25¢ WfJ/iIlE/iS·'''"''II·''No. 424 20 March 1987

As War-Mad Reagan Goes Down the Tubes... Gorbachev's Pipe Dream: Peace ·with Imperialism Defend the Soviet Union Through World Revolution!

The Tower Commission report offi­ did reject it, then. They pointed out the cially told the American people what "zero option," while calling for the was always perfectly clear to everyone removal of almost 500 Soviet missiles in who had eyes to see, that Ronald exchange for a promise not to deploy Reagan is a moron and a liar. The U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles, did victims of this vicious regime-workers not touch the British and French who've had their unions gutted and missiles targeted at theircities, nor did it broken, the black and Hispanic poor affect U.S. submarine-launched missiles who've seen their children starved by the in European waters. At the Reykjavik racist cutbacks-are now witnessing the summit the Soviets insisted that a sight of Reagan twisting slowly in the "Eurornissile" deal depended on limit­ wind. Butgloating over the downfall of ing Reagan's "Star Wars" scheme; now the teflon president is not enough. Hard they have dropped even that condition. class struggle can turn this country One of the U.S. negotiators who first around, galvanizing the sympathy of the proposed the "zero option," Spurgeon ghetto poor and unemployed, farmers Keeny, says the latest Soviet offer "is driven into bankruptcy, and all the a far better deal than anyone would TurnleyINewsweek intended victims of Ed Meese's thought have prophesied" (New York Times, 4 As Pentagon's first-strike missiles target USSR; and sex police. Now is the time to strike March). Reagan and Gorbachev meet at Reykjavik last back, not only against the crippled But all these negotiating moves, the October. Reagan government but the whole racist endless offers and counteroffers at TaylorlSygma capitalist system. Geneva or Reykjavik, in no way reduce heads which could be placed on a strategy is to attack on the periphery of Instead, Soviet leader Mikhail Gor­ the threat of nuclear war hanging over missile. In the decade following the Soviet power. In the 1950sJohn Foster bachev holds out his hand to the rabid mankind. "Arms control" is a hoax SALT I treaty, the Pentagon simply Dulles called this "rollback." Today it's warmonger Reagan as a partner in which in fact serves to stimulate the multiplied the number of warheads per called the "Reagan doctrine" for export­ securing "world peace." Business Week development of new weapons systems. missile, increasing its nuclear arsenal to ing counterrevolution. (16 March) breathed a sigh of relief: The NATO powers will not give up or the tune of three a daylSo much for But the imperialist war drive against "Just as the Iran-contra scandal was limit any weapons unless they can be arms control and detente. -, the Soviet Union is bipartisan, including laying waste to the Reagan Presidency, replaced by comparable or more effec­ the Democrats as well as the Republi­ the leader of the 'evil empire' held out tive ones. The Soviet Union should America's Main Export: cans. "Arms control" honcho Adelman the promise of an arms-control break­ build and acquire whatever weapons it Counterrevolution summed up the immediate aims of the through on medium-range weapons in considers necessary without being en- Rabid warmonger Richard Pipes, "Reagan doctrine": force Moscow to Europe." Administration hardliner . cumbered by"arms control" agreements formerly Soviet "expert" for Reagan's end "the Soviet occupation of Afghani­ Kenneth Adelman crowed that the latest . with its implacable imperialist enemy. National Security Council, recently stan, the continuation of military sup­ Soviet offer "shows that the Russians Look at the 197~ SALT I treaty, wrote: "Even a good [missile] deal port of regimes in Angola, Cambodia have ,not given up on President Rea­ which the Kremlin bureaucracy holds would be a mistake, for the root of the and Nicaragua" (Washington Post, 13 gan." Not only has Gorbachev not given up as a model "arms control" agree­ problem is not nuclear weapons" (New November 1986). In other words, the up on Reagan, he has given in to him. ment. Visiting the U.S. not long after York Times, 10 October 1986). No, the arms race is being used as a means of The latest Soviet "arms control" pro­ this treaty was signed, Soviet leader root of the matter is revolution and pressure on Russia to surrender Af­ posal is the very same one Reagan made Leonid Brezhnev declared: "The counterrevolution. Pipes makes no se­ ghanistan to the CIA-armed Islamic in 1981 when NATO was about to quarter-century period of the Cold War .cret of his goal to overthrow the collec­ fanatics, abandon the heroic Vietnam­ deploy the Pershing 2 missiles in West is now giving way to relations of peace, tivized economy of the Soviet Union­ ese people who inflicted upon Ameri­ Germany, a first-strike weapon eight mutual respect and cooperation be­ the product of the 1917 Bolshevik can imperialism the greatest defeat in minutes flying time from Moscow. tween the states of the East and West." Revolution-and restore "free market" its history, let the racist butchers in Washington's so-called "zero option" Superficially, the SALT agreement capitalism. However, the Soviet Union South Africa take over Angola, and cut was so one-sidedly advantageous to froze the number of missiles on both is too strong militarily and the loyalty of off support to Sandinista Nicaragua NATO forces, it was designed to be sides. However, Nixon/Kissinger insist­ its people too deep for Western imperi­ against Reagan's contras. rejected by Moscow. And the Russians ed on exempting the number of war- alism to risk a direct assault. Instead the For the imperialists, a key test of Gorbachev's "desire for peace" is his willingness to abandon Afghanistan, on the southern border of the USSR, to "freedom fighters" who shoot school­ Detroit Auto Bosses Raped America teachers for teaching young girls to read. Gorbachev has called the war in Afghanistana "bleeding wound" and repeatedly declared his intention to Racist Terror on U.S. Campuses withdraw all Soviettroops in a relatively short time. Perhaps the Afghan army­ trained by the Russians and bolstered by Black Students popularsupport for land to the tiller and other democratic measures-can mop up the mujahedin scum by itself. But Under Attack there appears to be an increasing danger ----- See page 5 ------See page 6 ----- that the new Soviet leadership will sell continued on page 10 working-class education "reform" bill, dragnet raids, massive wiretaps, RICO the Mitterrand/Chirac government was conspiracy laws and preventive deten­ Parti!Mao Defeo8e shaken when the workers hit the bricks tion is part of the government's efforts for themselves. The Ligue Trotskyste de to crush the "independentistas" and try £ona...ittee France (LTF), French section of the out Meese's arsenal for criminalizing international Spartacist tendency, was political opposition on the mainland. CLASS-STRUGGLE DEFENSE NOTES authorized by the strikers to raise funds The PDC has donated $100 to their to assist rail workers arid their families defense, which is crucial to all workers, who lost wages during the strike. The oppressed and enemies of colonialism. PDC contributed $100 to express our Labor Defense-Wherever the solidarity .with their struggle against * * * years of anti-working-class austerity. For 13 years Canadian abortion Class Struggle Rages rights activist and concentration camp * * * survivor Dr. Henry Morgentaler has In South Asia, U.S. imperialism's been the target of vicious state prosecu­ "The movement for non-partisan, Partisan Defense Committee has sup­ anti-Soviet war drive fuels state terror tion and fanatical fundamentalist vio­ unified working class defense is not only ported a numberofcases ofworkers and and pogromist attacks against Sri lence. The bible-thumping anti-Semites not confined to anyone country, but is oppressed facing state repression across Lanka's hideously oppressed Tamil and abortion clinic bombers have in connected up in a strong ring of the seas. minority. The capitalist powers such as their sights not only women's rights but solidarity which embraces the entire 'Britain who arm and train the death every working-class gain, from unions world. Wherever the class struggle * * * squads of Jayewardene's reactionary to the Russian Revolution. The PDC rages, and the capitalist class takes its Mordechai Vanunu is the Israelitech­ regime close their borders to Tamil contributed $100 to Dr. Morgentaler's victims from among the workers and nician who disclosed Israel's arsenal of refugees. On February 18 the PDC defense, and encourage WV readers to farmers, the movement for labor de­ 100-200 nuclear bombs. For this ele­ cabled our protest of the Thatcher render much needed support. As Dr. fense grows up out of the struggle and mental defense of all peoples by disclos­ government's attempt to expel 58 Tamil Morgentaler wrote, "I wish to thank you into an arm for the masses" (Labor ing this danger of a thermonuclear refugees at London'sHeathrow Airport for your contribution to cover expenses Defender, July 1927). holocaust, Vanunu was kidnapped by and demanded full political asylum. related to my struggle for reproductive Last year South African workers at the Israeli secret police, Mossad, and All Lankan workers face grinding ex­ freedom for women in Canada. It is a Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing faces the death penalty as he stands trial ploitation to safeguard the profits ofim­ long, arduous and protracted battle. I downed tools in support of their for treason. The POC issued an urgent perialist investors. In 1984 the PDC appreciate your support and view it as brothers facing a shutdown of 3M's appeal for an international campaign of raised money for the mainly Sinhalese an encouragement to continue in spite Freehold, New Jersey magnetic tape protest demanding that charges be women textile workers striking at Mag­ of all the difficulties." Send contribu­ plant. Salvadoran phone workers struck dropped and Vanunu freed. In a tele­ num Garment. On 12 December 1986, a tions to: Pro-Choice Defense Fund, 238 in the face of death squad terror. The gram protest to the Israeli Embassy, we stop-work action was called against an Davenport Road, Toronto, Ontario, courageous struggles .and solidarity of charged, "Death penalty threat recalls attempt by Magnum bosses to take back Canada M5R IS6. these brutally oppressed workers is an anti-Semitic McCarthyite murder of bonuses, one of the gains of the 1984 inspiration to their brothers and sisters Rosenbergs." strike. The bosses retaliated by sacking throughout the world. In the belly of * * * four founding members of the union We urge WV readers to continue to this largest imperialist beast, whose who had led the stop-work, Leela bloody hands terrorize workers and * * * help build the. PDC. Become a sustain­ Samarasinghe, Indrani Dayananda, ing contributor. For your contribution oppressed worldwide, U.S" workers Following the well-publicized student Latha Gomes and Renuka. Once again have a special duty and capacity to assist upheavals last December, which backed of $5 or more you will receive a we call on WV readers to dig deep for subscription to Class-Struggle Defense our victimized brothers and sisters by the threat of labor strike action funds to aid our sisters in Lanka and around the world. In recent months the forced the withdrawal of the anti- Notes, newsletter of the PDC. For a their battle to win back their jobs. single copy send $.75. Earmarked contributions to any of these and other * * * vital cases we support may be sent to: Thirteen Puerto Rican independence Partisan Defense Committee, P.O. Box Workers Revolution to fighters face FBI frame-up charges in 99, Canal Street Station, New York, Disarm the Imperialists Hartford, Connecticut. The use of NY 10013.• Besieged by imperialism and civil war, the young Soviet republic appealed for revolutionary action by the international proletariat. In March 1919 the Third International wasfounded, and two weeks Feds Continue Vendetta later the Russian Communist Party (Bol­ sheviks) adopted a program drafted by Lenin which stated: TROTSKY LENIN John Gotti Beats The resistance of the exploiters, which grows simultaneously with the intensifica­ tion of the onslaught of the proletariat, and is particularly intensified by the victory of the proletariat in individual countries, and the international solidarity and organisation of the bourgeoisie inevitably cause the combinati~n of civil .war in RICO Frame-Up individual countries and revolutionary wars between the proletanan countnes and bourgeois countriesfighting to retain the rule ofcapital. In view of the class character After a seven-month trial in of such wars, the distinction drawn between defensive and offensive wars becomes Brooklyn, John Gotti was acquitted utterly meaningless. - of federal charges under the Racket­ By and large, this development of international civil war, a process which has been eer Influenced and Corrupt Organi­ taking place with exceptional rapidity before ourvery eyes since the end of 1918is the zations Act (RICO) of engaging in a legitimate product of the class struggle under capitalism and a legitimate step criminal conspiracy as a capo (and towards the victory of the international proletarian revolution. later head) of the Gambino Mafia For this reason, the R.t.P. emphatically rejects the hope of disarmament under "family." Before leaving the court­ capitalism as the reactionary philistine illusion of petty-bourgeois democrats, even house Gatti noted, "They'll be ready though they call themselves socialists and Social-Democrats, and in opposition to to frame us again in two weeks ... this and all similar slogans which actually play into the hands of the bourgeoisie, it just watch" (New York Times, 14 advances the slogan of arming the proletariat and disarming the bourgeoisie, the March). The very next day, the Times slogan of completely and ruthlessly suppressing the resistance of the exploiters, the reported that Manhattan federal slogan of fighting until victory over the bourgeoisie of the whole world is achieved attorney Rudolph Giuliani has seized both in civil wars at home and in international revolutionary wars. the case and is preparing a "new" case, based once again on RICO -V. I. Lenin, "Draft Programme of the R.C.P.