjamin Linder's family, joined by Sandinista president Daniel Ortega (left) individuals like Ben Linder, who has Asked how he felt about the danger of in funeral procession in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. now been martyred, points to the need attack, he replied with the Sandinista for international brigades, including slogan,' "For our dead, we swear to provincial capital of Matagalpa for use his technical skills to support the American volunteers, fighting to defend continue with the revolution." Linder Benjamin Linder's burial. Nicaraguan Nicaraguan Revolution. Recently grad­ Nicaragua against the contras and a was part of a lawsuit filed by the Center president Daniel Ortega joined dozens uated from engineering school at the . possible U.S. invasion. Thegovernment for Constitutional Rights last fall which of other' Nicaraguans, Americans and University of Washington, he .joined has already "brought the war home;' sought to halt U.S. funding of the other internaciona/istas in the guard of thousands of European and American with its witchhunting and. hounding of contras on the grounds that it threat­ honor, carrying his coffin and burying brigadistas in Nicaragua. International volunteers connected with TecNica and' ened American-citizens. In his affidavit him in Nicaraguan soil as he had assistance, especially Cuban teachers other groups. Linder wrote, "The danger to my requested. The Sandinista government and technicians and Soviet military and We salute Benjamin Linder. We also physical safety is immediate, and unless decorated Linder with its highest civil­ economic aid, has to some extent off­ know that his fate could have befallen an injunction is issued, I may suffer ian citation, the Order of Commander set the U.S. imperialist siege. Linder one of the number of Spartacist com­ irreparable physical harm as a result of Jose Benito Escobar, the first time it was worked for the Nicaraguan Energy rades who have visited Nicaragua in the unlawful activities of the U.S. awarded to a foreigner. International Institute, courageously building small solidarity and to witness firsthand a government." A U.S. district court volunteers vowed that rather than being power ptantsin the contra-infested revolution under way. Anti-imperialism judge threw out the suit, calling it a intimidated they would continue to northern provinces. He brought elec­ abroad means sharp class sttjaggle at "political question" for Congress and stand alongside the Nicaraguan people. tricity for the first time to the remote home, including labor strikes against Reagan. In the U.S., a candlelight vigil of 2,000 hamlet of El Cua, where he lived. U.S. war moves. It will take the Many Nicaraguans knew the popular people was held in' Linder's home Benjamin's father spoke his epitaph: revolutionary victory of the proletariat young volunteer, who also used his town of Portland, Oregon and a thou­ "He had a commitment to the to provide the conditions for the Ben revolution. And by the revolution, he talents as a clown to encourage children sand came out to honor him in San Linders of the world to effectively fight Francisco. . . defined it as giving people schools,· to participate in a vaccination cam­ givingthem medicalcare, givingthem a . to improve the lives of the planet's poor paign. Thousands lined the streets in the In 1983 Benjamin Linder decided to little respect, giving them a little land, and oppressed.•

country's technicians. Even the Wall and veryquicklyconfronted with tasks, USec's 1985 world congress resolution Street Journal (9 July 1986) admits: the fulfilment of whichisbound up with on "The Central American Revolution" "When Fidel Castro marched into deep inroads into the rights of bour­ geoisproperty. The democratic revolu­ declares that' "power passed into the Havana in 1959, one of his first moves hands of the workers" on 19 July 1979, was to abolish segregation in Cuba's tion grows· over directly into the deeply racist society. Twenty-seven socialist revolution and thereby be­ and says nothing about defending the years later, blackscontinueto beamong comes a permanent revolution." right to strike or about organs of the foremost beneficiaries of his revolu­ - The Permanent Revolution workers power; rather than a Trotskyist (1929) tion, as race increasingly fades as a party, the Mandelites call for "building barrier to social mobility." In Nicaragua today, a Leninist­ the Sandinista revolutionary party"! In fact, by many social indexes,.Cubans Trotskyist party must fight for a genuine The lessons of the Cuban Revolution are better off than Americans. And agrarian .revolution, expropriating in for proletarian Marxists are quite dif­ there is no comparison with the mass particular the large landowners (the backbone of the internal contras), who ferent from the liquidationist conclu­ misery next.door in Haiti. This is the sions of these anti-Trotskyists. As stated night-and-day difference a social revo­ produce almost all of the country's in the 1963 RT resolution, "Toward lution makes. exports. Such measures, as Trotsky Rebirth of the Fourth International," But Cuba is still a poorcountry, living wrote, would directly pose the expropri­ one of the founding documents of the off the subsidy provided by an estimat­ Der Spiege ation of the, bourgeoisie. Sandinistas pursue suicidal policy But in response to enthusiasm for the Spartacist tendency: ed $4 billion in Soviet aid annually, and "Experience since the Second World of "political pluralism" a'nda "mixed Nicaraguan Revolution, various osten­ a bureaucratically deformed workers economy." War has demonstrated that peasant­ state. The leadership is a tight group sibly Trotskyist outfits have openly based guerrilla warfare under petit­ consisting of Castro and his.immediate iat,groaning under IMF-imposed aus­ renounced the program of Trotskyism. bourgeoisleadershipcan initselflead to associates; who happens to be riding Most notorious is the AmericanSWP of nothing more than an anti-working­ terity: Above all, to transcend the class bureaucratic regime. The creation alongside the lider maximo on his jeep incredible poverty of this region of Jack Barnes, who in a December 1982 of such regimes has come about under ride is still more important than any banana and coffee republics,lherevolu­ speech dismissed Trotsky as "ultraleft" the conditions of decay of imperialism, vote by the empty "people's power" tion must be taken to the imperialist (see our Spartacist pamphlet, The So­ the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the assemblies or even a Communist Party heartland. This is the special responsi­ cialist Workers Party: An Obituary). Barnes is just putting the final touches absence ofrevolutionary Marxist lead­ . congress. In more than a quarter centu­ bility of North American communists. ership of the working class. Colonial ry under Yankee guns, Havana has Yet just as under the watchwords of on the SWP's anti-Trotskyist course revolution can have an unequivocally undertaken internationalist missions "political pluralism" and "mixedecono­ which began with its capitulation to progressive significance only under from Grenada to Angola, where Cuban Castro. Yet most of those who have such leadership of the revolutionary my" they have allowed a pro-contra proletariat." troops have held off South African bourgeois "fifth column" to operate claimed to defend Trotskyism against invaders for more than a decade. But inside the country, in the name of the renegade Barnes have taken a line The road to defend, complete and ex­ following the nationalist logic ofStalin­ "nonalignment" the Sandinistas have toward the FSLN indistinguishable tend the Nicaraguan Revolution is the ism, they have also supported bloody refused to aid the Salvadoran guerrilla from the SWP's. USec superstar Man­ road of Lenin and Trotsky, of perma­ butchers like Ethiopian strongman struggle, at least since the Reagan del, for instance, whips off a 30,000­ nent revolution and the reforging of the Mengistu, who has slaughtered Eritre­ administration put on the heat in early word document "In Defense of the Trotskyist Fourth International, world ans, Somalis and a generation of Ethi­ 1981. And they will do nothing to upset Permanent Revolution," while the party of socialist revolution.