A.,Spartacist Pamphlet $1

Mary Van De Water~Quirk, Down With Nee-Apartheid Capitalism I , From Death Row, This Is 1954-2000 ...... 2 For a Black-Centered Workers Governmentl Mumia Abu-Jamal South African Workers Battle ANC Disease, Bigotry and Imperialist What Dlallo Really Means ...... 34 Hypocrisy Union-Busting, Austerity ...... 13 Free Mumiaf Abolish the South Africa Torn by Hue and Cry over Land Seizures Racist DeathPenaltyf .....•..... 35 I i AIDS Crisis ...... 3 in Zimbabwe ,,"- South Africa ANC Regime: Enforcer Racist Democratic Party Hustles 16 for Imperialist Plunder ...... 20 Black Vote Labor/Black Mobilization Down With the Confederate Rides KKK Out of NYC ...... 26 Flag of Slavery!...... •...... 37 Diallo Trial: Racist Killer Cops Acquitted Racist Roots of "Right to Work" Laws I There Is No Justice In the The Fight to Unionize the ! 0 4470 81032 2 Capitalist Courts! ...... ; . 32 "Open Shop" South ..... ',' ...... 43

January 2001 Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116

-'--"~--~-"~'"""'I'rrnlll'mrl."mnIr'l1nnrmnmffl 111111111111 _III Ii" 2 Mary Van De Water-Quirk On 9 May 2000, one day munism" triumphalism. Yet before her 46th birthday, the local recruited youth with our comrade Mary Van De ~ regularity, shaped them into Water-Quirk, organizer of the I cadres and transferred them Chicago local of the' Sparta­ to other locals and ICL sec­ cist League for 13 years, died tions where they would play after a four-year battle with important and often leading bile duct cancer. The length I roles. In his comments at the of her tenure as party organ­ ~ memorial, Sam Kaehler cap­ izer in a city where the cruel tured how Mary took every contradictions of racist Amer­ ~ opportunity to train new ican capitalist rule are most recruits: acutely concentrated, and of "Mary had a keen sense of her struggle against this form I what it meant to be a commu­ nist in 'Segregation City.' As of the disease which normally ~ the cars left the parking lot results in a rapid demise, ~ at the Ford stamping plant speak to her tenacity and will. factory gate sale, she would A memorial meeting for I point out how blacks and ~ Mary was held at the Inter­ 1/ whites worked side by side in the plant, but when they went national House. of the Uni­ ,j~ home, blacks turned one way versity of Chicago on June 3. and whites went the other. Among those who came to These stories had a purpose. celebrate Mary's life were Because after several sales comrades from every branch with Mary, you were ready to lead them up yourself. That's of the Spartacist League/U.S. how you were trained. It went and from other sections of for little things as well as big the International Communist things." League, her sister and com­ Mary tended to cede the rade Karen and other family role of political spokesman members, friends and neigh- to others, but her instincts bors. A group of black transit 1954-2000 were almost invariably cor­ workers who knew Mary and rect. Mary was capable of her husband, Kevin Quirk, fighting fiercely to keep. the an Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Politically, Mary's focus was on the local on track, especially when the fight Local 241 member, came to pay tribute black question. To this she brought no against racial oppression was at issue. to her tireless efforts at combatting the small amount of compassion and human­ However intense the fights and however racist oppression that is the defining fea­ ity. The apartment she shared with Kevin wrongheaded the opposition, comrades ture of American capitalism. was a center for political and social inter­ were comrades in the Chicago local. In Mary was recruited to the SL in the action with scores of black transit work­ trying times, she was the social and polit­ Bay Area in 1979. A more than able ers and other trade unionists, a singular ical glue that held the local together. learner, Mary became the Spartacus experience in America's most segregated Even in the last months of her illness, Youth League's Bay Area organizer only city. Among those attending her memo­ Mary pushed forward the party's perspec­ three months after joining. She arrived rial was Cassandra Seay, an ATU member tives, most importantly training young in Chicago in 1981 and became SL organ­ successfully defended by Local 241 and comrades and assisting them in commit­ izer there in 1983,remaining in that post the Partisan Defense Committee against ting fully to the cause of world proletar­ • until forced to leave by the debilitating felony charges in the aftermath of a 1987 ian revolution. Mary will be greatly I treatment process. attack by Chicago cops on her and her missed, but more she will be remem­ Mary was one of the main organ­ family. Cassandra spoke movingly of bered. She was one hell of a communist, I izers of the November 1988 laborlblack how Mary convinced her of the need to a fighter and friend. As Kevin Quirk told I mobilization in Philadelphia that spiked fight her racist frame-up. Despite heavy the June 3 gathering: a threatened KKK provocation and of pressure to have nothing to do with com­ "The wellspring of Mary'~ courage and the Springfield, Illinois anti-Klan dem­ munists· who purportedly wanted to will was her total unwavering commit­ onstration on Martin Luther King "use" her, after talking to Mary for only ment to the fight to rid this planet of Day in 1994. She served essentially as five minutes, Cassandra knew we were oppression, to end for all time the exploitation of the many by the few. In the SL's Midwest organizer and spurred for real. other words, it was her devotion to the the Chicago local to expand its politi­ Mary's stewardship in Chicago took fight for a socialist future. That is why cal terrain through forays that ranged place during the difticult Reagan years she lived. That is why she fought the from Texas to Pittsburgh. and the bourgeoisie's later "death of com- way she did right to the en~:' - 3 reprintedJrom Workers Vanguard No. 749,5 January 2001

,D'isease:;/~~~Yifflq~~IJim:;~~jSt:,J1y'>pocrisy : , "" South Africa Torn. by AIDS Crisis·

AP Protesters outside International AIDS Conference in Durban in July 2000 demand access to medication. Extortionate Western drug companies, bigotry fanned by local capitalist regimes have exacerbated AIDS pandemic ravaging sub-Saharan Africa.

The catastrophic impact of the AIDS provoked a furor at an international con­ the impoverished masses of sub-Saharan pandemic ravaging South Africa was ference on AIDS that met in Durban last Africa. Last year, the Clinton admin­ highlighted in early December 'when for­ July. i~tration threatened sanctions against mer African National Congress (ANC) Mbeki's ignorant statements challeng­ South Africa for trying to buy AIDS med­ leader Nelson Mandela joined with F. W. ing scientific evidence that HIV causes ication at international prices lower than De Klerk, the last president of the former AIDS are aimed in large part at deflect­ those set by the extortionate pharma­ apartheid regime, in launching a national ing criticism over the refusal of his ceutical monopolies. And Tony Blair's "HIV/AIDS Day" at a Johannesburg "tripartite alliance" government-which Labour government in Britain, home to cathedral service on December 5. With includes the Communist Party (SACP) the Glaxo Wellcome drug giant, contin­ grotesque cynicism, De Klerk, who pre­ and the Congress of South African Trade ues to oppose any such effort by South sided over a reign of terror against South Unions (COSATU)-to allocate, medical Africa. Africa's black majority and whose resources to combat the epidemic. Seiz­ We publish below in edited form a talk National Party supported the Nazis in ing on this, the National Party's racist given in Johannesburg on 18 October World War .II, compared the AIDS successor, the Democratic Alliance, cam­ 2000 by comrade Karen Cole of Sparta­ scourge to 'the Nazi Holocaust of the paigned for DecemberS nationwide mu­ cist South Africa. Jews. For his part, Mandela appealed for nicipal elections on a promise of distrib­ compassion, for the four million South uting anti-HIV drugs to pregnant women * * * Africans infected with HIV, implicitly who have AIDS and scored unexpected The ArIDS pandemic that has reached rebuking his successor and current ANC gains, including among black voters. every country on earth touches on a range president, Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki's anti­ Meanwhile, the Western imperialists who of social issues. It exposes the most hor­ scientific diatribes have encouraged big­ hypocritically denounce Mbeki refuse rible, murderous aspects of capitalism in oted attacks on people with AIDS and to lift a finger to provide medical aid to its death agony. And it underlines the I

~-.... ------.--. --·...-.----~------____I'-- 4 need for international socialist revolution. for the oppressed masses of the econom­ same period? The atomic bomb, which Diseases and infection will never com­ ically backward countries was the pro­ killed some 200,000 people in Hiroshima pletely go away. New diseases will de­ letariat seizing power at the head of all and Nagasaki, Japan, and was intended velop: it's just an aspect of nature that the oppressed, linked through its revo­ as a warning to the Soviet Union that the microbes and parasites change, mutate lutionary leadership to the proletar­ U.S. ruling class would stop at nothing and evolve to find an ecological niche in iat in the advanced countries. This is to destroy the first workers state in his­ human beings and other animals. It's pos­ the programme of permanent revolution. tory. So you see ,the relationship between sible that the AIDS virus will elude mod­ National liberation and all the basic dem­ the development of science and the class ern medical ,technology at its current ocratic rights achieved in the advanced interests of the capitalist class. The bour­ state. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution industrial countries in previous centuries geoisie can mobilize when it wants to. couldn't do anything immediately about are only realisable through the dictator­ One speaker at the July Durban AIDS the worldwide influenza pandemic of ship of the proletariat and international conference complained that one-quarter 1918. Three million people also died of socialist revolution. of the U.S. defence budget for one year typhus in the Soviet Union between 1917 would provide anti-retroviral treatments and 1923. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik The AIDS Epidemic and for all Africans who needed them. That Revolution for the first time in 'history Capitalist Oppression certainly may be true, but of course it is opened the road to get rid of oppression, We are historical materialists and scien­ never going to happen. The underlying exploitation and inequality that stand in tific socialists. Class struggle is the motor assumption of this statement is that if the the way of applying rational approaches force of history. Throughout history, hu­ imperialist bloodsuckers could be pres­ to disease research and control and manity'S ability to master its environment sured to shift their priorities and be more opened the way for massive public health is determined by the level of the produc­ humane, then all will be solved. But the programmes under the direction of a tive forces at each stage. However, scien­ drive to war and plunder-to acquire workers state. tific progress cannot rise above or be sep­ new markets, raw materials and cheap The gains of the Russian Revolution arated from class interests. Here's an labour with the aim of amassing prof­ could only hint at what a worldwide illustration of what I mean, and it is its-is inherent to the capitalist system planned economy could do. The ABCs of directly relevant to the AIDS pandemic. in this epoch. The AIDS pandemic also Communism, which some of you have Penicillin is one of the greatest medical exposes the lie of "nation building" rhet­ read, a book used by the Bolsheviks to discoveries in the twentieth century. oric; it obviously cannot be solved train workers in literacy and the princi­ Some of us in this room would be dead within the borders of one country. ples of communism, significantly devotes today if Alexander Fleming had not iden­ Only world socialist revolution can its final chapter to public health care. It tified a mould that could kill staphylococ­ tear the means of production out of the makes the point that the new dictatorship cus bacteria in 1929. All modern antibi­ hands of the greedy capitalist class, of the proletariat immediately imple­ otics flow from this discovery. But the ushering in an egalitarian socialist soci­ mented hygienic techniques for public development of penicillin was virtually ety. Then all the positive gains of modern communal kitchens and training for ignored until the U.S. imperialists mas­ science can be put at the service of man­ health care workers to control cholera and sively funded and distributed it during kind, and all the fake science that is used typhus. They nationalised all private hos­ World War II, 15 years later. Why then? to justify and defend capitalist rule can pitals, opening them to the masses for the American imperialism had an interest in be rejected. How we approach this grim first time. keeping its soldiers from dying from bat­ epidemic is shaped by our vision of a The Bolshevik Party's programme was tlefield infections. communist future. committed to wiping out age-old oppres­ And what other new technology was Let me give a few facts up front about sion and elevating Russia out of poverty the U.S. funding massively around the HIV and AIDS. You cannot get AIDS and ignorance. The Bolsheviks under­ stood that ultimate success required the extension of the revolution to the wealthy and advanced, industrialised cap­ italist countries. You can't fight cholera if you don't have the material resources to build river dams and water purification plants. The International Communist League fights for new October Revolu­ tions in the centres of imperialism in America, Europe and Japan as well as in the ''Third World." In South Africa, that means we fight for a black-centred work­ ers government that would be centrally based on the black majority while guar­ anteeing full rights for the "coloured" [mixed-race], Indian and Asian popula­ tions and those whites who accept the rule of black workers. Based on the experience of the Russian 'Revolution and the lessons of the aborted Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, Leon Johannesburg municipal workers rally during November 2000 strike against Trotsky and the International Left Oppo­ threatened privatizations. COSATU union tops chain powerful and combative sition taught that the only way forward black proletariat to bourgeois-nationalist ANC. 5