(B.)" (March 1919) statutes, accusing Gotti and his six codefendants of running a "criminal John Gottl enterprise"-the "Gambino crime and sums up the total as a multiplica­ family." So with Giuliani bucking for tion of felonies. higher political office, the govern­ "It has been said that, if such things can be done to the Mafia, they can be ment vendetta continues. As liberal done to us all. We would better say !!~!.'!.!o!A.!1!e.f!! ~ columnist Murray Kempton sarcasti­ that they ought not to be done to anyone." DIRECTOR OF PARTY PUBLICATIONS: Liz Gordon cally observed before the verdict was in: -"If RICO Wins, We Lose," EDITOR: Jan Norden Newsday, 8 March "It is an article of faith for civics PRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah Wilner classesthat no man can be tried twice The government's momentary CIRCULATION MANAGER: Jon Lawrence for the same crime. We can thank defeat in the.Gotti case came after a EDITORIAL BOARD: Bonnie Brodie, Jon Brule, George Foster, Liz Gordon, RICO for liberating us from that string of courtroom victories culmi­ Jan Norden, James Robertson, Reuben Samuels, Joseph Seymour, Marjorie Stamberg, prejudice ... Noah Wilner (CloSing editor) "John Gotti could be convicted and nating in theconviction of 17reputed Workers Vanguard (USPS 098~770)published biweekly. excepl2nd issue Augusl and wilh 3'week inlerval December. sent away for 40 years or more if the Mafia leaders in the "Pizza Connec­ by Ihe SparlaciSI PubliShing Co .. 41 Warren Slreet. New York. NY 10007. Telephone: 732-7862 (Editorial). 732·7861 jury found that he had conspired to (Business). Address all correspondence 10: Box 1377. GPO. New York. NY 10116. Oomesl,csubscropllOns: $5.00124 tion" trial earlier this month. This issues. Second-class postage paid al New York. NY. POSTMASTER: Send ,ddr_ changes 10 Workers Vanguard. commit a 1975 homicide for which time, the intended victim Gotti was Box 1377. GPO. New YOrk. NY 10116. he had already served a prison lucky enough to have a jury which OPinIOns expressed in Signed articles or le"ers do not necenerily a.press the editorial vitwpoint. term.... RICO arithmetic is the sci­ ence that takes one felony already wouldn't buy the bought testimony No. 424 20 March 1987 adjudicated, adds one.misdemeanor continued o!' page 9

2 WORKERS VANGUARD Unholy Alliance of Israel, Syria, Shi'ite Amal

AFP Israeli soldiers terrorize Arab youth on occupied Shl'lte Amal slaughters Palestinians In West Bank. Beirut. Palestinians Under Siege For decades the Palestinian resistance managed to flee the nearby Baraj al has been hailed by Arab nationalists and Barajinah camp recounted in. horror: their left cheerleaders around the world "Famine is ungodly and wicked. The as the vanguard of the "Arab Revolu­ children were constantly screaming for food. When there was shelling I prayed tion" against Zionism and imperialism. to God to take us so we would not feel In reality, all the Arab governments­ our hunger anymore." feudal monarchies or "radical" military -Washington Post, II February regimes, pro-Western or Soviet client Then, in mid-February, fighting states-have betrayed the dispossessed broke out in Muslim West Beirut Palestinian people and sought to crush between Amal and the Lebanese Com­ their armed militants: the 1970 Black munist Party. The initial turf battle was September massacre by Jordan's King followed by a wave of assassinations of Hussein; the 1976siege of Tel Zaatar by top CPers (at least nine killed) and the Lebanese Christian Maronites backed kidnapping and murder of scores of by Ba'athist Syria; the 1982 Israeli party members. Shi'ite clerics reported­ invasion of Lebanon, when the entire ly issued religious edicts calling for the Arab world stood by while the Palestine killing of all Communists in southern Liberation Organization (PLO) faced Lebanon. Lining up with the CP in the alone the full might of the Zionist war Beirut battles were the Druze militias of machine. Today, once again, the bloody Walid Jumblatt and the pro-Khomeini events in both Lebanon and the Israeli­ Shi'ite Hezbollah (Party of God), which occupied West Bank and Gaza highlight . has itself gone after the CP in the past. the unholy alliance of Western impe­ AP This "war of the allies" pitted against rialism, Zionism and the Arab rulers Palestinian camp of Shatlla In West Beirut-scene of Zionist genocide In 1982-reduced to a few hundred square yards of rubble by Amal artillery. each other forces which had fought against the Palestinian people. together against the Maronite Christian During the 1982 Israeli invasion invasion and subsequent pullback, is However, Amal, with itsgreater popula­ Phalange in 1983-becoming one more of Lebanon, imperialist war criminal determined to prevent the restoration of tion base among Lebanon's 1.1 million episode in the endless, shifting commu­ Henry Kissinger gloated: . Palestinian armed force in Lebanon. As Shi'ite Muslims, has placed a strangle­ nalist civil war among the kaleidoscopic "No Arab government has given more a result there has been the grotesque hold around Palestinian camps in sectarian forces of Lebanon. than verbal support to the embattled Palestinians, and even that lacked the spectacle of Shi'ites pounding the southern Lebanon and West Beirut. The entry of the Syrian army, 7,000 traditional passion. Even Syria stood by Palestinian camps with artillery fire and Besieged for five months, the 22,000 strong, into West Beirut late last month passively until its own forces were trying to starve them out, while Israel refugees at Rashadiyeh have been will bring no respite for the starving directly attacked, and made a separate bombs them from the air and sea. And forced to eat cats, dogs, donkeys. Even Palestinian camps. On the contrary, cease-fire while the PLO was being systematically destroyed." now Syria has sent its army into West the grass is gone. Young Palestinian while the declared purpose of the Syrian -Washington Post,I6June 1982 Beirut to break the power of the PLO. children who try to slip out to pick green intervention was to stop the fighting Amid the squalid communalist blood­ plants are killed by Arnal- militiamen. between Amal and Druze forces, Da­ However, the Palestinian forces in letting in Lebanon, the struggle of In West Beirut, the Shatila camp­ mascus strongman Assad's real target is Lebanon have since managed to re­ the Palestinians for national justice is where in September 1982 the Israelis the PLO. For all his hardline rhetoric group and grow, in part due to the the one continuing social struggle which organized the massacre of thousands of against Israel, from his 1976 Lebanese Zionist state's savage repression in the can legitimately claim the support of the Palestinians by their Christian Maro­ intervention (initially on the side of the . West Bank and Gazaand continuing world proletariat. Revolutionaries must nite henchmen-is now reduced to a Christian Maronites) to today, Assad's expulsion of Palestinians from-their support the Palestinian fighters defend- few hundred square yards of rubble, its overriding aim has been to break up a homeland. An estimated half of the ;ing the besieged camps. But backing the drinking water contaminated and ty­ "Fatahland" in Lebanon under the 12,000 PLO commandos driven out of Palestinian cause does not mean politi­ phoid running rampant. Amal's tanks influence of PLO leader Arafat. As the Lebanon in 1982 have since slipped cal support for the Pl.O, whose petty­ stand near the mass grave where the astute Near East correspondent David back. However, the Shi'ite Amal, the bourgeois nationalism has produced victims of the earlier massacre are Hirst wrote: "A new link-up between the main beneficiary to date of the Israeli defeat after defeat for the Palestinian buried. Two-thirds of those killed and besieged [Palestinian] camps and West people. During the Israeli siegeof Beirut wounded are civilians. "The screaming Beirut was something that President in 1982, Arafat even called on the of women and children is mixed with the Assad had to prevent at all costs" imperialist elite guard-the U.S. Ma­ moaning of the sick and wounded," (London Guardian, 23 February). rines, French legionnaires and Italian exclaimed one Palestinian trapped in For good reason the PLO (now commandos-to disarm and escort out this camp of death. A woman who continued on page 11 of Lebanon the PLO's own fighters, leaving the Palestinian masses defense­ less before the Israeli butchers and their Christian Maronite jackals. The Sabra/ Shatila massacre, reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust, was the direct result of Arafat's betrayal. Today, it is the Shi'ite Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League Amal which is carrying on the Zionists' dirty work. o $5/24 issues of Workers Vanguard o $2/4 issues of (includes Spartacist) International rates: Women and Revolution "War of the Camps" and o New 0 Renewal $20/24 issues-Airmail "War of the Allies" $5/24 tssues-e-Seamail 0$2/10 introductory issues of o $2/4 issues of Spartacist Workers Vanguard The "war of the camps" began last (ediclon en espanol) (includes Spartacist) September when Amal renewed its siege of Rashadiyeh, a Palestinian camp near Name ------r------Tyre in southern Lebanon. The PLO Address _ fought back effectively,overrunning the ______Phone (--) _ Amal stronghold of Maghdusheh over­ looking Sidon and carving out a six- City State Zip --,,------;;:-:- , 424 Kara/Sipa . square-mile "liberated zone" outside Syrian army Intervention In West this strategic port of southern Lebanon, Make checks payable/mall to: Spartaclst Publishing Co., BOil 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 Beirut targets PLO. only 35 miles from the Israeli border. 20 MARCH 1987 3 Young Sparlacus

Afghan mullahs. Or to get up here and .argue that they're against Soviet aid to Nicaragua, which is in fact their posi­ tion. Or, you know, they would also have a real problem with the Cuban Drive CIA Recruiters troops in Angola that are fighting South African apartheid." Unable to defend their politics, the ISO resorted to their fists in a cowardly attack on 5'2" SYC member Judith Preston as she was selling Workers Vanguard a few days after the demonstration. The violence of Off Campusl these "third camp" social democrats will be put to a stop. So far, the Madison SYC has distributed over 1,000copies of ,', •.....'1//-.. j) . 'ii' an "Open Letter to Madison Students '"l~"i<@ and Labor" exposing and condemning I the ISO's thuggery. The "workerist" ISO was feeling prickly about our comrades' condemna­ tion of their role in producing a scab leaflet for the anti-CIA protest. This violated an agreement among the endorsers that the united-front leaflet would be printed by donated labor or at a union shop-a proud tradition of the workers movement. We challenged the ISO, as ostensible socialists, tojoin.us in the fight for a union-printed leaflet. Not surprisingly, these "State Depart­ ment socialists" would rather support counterrevolutionary Polish Solidar­ nose, the only "union" loved by Reagan, than real trade unions, and flatly refused. The SYC had the leaflet reprinted with a prominent union label (bug) and mobilized students to make announcements and leaflet classes, cafeterias and campus events to build for the demonstration. Meanwhile a dozen ISO and PSN members attempted to purge the SYC from the united front due to our "divisive" and "uncomradely" insistence on the trade-union principle! But the 300 Protest in Madison students who sat in all night in the administration building voted two to one to have the SYC speak at the rally. MADISON-On February 25, 300 and held a teach-in in the corridor. PSN, noting "Sufficient opposition to So, the ISO (literally) got a bug up their students at the University of Wisconsin­ Members of the PSN and CALA spoke the CIA presence may have a decisive ass, and' antics by other anti-Soviet Madison rallied at the Memorial Union, about the CIA's crimes in Africa and effect in the agency's decision about "leftists" also fell flat. A PSNer au­ demanding "CIA Off Campus!" The Nicaragua, but avoided the issue of the whether recruitment here is worth its thored a sinister "Sparticus [sic] Rap" two-day demonstration, endorsed by Soviet Union-the main target of the time and energy. But the, CIA will featuring the FBI's preferred misspell­ the Spartacus Youth Club, the liberal U.S. war drive. Spartacus Youth Club continue to exist, because' the U.S. ing of our name, which retailed sinister Progressive Student Network (PSN), spokesman Judith Preston made the