• opian leftists. And while Cuba has sent their ties with Mexico, even as the latter teachers and military trainers to Sandi­ increasingly capitulates to Washington nista Nicaragua, the State Department's and the possibility for explosive class wild claims of vast Cuban aid to Latin struggle mounts in the land ruled by the American guerrillas, particularly in El "Institutional Revolutionary Party." Salvador, are unfortunately a myth. This .only underlines the need for Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartaclst League forgfng an authentically communist For Permanent Revolution party openly fighting to complete a in Central America! socialist revolution. As Leon Trotsky o $5/24 issues of Workers Vanguard 0$2/4 issues of At the heart of the Nicaraguan ques­ wrote in summing up the lessons of the (includes Spactacist) International rates: Women and Revolution New Renewal $20/24 issues-Airmail tion is the Trotskyist program of perma­ Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 o 0 $5/24 issues-Seamail $2/10 introductory issues of nent revolution. Not even the limited (and their negative confirmation in the o o $2/4 issues of Spartacist Workers Vanguard gains won in the overthrow of Somoza, failed Chinese Revolution of 1927): (ediclon en espariol) (includes Spartacist) much less a workers revolution, can be "No matter what the first episodic defended in a Nicaragua surrounded on stages of the revolution may be in the Name _ individual countries, the realization of all sides by Yankee neocolonies. To sur­ the revolutionary alliance between the Address ----'----__ vive, the Nicaraguan Revolution must proletariat and the peasantryisconceiv­ ______Phone(__) _ break out ofthis vise, inspiring and aid­ able only under the political leadership ing revolutionaryclass strugglethrough­ of the proletarian vanguard, organized City State· ' Zip _ in the Communist Party.... out Central America-in the first in­ "The dictatorship of the proletariat 428 stance, El Salvador-andextend it tothe whichhas risento poweras the leaderof Make ehecka payable/mall to: Spargel.' Publ..hlnll Co., Box 1377 GPO,'New York, NY 10116 many million-strong Mexican proletar- the democratic revolution is inevitably 15 MAY 1987 11 "War on Nicaragua" said flat out, "The . Hart sex scandal pushed Reagangate was "wimp." Reaganga~e so-called Boland Amendment has the into second billing as some "anony­ A number of the chief operatives in effect of ratifying the secret war-not' mous" tips to an easily manipulated the affair were military men who were Cover-Up ... curbing it." CIA director Casey himself press knocked out the Democratic passed over for promotion or resigned supported the Boland Amendment. front-runner. This left a field of barely­ under fire. Secord didn't make it to J) (continued from page The Democratic-controlled "investi­ knowns (except for black Democrat Lieutenant General -because of his Secord named him as the chief conspira­ gation~ is a cover-up in part because it is Jesse Jackson) derisively known as the association with Edwin Wilson, one­ tor. But they wouldn't even let him rest their own crimes they are camouflaging, "Seven Dwarfs." The response was a lot time U.S. superspy now sitting in jail for in peace. At Casey's funeral, Bishop and partly because as committee chair­ of hand-wringing over how U.S. capital­ selling explosives to Qaddafi. Another John McGann denounced "the violence man Inouye stressed: "In the last quarter ism selects its leaders. top Contragater, General Singlaub, was wrought in Central America by support century, we have seen how foreign per­ Scandals over sex and secret wars are cashiered for opposing Carter's planned of the contras." Occupying a front-pew ception of weakness in the Oval Office a staple of American bourgeois politics reduction of U.S. troops in Korea; now seat, President Reagan must have contributed to crises for three Presi­ in recent years, just as endless affairs he's head of the "death squad interna­ longed to give His Eminence the dents." Damage control is the name of over financial swindles and the mercen-· tional" (the World Anti-Communist Archbishop Romero treatment­ the game. And meanwhile the U.S. war ary press marked the French. Third League), while still sitting on a Pen­ where's a death squad when you really on Nicaragua goes on, "Stinger" mis­ Republic in the 1930s. Until the 1960s, tagon "advisory committee" on "low­ need one? He had to settle for the siles are sent to Afghan mullahs so they Americans uniquely among Western intensity warfare.'; The prevalence of closest substitute, Jeane Kirkpatrick, can shoot down civilian airliners, and "democracies" believed "their'! govern­ veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and who rose to condemn the troublesome the U.S. is still secretly shipping arms to ment; today the presumption of public the U.S.' "secret wars" in Laos and priest's "mean-spirited and ill-informed Khomeini, all for the anti-Soviet war prevarication is so widespread that TV Vietnam in the Iran-contra operation is comments." But Bishop McGann con­ drive, a bipartisan enterprise of the ads for imported cars feature blatantlies reminiscent of the role of former cluded with a prayer that Casey "will partner parties of American capitalism. with grandmothers struck dead by paratroopers from the Algerian dirty now live forever in the presence of lightning. But beyond the national dif­ war in French fascism today. Such sorts Creation's' central intelligence"-the Crisis of the Imperial Presidency ferences in subject matter, the preva­ easily go over into a Nazi-like mentali­ great DCI in the sky. At the heart of the affair is the war lence of such debilitating affairs reflects ty over frustrations with the "restric­ You don't have. to be a canary'to drive against the Soviet Union, aiming the sapping of the strength of the tions" of bourgeois democracy, however sing-e-sometimes pigs squeal. As Con­ .at the overturn of the remaining respective bourgeoisies. They've been limited. So they were out to line their gressional hearings were about to open, conquests of the Russian Revolution of running a not-so-secret war 'in Nicara­ own pockets: Goring also grew quite former U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica October 1917. In his May 11 testimony, gua because after the"American Centu­ rich off his crusade. Lewis Tambs said he was just following McFarlane put forward the basic ry" went down to defeat in Vietnam, the But while Reagan is discredited and orders. Ambassador Tambs set up a widely hated, and the administration in contra "southern front," arranged for a disarray, the U.S. imperialist state is secret airfield to be carved out of the immensely powerful ...and dangerous. jungle, provided logistical aid for contra Capitalists intend to keep on taking arms flights and threatened the Costa back union gains, cops think they have a Rican president. But when