OverwhelmingmaJority of the 36 million people with HIV/AIOS. are concentrated In sub-Saharan Africa: from mosquitoes or through casual con­ prevents you from catching the disease in inform development of a cure, because tact with infected persons. The human the first place. But the HIV virus can people avoid getting tested for fear of per­ immunodeficiency virus, HIV, concen­ mutate--change its structure-rapidly. secution. The vast majority of youth do trates in body fluids that are most com­ So treatment applied to one strain won't not even know they are HIV-positive. monly passed on through any form of work on another, somewhat like the in­ Also some say, "Why get tested? There is sexual intercourse, through blood transfu­ fluenza virus where a new vaccine must no treatment available." sions, needle sticks and the sharing of be developed every year to prevent only , More than with any other disease in hypodermic needles, or from mother to the most common varieties. Edward Jen­ modem history, every step. in the search child at birth or through breast milk. ner proved the efficacy of vaccination to control and cure HIVI AIDS has been Becatise blood transmission is most effi­ against another worldwide killer, small­ hampered by the profit-drivencapitatist cient, sexually transmitted diseases that pox, in 1796, and the last person on earth , system and all the backward, repressive, cause open sores on the penis or vaginal who caught the' disease recovered, in racist and anti~woman ideological crap or anal passages increase the possibility Somalia, in 1976---almost two centuries that comes with it. This epidemic has of transmission, as do sexual prac­ later. And smallpox was a very simple arisen) and is spreading in the epoch of tices that might tear the anal or vaginal virus. capitalism's decline. The optimism of walls. One of the reasons that AIDS has HIV/AIDS is still spreading'exponen­ the scientific revolution that accompanied spread so fast in southern Africa is that tially worldwide. In Africa, it was ini­ the rise of the capitalist class ,has long untreated sexually transmitted diseases tially spread by those who travel a lot been on the decline, exemplified by the like syphilis, gonorrhea and pelvic infec­ for a living such as airline workers, truck resurgence of religious fundamentalism, tions are widespread. drivers, seamen and soldiers and spread superstitions, prejudices and obscurant­ People may have the virus for many rapidly among professionals such as ism. Even in the most advanced industrial years without any symptoms. But eventu­ teachers and doctors. Now, infection has countries, people with AIDS continue to ally the virus will suppress the person's become rampant especial1y in poorer be viciously stereotyped, ostracised and natural defences against infections, called areas and population groups. Less devel­ stigmatised. These prejudices are com­ the immune system, and the person will oped countries account for 95 percent of pounded many times over in Africa and develop AIDS, Acquired Immune Defi­ known cases and 70 percent are in Africa. other countries of the so-called ''Third ciency Syndrome-that is, they will de­ Twenty-four million HIV-infected people World" like India. And because it is a sex­ velop life-threatening illnesses that al­ live in southern Africa. Predictions of ually transmitted disease, the special most never appear in healthy people with rates of increase must be continually oppression that women suffer under cap­ normal immune systems. In Africa, where revised upwards. The report of the United italism creates a major obstacle to a cure. people are already weakened by many Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS that All the guilt, shame and repressive taboos untreated diseases and malnutrition, the came out in. June predicted that half of about sex that are designed to subjugate virus destroys what's left of the already current l5-year-olds in South Africa and women via bourgeois morality also play weakened immune system more rapidly. Zimbabwe may die of AIDS. In Botswana a major role in sabotaging a scientific The virus is of a particularly complex up to two-thirds of youth will die of response to AIDS. variety called a "retrovirus," which re­ AIDS. The rising number of orphans lates to its structure and how it repro­ throughout southern Africa means there Imperialism and duces itself. Anti-retrovirals like AZT and are a growing number of households Neo-Apartheld Capitalism nevirapine suppress and slow down the ad­ headed by children. It's difficult to get South Africa was built on the superex­ vance of the virus. An inoculation ideally accurate statistical surveys, which are ploitation of black labour, extracting gives you immunity; that is, it actually basic to public health care and would huge profits for the imperialists. And the

---___11111_ 6 imperialists and Randlords' craven junior partners of the capitalist ANC-led Tripar­ tite Alliance can only continue to perpet­ uate death and misery for the African masses by overseeing neo-apartheid cap­ italism. In South Africa, the contrasts of uneven and combined development are most sharp. The white ruling class and petty bourgeoisie live as well as anyone in America or Europe while the black masses live in conditions that have not been seen in America or Europe for sev­ eral centuries. What incentive is there for the capital­ istclass to find a speedy cure or to treat those already infected? Internationally, the bourgeoisie views the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa as a convenient answer to unemployment and low pro­ ductivity. An article in Business Day ANC government fired 6,000 nurses after 1995 wildcat strike. Strikers carried (November 1999) outlines the following: signs reading "Away with Mandela," denounced ANC leader as "driver of Every year'the U.S. Investor Responsibil­ gravy train" for aspiring black capitalists. ity Research Center asks multinationals how they perceive the South African busi­ spend that money to repay bank loans. diers may be exposed to AIDS when they ness climate. They reported that AIDS The 17 July edition of the widely circu­ are sent to war-torn African countries to was no problem. The epidemic is mainly lated American magazine Time featured protect American economic interests, confined to those who are economi­ an editorial comparing the AIDS epi­ During his recent visit to Nigeria, where cally marginal: women and children, the demic with the bubonic plague of 14th­ his real worry is about the potential of unemployed and unskilled workers who century Europe. A full third of the Euro­ militant oil workers interrupting the flow can be easily replaced given the massive pean population died in what was then of oil, he promised some token aid. Tell unemployment. Insurance companies are called the""Black Death." The writer says the people of Iraq-where the U.S.fUN unconcerned because these people· are that "every cloud has a silver lining"­ starvation blockade causes up to 200 chil­ not insured. Mines are closing, so miners good always comes of bad-wiping out dren a day to die of malnutrition and lack are disposable, and due to the many job­ much of the population in the 14th cen­ of medicines-about Clinton and the U.S. related illnesses they suffer,they die tury led to an increase in labour produc­ bourgeoisie's concern for health care! quickly ,once their immune system is tivity and paved the way for progress. compromised. Investors are slightly con­ Therefore, according to this, killing a ANC on AIDS: Confuslonlsm . cerned that the disease is beginning to third of the African population may be and Criminal Neglect spread to skilled workers and teachers. just what Africa needs to modernise! According to the UN report released in But they are most worried that the South Recently Clinton has decided to throw June, although Botswana has the highest African government may choose to spend a few cents at AIDS programmes in percentage of HIV-positive people, South money on health care for people who, as Africa, partly to secure the black vote in Africa has both the greatest absolute far as they are concerned, will be dead the U.S. in an election year. Clinton is number and the highest growth rate in within a couple of years, rather than also motivated by fear that American sol- southern Africa. The fastest-growing sec­ tor is young women. The government's !!...------._-- ~ response has been to deny that HIV causes AIDS. to deny that AIDS exists at [SPART~9St1~_: llmJ I i§ '" j,j, I h4M ~ -~ all and to blame pharmaceutical com­ I II " t , Women and panies and the CIA for spreading such Permanent Revolution in "lies." They have found endless ways to ..... South Africa impede and postpone implementing the most minimal, well-known and tested medical treatments. When Mbeki called together a panel of discredited researchers and local healers earlier this year to open a discussion on whether HIV causes AIDS, government spokesman Parks Mankahlana ominously warned that any critics of the government on this issue should be silenced. In response to the Durban AIDS conference statement reaffirming that HIV causes ....._-... ._ ..... _ ...... , ...""' __0< .... OIL ..... I AIDS, Mankahlana said the statement "belongs in the dustbin." Mbeki hailed Spartac/st (English edition) No. 54, Spring 1998, $2 (48 pages) another recent conference of these AIDS­ Order from: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 denying pseudo-scientists in Uganda, 7 which criminally called for stopping all of "toyi-toying" [the defiant dance of facilities for abortions or for care for HIV testing and condom distribution! anti-apartheid marchers] are over; this is AIDS patients, they have no interest in The confusionism and abject neglect your government. fighting backward ideas. has already resulted in untold deaths and While the imperialists write off Afri­ Women are promised full and equal misery; Social workers at Chris Hani cans as hopeless barbarians, their lapdogs rights· in the constitution, but the ANC Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto have, of the national bourgeoisie expound has never even taken a public stand reported that patients, particularly hus­ about the "African Renaissance" and laud against female genital mutilation still bands, have stopped coming to the clinics "African solutions" romanticising tribal practised openly in rural areas and because the president says HIV doesn't societies and conciliating "traditional secretly in the townships. In some cases, exist. And it also created the atrnosphere leaders" in parliament and local govern­ the clitoris and labia are cut off. In oth­ that allowed a mob in KwaZulu-Natal in ment. Meanwhile, the racist hypocrites of ers, young girls' vaginal openings are December J 998 to stone and knife to the Democratic Alliance and other foul sewn up and later bloodily torn open death Gugu Dlamini,.a courageous young leftovers of apartheid piously shake their when they wed. On top of all the physical woman who spoke out on the occasion of fingers at Mbeki for his statements about and mental damage that accompanies World AIDS Day about her HIV-positive HIV/AIDS while praising him for toeing such mutilation, these women are much status: In rural KwaZulu-Natal. where the the International Monetary Fund (IMF) more susceptible to HIV infection. rate of HIV infection is the highest in and World Bank line of slashing jobs and The ANC was recently on its knees South Africa, it is commonly believed cutting back social services. eulogising the filthy rich Randlord Harry that women are the source of the disease The ANC health minister, Tshabalala­ Oppenheimer, one of the latter-day archi­ and all those infected should be killed. Msimang, has pronounced that it is tects of the brutal migrant labour sys­ Gugu Dlamini's body now lies in an unwise to spend money on AZT for HIV­ tem. A short time later, South Africa unmarked grave. positive pregnant women (which has became the last country in the world to Why have the bourgeois nationalists proved to protect the fetus against infec­ switch to the modern injected tuberculo­ latched onto theories which fly in the tion) because these women will only sis vaccine. Oppenheimer probably knew face of almost 20 years of experience create more orphans as a burden on the a lot about TB since it flourished in his with this disease? Because Mbeki and state. The message here to AIDS sufferers congested hostels for migrant miners. the black front men for capitalist rule are is "Drop dead!" Now tuberculosis is on the rise again incapable and unwilling to provide the The South African constitution and the because it can thrive in the weakened most basic material needs. The imperial­ . laws passed since 1994 are continually immune systems of people with AIDS. ists celebrated Mandela and the' ANC lauded as the most democratic in the The mine and factory owners who con­ coming to power because they counted world. For example, abortion was made demned black workers to squalid,con­ on Mandela's moral authority to sup­ legal. Currently the official position of gested housing' used to complain that press the just aspirations of the horribly the government is to leave the legal right blacks were' biologically susceptible to oppressed black masses. Therefore the to abortion to the "individual choice" of TB; therefore,TB was "treated" by send­ ANC must lie and rationalise ... their doctors and nurses. We say health care ing sick, used-up black workers to the attacks.on the working class in service to workers who deny women abortions rural bantustans to die. The TB death rate their capitalist masters. should find jobs in another industry. in South Africa is as bad today as a cen­ The neo-apartheid capitalist regime Health care workers who reflect the anti­ tury ago; 10,000 mainly young men and administered by the ANC, COSATU and scientific prejudices of the ANC govern­ women die every year from TB, which the SACP-what we call a "nationalist ment often abuse and harass AIDS continues to be stigmatised as a disease of popular front"-speeds up privatisations patients, pushing bourgeois moralism "fast living, hard drinking and smoking." and retrenchments and is expanding the and blaming them for their illness. In repressive state apparatus. From their order to maintain one of the most Apartheid Crimes and, golf clubs and African fashion shows, the unequal societies on earth, the bourgeoi­ Conspiracy Theories government bureaucrats and new entre­ sie must pit one sector of the oppressed The first recorded cases of AIDS in preneurs-subcontractors for the capital­ against the other to cover its own bank­ South Africa were white homosexuals ist class-exhort the masses that the days ruptcy. Since they cannot provide the in the I 980s. Considering there were