government will continue to have as its violence-baiting lies and ridiculed our Community Action on Latin America connection: goal the restructuring of global society slogan, "We are the party of the Russian (CALA, a CISPES affiliate), Women's "What linkstogetherthe CIA's crimes, to accord with the needs of U.S. Revolution." Some anti-eommunists International League for Peace and U.S. support to South Africa, and the capitalism. The goal of protesting the intended to "rap" this ditty during our Contra International which the CIA Freedom, and the reformist Interna­ CIA's presence should be directed ... so comrade's speech at the demonstration, tional Socialist Organization (ISO), was finances and operates,is the bipartisan that we can challenge the foundations drivefor war against the SovietUnion. but gave up when they saw the crowd also attended by 20 students from the Andinorderto regiment thepopulation for the CIA's existence." wasn't interested in their trash. University of Minnesota at MInneapo­ to go along with their war plans,social The protest continued into the night We in the Spartacus Youth Club are lis, where the CIA was successfully reaction at homemeansattacksongays, as students occupied the administration proud to be known as partisans of the prevented from recruiting last month. abortion clinic bombings, the drug building. The PSN focused on trying to witchhunt, the defeatof schoolbusing. Russian Revolution. We are fighting to The two demands of the united-front From Howard Beach to Cumming, pressure the chancellor to ban CIA build an international party of the demonstration were "CIA Off Cam­ Georgia to Tampa, Florida, the racists recruiters. SYC members participating working class to finish the work begun pus!" and "Drop All Charges Against and fascists are emboldened with their in the all-night sit-in argued against any by the Bolsheviks: abolishing capitalist twice-endorsed favorite presidential the Anti-CIA Protesters!" Five students illusions in the administration, pointing exploitation, racism and all oppression, still face charges from an October 1985 'Klandidate' in the White House. out that universities are part of the Internationally, U.S. imperialism sees and establishing a planned economy anti-CIA demonstration where the the Soviet Union, homeland of the first capitalist system, training centers for and collectivized property. The Sparta­ campus cops attacked protesters, injur­ successful workers revolution, behind the managers, technicians and ideo­ cus Youth Club fights to win young ing one and arresting others on phony every struggle of the oppressed, and logues who run it-and the administra­ sends their CIA dogsof warto crushit. militants to defense of the gains of the "disorderly conduct" charges. tion's position was made clear at past working class internationally, and to a Sincethe internationalworkers victory anti-CIA demonstrations where anti­ As the demonstrators marched up of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the lifetime of commitment to the fight for Bascom Hill to where the CIA was U.S. and other imperialist powers have imperialist students were met with mace a socialist future. Join us'- recruiting, many picked up the Sparta­ made it their number one target in and billy clubs by the campus cops. cus Youth Club's chant "Roach motels trying to get back that one-sixth of the for the CIA-They check in and there earth for capitalist exploitation and "State Department Socialists" profits." See Red Spartacus Youth Club they stay!" The SYC stood out as the Class Series bright red contingent in the march with The PSN consistently tries to duck The anti-Soviet ISO was caught with placards reading, "Break with the these issues and limit opposition to the their political pants down during the Democrats-Build a Workers Party!" CIA to complaints that it's "not a two-day anti-CIA protests. Under­ The Fight for "For Labor/Black Action to Stop legitimate employer" because it "vio­ handed maneuvers to exclude the Socialism Racist Terror!" "Free Abortion on lates the law." Thus in a statement Soviet-defensist Spartacus Youth Club Alternate Saturdays, 2:00 p.m. Demand! Union Defense of Abortion printed in. the Daily Cardinal (24 blew up in their face; they shrank from Next classes: March 28, April 11 Clinics!" "Hail Cuban Troops Defend­ February), PSN spokesmen decry the open political debate and did not even See "Today in the Union" for room ing Black Angola!" and "Communist CIA's crimes around the world while attempt to speak at the rallies. As SYC University of Wisconsin Revolution is America's Last Best­ conceding its possible "value" as an spokesman Richard Genova stated at For more information: (608) 257:8625 Hope!" "intelligence-gathering agency"! In a 26 the rally following the sit-in, "It would The marchers moved inside the February staff editorial the Daily be pretty hard for the ISO to explain MADISON building where the CIA was ensconced Cardinal came out to the left of the their positions, like how they back the 4 WORKERS VANGUARD Racist Terror on U.S.Cam~uses Black Students Under Attack Racist terror in America is not con­ ed of the highest black enrollment in the fined to the mean streets of Howard Ivy League (a paltry 8 percent), minority Beach and Forsyth County. From the admissions plunged 25 percent in one mob rampage against black students at year after sledgehammer-wielding ra­ UMass Amherst following the Red Sox cists of the Dartmouth Review crowd loss in the World Series, to the KKK­ leveleda shantytown, unable to tolerate style cross-burning in a black cadet's even a symbolic gesture of solidarity room at The Citadel, there has been an with the black freedom struggle against ominous surge of racist violence on apartheid. To eliminate the race and campuses across the country. These class privilege in higher education, the attacks have evoked outrage by minori­ Spartacus Youth Clubs demand the ty and anti-racist students who've nationalization of private universities. c organized large rallies and "racial For open admissions and free tuition awareness symposiums." In several and a state-paid stipend for all! instances, the racist punks have. been What this country needs is some identified and been let off with a slap on good old-fashioned class struggle­ the wrist. now, while the Reagan gang is widely If even one of these bigots were despised as brutal, incompetent, war­ nabbed and displayed with a yellow Carter/ hicago Tribune .crazed criminals. Iflabor flexed its mus­ stripe painted down their naked back, Black Student Union at Northern Illinois U. led targe, integrated protest cles, the racist vermin crawling around it would do more to improve the "cli­ against racist threats on March 5 after Nazi swastikas appeared on campus. the campuses would slink back to their mate of opinion" than a thousand holes, and frat rats now hoisting the "consciousness-raising" sessions. Rac­ Confederate flag of slavery wouldn't be ist terror will not be stopped by The next day, over 100 students who violence on the campuses in this country whistling "Dixie." Impossible? Not at came out to protest this assault became today reflects the frenzy of the petty­ moral suasion-it must be smashed all. In 1982, the Spartacist League by the social power of the working the target of another attack as racists in bourgeoisie whose economic position initiated a successful united front of class, united with the intended vic­ a pickup truck tried to mow down the has eroded with the rot of American labor, minorities and students which industrial capacity. Yuppies grow up tims of race-terror and all anti-racist marchers. Another punk in a white swept the Nazis off the streets of Ann Cadillac smashed the camera of a Bos­ and become "dinks" ("double income, fighters. Arbor. ton Globe photographer. Outrageously no kids"-'cause they can't afford them) • At the University of Michigan in On their own, students have no social blaming the victim, university officials and middle-class families finance col­ Ann Arbor, a former hotbed of radical power, but united with Detroit auto are denying that the attack on Kremer lege educations the way they'd buy a student protest, racist flyers declaring workers and other sections of the labor (who was sent to a local emergency house, by going into massive debt. the end of deer-hunting season and movement can beat back these racist room from the school infirmary that The intensified racial polarization on announcing "open season" on blacks night) ever occurred, claiming that the the campuses is also a direct result of were shoved under the door of a lounge snow where Kremer was beaten showed government policy. The fascist scum got where black women students were no trace of a scuffle! their green light. under Democratic meeting. The scum responsible are president Jimmy "ethnic purity" Carter feeling so emboldened that when several • At UMass Boston, liberal profes­ sors have received hate mail on with the 1979 slaughter of five leftists hundred students marched in protest of university stationery and swastikas have and union organizers in Greensboro, these threats, Klan outfits were hung been plastered on their office doors. North Carolina. The Klan-endorsed Professor Kevin Whitfield, the faculty Republican presidentRonald Reagan adviser for InCAR (Progressive La­ has continued state-sponsored terror­ bor Party's "International Committee ism against black people asa policy. The Against Racism") received a threat bombing of the black Philadelphia stating that his "case" has been assigned MOVE household, legally sanctioned to the "werewolf section of the SS in cop murder of black people iii. the streets Urbana, Illinois." of New York City, gutting busing for • The elite University of Chicago is school desegregation, banning "secular no safe haven from menacing bigots humanist" textbooks-s-these are the who take their cues from the KKK/Nazi emblems of a willfully vicious ruling fascists who've targeted that city for class. attack. Stickers reading "Stop AIDS: Government slashing of financial aid San Francisco, 1984: We tore down Castrate Gays" appeared in the black has hit black families the :hardest. the Confederate flag of slavery! neighborhoods around Hyde Park and Universities get whiter while the armed on the campus- Gay and leftist student forces are disproportionately black and attacks through militant action. What's leaders received letters which were also Hispanic. Union-busting attacks by the lacking is a revolutionary leadership to sent to their parents, roommates and bosses have given rise to a two-tier wage get the unions off their knees and employers threatening "strong meas­ system in this country where young fighting in defense of their own class ures" against their "deviant" behav­ workers employed at a lower pay scale interest and that of all the oppressed. On ior-the return address was stamped are wielded as a club against the unions the campuses and elsewhere, the Sparta­ "The Great White Brotherhood of the themselves. Newsweek On Campus cus Youth Clubs seek to win anti-racist Iron Fist, Botha Boulevard." (February 1987) reports that at "many militants to the side of the working class, • At UCLA, an outfit named the 'integrated' colleges blacks are fast to fight for revolutionary integration­ "White Student Alliance" posted flyers becoming missing persons.... In the ism. The racist oppression endemic to for a racist rally on minority professors' 1984-85 school year. .. the proportion this society can only be eradicated by WV Photo doors and in Campbell Hall where the of blacks in college decreased 20 per­ overthrowing the capitalist system United front of labor and students, affirmative action center is located. cent. And this happened even as the which breeds it. We are dedicated to initlaited by SL, drove Nazis out of Ann Arbor, March 1982. Student groups organized a rally against number of black high-school graduates building the party to lead these struggles racism, drawing some 400 predominant­ was rising." to finish the Civil War through socialist from a dormitory along the march ly black and Hispanic students out to At Dartmouth, where officials boast- revolution.• route. Racist graffiti is now common­ combat this threat. This mobilization place in study carrels in the library; a kept the racists from rearing their ugly book by Mark Twain.was defaced with heads that day. Campus administrators are tripping Spartacus Youth. Club swastikas and pictures of lynched blacks Class Series hanging from trees. In early February over themselves hurrying to "fix" the I the campus radio station was (tempo­ damage by avowing their commitment rarily) shut down and a "deejay" fired to "diversity" and attribute the "troub­ Trotskyism: for broadcasting vile racist "jokes" les" to the fact that youth are young (!) Spartacist Class Series Revolutionary complete with "laugh track." and haven't livedthrough the civilrights • In Austin, Texas, two students, struggles of the 1950s and '60s. Since the Black History and Marxism Today wearing Ronald Reagan masks and 1930s political activism on American (Exco Course) carrying a gun, cornered a prominent campuses has been predominantly the Class Struggle Alternate Tuesdays, 7:30 p.m. black student activist and tried to push liberal rather than right-wing. But as a Saturday, April 4,1:00 p.m. Next olasses: March 31,April14, 28 him through a plate glass window. petty-bourgeois strata, isolated from the Blackburn Center, Room 150 Wilder Hall, Room 212 • Just after midnight on February 18 reality of working-class struggle, stu­ Howard University Oberlin College dents can swing pretty far to the right. In at Tufts University near Boston, Ian For more information: (202) 636-3537 For more information: (216) 775-5858 Kremer, a student well known for his Germany in the '30s, the campuses were anti-racist views, was attacked by thugs -breeding grounds for the ideological who beat him to the ground screaming, storm troops of Hitler's Third Reich. WASHINGTON, D.C. OBERLIN "nigger lover," "pinko" and "Jew boy." To some degree, the increase in racist 20 MARCH 1987 5 Detroit Auto Bosses Raped America