Tambs green light to terrorize the ghetto, and found out some of his contra pals had frustrated "neo-conservatives" would targeted him for assassination to facil­ like to revive McCarthyite witchhunt­ itate their Colombian drug connection, ing to strike at the "enemy within." Thus the same ones who carried out a bomb around the April 25"peace" crawl, there attack on "Comandante .Zero" Eden was a burst of redbaiting, from the Pastora when he fell afoul of the CIA, it Moonies' Washington Times (which loosened his tongue. "Now the people accused the Sandinistas and Qaddafi of who gave us the orders are trying to financing the protests) to Cold War paint us as running amok," he liberals such as Washington Post complains. columnist Stephen Rosenfeld, who Fawn Hall knew all, while other denounced this supposed "Mobilization secretaries in Washington (like State Against Democracy," and William and War) are pleading ignorance. Randolph Hearst, Jr., who bellowed Maybe they didn't want to know, but about a "communist-sponsored propa­ the Reagan gang conducted their ganda stunt." .Similar ravings came conspiracy pretty openly, and now Washington Post . from teachers union president Albert Reagan (far·right) and Lt. Col. they're being hit with it. Tambs' orders North with Nicaraguan contra Shanker and AFL-CIO chief Lane came from the "Restricted Interagen­ leaders. North associate Carl Kirkland. ' cy Group" headed by 'Elliott Abrams Channell's TV commercials w,re Anti-Reagan liberal James Ridgeway (about whose denials of U.S. involve­ front for gunrunning to hoped (Village Voice. 5 May) that the ment with "private" contra supply oper­ counterrevolutionary terrorists. April 25 march "could eventually be a ations Republican Senator Durenbur­ spinal transplant for the Democrats in ger remarked last fall, "I wouldn't trust '88." The Democrats want to return to Elliott Abrams any further than I rationale of the operation, to overcome American population and large sections the White House to administer "ration­ could throw Oliver North"). And what the "Vietnam syndrome": of the ruling class have no appetite for al" Reaganism with a populist face. In they did in Iran was fairly shocking, by " ...if we could not muster an effective getting bogged down in another Third Washington, Jesse Jackson called for counter to the Cuban-Sandinista strat­ World military adventure. And the their own standards. Here was a half­ egy in our own backyard, it was far less protectionism (in the guise of fighting colonel going around telling people: My likely that we could do so in the years business blows up because the contras "slave labor"), for a "Camp David" style name is Lt. Col. Oliver North, I believe ahead in more distant locations. There's are losers. ' accord with the Sandinistas (to nego­ deeply in Jesus Christ, I work for the a corollary to that proposition: For if Democrats and Republicans alike tiate away the "danger" of revolution in we did prevail in Nicaragua, the president and I will get you a tax President might go far toward inhibit­ are up to their eyeballs in the Irani Central America), for "all foreign exemption if you will pay to send arms ing Soviet pursuit of this strategy in Contragate conspiracy, but the present troops out of Angola" (removing the to the ayatollahs. Texas billionaires, other areas.... We had to win this one." ruling clique have a distinctquality. The valiant Cuban forces who for the last Israeli arms merchants, Saudi princes. But now this gang of crusaders against fervor of the Reaganites when they took decade have prevented the South and Brunei sultans bought it, but saner . the Soviet "evil empire" is going down office was similar to when Nixon came African apartheid army from reestab­ minds in Washington decided it was and their desperation is showing. Jeane in, except "Tricky Dick" was less an lishing colonial rule), and proclaimed, time to cart some of these characters off Kirkpatrick, formerly Reagan's favor­ ideologue than a simple crook. There "we must not only march together and to the looney bin. That was the job of the ite Dragon Lady, asks "Is the Soviet was also something of the flavor of when pray together, we must coalesce and Tower Commission. Union under Gorbachev really in con­ the Nazis took over, a righteous political vote together." And the reformist left The Congressional hearings show trol of the international agenda" and (not social) revolution that took over tail on the Democratic donkey tags what we all knew all along-that the wonders if the U.S. has "entered a (rather than smashed) a state machine along repeating the "Rainbow" rhetoric. Great Prevaricator was the No. 1 period of historical decline'; (Newsday, they were at odds with. This'created .In the Atlanta convention, Jackson will unindicted contra co-conspirator. Se­ 29 March). And now with Soviet leader quite a contradiction, and on top of it try to turn this support into some cord takes the stand as the patriotic Mikhail Gorbachev, things Soviet are they tried to carry out the "Reagan "clout," perhaps in exchange for deliver­ American, just carrying out the presi­ the rage in the U.S. as T-shirts sporting revolution" without much of a majority ing a block of delegates to some dent's policy: "There's no question that Lenin's portrait, -cccr- and hammers in Congress. As liberal Vietnam histori­ Dixiecrat warmonger like Georgia Sen­ the covert operation was designed to be and sickles are "in." an Frances FitzGerald noted in an essay ator Sam Nunn. concealed from Congress." Everyone in The unraveling of the Reagan regime on "Reagan's Band of True Believers" Imperialism is not a policy, but a Washington politics was in on the exposes a broader crisis of leadership at (New York Times Magazine, 10 May), system-capitalism in its epoch of "secret," including Congress and the the helm of American imperialism's they had Reaganite fanatics heading terminal decay. By itself, the effect of a press. The managed media buried the "ship of state." The White House officeswhose functions they oppose: put Watergate or Contragate crisis will pass story until Meese handed it to them on a couldn't find a new head of the CIA with . someone in charge of mine safety who as the personnel directing the imperialist platter at the November 25 news con­ clean hands, so the Senate had to settle doesn't believe in mine safety, and the state machine are switched. What's ference. The Wall Street Journal (1 for ex-FBI boss William Webster, same for environmental protection, air needed is a class-struggle workers party May) now admits that it and other despite his claims to have "lost" the safety, civil rights, human rights, educa­ to mobilize the proletariat and its allies, papers "delayed stories about the Con­ report of a 1985 investigation into tion, arms control, etc. And from the leading all' the oppressed-all the vic­ tras naming Lt. Col. Oliver North" from North's contra operations. And several day they took office, they werefinagling tims of Reaganism and their Democrat­ 1985 on. Congressiortal intelligence top Reaganites have turned down the to get around legislative and bureau­ ic partners in crime-in a struggle for committees asked for details of North's directorship of the FBI, which for half a cratic restraints. As their field of socialist revolution that will'sweep out operation, then dropped it on White century under red-hunter Hoover was a maneuver narrowed, the gang in the the White House, the Pentagon, Wall House assurances that laws Were not key position to blackmail anyone White House basement saw the rest of Street and the capitalist class. The aim