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Protester outside Durban AIDS conference. ANC president Thabo Mbeki with U.S. secretary of state Albright. Neo-apartheid regime promotes social , backwardness, helps enforce Imperialist domination. 8

preventive measure ,would be to provide free formula to all infected women. Volunteer Cuban doctors are some­ times the only doctors who will service the rural areas, and are embraced by the population. That doctors from the Cuban deformed workers state do this service underscores why we defend the enormous gains embodied in the Cuban Revolu­ tion-the collectivised property forms and planned economy-as we do in China, Vietnam and North Korea against internal counterrevolution and imperialist attack. After the 1949 Revolution in China, large public health campaigns were launched. women were freed from slavery and conCUbinage. To this day, the standard of living in China is higher than in capitalist India, a country which achieved political independence from Britain at about the same time as the Chi­ Guzy/Washlngton nese Revolution, but which is devastated Sign In Kenya. Superstitions discourage people with AIDS from 8eeklng by imperialist neglect. treatment while leading to horrific attacks on HIV-p08ltlve women a8 wltche8. Union Tops, Fake lefts no medical records kept for blacks, Afrikaner women were told to "Make Front for ANC coloureds and Indians, it is impossible to Babies for Botha." In South Africa, health care in rural trace the history of the disease in this Then there is the case of Dr. Wouter areas is often a container car or a van country. The apartheid regime's cam­ Basson. This apartheid regime version of that may arrive once a ,week. As we paigns against AIDS in the '80s included the infamous Dr. Mengele in Hitler's speak, there is a cholera outbreak in putting stickers on taxis from Jo'burg to concentration camps carried out biologi­ KwaZulu-Natal not far from Durban, Soweto that said, "You can't get AIDS cal and chemical warfare "experiments" which has been out of control for two from swimming pools"-not exactly a on kidnapped township residents in Zim­ months. Over 20 people ~have died so far; relevant issue for the apartheid town­ babwe and poisoned SWAPO prisoners more than 2,000 people have been hos­ ships. The campaign used a drawing of a in Namibia and then went along for the pitalised. Every' day there are newly supposedly "neutral coloured" yellow helicopter ride to drop them into the reported cases, and many more go unre­ hand. But for black women whose main ocean. After a cover-up by the security ported because people have not gone to occupation was as domestic servants, forces in the so-called "Truth and Recon­ clinics for treatment. Cholera is an the yellow hand recalled the rubber wash­ cilation Commission," the reason Basson example of a completely understood dis­ ing gloves belonging to the hated is on trial now is to further "reconcilia­ ease that is totally preventable and treat­ "madam." During the early '90s, the tion" with the apartheid butchers. Basson able-and has been for over a century. Nationalist Party put up posters in Soweto is still a practising cardiologist one day a Unemployment is at 50 percent or with crude depictions of black men, week at a public hospital in Pretoria, so higher, and latest reports are that the gap warning that returning ANC exiles were the ANC is paying for his legal expenses. between wealthy and poor is increasing. bringing AIDS into South Africa. The workers in power would try him and It's election time, so Mbeki has been AIDS conspiracy theories are widely many other apartheid murderers for their double-talking about providing some held. There is an understandable mistrust crimes. token amount of free electricity, while of so-called "Western medicine" and With all the stigmas attached to AIDS, always calling to get rid of the so-called white doctors who historically abused, mothers are afraid to admit they are freeloaders. This is happening while fuel neglected, poisoned and experimented on bottle-feeding their babies for fear they wood is diminishing. Rural labourers are black people, and not just here. In the will be ostracised. The international man­ still paid in kind-for black and coloured U.S., in the infamous Tuskegee experi­ ufacturers of milk and baby formulas workers in the Western Cape's money­ ments 400 Southern black men with have been remarkably silent regarding making vineyards, this means a high rate syphilis were left untreated for over 30 affordable bottle milk for babies at risk. of infant alcohol syndrome. The develop­ years and allowed to die to see its effect Back in 1976, we supported interna­ ment of water resources is planned for on their mortality rate-and on their chil­ tional protest when Nestle's dressed up livestock, not for women who have to dren. Under apartheid, young women its salespeople in nurses' uniforms to fool haul water back to their dwellings. in Botswana were sterilised and given impoverished women and push expen­ The SACP-dominated COSATU lead­ forced injections of the contraceptive sive manufactured milk. While breast­ ership sabotaged the national protest Depo-Provera, at that time banned in the feeding is more desirable than bottle­ called the day before the AIDS confer­ U.S. and other countries. South African feeding because of the immunities it ence in Durban by mobilising the most women were forced into massive birth passes on from qwther to child, the real token presence. Why? They could not control programs, sterilised without issue with the former is malnutrition and embarrass Mbeki, their alliance partner. their knowledge and administered IUDs with the latter access to clean water. The pro-capitalist COSATU leadership's (contraceptive intrauterine devices) as However, now that it has been proven that treacherous role in the nationalist popular conditions for employment. Meanwhile, mv is conveyed by breast milk, a basic front is to keep the lid on the explosive , I I ~ , - 9 and powerful South African proletariat, to narrow trade-union programme which the Eastern Cape, headed at that time by tie the oppressed masses to the bourgeois­ accepts capitalism. The proletariat must Raymond Mhlaba of the SACP. nationalist ANC. In the Metalworkers take up the fight for permanent revolu­ Black nurses and student nurses have [auto, steel, etc.] union, NUMSA, discus­ tion by building a Leninist vanguard been in the forefront of protests for sion of AIDS is tabled to the "Gender party, based on the most advanced decent health care for decades. Health Committee," which is the code word layers, that will be a tribune of all the care was totally segregated under apart­ for "toss it to the women." The recent people, that will defend the Gugu Dlami­ heid-white hospitals were built in urban national COSATU congress supposedly nis and all the oppressed. areas, and no hospitals were built in did their big act of defiance of Mbeki by the rural areas where the majority of the declaring it is "morally wrong" to deny Free, Quality Health Care black population lives. No matter how drugs to pregnant women and rape vic­ for All! much experience a black nurse had, she tims. They buy the moralistic line that Under the ANC regime, hospitals have was always under the direction of white only some are innocent. How about been closed in the name of reducing nurses. often young Afrikaners who everybody else infected? Teenagers, IV duplicate services segregated under were incompetently trained in backwater drug users, truckers, prostitutes, miners? apartheid. Kempton Park Hospital out­ Calvinist Dutch Refonned platteland Do they deserve it? side Johannesburg was shut down. In schools. In the 19508, black nurses were The SACP played its role at the confer­ Johannesburg, Hillbrow Hospital stands at the centre of protests against carrying ence of slavishly shoring up the class­ empty for years while the AIDS epi­ passbooks, since they were almost the collaborationist alliance against any demic grows among the destitute immi­ only black working women in urban opposition. After the conference, the grant population of the area and patients areas. The police were turned on them in SACP made a declaration on AIDS which lie on the floor in Jo'burg Hospital and Soweto and Durban. cravenly capitulated to Mbeki, stating outside Chris Hani Bara admitting area Back when the apartheid government they have "not sufficiently studied the waiting for beds. Retrenchments and pri­ decided to forcibly move the first black complex issues about anti-retroviral vatisations are causing ward closings and nurses from the all-black Baragwa­ HIV / AIDS drugs so as to comment." cutbacks. The 26-year-old singer and star nath Hospital to the all-white Jo'burg Meanwhile, those already infected con­ of the widely acclaimed movie Sarafina, Hospital because of a supposed "shortage tinue to suffer miserable deaths. The fake Wendy Mseleku, recently died after of nurses," the black nurses protested left--from the International Socialist being turned away three times from pub­ because the white hospital was at 50 per­ Movement and Keep Left [a group buried lic hospitals for lack of beds. In large cent capacity and Bara was over 100 per­ inside the SACP linked to the U.S. Inter­ parts of rural areas, where health care is cent. In 1985, hospital workers at Barag­ national Socialist Organization] to WIVL solely in the hands of nurses, many of wanath went out on strike. Student nurses [Workers International Vanguard League] these nurses are the same young women were assaulted by security guards, 700 and WOSA [Workers Organisation for who are being devastated by the disease. workers were arrested and 1,700 dis­ Socialist ActionJ-also echo the moral­ Nurses and health care workers were missed, sparking solidarity actions across ism, and deflect all criticism away from among the first targets of the ANC's anti­ South Africa and international protest. the nationalists by appealing to the multi­ working-class programme. In 1996, the . Today Chris Hani Bara services a popula­ national drug companies and the World Mandela government was to decree free tion of 3.5 million blacks. The hospital is Bank. At the. 26 September protests here health care for all children under the age falling apart. In Khayelitsha Day Hospi­ in Jo'burg in conjunction with the pro­ of six at local clinics and hospitals. As tal in the Western Cape, doctors see up to tests in Prague at the IMFlWorid Bank we wrote at the time, that was a cynical 96 patients a day each. In most hospitals meeting, the fake left channelled the lie. No additional funds were allocated to white doctors and black patients do not anger of the protesters into begging the hire more nurses and other health care speak the same language, making diag­ imperialists to "cancel the debt." workers. There was no equipment or' 'noses slow and difficult. Militant South African workers, like medicines. When nurses went on strike, We sell our newspaper at '10' burg Hos­ the workers at the Volkswagen plant in the. SACP/COSATU bureaucrats called .. ,pital, mainly to black nurses and hospital Uitenhague, are looking for an alterna­ the nurses' action "counterrevolutionary." . workers. The unionised staff is constantly tive to the class-collaborationist national Isolated by COSATU, the strike eventu­ threatened with being replaced by non­ popular front. However, the South Afri­ ally ended, and 6,000 nurses were dis'­ union contract labour, and some have can proletariat cannot go forward on a missed by the provincial government of been already. We talked to a doctor who

SAse Video Videotape of sadistiC cop attack on three black immigrants in 1998, televised two years later, generated storm of outrage over racist terror in the "new South Africa,"

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10

staffs the Casualty Unit. He said that on an average day, two-thirds of the people coming into the unit have symptoms of full-blown AIDS. Many come in with ritual cuts on their bodies administered by inyangas and sangomas [traditional healers]. Doctors must treat people who are suffering from self-induced vomiting I caused by herbs and from repeated ene­ mas prescribed by traditional heal­ ers. When I asked the doctor what he thought of the latest vaccine trials, he answered despondently, "There's no - electricity. You can't distribute a vaccine Emergency room without refrigeration." in Soweto's Anti-retroviral drugs have extended Baragwanath I the lives of those who can afford them, Hospital, 1991. mainly in the advanced capitalist coun­ Today this tries. The pharmaceutical companies deteriorating make more profits on chronic illnesses hospital serves like diabetes or AIDS which require 3.5 million a continual variety of medications and black people. procedures and have no cure, so they have a marketing policy of pumping out copy-cat anti-retrovlral drugs rather than engaging in long-term vaccine research with uncertain results. Years have been wasted because basic research for vac­ Ii I cines just does not tum a fast buck. Pro­ , vincial hospitals have been defying the monthly virginity testing "ceremonies" government as the front line against government to take limited handouts of in KwaZulu-Natal. This was a virtually AIDS. They are the only "health care" drugs from different charitable sources. extinct centuries-old custom that has many people ever see. People are poi­ What can we say about Uganda's so­ been revived in the last four years. Girls soned, murdered and raped by these called reversal of AIDS? Uganda's much­ are stripped naked and endure a humili­ "healers," who encourage the revival-of acclaimed campaign was centred around ating half-hour examination by older beliefs in witchcraft, beliefs which have the "ABCs"-Abstinence, Be faithful to girls to ascertain if their hymen is intact. caused mob killings of mainly old rural your -spouse, use Condoms. A United There has been much favorable coverage women. In fact, to be a woman and old is Nations report claims that the prevalence of this in the media. Nomagugu Ngo­ suspect in conditions where life is nor­ of HIV in Uganda has fallen from a high bese, who has just completed a book, mally cut short by violence and "inexpli­ of 14 percent in the early '90s to 8 percent Fertility and Customs, spoke recently at cable" deaths from preventable diseases. today. But to call Uganda a "success a government-sponsored Gender Equal­ The Gauteng Health Department funds story" captures how bankrupt current pro­ ity and National Youth Commission AIDS education for the Traditional Heal­ grammes are, how hopeless are policies meeting advocating these procedures. ers Organisation. Since bloodletting based on "don't have sex" and how venal She stated, "Moral values are possibly through razor cuts to communicate with are the bourgeois nationalists. In Uganda, the only solution we have to curb the ris­ I ancestors is a common cure: for witch­ there are no. medicines to treat AIDS­ ing HIV/AIDS statistics." craft, the ANC "educates" these heal­ related illnesses, and there are 20,300 At an educational conference in Pre­ ers to use different razors for each people for every doctor. Last year, Presi­ toria, the deputy education minister said client. Demonstrations through down­ dent Yoweri Museveni called for the the "African Renaissance" should be town,Johannesburg feature banners read­ arrest of homosexuals. Uganda's terribly founded on "a recovery of moral- values ing, "One Man, One Razor." Beside their I low life expectancy, only 40-41 years, is and ethical conduct." Mary Crewe, direc­ role in furthering ignorance, these tradi­ all attributed to preventable conditions: tor of the AIDS study centre at \J;le Uni­ tional healers are part of the repres­ childbirth circumstances, malaria, pneu­ versity of Pretoria, responded that ijnking sive political structure that runs from the monia, diarrhea, poor nutrition and AIDS with religion and morality has fed community "sangoma" straight up to unsanitary water. The average annual into denial and apathy around the disease CONTRELESA, the House of Traditional income is 1,850 Rand [US$250]. As the and to marginalisation and social rejec­ Leaders, which is officially part of the bloody imperialist carve-up of the Congo tion of sufferers. The teaching of "right bourgeois state. [where Uganda has intervened] heats up, and wrong" related to AIDS was detract­ These bastions of reaction, former bullets will surely be a rising cause of ing from, as she put it, "the overriding apartheid bantustan collaborators, are death. moral imperative to save lives." The only murderous remnants of pre-capitalist "morals" that the capitalist class has is to society. Throughout southern Africa, they Imperialism, Nationalism and rake in profits, backed up in blood by the fight tooth and nail to deny women abor­ Social Backwardness state-the cops, the courts, the prisons, tion, inheritance and property rights. One example lauded as an "African the army-and ideologically by the con­ They are courted by the ANC just as solution" to AIDS is where thousands of servatising force of religion. they were courted by the original coloni­ unmarried women and children attend Traditional healers are hailed by the alists and the apartheid regime. They