Such views have become fashionable A Review: in American intellectual and also busi­ ness circles. The doyen of liberal econo­ The Reckoning mists, John Kenneth Galbraith, hails by David Halberstam The Reckoning as an "impressive William Morrow & Company, achievement" and endorses Halber­ New York, I ~86 starn's analysis. Critics of the American auto industry now apportion the blame PART ONE OF TWO more or less equally between the greed and shortsightedness of the Big Three executives and the UAW. Maverick In the early 1970s a business friend John DeLorean, once a GM vice pres­ told Lee lacocca, then president of ident, declares that "monopoly led to Ford, that he'd been offered a big lavish overhead, including lavish union Toyota dealership in Houston. "Don't contracts and lavish salaries for man­ take it," lacocca advised him. "Why agement" (New York Times, 7 Decem­ not?" he asked. "Because," the blow­ ber 1986). Consider how lavish the life hard Detroit auto man declared, "we're of a typical Detroit auto worker is com­ going to kick their asses back into the pared to DeLorean's. One Christmas he Pacific Ocean." In the next decade it was gave his wife three sable coats of differ­ the Japanese who kicked the asses of ent lengths, one for every occasion. lacocca and his colleagues back into the­ Halberstam does not especially con­ Great Lakes. So now the Chrysler chair­ demn the UAW leadership, though he man is selling cars with "Born in does argue that the union pushed up America" flag-waving ... and Japanese wages to a point that damaged the imports. (Incidentally, lacocca's friend industry's competitiveness. Still, he is took his advice. and later said it was the deeply respectful toward Walter Reu­ worst business decision he ever made­ ther and his successors in Solidarity cost him $10 million at least.) House: "Ifthere was a certain nobility of Today the U.S. is running a whop­ purpose-a vision of a better and more ping $170 billion annual trade deficit, just society-that drove the union, then half of it to Japan. Democrats threaten much of that came from Walter Reu­ trade war by pushing protectionist bills ­ ther." No, it is the rank-and-file auto in Congress while Reagan's Treasury workers Halberstam condemns for get­ Department wages currency war, trying ting too much money for doing too to make the yen expensive and the dol­ little. lar cheap. As auto bosses push their It isn't that Halberstam is blind to the Japan-bashing "Buy American" ads, present suffering of the Midwest's blue United Auto Workers (UA W) officials collar workers and their families. He are bashing Toyotas, whipping up paints a powerful and moving picture of deadly chauvinism in the ranks of labor.: Detroit in the early 1980s-skilled Already one Chinese American, Vin­ craftsmen pawning their tool kits, some cent Chin, was beaten to death by a worth $2,000 apiece; hundreds standing Chrysler foreman screaming about in the freezing cold all night to apply for stealing American jobs. And now, as a handful of jobs as department store Japanese investment in the U.S. in­ clerks; the marked increase in broken creases, the media are handing out homes and wife beatings asjobless men advice on "Working for Japan Inc." take their anger and frustration out on "Keep your union card in your wallet," their families. suggests Newsweek (2 February). But for Halberstam, auto workers With U.S. industry increasingly brought these terrible conditions down "uncornpetitive,' turning out shoddy on themselves. Pointing to the break­ products while the companies sink down of labor discipline in the early billions into takeovers instead of pro­ '70s-the rash of wildcat strikes, in­ ductive investment, anti-Japanese pro­ creased absenteeism-he retrospective­ tectionism has tied American workers to ly warns that "these alienated, compla­ the bosses and the Democratic Party. cent workers, whether they knew it or Last year, AFL-CIO tops scheduled a not, were under challenge from pur­ chauvinist demonstration on PearlHar­ poseful, disciplined workers around the bor Day, December 7, demanding the world, and their jobs and their whole hiring of more union labor in building a way of life were in the balance." Hal­ Toyota plant in Kentucky. And Dem­ berstam writes of Midwestern auto ocrat Mondale appealed for unionsup­ v Photo workers, a large number of them ghetto port to his '84 presidential bid ranting, Modern Japanese manufacturing plants dominate world markets, Wall Street blacks, as if they were "me generation" "If you try to sell an American car in speculators drive American industry into the ground. yuppies into their BMWs, tennis les­ Japan, you better have the United States sons and aerobics classes. The fact that Army with you when they land on the voked Japan into war and then ended it device of parallel histories of Ford and with one of the most cold-blooded Nissan, the number two auto makers in Detroit is a largely black town is barely docks!" We denounced this war talk, atrocities in modern times: dropping the mentioned in this 700-page study ofthe and pointed out: first nuclear weapons on the defenseless their respective countries. But this is not a narrow, dual corporate chronicle. The postwar American auto industry. While "Japan was driven into [World War 11] civilian populations of Hiroshima and condemning auto worker militancy in by protectionist barriers raised against Nagasaki. Reckoning ranges far and wide, from its exports by the Western powers dur­ "The answer to Pearl Harbor and Hiro­ the politics of the postwar American the early 1970s, The Reckoning gives a ing the Great Depression of the 1930s. shima is for the American and Japa­ occupation ofJapan to the economics of glowing account of Nissan's new and nese workers to unite and wage class The attack on Pearl Harbor was a direct OPEC. non-union plant in Smyrna, Tennessee: response to the American, British and war against their own exploiters on "Morale was unusually high among the Wall Street and in Tokyo ...... At its core The Reckoning is a slick, Dutch embargo of oil shipments to workers ... it seemed as if fifty years of Japan without which its economy could -"Workers: Don't Buy ideological apology for economic aus­ not survive. U.S. imperialism thus pro- Protectionist Poison!" terity and giveback unionism. Halber­ WVNo.416, starn blames Detroit's economic col­ 21 November 1986 lapse on geology and the American An Apology for national character, or rather lack of Giveback Unionism character. The American people, he maintains, became soft and spoiled by The "secret" to Tokyo's economic the easy prosperity of the 1950s-'60s success is a hot topic from corporate based on cheap oil, making the U.S. boardrooms to the shopfloor. So unfit to compete in the leaner and explaining Japan's evident industrial meaner world of the 1980s: "America, superiority has become a cottage indus­ facing competition from hungrier, more try for American academics and jour­ disciplined Asian nations, seemed un­ nalists of late. There's Ezra Vogel's able to discipline itself." Basically Hal­ Japan as Number One, Herman Kahn's berstam agrees with Nissan head Ta­ The Japanese Challenge, etc. The most kashi Ishihara, who told the UAW's recent contribution to this literature is Doug Fraser a few years ago: "Your journalist David Halberstarn's The problem in America is of your own mak­ Levin/Black Star - Reckoning, which sets out to tell "the ing. It is your work force-it is your Flag-waving blowhard Lee lacocca Slick apology for givebacks, parallel stories of the Japanese ascent whole American system. Nobody wants pushes protectionism ...and Japa­ austerity. and the American malaise." He uses the to work." nese imports. 6 WORKERS VANGUARD labor-management bitterness had been Japan. Instead the JCP obeyed MacAr­ wiped away." thur's orders and called off the general The core of Halberstarn's argument is strike. By surrendering when they were taken over from Jimmy Carter's late '70s strongest, leading the most militant anti-OPEC hysteria: namely that the elements of the Japanese workers move­ relative prosperity of the 1950s-'60s­ ment, the Stalinists soon lost the posi­ the vaunted "American way of life"­ tion of strength that they had. was based on cheap oil, much of it by a After the aborted February 1947 gen­ happy accident of nature located under eral strike, the American occupation American soil: switched to a "Reverse Course." In Hal-

"The oil culture, with itseasyaffluence, o berstam's words, its earlier "New Deal was like an addiction. Americans had liberalism" was scrapped. MacArthur been rich for some sixty years, and several generations had become accus­ organized a red purge of Japanese tomed to prosperity. unions, enlisting for this purpose the "The postwaryears,the immense mate­ fanatically anti-Communist bureau­ rial strength and physical might, two crats of the American Federation of generations of unrivaled prosperity-it Labor. A top official of the AFL, James had all lulled America into thinking it hadattained an economicutopia,a kind ' Killen, was sent to Japan to set up , ofguaranteednational prosperity,likea ­ "democratization leagues" which acted

concession won in somemarathon bar­ ~ as anti-Communist cells within the mil­ gainingsession with God, a guaranteed Schell/Youngstown Vindicator itant labor movement. Today, when the annual increase in the standard of liv­ Steel mills demolished in Midwest rust belt. Wall Street is deindustrializing AFL-CIO tops shriek about "unfair ing. In those few postwar decades, America. America had taken a temporary histor­ Japanese competition" due to Japan's ical accident and construed it as a per­ only did these new workers have very Ayukawa) were imprisoned for a time or compliant corporatist unions, Ameri­ manent condition." good basic schooling, particularly in otherwise barred from public life. The can workers should know that the It is true that oil is a limited natural mathematics, on a level well above their Japanese ruling class was demoralized "labor" agents of U.S. imperialism resource. But for now and the foresee­ counterparts in American industry, but by the foreign occupation oftheir coun­ helped split the Japanese unions and able future there is plenty available in they were much more driven by social try for the first time in history, blamed break their power. In 1948 MacArthur the ground and it can be extracted for a ambition." Halberstam is impressed by by the masses for the disastrous warand outlawed all strikes by government very smallfraction of the going price. It the "cohesiveness" of Japanese society, fearful of the intentions of the Ameri­ workers. This affected wide sectors of costs around 20 cents for ARAMCO the almost "familial" sense of national can victors. the economy, for example the state­ (the American oil consortium) to pump loyalty. At the same time, thousands of left­ owned railroads. a barrel of oil out of Saudi Arabia, However, Halberstam's own nar­ ists and working-class militants were While the U.S. occupation forces which has by far the world's biggest rative account of Nissan and early post­ released from prison. The Japanese moved against the left and workers known reserves (Alessandro Ronca­ war Japan explodes these very myths Communist Party (JCP) emerged from movement from early 1947 onward, glia, The International Oil Market which he otherwise perpetuates. This is the underground with great moral Washington was not yet prepared to [1985]). That barrel sells for $19, almost the most valuable aspect of The Reck­ authority among advanced workers and restore Japanese imperialism as a full­ /00 times the cost of production! A few oning. In particular, it demonstrates the radical intellectuals as the only political fledged Cold War ally. That develop­ years ago during the manipulated "oil direct link between the creation ofcom­ force which had opposed the mili-, ment was precipitated by a momentous crisis" the price was twice that. While pany unions in Japan and the Cold War Halberstam takes Detroit's BigThree to alliance with U.S. imperialism against task for artificially propping up auto­ the Soviet bloc. mobile prices, he ignores the'far more That alliance came to defeated Japan powerful and dangerous Seven Sis­ a few years later than to defeated Ger­ ters-the American/British/ Dutch oil many. Almost as soon as Hitler's aides cartel. In fact, he blames the oil-price poured gasoline on his corpse, the U.S.' explosion of the 1970s entirely on the set about rebuilding occupied western Arabs (he also thinks Iranians are Germany' as a bastion against Russia. Arabs). "Denazification" was a joke. Apart But all this is totally irrelevant to from a handful of top figures like Japan's competitive superiority over Goring and Goebbels, the masters of the American industry, especially since the Third Reich were co-opted en masse U.S. produces some oil and much coal into the "free