being violated. And Congress bought all including presidents. The Democrats the administration as part of the . of the Spartacist League is to put an end the. fairy tales the administration con­ are faring no better, and could even obstacle. In the code language of to their increasingly despotic, wantonly cocted to sell contra aid, and as the PBS snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Secord's "enterprise" North was "Mr. vicious and capricious rule, that brings Frontline (21 April) TV special on the '88. For the first week in May, the Gary Good" and the State Department untold misery to the planet. • 12 WORKERS VANGUARD Navy Gunning for Maritime Strikers erate Flag") Feinstein, isechoing Todd's threats that"it would be cheaper to close the yard" (San Francisco Chronicle, 9 ILWU: Shut Down Coast Ports! May). And the pattern for the massive cuts sought by the Bay Area shipyards was set in Seattleand Portland when the OAKLAND, May ll-A concerted Trades Council, who have fought to union tops capitulated to a court­ .effortis under way by the Navy, mar­ crush the shipyard strike ever since it imposed wage cut at Marine Power and itime employers, Democratic Party pol­ began six weeks ago, "voted unan­ Equipment Co. in July 1986.The Navy iticians and the union bureaucrats to imously to not consider work aboard is gunning for shipyard workers from tighten the screws on the Bay Area the [amphibious transport USS] Van­ Norfolk to Seattle. They want to break shipyard and West Coast Inland Boat­ couver 'struck work' if the Navy decides the unions, just as the bipartisan war men's Union (IBU) strikes. On May 8 to move' the ship" from dry dock at drive is aimed at smashing the Soviet the Navy threatened to cancel its Todd ("Bay Cities Metal Trades Coun­ workers' conquests in the 1917October contract with Todd Shipyards, the cil Strike Update," 7 May). The back­ Revolution. largest of the struck yards, fueling stabbing union tops have already The union tops are doing everything rumors that it will be permanently allowed Pacific Dry Dock, a subsidiary in their power to isolate the maritime closed. In Seattle, the International of Crowley, to bring in scabs. and shipyard workers and make them Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's The Pacific Maritime Association take on the bosses and the capitalist Union (ILWU) tops ordered boatmen to (PMA) bosses have targeted the ILWU. government alone. This is how strikes take down their picket line against They long to replicate the two-tier wage­ are lost. To win, the social power of all Crowley Maritime so that scabs could slashing agreements and erosion of Striking boatmen at the Port of the maritime workers must be com­ tow a barge to Alaska with DEW-Line union jurisdiction in the Atlantic and Oakland, February 22. For ~ coast­ bined. Longshoremen, whose contract anti-missile materiel for Reagan's anti­ Gulf ports. Already Alaskan cargo has wise maritime/waterfront strikel expires June 30, must take the lead in a Soviet war drive. been taken away from the ILWU in coastwise shutdown, ..welding together While Todd floats shutdown rumors, Seattle and Puget Sound, and the PMA chained them to the Democratic Party shipyard workers, the IBU and related another struck yard, Southwest Marine, has the union hiring hall in its sights. and the bosses' courts, and bows down transport workers in a fight against the is using scabs to work the USS Wichita West Coast maritime workers are before the capitalists' "national securi­ years of concession takeaways. Victory at the Alameda Naval Air Station. And being ripped up because they are ty." The bureaucrats' "friend of labor," to the shipyard and IBU strikes! Bring the union bureaucrats on the Metal saddled with a leadership which has San Franciscomayor Dianne ("Confed- out the power of the ILWU! •

and unionists to stop the Klan from ate flag, the BT called it an adventurist to keep us out of "their" demonstra­ What Makes marching in Washington, the BT didn't stunt. tions, they run point for repression bother showing up. Instead they wrote And what about Geronimo Pratt? against.the left. But the reformists and us a letter accusing us of selling out to The BT tried a real provocation to get rad-libs who hate our politics aren't BT Run? ..· Stalinism because we called one of the on the platform of our rally in defense of obsessed with us. Their appetites lead (continued from page 6) buses to the demonstrationthe "Yuri this framed-up Panther leader. Why? them in anotherdirection; they just wish defensive action they could have in Andropov Brigade." Of course the BT They had shown no interest in the case. we would go away. shooting down what looked to be a could have no appreciation of the They didn't even endorse the rally until But how can one explain the BT? military aircraft. We and the Russian pleasure of deeply alienated blacks, we observed that supporting the case Writing on the BT two years ago ("ET: government deplored the loss of inno­ infuriated that the White House in- was a precondition for speaking there! New Name, Same Game?" WVNo.388, cent lives, victims of Reagan's anti­ 4 October 1985) we observed: "Those who are guided by intense" Soviet war drive. But not so the BT. subjective malice as a political program The BT's theoretical bloodthirstiness are just asking to be someone's tool, has always been extremely vicarious and witting or unwitting (sometimes in direct proportion to their distance both).... But applying the criterion cui from where the blood was being shed. bono (who benefits) to the ET/BT suggests answers ranging from the The BT's "live like pigs, die like pigs" merely unsavory to the downright slogan for the Marines in Lebanon sinister." hardly fits in with its sidling up to the The whole tone of the BT recalls social-patriotic "No More Vietnams" nothing so much as the insinuating style crowd. And how does its KAL 007 associated with the FBI's infamous position square with the "third camp" COINTELPRO. The aforementioned swamp in which the BT is so comforta­ Mandel petition urges people to con­ bly ensconced? We surmise that the BT demn a presumed act while admitting would love to push us into hailing the they have no idea if -it actually took gratuitous spilling of blood, the better to place: "While I did not witness the feed the anti-communist fantasies of assault ...I condemn this and any use of government witchhunters, perhaps. physical violence within the workers Except for such a twistedpurpose, why movement."Ortake the comments from should the BT seek to paint us as social­ the first issue of 1917 on the spectacular patriots and take up themselves a implosion of the Healyite tendency. bloody-minded posture? Particularly. Noting that the Healyites are notorious after the departure of Mandel (about, for beating up internal opponents, the which the BT has provided no word of BT opines that "This is something which explanation), the BT's leading light is the SL is not guilty of to our knowl­ unquestionably Howard Keylor, a man WV Photo "We Stopped the Klanl" said S,OOO-strong Labor/Black Mobilization initiated edge," adding that "intimations of such who to this day supports the' U.S. appetites are increasingly common." imperialist side in World War /II by the Spartacist League, 27 November 1982 in Washington, D.C. Where were the BTs? This is like asking, "When are you going to start beating your wifer' . BT Spits on the Black Oppressed tended having the Klan parade through The lousy one dollar bill they tried to Ex-members of the socialist move­ Obscenely the BT has called ourwork the nation's capital, at