\ ,; , • ,-~. 11 run much of KwaZulu-Natal, the epicen­ ages multiple sex partners. The migrant dren. Youths hang out where trucks lay ter of the epidemic in South Africa, labour system, which permeates all of over along the highways of southern and many parts of the most impover­ sub-Saharan Africa, is perpetuated under Africa to earn a bit of money. Domestic ished Eastern Cape. Bourgeois-national­ neo-apartheid capitalism because it is the work is still the largest category of legal ist ideology has always relegated women backbone of the superexploitation of employment for women-sex for money to being baby-makers. The capitalists and black labour. is the only other option to housework. So­ their lackeys are the enemies of women's Foreign workers desperately seeking called educational campaigns about the liberation. jobs in South Africa are targeted by the sins of promiscuity are not only false and We fight for women's liberation government. The apartheid regime used reactionary, but also absurd in a situation through socialist revolution. Since the" to send South African miners back where you are having sex so you can buy beginning of class society thousands to the rural areas to die from TB; now' 'some maize for you and your child to eat. of years ago, the institution of the family the neo-apartheid state carries on the At the Durban AIDS conference, advo­ has been the fundamental source of the same policy with workers from bor­ cates of vaginally applied anti-viral subjugation of women as dependent dering countries-HIV-positive Mozam­ foams-which may afford easy and pri­ domestic slaves. In a socialist planned bican miners are deported to die with­ vate protection-protested that they are economy, the family as a social unit will out even being informed of their status. not being adequately researched and be transcended by socialisation of child­ The health minister recently argued funded. Underlying the lack of interest in care and household duties. Only then can that they cannot distribute nevi rapine lest the foams is the morality issue again­ relationships be entered into freely and people from neighbouring countries sex for any reason but reproduction is without economic compulsion. flock to South Africa for treatment. We deemed sinful. The oppression of women in Africa demand full citizenship rights for all cannot hegin to change and the drudgery immigrants, including access to schools Full Democratic Rights for and hardships women suffer cannot begin and medical care. Homosexuals! to be alleviated withouta socialist revolu­ Prostitutes should not be afraid to get Homosexuals continue to be scorned tion extending to the advanced capitalist health care and education and should not and threatened everywhere. In the '80s countries. Women in southern Africa are be at the mercy of gang violence. We are anti-apartheid activists who struggled still largely deemed miMrs with few for the de-criminalisation of prostitution. 'also for democratic rights for gays often enforceable rights of ownership or inher­ Professional prostitution is actually a had to fight their way into the political itance. Widows are still inherited by their minor business compared to all the organisations. Tseko Simon Nkoli, a husband's brothers. Polygamy based on ways women living in poverty must sell young gay CaSAS [Congress of South the economic subordination of women sex for survival. Teenagers and young African Students] and ANC activist, was still occurs. Women are under tremen­ women need money and gifts to get arrested in 1984 for speaking out in dous economic pressure to demonstrate through secondary and tertiary institu­ defence of the massive stay away strikes their fertility. And children are, in fact, tions. Women acquire "sugar daddies" to that fall. He was kept in detention for 16 the only potential means of support in old survive, and for money for their chil- months and then brought to trial as part age. Lobola [bride price] is pervasive, and lobola basically means women are prop­ erty like cattle. Children are considered ( ---'-SPARTACISr'LEAGUE/U~S. -_. ___ ltl illegitimate and have no rights under cus­ tornary law if lobola payments have not Local Directory., f:l,~~ P,u,blic Offices been completed. And most significantly National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 • (212) 732-7860 for the spread of AIDS, the man pays for Web site: www.icl-fi.org·E·mall.address:[email protected] the woman to provide him with sex. Women are afraid to ask their husbands Boston Los Angeles Oakland to wear condoms, and are beaten and Box, 390840, Central Sta. Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta. Box 29497 turned out for refusing sex. Rape is ram­ Cambridge, MA 02139 Los Angeles, CA 90029 Oakland, CA 94604 pant in South Africa. Rape and "dry sex" (617) 666-9453 , (213) 380-8239 (510) 839-0851 practices (where women apply detergent Public Office: Public Office: or herbs to dry out their vagina, which Chicago Sat. 2-5 p.m. Sat. 1-5 p.m. Box 6441, Main PO 3806 Beverly Blvd., Room 215 1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor supposedly increases a man's pleasure) Chicago, IL 60680 multiply the possibility of infection. (312) 454-4930 New York San Francisco Moreover, it is widely believed that sleep­ Public Office: Box 3381, Church St. Sta. Box 77494 ing with a virgin will cure AIDS. Tues. 5-9 p.m. New York, NY 10008 San Francisco, CA 94107 The Christian missionaries who and Sat. 12-3 p.m. (212) 267-1025 (415) 395-9520 accompanied the imperialist plunderers 328 S. Jefferson St. Public Office: Public Office: imposed on women a conservative, Suite 904 Tues. 6:30-8:30 p.m. Tues. 6-8 p.m. restrictive family idcology against which and Sat. 1-5 p.m. 564 Market St., Suite 718 thcir lives were judged, enforcing their 299 Broadway, Suite 318 subjugation. Many women traders and entrepreneurs in urban and port areas TROiSKYiST L.~AGUEOF CANAlJi/LIOUETROTSkvsTE'DU CANADA were driven back into domestic slavery. The apartheid migrant labour system that Toronto Vancouver historically tore apart families contin­ I Box 7198, Station A Box 2717, Main P.O. ues and has been called the "engine I Toronto, ON M5W 1X8 Vancouver, BC V6B,3X2 of the epidemic" because it encour- l'-____(4_1_6_) 5_9_3_-4_1_38______(6_04_)_6_87_-_03_5_ 3 ______~ __~)

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of the world-famous Delmas treason trial Zimbabwe, putting AIDS as cause of as opposed to coercion-and the state which started in 1985, along with death on a death certificate was banned. has no business interfering. Mosiuoa Patrick "Terror" Lekota and The heads of state of Zambia, Namibia, We are for free, quality health care and Popo Molefe [who are now respectively Kenya and Swaziland have all made pub­ treatment for all and for massive medical minister of defence and premier of North lic their contempt for homosexuals, citing research programmes. It certainly means West Province]. He had to argue against both "African traditions" and "biblical that the working class must expropriate the anti-gay bigotry of the other ANC teachings." This month, the minister of the pharmaceutical companies. It means defendants who wanted to throw him out home affairs of Namibia called on the education-including in scientific mat­ of the case. On 30 November 1998, police to eliminate homosexual men and ters-which begins with teaching basic Simon Nkoli died of AIDS. women from Namibia. health care, medical precautions and sex In at least 30 African countries it is ille­ Evidence as far back as ancient San education. Education here also means lit­ gal for a man to have sex with another [Bushmen, nomadic hunters of southern eracy. We are for expropriating the capi­ man. In South A-frica, the constitution, on Africa] cave paintings shows that homo­ talist class as a whole without compensa­ paper, opposes discrimination based on sexual relations have been around for­ tion-that means the land, the banks, the sexual orientation. However, when Mbeki ever in Africa, just like everywhere else mines and industry. Free medical care launched his so-called research panel, he in the world. The suppression of gays is requires building up the infrastructure, motivated questioning the connection of directly related to the suppression of sex­ training nurses and doctors, construction HlV and AIDS by saying, "Are you uality and the subordination of women of hospitals and clinics, as well as uncon­ aware, whereas in the West, HIV and and youth in the social unit of the family, gested housing, clean running water, AIDS is said to be largely homosexually the main institution for the oppression of electricity and paved roads. All of south­ transmitted, in Africa, including our women and children in class society. ern Africa needs a genuine socialist con­ country, it is transmitted heterosexually?" Democratic rights are indivisible. Com­ struction programme. So instead of scientific investigation and munists fight for full democratic rights The organised and combative South understanding, there is vilification and for homosexuals. We fight against anti­ African proletariat must take the lead prejudice. HIV/AIDS is not a "homosex­ gay bigotry and we are for the legalisa­ under the leadership of a revolution­ ual disease" or a "heterosexual disease." tion of all "crimes without victims." The ary internationalist Trotskyist vanguard HIV is a virus. Mugabe of Zimbabwe has guiding principle for sexual relations party. This is why you must become a called homosexuals "pigs," "perverts" should be that of effective consent-that communist. Only the communist party and "worse than beasts." Until 1989 in is, mutual agreement and understanding we are building here and internation­ ally has the programme to be the tribune of all people-women, gays, immi­ ( grants and the rural poor. We look for­ I International Communist League ward to the day when all socialist human­ i (Fourth Internationalist) ity, using the knowledge and science of '( International Center: Box 7429 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA the past, will have the freedom to go for­ I l ward and explore all the difficult ques­ I Web site: www.icl-fi.org I tions of life. In summary, I would like I' Spartaclst League of Australia ...... Spartacist League, GPO Box 3473 ! Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia to read a passage from a 1925 speech I by Trotsky on "Dialectical Materialism Spartacist League/Britain ...... Spartacist Publications, PO Box 1041 London NW5 3EU, England and Science": I Trotskyist League of Canada/ I "There are two aspects of by no means i L1gue trotskyste du Canada ...... Trotskyist League, Box 7198, Station A equal merit to the scientific contributions Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1X8, Canada of the past which are now ours and upon Spartakist-Arbelterpartei Deutschlands •... SpAD, Postfach 555 which we pride ourselves. Science as a 10127 Berlin, Germany whole has been directed toward acquiring Dublin Spartaclst Group ...... PO Box 2944, Dublin 1 knowledge of reality, research into the Republic of Ireland laws of evolution, and discovery of the properties and qualities of matter, in order I Ligue trotskyste de France ...... La Bolchevik, B.P. 135-10 75463 Paris Cedex 10, France to gain greater mastery over it. But knowl­ I edge did not develop within the four walls Spartacist Group India/lanka ...... write to Spartacist, New York of a laboratory or a lecture hall. No, it Lega trotsklsta d'italia ...... Walter Fidacaro remained a function of human society and C.P. 1591,20101 Milano, Italy reflected the structure of human society. For its needs, society requires knowledge Spartacist Group Japan ...... Spartacist Group Japan of nature. But at the same time, society I PO Box 49, Akabane Yubinkyoku demands an affirmation of its right to be I Kita-ku, Tokyo 115, Japan what it is. a justification of its particular I Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico ...... J. Vega, Apdo. Postal 1251 institutions-first and foremost. the insti­ ! Admon. Palacio Postal 1 tutions of class domination-just as in I C.P. 06002, Mexico D.F., Mexico I the past it demanded the justification of i Spartacist/Moscow ...... write to Le Bolchevik, Paris serfdom, class privileges, monarchical prerogatives. national exceptional ism, etc. I Spartakusowska Grupa Polski ./ ...... Platforma Spartakusowc6w I Socialist society accepts with utmost Skrytka Pocztowa 148 gratitude the heritage of the positive sci­ 02-588 Warszawa 48, Poland I ences, discarding, as is the right of inven­ II, Spartacist/South Africa ...... Spartacist, PostNet Suite 248 torial choice, everything that is useless in i Private Bag X2226 acquiring knowledge of nature but only I Johannesburg 2000, South Africa I useful in justifying class inequality and Spartaclst League/U.S...... Spartacist League, Box 1377 GPO all other kinds of historical untruth." New York, NY 10116, USA -Problems of Everyday Life l J (1973). ~------~

,,,.... , '''' "'1111'1'11'111 13 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 736, 19 May 2000

Down With"" Neo~Aparthetc('Capital ism! For a Black-Centered Workers Government!