world." Reinhard Gehlen, while Japan imports all its oil and chief of anti-Soviet intelligence for the scrapped most of its coal mines in the Reichswehr, was recruited by the Amer­ late 1950s. True, the oil shocks of the icans with such dispatch that some of his agents never missed a payment. '70s first turned American consumers Kyodo Photo Service away from Detroit's big gas-guzzlers The situation in the Far East after Striking workers surround Japan and toward smaller, more fuel-efficient World War II (the "Pacific War" to the Broadcasting Co., 1946. Stalinist cars which the Japanese produced well Japanese) was somewhat different. union leader Yashiro Ii (above) calls and cheaply. But the flood of Toyotas There, Chiang Kai-shek's China was off planned general strike, 30 Jan­ and Nissans into the American market America's main "free world" ally, and uary 1947. was by no means based solely on size Washington viewed the resurgence of and unexpected event on the other side and price. The Japanese simply make Japanese militarism asa potential threat tarists' drive toward war. Under these of the Sea of Japan: the victory ofMao's better cars. By the late 1970s Hertz to America's sphere of influence. Thus conditions Japan experiencedan explo­ Red Army over Chiang Kai-shek in Rent-A-Cars' maintenance reports indi­ the American occupation under mega­ sion of pent-up class struggle,unique in cated that Japanese cars were twice lomaniac General Douglas MacArthur its history. Within a year and a halfafter early 1949. This immediately produced the quality of comparable American took certain measures to weaken the tra­ the surrender of August 1945, five a reversal of alliances. Japan became America's "best friend" in Asia, Red models. ditional Japanese elite, notably a land million workers were enrolled in trade China its demonic enemy. Halberstam And what does the price of oil have to reform which created a class of mid­ unions, more than ten times the prewar summarizes U.S. imperialism's changed do with Japan's superiority in steel mak­ dling peasant proprietors. peak. The most militant union federa­ policy toward Japan: ing, machine tools, consumer electron­ . Steps were also taken to break up the tion, Sanbetsu, was strongly influenced zaibatsu, the .big industrial monopolies by the pro-Moscow J_CP. "The policy changed not so much ics, office equipment...? Japan has now because of events in Japan but because overtaken the U.S. in high-tech, like Mitsubishi and Mitsui. A goodly The workers were clearly on the of events in the world. The Cold War microchip-based electronics. A recent number of prewar Japanese politicians, offensive. An American liberal, who vis­ had. intensified in Europe, the Com­ report by the CIA concluded: "We military men and industrialists (includ­ ited Japan in this period, wrote: munistswereabout to wininChina,and ing the founder of Nissan, Yoshisuke "In the early days of the occupation Washington, which was already in the believe the U.S. semiconductor indus­ most disputeswere settled quickly, and processof strengtheningand reindustri­ try is at a crucial turning point in its his­ usually with a victory for the union. alizingWestGermany, suddenlybegan tory. It fundamentally cannot compete Employers were stunned by the defeat, to see Japan differently: It should in its present form" (New York Times, 5 disorganized and uncertain, fearful of become a free-world bastion in Asia. It January). In short, Japan has a clear antagonizing the occupationforces, and should be industrialized. Its traditional in some cases, no doubt, apprehensive business structure should be strength­ edge over the U.S. in every branch of of revolutionary developments." ened, not undermined. Assaults upon manufacturing not directly related to -Miriam S. Farley, Aspects of the zaibatsu were to stop." the military, like aircraft. If, in Halber­ Japan's Labor Problems (1950) Significantly, the Korean War, begin­ stam's words, by the late '70s "the entire In addition to strikes, Farley reported ning in mid-1950-"a gift from the American industrial core was vulner­ thatmilitant unions employed an effec­ gods," prime minister Yoshida called able to relentless challenge from a con­ tive tactic called "production control" in it-both consolidated the new Wash­ fident, disciplined Japan," this had which the workers "take over the plant ington/Tokyo axis and pulled Japan I absolutely nothing to do with OPEC. and run it until management meets their out of its prolonged postwar econom­ demands ora compromise is reached." ic depression. The zaibatsu, became The Cold War and Japanese The rising line of class struggle cul­ MacArthur's quartermasters, supplying Company Unions minated on I February 1947 in a call for arms to the U.S. forces in Korea. Nissan While Halberstam sees the American a general strike not only around eco­ produced jeeps and trucks for the Amer­ people spoiled during the era of cheap nomic demands but also for the ouster ican army. oil, he sees in the Japanese people mod­ of the right-wing Yoshida government. Initially, however, the U.S. Reverse els of every economic virtue. They are On the eve of the planned strike MacAr­ Course toward Japan was associated portrayed as combining the discipline thur ordered it banned. The Stalinist economically with the "Dodge Line." and spirit of self-sacrifice of ancient JCP, like its counterparts in West Eu­ In early 1949 Joseph Dodge, a right­ Press Association Spartans with the intellectual rigor U.S. occupation forces under Gen­ rope, was unwilling and unprepared to wing Detroit banker, designed an eco­ and intensity of nuclear physicists. The - eral MacArthur (with Emperor fight for power. Such a fight meant tak­ nomic program for Japan similar to Japanese "were exceptionally well pre­ Hirohito) helped break combative ing on the American occupation army, Milton Friedman's post-19i3 "shock pared for an industrial society." "Not Japanese labor movement. the effective bourgeois state power in continued on page 8 20 MARCH 1987 7 social democrats. Fraser took a seat on the Chrysler board Japan Inc... Masuda met his nemesisin Katsuji as part of the "government bailout/give­ Kawamata,a functionary of the Indus­ back deal. Why was Japanese auto (continued from page 7) trial Bank ofJapan. In 1947 Kawamata unionism totally' broken by the com­ treatment" for Pinochet's Chile. His de­ was assigned to Nissan's management panies in the early 1950s while a quarter clared aims: "increase in unemployment by the bank to bring the troubled com­ of a century passed before the leaders of will in turn lead to increased efficiency pany into line. He first successfully chal­ American auto unionism became open of labor and a greater production.... lenged the union during the Dodge Line company cops? Get the country into hard condition for by laying off 2,000 workers. However, a First ofall, the Japanese unions in the the struggle in the export market." decisive showdown was postponed for late 1940s were far more radical than Government expenditure was cut to the the duration of the Korean War boom. anything seen in Detroit in the postwar bone while taxes were raised. Central The company was finally making era. Reuther's UAW negotiated work bank credit was frozen while loans were money, and the last thing management rules that in no way obstructed the called in. A third of. small Japanese wanted was a long strike. The workers effective exploitation of its member-' businesses went bankrupt; by mid-1950 needed all the overtime they could get to ship by the auto bosses. From the time industrial production had fallen to less "keep up with the war-generated infla­ he became UAW president in 1946, tion. During the Korean War years the AP Reuther advocated active class collab­ than a third the level of 1931, at the Victory of Chinese Revolution in union remained strong and militant on oration between the union, auto bosses depth of the Great Depression! 1949 cemented Washington-Tokyo Hundreds of thousands of workers, the shopfloor. Abusive foremen were axis. and government. In the I960s, for exam­ almost 200,000 in the government sec­ ground down by the suribachi (mortar ple, he proposed to the Johnson admin­ and pestle) treatment. They were sur­ yakuza, and the police were called. The istration that it waive the anti-trust laws tor alone, were thrown onto the streets. struggle went on day after day. The first The mass layoffs greatly facilitated rounded by angry workers, who ha­ barricade had been flimsy; the next bar­ so that the BigThree couldjoin forces to purging leftists from the workplace and rangued them for hours, not even let­ ricade was stronger, and again Masu­ produce a small car to compete with the breaking the power of the radical ting them go to the bathroom. da's people charged it. Masuda was Germans and Japanese! So it's hardly unions. Halberstam pinpoints the origin With the end of the American occu­ arrested." surprising that the head of the Nissan of Japan's company unions and sub­ pation in 1952 and the Korean War In the end the union was defeated by a company union, Ichiro Shioji, declared missive labor movement in the Dodge winding down, the Japanese ruling class management, supported by the power of repeatedly that his role model was none Line and red purge: was determined to reestablish itself as the state, that was determined to starve other than Walter Reuther! "In 1949, with MacArthur's support, unchallenged master in its own house. them into submission. By the end of But more fundamentally, U.S. impe­ there was an all-out assault upon Com­ There would be no deals and compro­ September Masuda admitted he was rialism was top dog. In the early 1950s, munist leadership in the unions which mises with labor radicals like Masuda. beaten and advised his people to return Detroit dominated the world auto mar- became known as 'the Red Purge.' In At stake at Nissan was not simply the union after union the Communists and 3l c: some of their colleagues were simply fate of one medium-sized company but Q) Q; arrested and removed from their jobs. the shape of the postwar bourgeois o As many as ten thousand workers were order in Japan. Knowing the entire fired during these purges, and hun­ '0 bourgeoisie was behind him, Kawamata "E dreds of thousands were pulled back Q) prepared carefully to destroy the union. E from union membership .... t: os "As one radical union after anotherfell, He borrowed his own strike fund from a. the Japanese industrialists replaced the banks of $1.5 million, an amount cQ) them with unions that to Americans almost equal to the company's annual seemed company-sponsored. What was emerging were management-union revenue. He extracted promises from (or, some would say, management­ Toyota and Isuzu, his major compet­ During Korean management) relations that Americans itors, not to take Nissan's regular cus­ War Japan could not match, an advantage that tomers in case of a strike. He hired became supply American industrialists did not them­ base for U.S. selves enjoy." gangsters (Yakuza) as strikebreakers. And, not least importantly, he con­ imperialist army. Halberstam notes the historical irony spired with Masuda's right-wing oppo­ that a Detroit banker helped create in nents in the union to split it and set up a Japan an economic power that three pro-company union. to work to save their jobs. ket and so could easily tolerate a strong decades later would reduce the U.S. When it finally came in May 1953,the auto capital to an industrial ghost town. Could the Nissan strike have been but decidedly unrnilitant union like the Nissan strike was, in Halberstam'z won? Yes, but only by extending it UAW. The far poorer Japanese auto The 1953 Nissan Strike: words, "like a small war." Kawamata beyond the confines of Nissan. At the industry, struggling to break into for­ A Historical Turning Point flat out refused to negotiate with Masu­ minimum Toyota and Isuzu also had to eign markets, could not afford any kind da. His demand was unconditional sur­ be struck, thus crippling Japanese auto of unionism. The advantage in labor While the Dodge Line and red purge render, no compromises. As it became and truck production, some of which costs Toyota and Nissan had over GM greatly weakened the radical unions, clear that Nissan was prepared to stay was still going to the American forces in and Ford (and that has disappeared) A Korea. But such a strategic blow to the was achieved not by "worker­ 'union democracy and militant class union organizers and red scares. It was strikers tried repeatedly to stop the struggle iscomplete independence of the the Communists who first organized the scabs brought in from' surrounding workers movement from the bosses' cannery and field workers long scorned towns. Amador Betancourt, a striker state. by the imperialist-bribed labor lieuten­ and husband of Strikers' Committee After months on strike the "peaceful, ants of capital. A vital part of a class­ president Gloria Betancourt, was jailed legal, play by the bosses' rules" line of struggle program is the fight for full for eight months for defending the the Teamster fat cats and the utter de­ citizenship rights for foreign-born picket lines. Even now the capitalist featism of the fake-left strike "support­ workers and their families. Many courts are threatening to imprison ers" took their toll. Instead of labor Watsonville workers migrate to Mexico Amador again, for supposed "viola­ action to hot-cargo the scab produce, WV Photo during the off-season at the canneries, tions" of