the idea of a give us as a "statement" of "support" ment do sometimes bear malice toward to mobilize against racists "ghetto" contingent named for their enemy's was an insult to a man who has been the organizations that "failed" them. work. They declare that by mobilizing chosen enemy, the head of the "Evil behind bars for 17 years. And then the But people who voluntarily leave even the biggest anti-fascist demonstration in Empire." Meanwhile the American BT speaker resurrected FBI lies about very bad organizations normally find decades, in Washington, D.C., in No­ apologists of the Soviet bureaucracy, "factionalism" that were used to set up that their grievances recede as they go' vember 1982-based squarely upon the the CP, were like the BT nowhere near Panther leaders for jail and assassina­ on with their lives. Hostility doesn't power of organized labor-the SL was the anti-fascist mobilization, being en­ tion. The BT spits on the victims of make a program and ex-membership in abandoning "union work." Indeed, the gaged in the counterposed strategy of racist state terror, from MOVE to a party doesn't provide a sufficient fight for black liberation is counter­ preaching reliance on federal courts, Geronimo Pratt. Anybody the BT can reason for publishing a newspaper or posed to the BT's idea of union work: black mayors and the Democrats' recruit from us based on such a posture crossing North Am-erica_and Europe conciliating the racist labor tops. "Rainbow Coalition" to "ban" the Klan. is somebody we don't want. year after year seeking others similarly The SL raised the biggest outcry we The BT whines that the SL has inclined. The BT is manifestly an as­ could over the hideous government accused them of being racists. Well, if BT· Dancing to Whose Tune? semblage of garbage, a heap made up of murder of eleven black people, includ­ the shoe fits ... We can simply empiri­ The latest issue of 1917 says that the worse than worn-out people, the worst ing five children, incinerated in the 1985 cally show that the BT doesn't give a SpartacistLeague believes"in a gigantic of those who have departed from the bombing of Philly MOVE. The BT's damn about" the oppression of black web of intrigue connecting most of the SL, which we think is a ,pretty good response was to smear MOVE support­ people. The latest 1917 says not a word organized left to various police agencies revolutionary organization. But to take er LaVerne Sims as a cop fink and about escalating racist terror from in a sinister conspiracyaimed at-what that refuse heap and make it move like a denounce the SL for offering her a Howard Beach to Forsyth County. else?-the Spartacist League." No, most loathsome living thing requires some- platform at our "meeting honoring the When our supporter Richard Bradley of the left are surely not cop agents. We . thing more, an animating principle like MOVE martyrs. - scaled the flagpole in the S.F. Civic point out that when the popular-front the electric charge Dr.. Frankenstein When we mobilized over 5,000 blacks Center to rip down the hated Confeder- leftists call us cops while calling the cops used to imbue his monster with life.• 15 MAY 1987 13 many places. South Africa .... Far more significant is that anti­ (continued from page 16) apartheid protest - shut down Wit­ Free South African Black' Unionist! watersrand University; Even after the laager (camp). As even the Wall Street police attacked the largely white protest­ Journal (6 May) noted, the "spiritual ers with tear gas, beat them with whips Moses Mayekiso and intellectual molds of this nation's and batons and arrested 120 students elite ...are being rent by debate and and teachers, the crowd defiantly doubt about the wisdom of apartheid." regrouped with the help of sympathetic Must Not Die! At Stellenbosch.University, the centerof faculty. "Dancing, chanting students Afrikaner nationalism and the political cheered professors wearing academic Moses Mayekiso, head of the Tshabalala, Richard Mdakane and elite, comparable to Harvard or Oxford, gowns as a faculty spokesman, Prof. 61,000-member Metal and Allied Obed Dapela. In Britain, National a group of senior faculty resigned from Doug Hindson, said they would back Workers Union in South Africa, is Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur the ruling party in a bitter protest of the students' call for a two-day closure under threat of execution by the Scargill, Labour MP Tony Benn and Botha's failure to institute "reforms." of the university to protest the white vicious apartheid regime. Accused of others have called for his release. The There is a developing split in the election" (New York Times, 5 May). having tried.to "overthrow, usurp or international workers movement Afrikaner ruling class-reflected as well Clearly many South African white endanger the authority of the state," must be mobilized to demand free­ in the courts, which this week briefly youth do not look forward to living in Mayekiso is being tried on treason dom for Mayekiso and all victims of relaxed press restrictions on coverage of Botha's police state. There is even a charges. Four others are also facing apartheid repression. Messages of the unrest, while Pretoria ordered the growing "End-Conscription Campaign" the death penalty for their politi­ support may be sent to: MAWU, - police to ignore the court rulings in which opposes the drafting of youth for cal activism in the black township Fourth Floor COSATU House, 268 the oppressive army. of Alexandra: Mayekiso's younger Jeppe Street, Johannesburg 2001, This development provides opportu­ brother Mzwanle Mayekiso, Paul South Africa. nities for revolutionary proletarian class struggle in South Africa. Guaranteeing a place for white South Africans in a Before the elections, the ANC had move against the Afrikaner nationalist black-eentered workers government correctly ridiculed the upcoming vote, regime. Such a strategy can only lead to could assist in neutralizing the danger­ but after PFP member of parliament disaster by politically disarming the ous military machine of apartheid which Helen Suzman attacked the ANC's black proletariat and fostering illusions threatens a 'genocidal slaughter. More­ comments as "sinister" for "not giving in their exploiters. As we wrote in our over, whites can provide technical and us a last chance," Winnie Mandela came last issue: "Class exploitation is the cultural skills which will help secure a out for a "vote against apartheid" at her motor force for the disenfranchisement decent life for all in a socialist federation planned speech at the University of of apartheid's victims; their emancipa­ of southern Africa. Witwatersrand. This could only mean a tion requires a social revolution. What is But instead of making use of the vote for the PFP, the political arm of the urgently needed in South Africa is an polarization among privileged whites mammoth Anglo American mining and integrated revolutionary workers party, to press for workers revolution, the industrialconglomerate, a Bolshevik party, committed to the ABC-TV 600,000-strong COS ATU isshackled by This is in keeping with the ANC's expropriation of South Africa's wealth Apartheid cops attack integrated the nationalist-reformist perspective of traditional strategy of seeking to pres­ by its producers in a black-centered student protest which shut down seeking to pressure the (increasingly sure the English-speaking bourgeoisie, workers government. Smash apart­ University of Witwatersrand, May 3. less) "liberal" wing of the ruling class. and Anglo-American imperialism, to heid-For workers revolution!".•