South", :, III A'. 'r-IcanI Workers' . B'i:'>},i,. att1e ,. 61 ANC Union-Busting, Austerity

Up to 100,000 or more workers took to the streets of Johannesburg on May 10 as part of a one-day general strike called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) to protest massive job cuts. Reporting on the impact of the walk~ out, the London Independent (11 May) headlined its article, "Mass Strike Brings South Africa to a Halt." This action is part of a rising level of working-class opposi­ tion to the economic austerity and union~ busting policies of 'the African National Congress (ANC) government, including huge strikes by public sector workers last summer and fall and a militant wildcat in January at Volkswagen's Uitenhage plant near Port Elizabeth. The May 10 general strike was a meas­ ure of the pressure being exerted by the ranks on the COSATU leadership, which binds the unions to the capitalist govern­ ment through the so-called "tripart.ite alli­ Reuters ance," a nationalist popular front com­ South African labor struggle: public sector workers' protest, summer 1999. posed of the bourgeois-nationalist ANC and its junior partner, the reformist South lead the South African proletariat. stand­ the belief that, after decades of heroic African Communist Party (SACP), along ing at the head of all the oppressed, to struggle and great sacrifice. finally the with COSATU, There was widespread power through a socialist revolution black South African people were going sentiment among the workers to break which smashes the bourgeois state, to get social justice-not only demo-: with the "tripartite alliance." Reporting on expropriates the white capitalist class and cratic rights, but the equitable distribu­ the Johannesburg strike rally, a comrade of erects a black-centered workers govern­ tion of the wealth of the country to all its Spartacist South Africa, section of the In­ ment. We publish below an edited presen­ inhabitants. ternational Communist League, observed: tation given in Chicago last month by In fact, the ANC government initially "We found the demonstration to be very Spartacist League/U.S. Central Commit­ promised all kinds of good things. They polarized over the question of for or against the ANC and the alliance. In gen­ tee member Joseph Seymour, who visited had something called the Reconstruction eral workers hated the ANC and wanted South Africa earlier this year to work and Development Programme. It prom­ to break the alliance or they defended with our section there. ised a million housing units in tive years, the ANC and were hostile to us. In the * * * ten years of compulsory public education part of the demonstration that we sold In the ghetto neighborhood in the San for aU children, free socialized medicine. to, Workers Vanguard was a noticeable political feature-at least every tenth Francisco Bay Area where I have a part­ Thirty percent of the agricultural land person had a paper. When one comrade time job. one of my co-workers has in would be distributed to black farmers. was taking a photo of a contingent with his office a famous photograph from the But these were all empty promises. And the banner, 'Socialism-For Workers 1994 elections in South Africa in which in fact, today the Reconstruction and Empowemlent!', a worker shouted to her, 'Hi, Workers VaI181wrd!' He and the Nelson Mandela became the country's Development Programme is an embar­ workers around him were all holding the first black president. The photo shows an rassing memory for the government. The paper." old man who's crippled and can't walk. offices which administered it have long Our comrades seek to win working-class He's being carried to the voting booth by since been closed. Six years later, the militants to the fight to forge the Lenin­ a young man, probably one of his rela­ conditions of the black masses in South ist-Trotskyist vanguard party needed to tives. That photo captures the intensity of Africa are no better, and in some ways - .. " .. ,."" .... ,., ... ""...,.., .. , ..... " -" ,-",...... ~ .... -~ ...... -•.... "...... - - .. ' ......

14

worse-for example, the level of unem­ ployment--than they were under the old apartheid, white-supremacist regime. The ANC government is just as ruth­ less in defending the so-called right to private property as its predecessors. Last fall, some black squatters in a township near Johannesburg tried to erect a shanty­ town, and the local ANC authori­ ties brought in the police to expel them and demolish the shantytown. And when the squatters initially refused the police orders, the police ami security guards just opened up on them with gunfire, seri­ ously wounding scores. A few months later, the workers at the big Volkswagen plant in Port Elizabeth went on strike to protest the tiring of some militant shop stewards. The company responded by fir­ ing 1,300 workers, one-quarter of the entire labor force. The cops were brought in en masse to intimidate the workers. Radio Times Hulton They not only surrounded and patrolled Gold miners in the Transvaal, 1888. Mining of diamonds and gold by super­ the factory, they occupied the adjacent exploited black labor was key to development of South African capitalism. black townships. During the Volkswagen strike, ANC intemational campaign to free him in South Africa had the most unequal eco­

president Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's suc- I I which we, the International Communist nomic structure of an)' country in the cessor, gave what they call the "Throne League, participated. In fact, I remember world. The wealthiest 10 percent got over Speech"-the name is a carry-over from picketing with my comrades in San Fran­ half of all the national income. The poor­ the old days of British colonialism. The cisco with signs reading "Free Moses est 40 percent got less than 4 percent. main theme of this speech was the need Mayekiso!" What is Mayekiso doing That's still the case. What's changed is to attract foreign investors, to build a today? He's the head of some private that now the top 10 percent includes sev­ black capitalist class and consequently financial outfit. He's a small-time, or eral thousand blacks, many of them for­ to break the power of the black trade­ maybe a medium-time, finance capitalist. mer leaders of the so-called national lib­ union movement. He declared: "Our People like Mayekiso and Lekota are said eration movement, which in fact liberated standing in the eyes of the investor com­ in South Africa to be "on the gravy train." them-to drive BMWs, wear Armani munity cannot be held hostage by ele­ We characterize post-1994 South suits and move into posh, formerly all­ ments pursuing selfish and anti-social Africa as neo-apartheid. The legal and white neighborhoods. purposes." namely, militant workers. (The political structure of the apartheid system I "investor community"--what a nice way has changed quite radically. The social European Colonialism and to describe the heirs of J. P. Morgan and and economic dominance of the white Apartheid Capitalism the men who bankrolled Adolf Hitler, who minority has not changed. The superex­ To understand what .we call neo­ incidentally helped found Volkswagen!) ploitation of black and nonwhite labor by apartheid under the ANC, you have to But if things have not changed for the white capitalists, domestic and for­ understand apartheid under the white­ the black masses, they have certainly eign, has not changed. Whites still live supremacist regime. South Africa as it changed for their putative leaders. Last in the "First World," blacks in the ''Third exists today is the product of the Euro­ year, there was an emergency trade-union World." Average per capita consumption pean colonial conquest and subjugation conference and the government sent as its of electricity in the white neighborhoods of the indigenous black, Bantu-speaking spokesman the defense minister, Patrick of South Africa is about the same as in population. This history of colonial sub­ Lekota, the guy in charge of the mili­ Stockholm, Sweden and Munich, Ger­ jugation is the case as well in the rest of tary-a significant choice for spokesman. many, two of the wealthiest cities in the Africa and, in a different way, in the Near He presented a hardline defense of the Western world. One-quarter of all urban East and Asia. However, the European­ government's economic austerity poli­ blacks live in what they call "informal derived population in South Africa is far ci.es. One of the delegates at the confer­ housing"-backyard shacks, garages, larger and more deeply rooted than else·· ence had worked closely with Lekota in shantytowns made of cardboard and plas­ where in the colonial--Dr rather, now for­ the 1980s and went up to him and said, tic. Ninety percent of all rural blacks have mer colonial-world. "Patrick, we used to be comrades. What no electricity at all. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch has happened to you?" Lekota replied, The leading cause of death among Calvinists and French Huguenots moved "I am no longer your. comrade. I am a white children in South Africa is swim­ to South Africa in signiticant numbers minister now." ming pool accidents. Water also plays a and established an agricultural economy. Ten years ago, the most prominent left­ significant role in the death of black chil­ They calIed themselves Afrikaners, some­ wing workers leader in South Africa was dren, but in a rather different way. They times called Africa's "white tribe." In the Moses Mayekiso, head of the metal work­ die from diseases like dysentery, which late 19th century, when gold and also dia­ ers union and Central Committee member are contracted from drinking polluted monds were discovered, British imperial­ of the Communist Party. When he was in water. ism took over South Africa, fought a war prison in the late 1980s, there was an When Mandela took over as president, against the Afrikaners-the Boer War-

I t'.\ ii, ,. ,,,. ", , I I 15

and there was' Ii large influx of immi­ :different from the rest of·Africa, the Near mainly black African, some Indian and grants from Britain. Because of the rela­ East and Asia. In general, Western impe­ some "coloured" (or mixed-race). The tively large size and the permanent char­ rialism (and in the Far East, also Japa­ urban and rural poor were black. This acter of the white European population, nese imperialism) tended to widen and situation, of course, had a profound the imperialists have been able to exploit deepen the class divisions among the effect on the political consciousness and the indigenous population in a, far more indigenous colonialized peoples. That is, the organization of the black masses. complete and systematic,one might say .the colonial administration collaborated totalitarian, way than elsewhere in Africa ,with the indigenous, propertied classes Communism and Black and in other colonial countries. and the traditional ruling elite. In some Nationalism in South Africa At the beginning of the 20th century, cases, they even created classes where The South African Communist Party 'most blacks in South Africa were self­ none had existed. For example, among has for the past half century been an sufficient agriculturalists. They owned the Ibos in Nigeria, there were no hered­ important constituent part of the African 'their own land, they lived in, traditional itary chieftains. They simply had village National Congress, which, as its name tribal societies. The British government councils in which everybody had an indicates, claims to stand for the national then took their land-all of it-in the equal say. When the British moved into interests of the entire black African pop­ 1913 Land Act, declaring that South Nigeria, they appointed chieftains to the ulation of all social classes. In South Africa was literally a white man's coun­ Thos. They said, "We tell you what to do. Africa, Communism was seen as comple­ try. Blacks could only own land in the .you tell your people what to do. And you mentary and not antagonistic to black so-called native reserves (bantustans), will be well rewarded." African nationalism. In a conventional, amounting to 7 percent of the country; the . There were wealthy Indian landowners popular sense, what Communism meant most arid, desolate part. The main reason 'and Indian millionaire factory owners was, you take the wealth from the white that they did this was to provide a large in British India-likewise for Egypt, ruling class and you distribute it among pool of cheap labor to work in the mines, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies. the impoverished black masses. Commu­ .which for many was a death sentence. But not for South Africa. In South nism did not mean expropriating the fac­ After World War II, South Africa was Africa, the class structure of the black­ tories, the mines, the farms owned by ,industrialized by the superexploitation of or more generally nonwhite-population black capitalists. Because there were no black labor under the white police state. was compressed. Blacks couldn't even black capitalists. In order to provide the large white Euro­ own residential land in South Africa, The identification of Communism and pean population with a European living much less agricultural or commercial national liberation in South Africa was standard, every last bit of surplus was land. In the 1980s, the only black capi­ reinforced during the Cold War era by the squeezed out of the black population. By talists in Johannesburg were the guys international alignments. South Africa the 1980s, one-third of the entire white who owned and ran minivans and mini­ was an important strategic ally of the labor force and one-half of the Afrikan­ buses. Incidentally, these were very com­ United States, of Western imperialism. It ers were on the government payroll. And petitive capitalists-but not in ways that was part of the "free world"-an embar­ most of these people did nothing, they benefited their customers. Every once in rassing part to be sure, but part of it. The just pushed paper around. Half of the a while they would shoot each other up ANC was backed diplomatically and white government employees could have as a way of preventing the oversupply of financially by the Soviet Union. The stayed home every day of the year, sit­ their services. Soviet Union provided the arms and train­ ting around their swimming pools drink­ In South Africa, you had a complete ing for the ANC's basically token guer­ ing beer and it would have had abso­ correspondence between class divisions rilla warfare. During the township revolts lutely no effect on the actual economy. and national or racial divisions. The cap­ in the 'mid-1980s, the young black rebels They were totally parasitic. italists-big, medium and little-were' . called themselves "comrades" and waved In one important respect, the effect of . white, the state bureaucracy was white. the red flag with the hammer and sickle as colonial rule in South Africa was very The working class was nonwhite- a symbol of defiance. Dar Spiegel Peter Magubane ~4~

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Rigid segregation of apartheid era was written into law, enforced by brutal terror. Right: 1976 Soweto student uprising was inspired by Cuban defeat of South African forces in Angola .