draconian probation terms. strikers were sent on far-flung pickets of November 1985 rally for Watsonville underlining the need and potential for Scandalously, the Teamster bureaucrats Wells Fargo banks in Northern Califor­ strikers. SL banner in Spanish: militant, internationalist labor organi­ did nothing to defend Betancourt, even nia, in an impotent attempt at a "Labor's Gotta Play Hardball to zations on both sides ofthe border. cutting off his strike benefits while he consumer boycott of the cannery's Win'" was in jail! biggest creditor. The Wells Fargo was aided in his betrayal by the fake­ Build a Workers Party to Strikers' Committee member Cha­ campaign was the brain child of UFW left League of Revolutionary Struggle Lead the Oppressed to Victory! velo Moreno, who along with Carlos head Cesar Chavez, who pushed it to (LRS) and their newspaper Unity. Even Since Reagan smashed the PATCO Hernandez faces trumped-up charges cover his own strikebreaking refusal to after the strikers refused to buy Lopez' air traffic controllers strike in 1981, from a picket linearrest on February 17, stop harvesting the crops for the plant. "final" offer, the LRS supporters at a bringing the anti-Soviet war drive home spoke of the strikers' experience with The last days of the strike saw a March 9 strike rally told the crowd it with stepped-up union-busting and capitalist "justice" in a solidarity desperate hunger strike and a Chavez­ would be a "victory" to "get it over" and racist terror, millions of workers have message to the February 21 Oakland style "pilgrimage" of workers on their go back to work without medical been looking for a victory, a chance to rally demanding freedom for impris­ knees to a local church. benefits. The pro-Peking and anti­ break the cycle of defeats and betrayals. oned Black Panther Geronimo Pratt: "I In the end, the plant was sold to a Soviet LRS's "unity" has always been Like the Morenci copper miners and know the injustices that the law and the consortium of growers, Norcal Frozen with the labor tops and the racist, Hormel meatpackers, an isolated can­ police have against the workers, and Foods, in February. The new owners, capitalist Democratic Party politi­ nery workers union in a small company how they work for the bosses." Drop the who retained most of the old hated cians, like Jesse Jackson, who made town was left to fight alone. This charges against Betancourt, Moreno, managers, were under pressure to settle. two grandstanding appearances in testifies to the utter bankruptcy of the Hernandez, and all victimized strikers Instead of squeezing when it would hurt, Watsonville. leadership of the powerful industrial now! . the Teamster tops conspired with Jackson, like the rest of the Demo­ unions-auto, steel, longshore, trans­ The election of the Strikers' Commit­ Norcal to present a "final" offer that cratic Party, pushes racist protection­ port, mine workers. tee was a crucial factor in mobilizing would have deferred medical benefits ism to "save American industry," by Today the American government isin pickets and defending the strike against for up to three years. Local 912 head directing the hatred of U.S. workers at disarray as a political crisis racks their the capitalist cops and courts, and their Sergio Lopez tried to pass off this their class brothers and sisters abroad. imperial presidency. To seize this lackeys in the labor bureaucracy. But sellout with the line that it's "much The Teamster brass fought tooth and opportunity, and strike back at the workers were unable to wrest control of easier to fight from the inside than from nail to stop Spanish translation at union labor-hating racist criminals who rule the strike from the "official" leadership, the outside." Gloria Betancourt told meetings and "pledged that the union America, requires a revolutionary lead­ although at the end of the strike WV the strikers' sentiment: would work with Norcal 'to save the ership forged in the fight for a workers Committee members were brought onto "Eighty-six percent of the workers in frozen food industry in California. party to lead all the oppressed to this cannery are women, the majority the union bargaining committee. The single women with four or six children Together we will stave off foreign victory. A workers government will Watsonville strike showed the burning in the family to support. So at $5.85 an competition'" (California AFL-CIO expropriate the factories and fields, necessity of politically defeating and hour without medical benefits we won't News, 6 March). This despicable class ending the criminal rule of the capital­ ousting the labor traitors-class battles be able to live." collaboration is particularly dangerous ists who coin their millions from the can't be won with the bosses' agents at The Teamsters even cut off the for the Hispanic women at Watson­ sweat and blood of the working the head of the strike. workers' $55 weekly strike pay! Lopez ville, who face the terror of "La Migra" people.•

participation in a "criminal enter­ RICO as "by far the most powerful wrote in the New York Times Magazine RICO prise"-nebulous categories which have weapon in the FBI's drive." This (12 January 1986)that his experience in been applied against leftist and catchall "conspiracy" law is of a piece running a red purge of the Screen Actors working-class organizations. Then they with the rest of the feds' "legal" Guild taught him that "the tactics used Frame-Up..-. seize your assets as "proceeds of crime" paraphernalia, including entrapment by mobsters and totalitarian ideologues (continued from page 2) before the trial has taken place, to operations (which netted one Senator have a lot in common." Following the ensure you can't defend yourself! and five Congressmen in the late '70s) McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1950s,in of so-called witnesses-described by A recent article in the Washington and preventive detention (now before the '60s FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover Gotti's lawyer Bruce Cutler as "paid Times' publication Insight (16 Febru­ the Supreme Court in the case of Tony launched the COINTEL program which Government informants who lie, who ary) lauding the "new" (post-Watergate) Salerno, reputed boss of the Genovese was responsible for the murder of Black use drugs,' who kill people" ...and' who FBI crowed that under William Webster family). Add to this Meese's determina­ Panther leaders. Reagan/Meese have got reduced sentences or even new the agency doubled its budget, doubled tion to get rid of the Miranda prisoners' gone a long way in openly reinstating identities in return for' fingering the its wiretaps and doubled its undercover rights ruling and decree a federal death such police-state tactics. One Frank "dapper don." A master of understate­ operations to become "once again a penalty, and you get a blueprint for a Varelli, an ex-FBI informer currently ment, Cutler told the jury, "I never said confident and vigorous national police police state. testifying before Congress about his my client was a saint." But the federal force." The mouthpiece of the ultra­ Naturally, "organized crime" IS infiltration of the CIS PES solidarity prosecutors are hardly interested in right Sun Myung Moon sect singled out equated with "organized labor." The group in Dallas, has stated that between wiping out crime. Otherwise they could Moonie profile declared, "This year, the breaking into offices, electronic surveil­ go after a really big-time criminal FBI willtake aim at labor racketeering." lance, taping meetings and compiling hit conspiracy, Reagan's Iran/contra guns, Already in 1986, the government used a lists, the government's repressive cam­ drugs and murder operation. civil provision of RICO to take direct paign now includes "everything Cointel­ What Reagan, his top cop Ed Meese control of Teamsters Local 560 in New pro covered before" (Nation, 7 March). and the feds are after is expanding their Jersey. And although the Teamsters The feds' attempt to frame John Gotti laws of repression, to be used against the were one of the few unions to endorse failed-and that's a good thing, just like working class, minorities and political Reagan, the feds are going after IBT when in 1984a Los Angeles jury found opponents. As we wrote a year ago: president Jackie Presser, himselfan FBI former auto magnate John DeLorean "But this crackdown doesn't have much informant, even while admitting that innocent of a federal drug "sting." Gotti to do with justice: they are actually trying toframe the Mob. The RICO ... Presser's alleged payroll padding was returned to his home in Howard Beach, 'conspiracy' dragnet lets the G-men pick sanctioned by his FBI controller. Queens, the same community where a and choose who they feel like setting up Meanwhile, the U.S. Labor Department black man, Michael Griffith, was and when; they don't need evidence of has embarked on a wholesale Attempt lynched by a racist mob of white youth any actual crime. The Reaganites want to institutionalize the frame-up prin­ to "discipline" the labor movement last December. But the feds aren't ciple, and what easier target for a through criminal investigations, as a interested in pursuing that heinous frame job than vicious parasites like recent legal study noted (David Elbaor crime. After all; in the 1985 bombing of gangsters? and Laurence Gold, "The Criminaliza­ the black MOVE commune in Philadel­ "Why are we Marxists commenting on tion of Union Activity," 1985). One phia, all levels of the government, from these mobster trials? For one thing, we don't believe justice is only for the federal prosecutor drooled over the the local police and black Democratic innocent." possibility of putting "the entire Team­ mayor right up to the FBI and Meese -"Feds Frame Up Mob," no sters union into receivership" (Newsday, himself, were involved in a horrific WV No. 400, 28 March 1986 The Star Chamber, in Britain's Westminster Palace, where arbitrary 20 June 1986). racist mass murder. They did it simply In the RICO racket the victim is snared royal "justice" was meted out. It was As always, leftists are also high on the because they wanted to. That isperhaps not for committing a crime but for abolished by the Puritan Revolution government's hit list. Former FBI fink the most damning indictment of capital­ "patterns of racketeering activities" and in 1641. Reagan (informer code number T-IO) ist "justice" in Reagan's America.• 20 MARCH 1987 9 Gorbachev's Pipe Dream ... (continued from page 1) out Afghanistan for the illusion of "peaceful coexistence" with Washing­ ton. After a meeting with Gorbachev last month, Henry Kissinger wrote: '" had arrived in Moscow persuaded that the Soviet Union would never permit the overthrow of a regime established bySovietpower.... I am no longer so sure. Our Soviet hosts emphasized their desire for total with­ drawal. Theyalso affirmed the goalofa DPA Haqiqat Enqelab Sawer government of national reconciliation CIA-armed Islamic cutthroats in Afghanistan shoot schoolteachers for teaching young girls to read (left). At that would include representatives of right: Soviet soldiers in Kabul. Hall Red Army In Afghanistan-Extend Social Gains of Bolshevik Revolution to the guerrilla groups." Afghan Peoples! -s-Newsweek, 2 March We Trotskyists say: Hail Red Army While Gorbachev certainly hasn't official in the Carter administration, ping the limited Soviet support to in Afghanistan-Extend the gains of given up on Reagan, he is also appealing wanted to get into a crowded session revolutionary and national liberation the Bolshevik Revolution to Afghan' to out-of-office Western politicians, featuring Andrei Sakharov. When he struggles from Southeast Asia to Cen­ peoples! capitalists and media stars (the "glittera­ pulled strings in order to hear in person tral America. ti"). His effort to sponsor a global the Soviet dissident, an aide to Gary Gorbachev, Sakharov popular front for "peace" was launched Hart quipped his efforts had all the The Spectre of Trotskyism and the Glitterati in mid-February with a "Forum for a dignity of trying to get backstage at a Gorbachev's "peace offensive" is not a The Kremlin bureaucracy has Nuclear-Free World and the Survival of Rolling Stones concert. cynical ploy to gain the favor ofWestern preached and tried to practice "peaceful Humanity." There were 250 business­ Aside from Gorbachev, the other public opinion, nor is it motivated coexistence" with imperialism ever since men, 215 clergymen, hundreds of superstar at this "peace" confab was simply by a desire to free up economic Stalin, with his reactionary, nationalist scientists and a slew of retired NATO Sakharov, a man who had urged the resources now expended on the arms theory of "socialism in one country." generals. Returning the compliment, U.S. to deploy the MX missile (an race. The Soviet bureaucracy is genuine­ And the Gorbachev regime has played retired high-ranking military officers in acknowledged first-strike weapon) and ly frightened of nuclear war, and rightly this theme over arid over. Addressing the USSR have formed a new group, to economically blackmail the Soviet so. They also reflect the mass sentiment the assembled celebrities at the "no Soviet Generals and Admirals for Peace Union into withdrawing from Afghani­ of the people of the Soviet Union in a stan. Before releasing Sakharov from deep-seated, desperate desire for peace. comfortable internal exile in Gorky last But there is also a sense among elements December, Gorbachev may have in the Soviet