election. As Malcolm X said, if you vote New York ... for the Democrats, you're voting for the Dixiecrats, and Jesse Jackson is deter­ (continued from page 5) mined to prove him right. seem to be seeking confrontations with The fight against the racist terrorists the cops in which the demonstrators can requires a sharp break from the Demo­ only lose. At the Bumpurs trial, with cratic Party of racist American capital­ black demonstrators sandwiched by an ism. Key to liberation of the black army of police, nationalists began taunt­ Massive show masses is forging a multiracial workers ing the cops with the chant "Today's pig of police force party that champions the cause of all the is tomorrow's bacon!" On April 4, they at UN against oppressed. With racist terror on the marched on a Harlem station house and demonstrators rampage in New York City, powerful then to Columbia, baiting trigger-happy protesting workers action is urgently needed to attacks on black cops with chants of "Pigs have got to community, stop the killers cold. After Howard pay!" and trying to drive white stu­ March 20. Beach, militant transit workers in the dents away from integrated anti-racist Committee for a Fighting TWU called protests. on their union brothers to fight for Behind the provocative "off the pig" integrated union patrols to make the hype and poisonous race-baiting are the Some 2,000 riot-equipped cops moved no fluke. Louis ("Hitler was a great streets of New York safe for every likes of Sonny Carson (whose "Black in, sealing off the neighborhood and man") Farrakhanhas linked himself decent person! Outside the Bronx Men's Movement Against Crack" is an preventing a march on the synagogue' with the KKK, inviting California courthouse where the dead victim anti-drug vigilante squad Reagan would where an estimated 10,000 people were Klansman and DemocraticPartycandi­ Eleanor Bumpurs was ontrial instead of love), Al Sharpton(who led racist rallies celebrating the rabbi's birthday. It date Tom Metzger to his anti-Semitic the cop who killed her, on the Morning­ against Arab storekeepers in Harlem), would have been West Beirut in Brook­ tirades in Los Angeles. -After- the side Heights campus where city police Calvin Butts of the Abyssinian Bap­ lyn ...and the only force between blacks Howard Beach lynching, "former" haul off anti-racist protesters while the tist Church (whose "National African and Jews was Koch's killer cops! KKK "Imperial Wizard" David Duke "Heil Columbia" racist punks go free, Youth Student Alliance" lo.oks__ to the Who are these "leaders" workingfor? showed up at the pizza parlor to recruit the Spartacist League and the New York politics and methods of the anti-Semitic One answer was provided in early May for his latest racist hate group. Borrow­ Labor Black League for Social Defense bigot Louis Farrakhan, the man who when 22,000 posters went up around ing a line from Democrat Jimmy Carter, have' called for labor/black mobiliza­ wanted Malcolm X dead). Who benefits the city in a Police Departme.nt recruit­ Duke said, "Communities in this coun­ tions against lynch mob terrorists and from their antics? If New York City is ing drive for black cops. Bearing a try should have the right to maintain Koch's killer cops. engulfed in race war, Ronald Reagan photograph of four prominent black their ethnic purity" (Daily Challenge, Had the transit powerhouse of NYC would be the winner, unleashing the clergymen-Herbert Daughtry, Calvin 2 March). labor mobilized defense guards at the -forces of deadly repression against the Butts, Lawrence Lucas and Wendell time of the 1982 lynch mob murder of Foster-the poster bore the slogan, "We Break with the Democrats­ ghetto and cutting off the possibility of Forge a Workers Party! black union brother Willie Turks, integrated class struggle (while whack­ are New Yorkers looking for 'The Michael Griffith and Brother Wajid ing out the Democrats in the elections). Finest'." What an obscenity in Reagan's Black people in this country are kept Abdul-Salaam might be alive today. Itis Black people would be the biggest America, in Koch's New York, where in thrall through their leaders' ties to the the absence of integrated labor struggle losers. But that is exactly the logic of the names of black people murdered by racist Democratic Party. In New York, against the racists which opens the ethnic nationalist politics. the police are witness to the deadly black lawyers Alton Maddox and C. doors to those who seek to fan the In Crown Heights in particular the system of racist capitalist terror! This is Vernon Mason have championed the flames of race-hate in this city on the stage is set for a repeat ofthe 1978clash cause of black victims of police brutality brink. The "long hot summers" of the between blacks and Jews, when Her­ and murder, and been themselves the 1960s were massive outbursts of rage bert Daughtry deflected black outrage target of racist threats of disbarment. and frustration following the failure of over the cop murder of black communi­ - Yet they channel the just anger of the the liberal civil rights movement to ty leader Arthur Miller into pogromist ghetto into illusions in Mario Cuomo's change the conditions of black people in marches on Hassidic synagogues. This "special prosecutors." And meanwhile, the Northern ghettos. Twenty years February, the home of a black woman, Maddox whips up racism with his later, the black condition in America Willie Mae Reddish, was firebombed; despicable racist-baiting of young white has worsened by every indicator, from witnesses saw two Hassidic youth model Marla Hanson, the victim of a infant mortality to youth unemploy­ running from the house into a dormito­ hideous razor slashing, for identifying ment to the hundreds of black'son death ry forrabbinical students, but the police two black attackers. row. Now more than ever, it is urgent to didn't pursue it. Meanwhile, a vigilante Nationally, Jesse Jackson is now the win the ranks of labor, the youth, the patrol run by the synagogue has been Democratic Party front-runner.' But black and Hispanic masses to the beating and harassing blacks, trying to behind his populist Rainbow rhetoric, program of socialist revolution.- When run them out of the neighborhood. On Jackson will be brokering black votes thousands of black workers take their April I t, the sabbath before Passover, Jet for racist Dixiecrats like Sam Nunn in place as proletarian leaders in the black leaders massed 600 people to­ Rev. AI Sharpton's "crack-down" '88, just as he sat down to tea and pecan revolutionary vanguard .party, the march through the Hassidic area to the campaign: anti-drug vigilantes Rea­ rolls with Alabama governor George days of the racist terrorists will be home of the Lubavitcher Grand Rebbe. gan would love. "Mr. Segregation" Wallace in the '84 numbered.