... --1[",

16

The same factors and conditions made lady the black proletariat, in the struggle development of the international socialist the South African Communist Party as against the white-supremacist regime. revolution;" well as the ANC an incubator fora future But how does the proletariat become black capitalist class. Let's take a young For Permanent Revolution! the leader of the subjugated nation? For black intel1ectua1 in the 1970s, say, some­ Of course, the Communist Party does that it has to be organized and led by a one with a law degree. He's ambitious in not today, nor did it in the past, say, "Our revolutionary vanguard party, such as the a bourgeois-careerist sense. He wants goal is to promote a black capitalist class Bolshevik Party that Lenin built in tsar­ money, he wants the good things in life, and a black state bureaucracy." Rather, ist Russia, which politically combats and he wants to be a political mover and they justified and continue to justify their defeats the various bourgeois and petty­ shaker in his own country. But how can policies with reference to the old Stalin­ bourgeois nationalist parties which also he realize these aspirations? He can't ist dogma of "two-stage revolution." This claim to be the leader of the subjugated become a corporate executive of Anglo says that in all colonial or semicolo­ nation. Historically, the struggle for per­ American, the big mining and industrial nial countries, first we have to have manent revolution has been directed conglomerate. They don't have black cor­ the bourgeois-democratic revolution-in against the Stalinists' policy of collabo­ porate executives. Obviously, he can't South Africa it's called the "national ration with and support to bourgeois join the ruling white-supremacist party. democratic revolution"-Ied by a suppos­ nationalists. And this is the main form of So our ambitious young black intellec­ edly progressive or "anti-imperialist" opportunism in Third World countries. tual recognizes that if he is going to wing of the bourgeoisie. In South Africa But sometimes you get a very different become part of the ruling elite, then this role is assigned to the ANC of Man­ kind, or at least an apparently very differ­ they've got to, one way or another, dis­ dela and Mbeki. Then, at some point in ent kind, of political tendency within the place this white-supremacist regime or at the future, they say, we'll have the prole­ workers movement, which we would least arrange a "power sharing" agree­ tarian socialist revolution. characterize as "militant economism" or ment. So he joins the ANC, maybe he In opposition to the Stalinist doctrine syndicalism. This tendency maintains that joins the Communi~t Party, or at least of two-stage revolution, Leon Trotsky the workers should exclusively concen­ works closely with it. put forward the program and perspective trate on building their own organizations If you read the recent speeches of of permanent revolution, which he sum­ at the point of production-trade unions Thabo Mbeki, you might think they were marized in this way: or factory committees-and should turn written by the public relations department "With regard to countries of a belated their backs on the national liberation of the International Monetary Fund. For bourgeois development, especially the struggle; they should turn their backs on colonial and semi-colonial countries, the all I know, maybe they were. Mbeki is a theory of permanent revolution signifies the struggles of the peasantry and the former member of the Communist Party that the complete and genuine solution to other oppressed sections of society.· and this is generally true of that whole their tasks of achieving democracy and Interestingly, such a tendency emerged ANC ruling elite. If you survey maybe national emancipation is conceivable in South Africa in the late 1970s and the wealthiest 5 percent of black Africans only through the dictatorship of the pro­ '80s. They were called the "workerists" letariat as the leader of the subjugated in South Africa, probably over half of nation." and for a time they led a number oCquite them are former members of the SACP. - The Pennanent Revolution significant trade unions. Basically, the Some of them might even be current (1929) workerists~ looked around the rest of members of the SACP, at least nominally. Trotsky stressed, "In a country where the Africa, the Near East, Asia, and they saw To oversimplify, one can say that if proletariat has power in its hands as governments, like in Algeria, which had you wanted to be a capitalist and were a the result of the democratic revolution, come to power as the leader of a national black in South Africa, you had to call the subsequent fate of the dictatorship liberation movement. But these govern­ yourself a Communist. Because that was and socialism depends in the last analy­ ments then savagely suppressed the the only way in which you could hope to sig not only and not so much upon the working class. So the workerists in South mobilize the black masses, and particu- national produdtive forces as upon the Africa said, "We're not going to let that happen here." Basically, they projected I' i; :'1 that sooner or later, by one means or another, the ANC was going to come to power. And they saw their job as build­ ing strong trade unions which would defend the workers after the ANC came to power and which would pressure the ANC government into carrying out poli­ cies beneticial to the workers. In the early '80s, one of the leaders of this tendency, Joe Foster, laid out its political doctrine. He begins by describ­ Rural masses ing the ANC as "a great popUlist libera­ continue to live in tion movement" and goes on: abject poverty "But these movements cannot and have after end of white­ not in themselves been able to deal with supremacist rule the paJticular and fundamental problem in 1994. of workers .... "It is, therefore, essential that workers must strive to build their own powerful and effective organisation even whilst they are part of the wider popular strug­ gle. This organisation is necessary to protect and further worker interests and

I I II II I .", 17

to ensure that the popular movement is not highjacked by elements who will [in the] end. have no option but to turn against their worker supporters." -South African Labour Bulletin, July 1982 In opposition to this current, we wrote . at the time: ''The only way to ensure that national libc:ration movements do not tum against their worker supporters is for the work­ ers movement to place itself at the head of the oppressed black people, to com- I, bat every manifestation of white facist rule-the disenfranchisement of the black majority, the bantustans, the pass laws, the enforced separation of urban black workers from their wives and chil­ dren, the massive use of convict labor." - WV No. 366, 9 November 1984 A few years later, a number of the most prominent "workerist" leaders, like de Blois/AP Mayekiso and Alec Erwin, as well as many rank-and-file activists, joined the ANC and the Communist Party. I was in South Africa about six weeks ago, and I and a comrade met with some veteran trade unionists who had been part of this Racist state terror tendency. They had joined the ANC and· and anti-immigrant chauvinism under SACP but are today very disillusioned. neo-apartheid rule: We asked them, "Why did you join the police fire at black ANC and SACP since you had earlier township squatters criticized them from the left?" One of near Johannesburg; them said, "We were duped by Joe Mozambicans await Slovo," who was the CP leader at the deportation in time. "Slovo told us that'right after Man­ South African jail. dela came to power, the Communist Party would mobilize the working class in the struggle for the second stage, pro- Southern Africa, like much of the rest of refreshing places where profits are great I letarian revolution." and problems are small. Capital is not But why were they duped? These were the world, was an arena of the Cold War-and in the mid-1970s in Angola, a threaten~d .by political instability or not naive, politically raw youth. These natIOnalizatIOn. Labor is cheap the mar­ were battle-hardened, left-wing workers hot war-between Western imperialism, ket is booming, and the curr~ncy hard leaders. They were absolutely familiar led by the U.S., and the Soviet Union and convertible." -quoted in Martin J. Murray, ed ... with the politics and history of the ANC and its allies. South Africa was an impor­ tant regional ally of the U.S. The Penta­ South African Capitalism and and SACP. But the real reason is that in Black Political Opposition (1982) their own way, the "workerists," too, gon collaborated closely with the South African military; the CIA collaborated But over the course of the next decade had subscribed to the two-stage revolu­ or, so, developments took place which tion. They assumed and accepted that closely with its South African counter­ part. For example, in the early 19608 the very much changed this rosy picture the white-supremacist regime was going of South Africa in the eyes of the Amer­ to be replaced by the ANC and they AN~ decided t~ launch armed struggle agamst the whIte-supremacist regime, ican capitalist class. To begin with, saw their goal as simply to defend the ~ationalliberation struggles in neighbor­ workers' interests against the inevitable and its leaders, like Mandela, therefore went underground. It was the CIA Ing Angola and Mozambique, which were ANC regime. That was the point of inter­ Portuguese colonies when this Fortune section between the "workerists" and the Which, through one of its informants in the ANC, tracked Mandela down and article came out, not only succeeded in SACP. They never understood that the win~i~g independence from Portugal but working class could defend its interests informed the South African government which then captured him and put him i~ precIpItated a revolutionary upheaval in only, as Trotsky put it, by placing itself Portugal itself. In 1975, when the Portu­ at the head of the subjugated nation prison for the next 30 years. In the 1950s and '60s, South Africa was guese colonialists pulled out a left­ through the instrumentality of a revolu­ nationalist government allied to'Moscow tionary workers party. one of the very few countries in Africa or Asia with very large American, as well as was established in Angola, where the British, capital investment. The big monop­ ANC was now allowed to set up guerrilla South Africa in the Cold War bases. up until now, I've mainly focused on oly, Anglo American, was well named. Half of its stockholders were American At that point, the Americans encour­ the internal structure and developments aged the South Africans to send in their in South Africa. But one really can't and British. And in 1970, the American business magazine Fortune army and smash this left-nationalist understand the transition from apartheid wrote: "The Republic of South Africa has al­ regime-replace Portuguese colonialism rule to ANC rule and neo-apartheid ways been regarded by foreign investors with South African colonialism in Ango­ except in the context of world politics. as a. gold mine, one of those rare and la. In response, Soviet leader Leonid "--.If