officialdom, intelligentsia managed to turn him from his patrons in and working people that appeasement, Washington. At the Moscow conference capitulating to the "Reagan doctrine," Sakharov spoke out against Reagan's or allowing U.S. imperialism to isolate "Star Wars" and applauded the new and starve heroic Vietnam and take over Soviet leader. However, he also spoke Afghanistan are not the road to peace. for Soviet collaboration with imperial­ In a broadcast from Moscow last ism to maintain the global status quo: month, TV talk-show host Phil Dona­ "There must be a settlementof regional hue had a wide-ranging discussion with conflicts on the basis of compromise and restoration of stability wherever it scores of Soviet youth on god, Commu­ has been disrupted. Support for desta­ nism, nuclear war-and couldn't get a bilizing and extremistforces and allter­ single one to condemn Soviet interven­ rorist groups should be ended." tion in Afghanistan as unjust. -Time, 16 March Gorbachev sees Trotskyism behind "Terrorist groups" are what Reagan and any opposition to his headlong drive for his racist allies call national liberation "peaceful coexistence" with Reagan. At movements around the world. The the Communist Party congress in Feb­ white supremacist rulers of South Afri­ ruary 1986, he denounced "revolution­ ca label the African National Congress a Der Spiegel conomlst ary wars" as a "Trotskyite" heresy and Gorbachev (left) addresses glitterati at "no nuke" extravaganza In Moscow. "terrorist group"; the Zionists say the went on: "Today, too, we arefirmly con­ Participants Included actor Krls Krlstofferson (right), starof demented anti­ same of the Palestine Liberation Organ­ vinced that pushing revolutions from Soviet soap opera Amerlka. ization. To its credit, the Soviet Union outside, and doubly so by military has provided arms for the ANC and means, is futile and inadmissible" (New nuke" extravaganza in Moscow last and Disarmament. PLO. Sakharov's talk of "regional Times, 10 March 1986). The wars now month, the new Soviet leader declared: For a few days this winter Moscow stability" means abandoning South being fought, by the Vietnamese in "Before my people, before you and was the "in" place to be for the jet set. African blacks and Palestinian Arabs in Kampuchea, the Soviet army in Af­ before the wholeworld, I state with full Former Canadian prime minister Pierre order to restore the stability of two of responsibility that our international ghanistan, the Cubans in Angola and policyis more than everdetermined by Elliott Trudeau, leading West German the most murderous, racist 'states on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua are resis­ domestic policy, by our interest in Social Democrat Egon Bahr, liberal earth. tance to the export of counterrevolu­ concentrating on constructive. endeav­ American economist John Kenneth Sakharov's latest pronouncements tion. There probably are people in the ors to improve our country." Galbraith rubbed elbows with Norman wouldn't be all that important except Soviet hierarchy who are less willing -Moscow News, I March Mailer, Claudia Cardinale and Yoko they converge with Gorbachev's line. In than Gorbachev to sell out Vietnam or For the last decade, U.S. imperialism Ono. Actor Kris Kristofferson, fresh his biography of the new Soviet leader, Afghanistan for the sake' of better has tried to browbeat; threaten or trick .from starring in the vile anti-Soviet soap liberal Soviet dissident Zhores Medve­ relations with Washington. However, the Soviet Union into retreating from 'opera A merika, was there, too. The dev notes that the Brezhnev regime the answer to Gorbachev's version of the international scene. No wonder this atmosphere was that of a political rock played up its international successes, "peaceful coexistence" is not support to statement was greeted by Washington. festival. David Aaron, a former high from the U.S. defeat in Vietnam to more hard line elements in the Kremlin, aiding nationalist regimes in Africa and who will betray and weaken the defense revolutionary movements in Latin of the Soviet Union in other ways. America. By contrast, Medvedev writes The answer is the organization of the SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY approvingly: "if Gorbachev's foreign workers ofthe world by an international National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116. (212) 732-7860 policy intentions are to be judged by the revolutionary party to overthrow the new Party programme, there will be less war-driven capitalist system. And here Atlanta Detroit Norfolk ideological expansion of the USSR in the spectre of Trotskyism really does Box 4012 Box 441794 Box 1972, Main PO future, compared to what was promised haunt the Soviet bureaucracy. Witness a Atlanta, GA 30302 Detroit, MI 48244 Norfolk, VA 23501 in previous programmes.i .. The pro­ revealing article by one Nikolai Vasetski Boston Los Angeles Oakland gramme promises solidarity and coop­ in the Moscow-based America Latina Box 840, Central Sta. Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta. Box 32552 eration with the 'N ewly-Free Countries,' (No.3, 1986) which polemicizes against Cambridge, MA 02139 Los Angeles, CA 90029 Oakland, CA 94604 but no new substantive help" (Gorba­ an article in Workers Vanguard (617) 492-3928 (213) 380-8239 (415) 839-0851 chev [1986]). ("Carter/Reagan Nuclear War Fever," Not all Soviet actions abroad in the WV No. 264, 19 September 1980): Chicago Madison San Francisco name of "socialist solidarity" serve the "On the cardinal question of the day­ Box 6441, Main PO c/o SYL, Box 2074 Box 5712 cause of social progress and national defense of the USSR against imperial­ Chicago, IL 60680 Madison, WI 53701 San Francisco, CA 94101 ist aggression-the Trotskyists of the (312) 663-0715 (608) 257-8625 (415) 863-6963 justice. In particular, we strongly con­ United States considerthat Trotskyism demn the Kremlin's support to Ethi­ is distinguished both from petty­ Cleveland New York Washington, D.C. opia's Haile Miriam Mengistu, a left­ bourgeois pacifism as well as reformism Box 91037 Box 444, Canal S1. Sta. Box 75073 talking Idi Amin who has crushed the and centrism, because it recognizes the Cleveland, OH 44101 New York, NY 10013 Washington, D.C. 20013 nascent workers movement, extermi­ fact that the 'Eurornissiles' are aimedat (216) 881-3700 (212) 267-1025 , (202) 636-3537 the Soviet Union. nated an entire generation of radical "But after recognizing thisobviousfact, intellectuals and committed genocidal they draw the following conclusion: in Toronto ' terror against the Eritreans and other order to defendthe USSR it isnecessary TROTSKYIST LEAGUE national minorities. But the NATOcap­ to carry out a permanent worldrevolu­ Box 7198, Station A tion. The American Trotskyists are OF CANADA Toronto, Ontario M5W 1X8 itals are not much concerned about the against all disarmament' that isn't (41E?) 593-4138 Moscow-Addis Ababa connection. The undertaken by the workersthemselves. imperialists are concerned about stop- In their press organ they say that 'the 10 WORKERS VANGUARD possible destruction ofthe worldbythe CPparticipated in.the recent Syrian­ Nazi concentration camps in the last missiles and other components of the engineered massacre of the Sunni year of the Third Reich! In an act of imperialist war machine can only be Palestinians... Tawhid sect (which itself massacred .courageous working-class defiance of averted by the worldwide victory ofthe (continued from page 3) working class'.... scores of CPers three years ago). Israel's draconian martial law, in late '''Disarmament'Trotskyist-style isa fig headquartered in Baghdad, Iraq)de­ The politics of the pro-Moscow February Gaza Palestinian carpenters leaf to cover very different objectives Lebanese CP reflect the orientation of (supported by Israeli unionists and civil for the Trotskyist leaders: to present nounced the Syrian move "since Syria Trotskyism as the far left pole of the is a basic party to the blockade of the rulers of the Soviet Union, a rights fighters) formed a 400-strong antiwar movement (opposed to the Palestinian refugee camps and the bureaucratically degenerated workers union. supposedly reformist program of the state. Repudiating and fearing proletar­ As lran/Contragate investigations Communists) in order to attract those annihilation and starvation of thou­ sands of our people there" (New York ian revolution in the Near East (as show, Israel has placed itself in the workers whose class consciousness elsewhere), the Kremlin backs Arab forefront of U.S. imperialism's anti­ doesn't suffice to quickly understand Times, 23 February). This was verified Soviet war drive, doing itsdirty work in the Trotskyist ideology." immediately when the first major move nationalist regimesand movements who invariably end up at one another's the Third World. In return Israel gets $3 of the Syrian army in.Beirut was to It is perhaps no accident that a throats. Infact, all of the combatants in billion a year from Uncle Sam, two­ Stalinist polemic which admits that attack the Hezbollah, which for its own the recent fighting in Beirut are armed thirds of it in direct military grants. The Trotskyism can attract .revolutionary­ reasons had provided a certain buffer with Soviet weapons! And while Mos­ revelation by Mordechai Vanunu. that minded workers appears in a publica­ for the PLO camps. The only "peace" cow proclaims undying support to the Israel has 100-200 nuclear warheads that the Syrian army willbring to Beirut tion directed at Latin America. For in Palestinian cause, it has publicly en­ means that the Zionist rulers want the is the peace of the dead. Only last this part of the world hatred for Yankee capacity to nuke not only every Arab December the Syrian army organized dorsed the entry of the Syrian army into imperialism runs very deep and is near capital but also Moscow and Leningrad. the massacre of the Sunni fundamental­ West Beirut, designed to break the PLO. universal. "Peaceful coexistence" with To justify itself and "unify" the nation, a ist Tawhid sect (a PLO ally of the. Washington means Pinochet's torture For Proletarian Revolution garrison state like Israel must ever be on moment), in the northern Lebanese city chambers, Central American death in the Near East! the brink of war. And the most likely of Tripoli. Today, after 12 years of all­ squads and Citibank sucking the life­ While Amal militiamen try to starve Zionist target is Soviet-backed Syria. sided communalist slaughter, a full­ blood of the workers and peasants. At out Palestinian camps in Lebanon, the scale Israeli blitzkrieg and direct imperi­ Meanwhile, Reagan has the U.S. Sixth the same time, a victory for U.S. Zionist state is escalating its reign of alist military intervention, Lebanon's Fleet sitting off the coast of Lebanon imperialism in its "backyard" would terror both in the Occupied Territories, and would verymuch like a military cities look like they've experienced a spur on the war drive against the Soviet seized by Israel in the 1967 war, and small-scale nuclear war. diversion. A war between Israel and Union. Truly, as we have proclaimed, within Israel itself. In the West Bank last Syria could rapidly escalate into nuclear "Defense of Cuba/USSR Beginsin Cen- . The Lebanese Cockpit December Israeli soldiers opened fire on world war, especially given Israel's tral America!" And a socialist revolution 200 students conducting a nonviolent sizable nuclear arsenal, urgently posing in Latin America would send massive The slaughterhouse called Lebanon is protest. Two students were killed and at defense of the Soviet Union and the shock waves to the imperialist colossus a classic product of colonial divide-and­ to the North, panicking Wall Street and rule policies. France, which along with electrifying the millions of Hispanic Britain carved up the Ottoman Empire workers in America's factories and in the Near East after World War I, farms. created a separate Lebanon in order to While Reagan is on the rocks, the maintain a base of support among the thermonuclear-armed ruling class he Maronite Christian community which represents is still in the saddle. The fate feared incorporation into a predomi­ of the homeland of the October Revolu­ nantly Muslim Greater Syria. The 1943 tion, the emancipation of the oppressed National Covenant imposed upon and toiling masses, and the very survival Lebanon a government in which the of humanity are inseparably bound to spoils were allotted along religious/ working-class revolution in the domi­ communal lines with Christian Maro­ nant imperialist countries, above all the nites on top and Muslims, especially United States. World revolution is no Shi'ites, on the bottom. Adding fuel to utopia but the only reality which can the Lebanese tinderbox were the hun­ disarm the Pentagon. Lenin himself dreds of thousands of Palestinian authored the plank of the 1919program refugees who fled the Zionist terror by of the Russian Communist Party which the state of Israel was consolidat­ (Bolsheviks) which denounced "disar­ WV Photo ed in 1948. Tens of thousands more San Francisco-SL contingent in protest against ZlonisUascist Meir Kahane, mament under capitalism" as a "reac­ poured into Lebanon after the 1970 October 1985. tionary philistine illusion of the petty­ Black September massacre in Jordan. bourgeois democrats," calling instead In the mid-'70s all the pressures from least eleven wounded. The following social gains of the October Revolution. for "arming the proletariat