• 14 WORKERS VANGUARD that described Pratt as a "principled Geronimo individual and an idealist and supporter of human rights" whose "prognosis for parole should be excellent." The board Pratt, "I Intend to Pratt... cites Pratt's' courageous refusal to (continued from page 16) perjure and frame himself, to "jump because he symbolizes the best of the through hoops," in his words, by Keep On Struggling" millions who participated in the civil 'walking into the trap of "admitting rights and antiwar activism of the 1960s guilt" for a crime he did not commit. The following statement from and COINTELPRO-type repression. and 1970s. And the heinous denial of They smear this highly decorated Geronimo Pratt was read by Ashaki No matter what they do to me, I will freedom for this innocent man is once Vietnam veteran as a "walking time Pratt to the rally called by the always affirm the right to resist, the again openly political. He is "still a bomb." Committee to Free Geronimo Pratt right to struggle for freedom. This is revolutionary," raged' Los Angeles The parole system which keeps Pratt on the morning ofhis hearing before something that they can never take deputy district attorney Diane Vezzani in prison just caused a storm of public the' California parole board. away. I am 100 percent innocent of at the parole hearing (San Francisco outrage when it released one of Califor­ I want to thank everyone for your the charges for which I have spent 17 Chronicle, May 6). Pratt survived a nia's most brutal real murderers: Law­ active support-the letters, the peti­ years of my life in prison. But I am 1969murder attempt by the state, when rence Singleton, a (white) psychopath tions-and your presence here today. and always will be a freedom fighter police death squads laid siege to the who savagely raped a 15-year-old girl, I want you to know that whatever for Afrikan people-and for all L.A. Panther headquarters. Because he cut her arms off with an ax and threw the Parole Board decides today, I people. . survived, Pratt was framed on a murder her in a ditch to die, just walked out of intend to keep on struggling-no! In the spirit of Nelson Mandela rap in a travesty of a trial in which the prison a free man after serving a little only for my own release-but for the and Leonard Peltier, and also Anna star witness was a paid police and FBI over half of a 14-year sentence. No one release of all the political prisoners Mae Aquash, Haydee Torres, Mari­ informer who perjured himself by wants Singleton in their community. and prisoners of the war of injus­ lyn Buck and Watani Tyehimba, I denying his relationship to those agen­ But a senior editorialist at the Oakland tice, incarcerated in the dungeons of wish to thank you again for your cies. FBI wiretaps proving Pratt was 500 Tribune wrote on the day of the hearing the U.S. support, and encourage you to join miles away from the scene of the crime that Pratt "sounds like a model citizen All around the world, human hands and form a solid bastion were suppressed and then "lost." A to me." Meanwhile, the same Edwin beings fight against'injustice and for against the evils of oppression that retired FBI official, WesleySwearingen, Meese who scrambles to save his their people and their nations-in starve and murder us and make us later testified: "Pratt was set up." He has "legacy" of repression by keeping Pratt Azania, in Ireland, in El Salvador, in 'suffer so. endured 17 long years in prison includ­ in prison just went all-out trying to Chile. And all around the ~orld Asante, ing eight in solitary confinement. He has protect Nazi war criminal Karl Linnas governments lock up and criminalize A luta continua, withstood the attempts to break his from extradition to face justice in the people who resist oppression, racism geronimo ji Jaga spirit and assassinate his character. Soviet Union. Such is racist "justice" in . Unbowed, like Nelson Mandela in capitalist America. Who sits on this parole board, accountable to no one but their capital­ the Justice Department's Criminal ren Hinckle and Tribune editorial writer ist masters, seeking to do their dirty Division; Michael Nash, who fought Austin Long-Scott wrote powerful work in the dark like the star-chamber Pratt's appeal, is now a California pieces calling for his freedom. More inquisitors of the Middle Ages? Ap­ judge; Richard Wallace Held now heads than 100 trade-union, civil rights and pointed by California's staunchly Rea­ the FBI's San Francisco office. All of community organizations endorsed the ganite governor George Deukmejian them share with their godfathers Meese February 21labor/blackdemonstration and approved by the state senate, the and Reagan a deep, vested interest in called by the Labor Black League and board that denied Pratt's parole was keeping Pratt behind bars. As Hanlon the Partisan Defense Committee. The chaired by Edmund Tong, a former said, the parole hearing was "rigged PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian member of the Democratic Party's from the beginning in a very ugly racist legal defense organization in accord­ National Committee. The other two and political manner." ance with the political views of the members are deputy commissioner What James P. Cannon, then leader Spartacist League. Robert Roos, a professional "civil of the International Labor Defense, Radio Moscow covered the demon­ servant," and Maureen O'Connell. wrote in 1927 of the enemies of Sacco stration,noting that Pratt is among the O'Connell, in particular, stood out as a and Vanzetti applies fully to those who prominent "dissidents suppressed by the hoto vicious witchhunter. For ten years rob Pratt of his freedom: United States." At a February 27 "They want to know if...they can Partisan Defense Committee joins O'Connell was a sheriff in the Alameda Oakland news conference former Black County Sheriff's Department, which wreak their revenge upon these rebels, Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale protest demanding Pratt's freedom who have not feared to defy them, by May 5 outside parole board. works hand in glove with the Alameda burying them alive andat the same time urged support for a letter-writing County district attorney's office-a liquidating the movement which must campaign demanding freedom for South Africa, Pratt remains deeply historic recruiting ground for Reagan free them!" Pratt. Over 2,000 individuals and committed to the cause of the oppressed reaction that spawned Edwin Meese and -Notebook ofan Agitator organizations across the country re­ in fighting for his own freedom. his protege LowellJensen, the D.A. who At the .parole hearing Assistant D.A. sponded to appeals from the PDC and At the May 5 hearing, the parole directed the reign of terror against the Vezzani lashed out at the many who others to send letters to the parole commissioners displayed a vindictive­ Panthers in the 1960s. have come forward in the cause of board, and more than 1,000letters have ness and an open hatred for what Pratt At a protest called by the Committee Pratt's freedom: "He has a network of so far been sent to the Ninth Circuit represents that shocked even prison to Free Geronimo Pratt before the people who will assist him in any way he Court of Appeals where Pratt isfighting guards and newspaperjournalistscover­ May 5 hearing, Pratt's attorney Stuart wishes," she railed. fora new trial. ing the case. They especially went after Hanlon noted that the rogue's gallery of This frenzy is indeed testimony to the The government's efforts to isolate Pratt's honorable political past as a frame-up artists who railroaded Pratt breadth of support-for Pratt's cause. Pratt from his supporters will backfire; Black Pantherand humanist. The board used his case as a steppingstone: Jensen Newspaper, journalists' like the S.F. more and more enemies of social arrogantly dismissed. the latest in a long became a top official in the Justice Chronicle's Jack Viets are among those oppression and racist injustice must series of reports praising Pratt from San Department and was recently rewarded who over the years have prevented the make his cause their own. Step up the Quentin's own prison counselors and with a judgeship in San Francisco; trial case from being buried away from fight-all out for "Freedom Now for from staff psychologist Randall Bruce prosecutor StephenTrott is now head of' public view; Examiner columnist War- Geronimo Pratt!".