18

Brezhnev got the Cuban army to go in A few years later came the Mack next four years these negotiations didn't and the Cuban army smashed the South township revolts in which the segregated go anywhere-the most the ANC was African army, inflicting a humiliating townships like Soweto were effectively willing to concede was still less than defeat on it. Finally, the ANC guerrillas taken over by militants, generally sup­ what the white-supremacists and their actually got to be on the winning side, portive of the ANC and SACP-the American senior partners demanded. fighting alongside the Cubans. By them­ young "comrades" waving the red flag This deadlock in the negotiations was selves, they couldn't do very much. Let's with the hammer and sickle. The white­ broken not by developments in southern give credit where credit is due-to the supremacist regime, true to its nature, Africa but by developments· in East Soviets and Cubans. responded to this by escalating police­ Europe and the Soviet Union. The Soviet The war in Angola actually turned out state terror. In 1985, the government of Stalinist bureaucracy collapsed under the to be a turning point in the history of P. W. Botha declared a state of emer­ regime of Mikhail Gorbachev. Capital­ modem South Africa. The defeat of the gency. The police and army killed over a ist counterrevolution swept across East white-supremacist South African army by thousand blacks and imprisoned 20,000. Europe with Gorbachev's toleration and the Cubans, with the ANC in an auxiliary The American ruling class didn't encouragement. And everybody knew, if role, inspired and encouraged a new wave approve of this policy. Not on moral the Soviets were giving East Europe back of resistance in South Africa itself. Only grounds, to be sure. They figured that to the Western imperialists, they were cer­ a few months later came the 1976 So­ even if it worked in the short run, it was tainly not interested in a new client state weto student uprising. More importantly, not going to work in the longer run. For in southern Africa. In fact, Moscow beginning in the mid-1970s, you got the every black union activist and township dropped all of its support to the ANC and development of a black trade-union militant who was killed or imprisoned, moved to establish good diplomatic rela­ tions with the white-supremacist regime. In 1990, the South African govern­ ment legalized the ANC and the Com­ munist Party. A government spokesman explained why to its supporters. many of whom strongly opposed this move: "Our situation has changed fundamen­ tally by what has happened in the interna­ tional field, in Eastern Europe, Russia, Cuban women and in several African states recently. The troops prepare to IOtal effect of all these things puts the leave Angola, threat posed by the South African Com­ 1989. Cuban munist Party and the African National forces smashed Congress in an entirely new context." South African -quoted in David Ottaway, apartheid invasion Chained Together: Mandela, In mld-1970s. De Klerk, and the Struggle to Remake South Africa (1993) That is, the South African ruling class and the American imperialists under­ stood that bereft of Soviet support, the ANC and also the SACP leaders were willing to become their political agents, movement which over the next decade five more would replace them. And they to do their bidding. And that's exactly became one of the largest, most combative would be even more fanatically hostile to what has happened. and most left-wing in the world. the white-supremacist regime, even more Today, Mbeki states that his number Under these conditions, the more far­ fanatically hostile to the U.S. and more one, overriding economic priority is to sighted elements of the American ruling sympathetic to the Soviet Union and attract foreign investment. The minister class recognized that four million whites Communism. The American ruling class who is in charge of privatizing state­ in South Africa could not long continue sent a strong message to its South Afri­ owned corporations like telecommuni­ to completely subjugate and exploit 20 can junior partner. Wall Street financiers cations is a member of the Communist million nonwhites simply by the mecha­ dumped all of the South African stocks Party. The London Financial Times nisms of police-state repression. More­ and bonds that they could. U.S. banks writes, "the minister of trade and industry over, the longer the apartheid system refused to roll over their loans to the has enthusiastically liberalised trade and lasted, the more radical the black masses South African government and South promoted foreign private investment." would become; the more hostile they African corporations. The value of the That minister is Alec Erwin, former would become not only to the South South African currency, the rand, plum­ prominent workerist and leading member African ruling class but also to its Amer­ meted through the floor. One of the lead­ of the Communist Party. ican great-power ally. In 1981, the ers of the white liberal opposition, Helen Rockefeller Foundation put out a study Sussman, quipped that nobody had to For a leninist-Trotskyist Party! called South Africa-Time Running Out. call for foreign divestment anymore, it's But the investor-friendly policies of Here is their assessment: "All the ingre­ already happened. Mbeki, Erwin & Co. have caused wide­ dients of a major crisis are present there. Well, the Afrikaner nationalists are spread disillusionment among the work­ The dangers of political instability, large­ pretty hardheaded. But money talks. ing class and more importantly a rising scale racial conflict, and the growth of They got the message. So in 1986 they level of opposition. There was a public Communist influence are real." Their opened secret negotiations with the ANC workers strike last year which was the conclusion: "To promote genuine politi­ leadership, with Mandela in prison and largest and most politically significant cal power sharing in South Africa." the others who were in exile. But for the since the ANC came to power in 1994.

' .....·,1111 "'1'1" 'I II' r 19

The question that our comrades in South Africa are most often asked today by rank-and-file workers, by low-level union officials, even by some middle­ level officials, is, "What do you think we should do?" We don't have to argue, as we did in the past, that this is a capitalist government, anti-working-class in its pol­ icies and serving. the interests of Anglo I American, Citibank and Volkswagen. That's now taken for granted. The ques­ tion is what to do about it. There is a widespread sentimen~ among the workers that the unions should break with the "tri­ partite alliance," should cease supporting the ANC/SACP government and fight its reactionary economic policies. And of course that's what the unions should do.· But the decisive question, and this is where most of the discussions and argu­ ments lie, is what then and what more? Gubb/JB Pictures Because the South African working class Mass township revolt of the mid-1980s shook apartheid regime. Communist cannot defend itself even in the most nar­ red flag flies at funeral of anti-apartheid fighter killed by cops in 1986. row economic sense simply at the level of trade-union struggle, however militant lessened simply through trade-union the Vietnam War, the American army had and effective in its own terms. How struggle. It manifestly requires a prole­ become semi-mutinous, with soldiers could union struggle affect mass struc­ tarian revolution such as Lenin and killing their officers. South African black tural unemployment? According to the Trotsky's Bolsheviks led in Russia in workers-even left-wing workers--don't government's own figures, 40 percent of 1917: the expropriation of the white­ know that. Their image of the United the black labor force is unemployed. owned mines, factories and farms and States is this all-powerful military jugger­ Also, the South African workers move­ the establishment of a planned, social­ naut which rules the world without ques­ ment has not broadly or seriously organ­ ized economy. tion and nothing can be done about it. ized, even at the trade-union level, the As I emphasized, the Communist Party Which is of course exactly what their millions of agricultural laborers who, plays an important role in the ANC-Ied leaders tell them. along with the miners, are among the government. It also runs the main trade­ Those of you who are not members or most oppressed sections of the proletar­ union federation-run is the wrong word supporters of the Spartacist League, or iat. More generally, the workers move­ because the ranks are very restless; it's may even be our opponents, I presume ment has not concerned itself with the the leadership. How do these self-styled that you carne to this forum out of a sense desperately impoverished rural popula­ Communists justify their aggressively of identity and solidarity with the condi­ tion, both on the white farms and in the pro-capitalist and anti-working-class pol­ tions of the oppressed South African fonner bantustans, who live under condi­ icies? Their bottom line argument is that black masses. Those of you who are not tions which are not neo-apartheid but these policies are forced on them by the youth probably participated in the anti­ apartheid just like in the old days. unfavorable international conditions of apartheid protests of the· 1980s. Nothing To talk about rural South Africa is to the post-Soviet world. If wages are too you can do, and I repeat, nothing you can talk about the oppression of women. high, if the unions are too militant in do, would aid and encourage the struggle Central to the structure of South Africa is South Africa, investors will go elsewhere. for national liberation, social justice and that women and their children remain in They'll close down their factories and proletarian revolutIon :in South Africa the countryside while their husbands and unemployment will be~even worse than it more than building a communist party fathers are separated from them, work­ is today. As for proletarian revolution, based on the working class in the U.S.: ing in the cities and the mines. It is in they say, even if it's possible in South Every blow struck against American rural South Africa that patriarchal tradi­ Africa, it will simply and quickly be imperialism from within has powerful tions, inherently and deeply oppressive smashed by Western imperialism, led by reverberations in South Africa and in all of women, remain quite strong. Polyg­ the U.S. If there·s no military attack, countries oppressed and dominated by amy is practiced-it's not common but they'll starve us into submission. That's international capital, of which the U.S. is it's not uncommon-including by men the basic argument. It's a serious argu­ the self-declared policeman. who consider themselves left-wing work­ ment and it has to be answered seriously. It is certainly very possible. indeed ers leaders. Far more widespread is what When I was in South Africa I gave a likely, that the first battles of the world is called lobola-the bride price. If a talk-mainly to unionized black work­ proletarian revolution will be fought in black African man wants to get married, ers--on the changing conditions in South South Africa, Mexico or other Third he has to pay a substantial sum of Africa and their relation to world politics. ,World countries where the bourgeois . money-I guess it used to be cattle-to I concluded the talk by shifting the geo­ order is far more unstable than it is in the the family of the woman. graphical focus to the United States. That U.S. today. But the ultimate battle is But the fundamental point is that the is, I talked about the working-class strug­ going to be fought here in the bastion of many-sided conditions of exploitation, gle in the United States, the struggles of world capitalism. And the purpose of our oppression, and backwardness cannot be ;black and Latino minorities.. ·· I pointed party is to prepare for that battle. That's eliminated, cannot even be significantly out, for example, that in the last years of what we're all about. Join us!. ji·

20 reprintedjrom Workers yanguard No. 741, 8 September 2000 Sou!h Africa ANC Regime:' Enforcer for Imperialist Plunder

':, ;

Alexander Joe Land occupation in Zimbabwe. A few thousand wealthy whites own 70 percent of country's best land, while six million rural blacks scrape by on marginal plots.

JOHANNESBURG-U.S. president Clin­ who live on marginal rural lands, while retained control of Parliament-the South ton's visit to sub-Saharan Africa in late about 4,500 white farmers own 70 per­ African bourgeoisie has good reason to August highlighted imperialist concerns cent of the best land. Seeking to maintain fear the "contagion effect" of the Zim­ over growing instability in the region. its grip on power in the face of a chal­ babwe land seizures. The land question is Clinton sought to bolster the newly lenge by the Movement for Democratic explosive throughout the region. With the elected regime in oil-rich Nigeria-a Change (MDC), the bourgeois-nationalist dismantling of the legal structure of linchpin and regional gendarme in West Mugabe regime orchestrated the seizure apartheid in 1994, the white-supremacist Africa-having just dispatched hundreds of some 1,200 white-owned farms by regime was replaced by the bourgeois­ of U.S. troops to train the Nigerian self-styled veterans of Zimbabwe's war nationalist African National Congress military. In central Africa, Burundi and of independence against British imperial­ (ANC) of Nelson Mandela and his the Democratic Republic of Congo (for­ ism and the former white-supremacist successor, President Thabo Mbeki. But merly Zaire) are torn by civil wars. At the regime. Though relying on electoral sup­ the economic basis of the old apartheid southern end of the continent, in Zim­ port from the urban masses, particularly system-the superexploitation of black babwe, massive social unrest among both the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions labour-remains intact. While a thin layer the urban working class and the rural (ZCTU), the MDC is a stalking horse for of black capitalists have made it onto the population-fueled by nearly a decade of the white farmers and their imperialist ANC's "gravy train," the overwhelming austerity measures imposed by the capi­ backers, who have screamed like stuck majority of the black masses live in des­ talist ZANU-PF government and dictated pigs over the land seizures. In "infring­ perate poverty in the countryside or in by the International Monetary Fund ing" on private property, however hypo­ segregated townships, where unemploy­ (IMF)-has threatened to spill over into critically, Mugabe is playing a game ment ranges above 50 percent. Presiding neighbouring South Africa, the economic unsanctioned by the white capitalists and over the immiseration of the South Afri­ giant of sub-Saharan Africa. British and U.S. imperialism. can masses alongside the ANC are its In response to this sharp crisis, ZANU­ While the crisis in i Zimbabwe has partners in the "tripartite alliance," the PF president Robert Mugabe has cyni­ cooled down since parliamentary elec­ COSATU trade-union bureaucracy and cally exploited the burning land hunger of tions in June-in which the MDC made the South African Communist Party the more than six million Zimbabweans a strong showing though ·ZANU-PF (SACP).