and disarm­ below finally blew apart the fragile day the occupation troops struck again, The Zionist state, carved out of the ing the bourgeoisie" and achieving Lebanese system, .a bankers' republic murdering a 14-year-old boy, allegedly living body of the Palestinian Arab victory over the capitalists "both in civil whose rulers gorged themselves on oil for throwing stones. A few days later a people, offers Jews not a haven but a money while keeping the masses in 12-year-old boy was found murdered, deathtrap. Many Israelis do not want to grinding poverty. Growing out of a either by soldiers or clerical-fascist live in a permanent armed camp ever on series of strikes, and initially fueled by Israeli "settlers" who are issued auto­ the brink of war ...and not all of them legitimate grievances over Maronite matic weapons by the army. The can emigrate to drive taxicabs in New domination, the brewing social explo­ shootings were so viciously cold­ York City. Recently, a number of joint sion was transformed into a squalid blooded and obviously-state-sponsored Palestinian Arab and Hebrew demon­ communalist civil war by the traditional that even the UN Security Council strations have taken place despite leaders of the Muslim camp, such as the condemned them 14-0 with the U.S. increased repression on the part of the hereditary chieftain of the Druze sect, abstaining. Israeli rulers. Defense of the democratic Kamal Jumblatt. Had a revolutionary West Bank protests soon spread to rights of all the peoples of the Near East Marxist party stood at the head of the the occupied Gaza Strip where 550,000 requires a revolutionary struggle, with Lebanese Muslim and Palestinian toil­ Palestinians, half under the age of 15, the working class and its vanguard party ers, it would have put forward a pro­ live in an area 27 miles wide and five at the head of the exploited and gram capable of attracting the have-nots miles long. Here also Israeli soldiers and oppressed, that would smash the Zionist in the Christian community, splitting their "settler" auxiliaries fired at un­ state, bring down the rotten medieval and weakening the base of the fascistic armed Palestinian youths, wounding structure in Lebanon and sweep away Phalange and other reactionary Maro­ many, but this did nothing to quell the the Hashemite kingdom in Jordan and nite forces. But a genuine communist spirited protests. The Palestinians in bloody Ba'athist bonapartes in Syria. party does not exist in Lebanon. Gaza and the 700,000 on the West Bank The right to self-determination for both The Lebanese CP is one of the oldest are disenfranchised in their own land, the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew­ and relatively largest Communist par­ like blacks under South African apart­ speaking peoples, if it is to lead to ties in the Arab world. With a heavily heid except that they have even fewer genuine national emancipation and WV Photo Christian leadership and Shi'ite base, "rights." As the Zionist rulers have social progress, can only be realized in Spartaclsts protest ABC's Cold War . the Lebanese CP is uniquely placed to sought to transform Israel into a the framework of a socialist federation mega-series Amerlka In Washing­ cut across the sectarian/communalist garrison state where the main industryis of the Near East.• ton, D.C., February 15. divide. It is just about the only move­ armaments, the"dirty"(i.e., productive) wars at home and in international ment spanning the largely Shi'ite south work of construction, agriculture and revolutionary wars." Lebanon and the Christian/Sunni transport is increasingly allocated to Spartacist League What Trotsky wrote in 1940, when. north, leading the trade-union move­ Palestinians, especially superexploited Stalin was trying tciappease Nazi ment and dominating several Christian labor from the Occupied Territories. Public Offic'es Germany, retains its full force today as towns before 1976. However, because of Tens'of thousands of workers are -MARXIST LlTERATURE­ imperialism is preparing a nuclear its Stalinist politics the Lebanese Cp has trucked in daily from these Zionist Operation Barbarossa against the So­ tailed after the bourgeoisie for more bantustans since they are not allowed to . Bay Area than half a century, from abandoning . stay overnight in the "Jewish state." Fri.: 5:00-8:00 p.m.• Sat: 3:00-6:00 p.m. viet Union: 1634 Telegraph. 3rd Floor (near 17th Street) "The Fourth International can defend the struggle for independence inthe late They pay income tax and social security, Oakland, California' Phone: (415) 839-0851 the USSR' only by the methods of 1930s and '4Os to getting caught up in but receive no benefits-their payments revolutionary class struggle.... We the maelstrom of communalism in the go toward the costs of the military Chicago _ Tues.: 5:00-9:00 p.m.. Sat: 11:00a.m.-2:oo p.m. flatly reject the theory of socialism in '70s and '80s. In the 1975-76 civil war it occupation! At least another 50,000, 161 W. Harrison St.. 10th Floor onecountry,that brainchild ofignorant Chicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 663-0715 and reactionary Stalinism. Only the subordinated itself to Muslim confes­ often mere children, are paid a pittance world revolution cansavethe USSR for sionalists like Jumblatt (who masquer­ and are kept in locked huts overnight. New York City socialism. But the world revolution ades as the "Progressive Socialist Israeli civil rights fighter Israel Shahak, Tues.: 6:00-9:00 p.m., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.rn. carries with it the inescapable blotting Party") through the so-called Lebanese a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen death 41 Warren St (one block below out ofthe Kremlin oligarchy." Chambers St near Church St.) National Movement. And while it is the camp, noted that these Palestinian New 'York, N.Y. Phone: (212) 267-1025 Return to the road of Lenin and -target of a Shi'ite murder campaign in laborers ate given cooked marrow to _ Trotsky!. Beirut and the south, in Tripoli the eat-the same food given to Jews in the 20 MARCH 1987 11 WIIINEIiI ,,1.(;UIIIIIJ Defiant Cannery. Workers Go Back Watsonville: Hard 18-Month Strike WATSONVILLE-After 18 months of ing injunctions into worthless scraps of paper. And unionists must go after the bitter class struggle, the Watsonville employers' weak spot: their product is cannery strike ended March II. The seasonal and highly perishable. This strike of 1,000 mainly Mexican women means a strategy of labor boycott, not frozen-food workers against the arro­ impotent consumer boycotts.... Team­ gant agribusiness bosses of this com­ ster drivers, railway workers, ware­ housemen and retail clerks must hot­ pany town became a symbol of resis­ cargo (refuse to handle) the scab tance to the union-busting and give­ produce." backs of the Reagan years. It was the -"Victory to the Watsonville strikers' hard-bitten . tenacity on the Cannery Strike!" WV No. 389, picket lines that beat back the bosses' 18 October 1985 attempt to crush the strike outright At thebeginning of the strike, a group and destroy the union. In a dramat­ of women workers put forward a ic eleventh-hour effort, the strikers motion for a "general strike of all the stunned the 'company, Teamster brass canneries," and in January 1986strikers and media by defeating a "final offer" passed a motion demanding the Team­ that would have robbed the workers of ster tops stop the vegetables pouring medical benefits for up to three years. into the struck plant. But Local 912 The Watsonville strikers were at­ leaders declared the strikers' motion a tacked by the cops, betrayed by the dead letter, bowing before the slave­ bureaucracy of theirunion, Teamsters labor Taft-Hartley law' "illegalizing" Local 912, and isolated by California secondary boycotts. The Teamster tops' labor officialdom that preached "soli­ WV Photo sabotage was so blatant that they kept darity" and practiced betrayal. Yet the Militant cannery workers, predominantly Mexican women, march through the plant's own "waterhouse" freezer workers hung tougn" finally driving out Watsonville, California, November 1985. operators on the job-"because they're the labor-hating ~s and forcing the under a separate contract"-while new owner to restore benefits. The strike saved their union. sters against the UFW. Early in the Teamster drivers and warehousemen ended with a concession contract which The Watsonville strike could have strike, we put forward a program of continued to ship and store frozen food slashes wages to $5.85 per hour-from been won. Strike rallies and marches militant labor action to bring cannery produced by the scabs in the plant! the already miserable pre-strike wage of drew hundreds of members of powerful owner and Reagan buddy Mort Console Fed up with this backstabbing, an $6.66-and cuts the workforce by a unions in the San Francisco Bay Area, to his knees: assembly of 500 workers elected a third. But unlike the Hormel strike in two hours drive from Watsonville. The "All the canneries must be brought out Strikers' Committee. They demonstrat­ Austin, Minnesota, where the meat­ presence of Farmworkers (UFW) un­ on strike-6,OOO Local912 members are ed their determination time and again: still working without a contract at five in 18 months not one striker crossed the packers' local was ripped up and the ionists who pick the vegetables frozen in other canneries.... What is needed is membership fired, the Watsonville Watsonville was significant, given the daily mass pickets of area unionists to picket lines. Two months into the strike strikers' militancy and determination history of vicious raiding by the Team- stop the scabs and turn the strikebreak- continued on page 9

British Ferry Tragedy Free Enterprise Sinks Free Enterprise In the worst marine disaster in side. Within a minute the vessel cap­ British peacetime history since the sized, making it impossible to launch sinking of the Titanic in 1912, some life rafts. After the fact, port offi­ Ferry Herald of Free Enterp-risecapsizes, March 6, plunging hundreds into 134 crew members and passengers cials have acknowledged that leaving icy waters off Belgian port. Passengers and crew members were killed by decrepit British capitalism. went down with thecarferry Heraldof the docks without securing loading Free Enterprise when it capsized on doors is standard operating procedure Within a day of the disaster marine A 1980 report by the UN's Inter­ March 6 just outside Belgium's Zee­ for companies out to make a faster engineers confirmed what is widely national MaritimeCouncil noted that brugge harbor. buck by cutting turnaround times. known: the ferry design, utilized for these ro-ro vessels suffer twice the A catastrophe-but no accident. According to one report the Zee­ faster loading-i.e., to cut costs-is number of losses as other ships; over Rather it was the horrible outcome of brugge docks are among the lowest in notoriously unsafe. Incredibly, as one the last twenty years, 35 of them have utilizing a notoriously unsafe ship the Channel; water is pumped intothe British paper observed, they have the capsized. design and then disregarding one of forward ballast tanks to facilitate same fatal design flaw as the Titanic: So why are ships launched with the most elementary procedures of loading cars and trucks. The inquiry "It is right that we should recall the construction decidedly worse than that maritime safety: ship openings and confirmed that the ferry left "slightly worst and most famous mercantile which was proven deadly dangerous ports must be secured watertight trimmed down by the bow, which disaster of them all now, because it and unseaworthy almost 75 years ago? was that which imposed a fundamen­ before leaving dockside. Early on the would accentuate the scooping effect tal principle on steel-ship construc­ The answer is encapsulated in the .shipowner, Townsend Thorensen, of the bow." That more people weren't tion: that watertight bulkheads (steel names of Townsend Thorensen's tried to claim that "somehow" the killed is testimony to the heroic rescue walls) should extend crosswise at major ferries: the Herald of Free bow-loading "doors burst open." But efforts of the crew. Half of the 84 crew intervals from the bottom of the hull Enterprise, Spirit of Free Enterprise as survivors have testified and a members perished, many because of to the upper deck. The 'unsinkable' and PrideofFree Enterprise. And now Titanic had such bulkheads, but they preliminary inquiry affirmed, the ferry overexposure. As one seaman inter­ did not rise high enough. Roll-on; roll­ the British government has come up accelerated across the outer harbor viewed at the headquarters of the off (ro-ro) ships are the first major with a new and macabre use for-the ro­ before the crew on the lower vehicle National Union of Seamen in Dover commercial type to ignore this ax­ ro's: to refit them as prison ships to pen deck could close the apparently noted: "It was the cold water that iom.... If water ever penetrates these black and Asian immigrants refused box-like compartments in any quanti­ jammed doors. The ship became a killed them.... They died because they ty, it can cause a fatal list and the ro-ro entry into the country. Such is the giant scoop and rapidly destabilized as stayed behind to help others" (London rolls over in a few moments." private profit motive and the decaying water poured in and surged to the port Guardian, II March). -London Guardian, 9 March system of capitalism.

12 20 MARCH 1987