proletariat's treacherous misleaders. France ... And the fascist killers wouldn't even (continuedfrom page 3) exist if it hadn't been for the Stalinists' ,betrayal ofthe revolution in 1945,when national sovereignty by locking up our the French workers rose up in arms country in this European and Atlanticist against the retreating German occupiers conglomerate" (L'Humanite, 28 April). and their Vichy fascist puppets. But the This is a revolting attempt to rival the PCF disarmed the workers, politically fascists in French chauvinism. and physically, on the altar of the Fiterman ducked the central ques­ popular front with General de Gaulle. tion: anti-immigrant racist terror. Ap­ A militant and massivecounterattack pealing to the white labor aristocracy could check the fascist offensive and and trying to hold on to its municipal galvanize the entire working class, offices, the PCF won't touch the particularly its immigrant sector. For La Bolchevik burning issue of racial oppression. Even French Tro~skyists initiate united front, Rauen, 1981: "Popular Front Disarms the final victory against fascism-the worse, the Marchais leadership gro­ the Working Class! Crush the Fascist Vermin! For Workers Self-Defense!" product of decaying capitalism-the tesquely tried to prove its "responsibili­ , proletariat needs the leadership of a ty" to the bourgeoisie by attacking racist" alternative to the" Marchais regularly expels immigrants from his Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party African workers in an immigrant hostel leadership. But while criticizing the municipality). armed with an internationalist program at Vitry in December 1980! The social­ social democracy for not combatting Le The current trial of Klaus Barbie, the which poses the fight against racist chauvinist PCF tops pretend to counter Pen from the beginning, these liquida­ bloody butcher of Lyon, should be a terror and racial discrimination as a the fascist threat by simple economic tors line up behind Mitterrand's SP and reminder of the horrors of fascism ... strategie question for socialist revolu­ struggle, as if any such struggle actually cover up the racist police terror under and of the virulent anti-Semitism which tion in France. No platform for fascists! capable of wresting significant gains the Mitterrand popular front which went far beyond the open collaborators. Abolish the CRS and other special from the bourgeoisie would not have to paved the way for the fascists' current The working class must mobilize now 'police forces specializing in anti­ be physically defended from the fascist success. Even today the "Socialists" are against fascist terror. This means working-class and anti-immigrant re­ bands! the organizers of racial segregation in opposing the new popular-front alliance pression! Cops out of immigrant neigh­ The so-called "renovateurs." the het­ Marseille and Lyon (where the aspiring being pushed by the reformists aimed at borhoods! Full citizenship rights for erogeneous opposition inside/ outside Bonaparte Charles Hernu, Mitterrand's putting Mitterrand back in the presiden­ foreign workers! Worker/immigrant the PCF (now being frantically courted ex-minister of war who was responsible tial palace in 1988. Today Le Pen's defense guards. based on the trade by the LCR), postures as an "anti- for the murder of a Greenpeace activist, strength lies only in the cowardice of the unions! Fight for workers power!. 15 MAY 1987 15 W'RIlERI ".'OIlRIJ

Former Black Panther Steadfast in Freedom Sirugg!

PrattParo'le Denied OAKLAND-On May 5 the Califor­ upholds his innocence, the state keeps Reagan gang, a prime candidate for nia Board of Prison Termssummarily him in bondage today. Pratt was a the jailhouse. To shore up the com­ denied parole to former Black Pan­ victim of the FBI's COINTELPRO pletely tarnished reputation of Meese ther leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, ("counterintelligence program"), the & Co., the state treats Geronimo Pratt America's foremost class-war prison­ government's murder machine that like the fugitive slave Dred Scott, who er. A government conspiracy, spear­ killed 38 of his Panther comrades. the Supreme Court decided in 1856 headed by Reagan's top cop Edwin Meese used this frame-up to launch "has no rights that the white man is Meese, locked Pratt away 17years ago himself into the big time as Reagan's bound to respect." COINTELPRO is for a crime he could not and did not sinister attorney- general. Now this alive and well on the California parole commit. Because this courageous Contragate co-conspirator stands board. Geronimo Pratt, America's fore­ black fighter for freedom refuses to exposed to the world as a liar and one Pratt was framed and imprisoned most class-war prisoner. deny his political commitment and of the foremost criminals of the continued on page 15

South Africa Student Revolt Black Workers Strike Against Apartheid. Election One and a half mil/ion black workers African state has been racked by commercial center. Rail transport is far and students shook the foundations of massive black-resistance in the face of more strategic to South Africa's econo­ apartheid capitalism on May 5,,:(> in a savage police-state terror. and repres­ my than to the American. The strike was ..-... two-day nationwide stayaway from sion. White support to these anti­ only suppressed,with massive police Miller/Impact Visuals, work. South African president P.W. apartheid struggles has, however, been raids, in which several strikers were Founding rally of COSATU, 1985. Botha had planned to bolster the racist pretty much limited to a small number killed, followed by the mass firing of Massive May "stayaway" shows Pretoria regime by conducting another of courageous individuals.But this time, 16,000 strikers who defied a back-to­ combativity of South African black proletariat. racist "election" among the 2.5 million significantly, students and faculty at the work order. The police also raided the white voters-entirely excluding the predominantly white Witwatersrand downtown Johannesburg headquarters largest anti-government gathering since country's 25 million blacks. (The fake University in Johannesburg joined the of the black-centered labor federation emergency rule was imposed in June" parliaments for three million 'mixed­ stayaway protest against the racist COSATU (Congress of South African (Phi/adelphia Inquirer, 2 May). The race coloureds and one million Indians elections.'Police using tear gas attacked Trade Unions). successofthe two-day stayaway of May were not up for a vote.) "Ifvoting could 3,000Wits students who had gathered to Yet on May Day, even though the 5-6, called by COSATU and the anti­ change the system, it would be illegal," ,hear African National Congress (ANC) regime banned 20 protests, mass defi­ apartheid United Democratic Front, was a telling comment on a button in leader Winnie Mandela. ance of the police continued as the proved again that the combativity ofthe Cape Town, noted SouthAfrican.trade­ 'The whites-only ,"elections" took workers dared to celebrate the tradi­ black proletariat continues unabated. union organizer David Lewis (Nation, place in the aftermath of a militant six­ tional proletarian holiday with demon­ 25 April). . week strike by black railroad workers strations. In Cape Town 10,000people Fissures in the Laager But the massive display of black which paralyzed the apartheid state's came out for a May Day rally, "the Within the confines of the ever-more­ proletarian power that day exposed the constricted' apartheid white "democra­ election as a futile exercise in white cy," the elections registered a shift to the supremacy. On May 5, for instance: right-particularly among the English­ "More than half of the black workers in the Witwatersrand industrial area speaking voters-no doubt the product around Johannesburg refused to go to of the racial hysteria generated by the their jobs, and in the eastern Cape ruling National Party of P.W. Botha. Province region, the walkout of blacks The "liberal" Progressive Federal Party was 98 percent effective, according (PFP), political arm of the English­ to the independent Labor Monitoring Group. speaking bourgeoisie, lost sevenof its 26 "Three-quarters of the black public seats in the all-white parliament, while transport workers here and in Natal the diehard reactionary Afrikaner Con­ Province stayed home.... servative Party emerged as the main "The Durban area reported 60 percent absence of black factory workers in one parliamentary opposition to the ruling of the most sweeping strikes in the re­ National Party. gion in years." AP But at the same time, majorfissures to -Washington Post, 6 May Cops fire on University of Cape 'Town students protesting apartheid army 'the left have appeared in the white For almost three years the South raid Into Zambia. continued on page 14 16 ,15 MAY 1987