··•• ...... 11111111 II III I 21

The first law passed by the ANC­ Britain's prompting, the European Union breaks the power of the bourgeoisie and led capitalist government supposedly imposed economic sanctions against expropriates capitalist industry and the allowed black families to reclaim land Zimbabwe. large landowners. For a socialist federa­ that had been stolen from them under There is more at stake for the imperial­ tion of southern Africa! apartheid. Yet the government has re­ ists and their junior partners in Jo'burg distributed a mere 3 percent of the land, and Pretoria than a relative handful of Moe: Stalking Horse for·Whlte leaving 80 percent in the hands of the white-owned tobacco plantations. Muga­ Landholders, Imperialists white minority, which makes up only be has 12,000 troops in Congo, who Conditions for Zimbabwe's working 13 percent of the total population. control some key diamond-producing people have continued to worsen since 'Meanwhile, white farmers and hired areas in Kasai, a mineral-rich province the Mugabe regime imposed IMF­ mercenaries from the Executive Out­ where South Africa's De Beers has been dictated austerity measures in 1991. Mas­ comes "security" firm rove the country­ displaced. The many-sided war there, sive plebeian protests in late 1997 culmi­ ,side maiming and murdering with impu­ involving Laurent Kabila's government nated in a general strike called by the nity, as blacks are increasingly evicted troops, a half dozen rebel armies and as ZCTU that December, followed by .from white-owned lands they have . many expeditionary forces from sur­ another in March 1998. Mugabe's dis­ worked for generations.: rounding countries, has temporarily pre­ patch of 12,000 troops-from a country The land occupations in Zimbabwe vented the imperialists from getting their with a total population of 12 million-to have resonated strongly in South Africa. hands on the country's fabulously rich Congo further inflamed hostility to his An ANC spokesman vowed that South diamond and other mineral reserves. regime, as he sells his country's youth as Africa "will not go the way of Zim­ The United Nations is currently consider­ cannon fodder to keep Kabila in power in babwe." As the land seizures continued, ing the deployment of a "peacekeeping" return for diamond and mineral conces­ the value of the South African rand force to Congo, in which South Africa sions for him and his ZANU-PF cronies. plunged to a historic low, until Mbeki has already announced it intends to play Earlier this year, Mugabe tried to push promised to "take all necessary steps to a prominent role. The UN and Britain through a constitutional reform which ensure that the breaking of the law comes already have occupation forces in Sierra would have essentially made him presi­ to an end" if land occupations erupted Leone, another diamond-rich country. dent for life, while proposing a land dis­ here. In a visit to the Zimbabwean capital Imperialist hands off Congo! All U.S.! tribution scheme to mobilize his peasant of Harare last sp~ing, Mbeki quietly UN/British troops out of Africa! base against urban opposition. When twisted Mugabe's arm to announce that South Africa holds the key to the Mugabe's referendum failed because of he would try to bring the land occupa­ future of all of sub-Saharan Africa. opposition led by the MDC, ZANU-PF tions to a halt. Under the rule of the capitalist ANC, encouraged an escalation in the land sei­ In this the ANC leader was acting not this means continued brutal exploitation zures" Fearing that they will lose their only on behalf of the neo-apartheid bour­ . and oppression of South Africa's black, jobs if the large commercial farms are geoisie but of the major imperialist pow­ coloured and Indian working masses by broken up, the. 350,000 black agricul­ ers as well, particularly the Blair Labour the white racist bourgeoisie and enforc­ tural labourers and their families-who government in Britain, Zimbabwe's for­ ing imperialist plunder throughout the account for one-eighth of the total, popu­ mer colonial master. Most vitriolic in region. Under a black-centred workers lation-have been driven into the arms their racist and chauvinist denunciations government, South Africa's industrial of the MDC, and their own exploiters. of Zimbabwe were former Labour "lefts" and mineral wealth would be used to Founded last year under the leadership like Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and develop the vast resources of the region of ZCTU head Morgan Tsvangirai, the his aide Peter Hain, who was a promi­ for the benefit of the former colonial MDC has openly sought ties with the ,nent anti-apartheid activist in the 1980s. slaves. Spartacist South Africa, section imperialist powers and opposes the land London sent SAS special forces to south­ of the International Communist League, seizures. Last spring, when Britain threat­ ,ern Africa and prepared a "rapid reaction fights to forge the Bolshevik party ened to pull out a military training mis­ force" to move in to "protect" British needed to lead the pro1ietariat, drawing sion, the MDC urged London to keep the . passport holders, who make up more than behind it the rural landless and all the . troops in place as a "guarantee" of "dem­ a third of Zimbabwe's 70,000 whites. On oppressed, in a socialist revolution that ocratic government" (UPI, 17 April).

Economist AP January 1998: Protests against food price Increases and other IMF·dictated austerity measures imposed by Zimbabwe president Mugabe (right) were dispersed by police gunfire. Months of protests included two general strikes. 22

MDC leader Tsvangirai was joined by a workers and the poor," pretending that newly assertive trade unions, who number of prominent Tory politicians, a the MDC can be won to this pro­ brought the country to a grinding halt last former U.S. assistant secretary of state gramme (Socialist Worker [Britain], 1 week for the first time in half-a-century, and racist South African politician Tony July). The right-centrist Workers Power and white farmers whose domination of Leon in a letter to the London Times (13 group in Britain also calls for pressur­ the land appears doomed by looming April) denouncing the Mugabe regime. In ing the MDC, lecturing: "The work­ nationalisation." A more recent Mail & Zimbabwe, the MDC's supporters in­ ers, through their unions and other grass­ Guardian (11 April) reported: clude a prison torturer who served under root organisations, need to overturn "White support is proving crucial to the the former white-supremacist regime of the MDC's land programme" (Workers opposition. The party will not say how Ian Smith's Rhodesia (Zimbabwe's colo­ Power, July/August 2000). To justify much money it has raised, or from where. But the head of its campaign in nial name), and Smith himself, who once such appeals, the MDC is depicted as a Mashonaland West's 10 constituencies, ranted, "I don't believe in black majority social-democratic party, which the Cliff­ Duke du Coudray, concedes that a sig­ rule ever in Rhodesia-not in a thousand ites in particular claim the white landown­ nificant proportion of campaign funds years." Smith and his like deserve revolu­ ers have only recently begun to support. comes from white-owned businesses." tionary justice from a workers tribunal for Thus a Zim ISO leaflet issued before An integral part of this unholy alliance the butchering of African men, women the elections talks of "the need for work­ is the ISO, which boasts of being "a and children during his rule. ers and the poor to be at centre of the socialist pressure group affiliated to the Rubbing shoulders with this notorious MDC and to make sure that the party MDC" (Socialist Worker [Zimbabwe], racist pig in the MDC are the avowed puts workers interests at the fore and January 20(0). By their own admission, "revolutionaries" of the International not the capitalist ideas that are now the Cliffites are playing a very real role Socialist Organisation (ISO), Zimbab­ being propagated by the current middle in providing a left cover to lure militant ,wean supporters of the tendency founded class/capitalist leadership of the party" workers into the MDC, thus tightening by the late Tony Cliff. led by the British ("Mistake to Cancel the May Day Ral­ the political chains that bind Zimbab­ Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and lies-Now Prepare for General Strike!" wean workers to their capitalist exploit­ including the Keep Left grouping buried undated). An election statement on the ers and imperialist overlords. How do inside the SACP. (While the American back of this leaflet urges a "vote for self-styled socialists end up as brokers ISO has been at loggerheads with the MDC which was started by workers and for neocolonial domination? SWP of late, it was no less enthusiastic the poor." The starting point for the Cliffites, about the MDC's recent electoral gains.) Workers Power, et a1. is not revolution­ ISO spokesman Munyaradzi Gwisai was ISO: Economism in Service of ary Marxism but trade-union econom­ even elected to Parliament for the openly Pro-Imperialist Reaction ism, a programme limited to advancing pro-imperialist MDC in the Highfield Even the most abjectly pro-imperialist the economic interests of the working area of Harare. While whining that the reformist workers party, like the British class within the framework of capitalism. MDC "played into Mugabe's hands in Labour Party, is organically based on the In an imperialist "democracy" like Brit­ the rural areas by lining up with white labour movement. Not so the MDC, ain, this economist programme translates farmers," the SWP cheered that "the which was bankrolled from the start by into support for the parliamentary vehi­ MDC's victories will give confidence to the white capitalists-who determined its cle of the trade-union bureaucracy, the sections of workers" (Socialist Worker policy on fundamental issues-<>perating Labour Party. But in semicolonial coun­ [Britain], I July). in an alliance with the pro-capitalist tries like Zimbabwe, there is no room for While themselves ensconced in the ZCTU bureaucracy. The MDC grew out a parliamentary-reformist social democ­ party of the big farmers and indus­ of the 1997-98 upheaval. A Mail & Guar­ racy. The national bourgeoisie is too trialists, the Cliffites in their MDC elec­ dian article (17 December 1997) head­ weak and subordinated to imperiali!)m, tion campaign called for "seizure of big lined "Zim's 'Unholy Alliance': Black and the class contradictions in society farms without compensation," "tax the Workers, White Farmers" pointed to "an are thus posed too sharply, to allow for rich to fund the poor" and "power to unlikely consensus between Zimbabwe's labour reformism. Thus trade-union eco­ nomismends up directly allying with the bourgeois nationalists or, in the case of the MDC and the ZCTU labour bureauc­ racy, the white capitalists and imperial­ ists themselves. Frederick Chiluba of Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) is reportedly viewed as a model by MDC leaders. A former head of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, Chiluba came to power in 1991 as leader of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy, a lash-up of trade-union UN imperialist leaders and bourgeois politicians. The "peacekeeping" hated Chiluba regime has been notorious force In for corruption, IMF-imposed austerity diamond-rich Sierra Leone. and brutal repression. The economic and political conditions which have led to such movements are in part the result of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, bourgeois-nationalist regimes in Africa

I, t\~, .•. ,,"" III '1 II' 23 were able to jockey for financial aid between Washington and Moscow. Today, the imperialists see no need to subsidise these regimes, which have been forced to 'sell off nationalised industries and subject the masses to even deeper privation. Powerful South The appearance of bourgeois opposi­ African proletariat tion parties in some way connected to the holds key to emancipation trade unions in post-colonial countries is of sub-Saharan a reflection of massive discontent among Africa from workers with capitalist governments capitalist formed by former national liberation exploitation, movements which, once in power, neces­ imperialist sarily carry out the dictates of imperial­ domination. ism. Such discontent is expressed today in South Africa in the growth of a semi­ syndicalist mood among militant workers fed up with the betrayals of the reformist Such land clauses were put in the Lan­ South Africa, the burning democratic SACP as a co-administrator of the capi­ caster House Constitution by Britain tasks such as agrarian revolution, equality talist state. A few years ago, a number with the full blessing of Mugabe, just as for women and tribal/ethnic minorities of leading trade unionists, notably includ­ bourgeoIs property rights are enshrined and breaking the yoke of imperialist sub- ing Moses Mayekiso, called for the for­ in the new South African constitution. , jugation can only be realised through the mation of a workers party in opposition When Mugabe came to power in 1980, Trotskyist programme of permanent revo­ to the ANC/SACP. we wrote: "In every respect the 'Marxist' lution: the seizure of state power by the But a party narrowly based on defence Mugabe has demonstrated in no uncer­ proletariat standing at the head of the of the economic interests of unionised tain terms that he is a loyal lackey for peasantry and all the oppressed. In the workers cannot advance a programme to imperialism-from his 'good neighbor' imperialist epoch, the bourgeoisie in address the all-sided social oppression policy toward South Africa to the recent countries of belated capitalist develop­ facing the urban and rural masses. Not strikebreaking" ("Strikes Hit Zimbabwe­ ment, tied by a thousand threads to the surprisingly, Mayekiso and many of his Rhodesia," WV No. 256, 16 May 1980). imperialist rulers and fearful above all of fellow "workerists" were ultimately won Two decades of Mugabe's rule has its own proletariat, is unable to resolve over to theSACP. Even a substantial and offered proof in the negative of Trotsky's these tasks historically associated with permanent improvement in the living theory of permanent revolution: The the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of conditions of the workers in such coun­ replacement of the old white colonial the 17th and 18th centuries in West tries can only be achieved by overthrow­ elite by a black bourgeois governing party Europe and North America. ing the capitalist order and replacing it has done nothing to resolve the funda­ The current land seizures have report­ with a planned, collectivised economy. mental democratic and social questions edly extended beyond the war veterans What is needed is a revolutionary work­ after years of British colonial rule and mobilised by ZANU-PF to include home­ ers party which does not simply defend white-supremacist domination in the for­ less township dwellers and even rail­ the particular interests of the working mer Rhodesia. The few white-owned way workers. The aspiration of the dis­ class, especially its better-paid unionised farms which were taken over since 1980 possessed peasantry of Zimbabwe to sector, but fights as a tribune of the peo­ were handed to ZANU-PF stalwarts. reclaim the land that was stolen from ple to eradicate all forms of national and Under imperialism, "nation-building" them can be a powerful motor force for social oppression. I • necessarily means one tribal or ethnic proletarian revolution. But as Trotsky group dominating the others. A few years explained in his 1929 work The Perma­ For Permanent Revolution! after taking power, Mugabe, from the nent Revolution: Many of the Western fake leftists who dominant Shona group, unleashed a "The realization of the revolutionary alli­ today support the pro-imperialist MDC bloody attack against the Ndebele people ance between the proletariat and the against Mugabe hailed him as an "anti­ in Matabeleland, who made up Nkomo's peasantry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian imperialist" a generation earlier. In the base. Meanwhile, last year Zimbabwe's vanguard, organized in the Communist 1970s, Mugabe's ZANU and the rival Supreme Court ruled that women could Party. This in turn means that the victory ZAPU of Joshua Nkomo waged a guer­ not inherit land and argued that such dis­ of the democratic revolution is conceiv­ rilla war against the Smith regime, crimination is "in the nature of African able only through the dictatorship of the simultaneously engaging in murderous society." Unemployment stands at over proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves feuds with each other. While extending 50 percent, while the country has among first of all the tasks of the democratic military support to the struggle against the highest rates of people with AIDS revolution .... white-supremacist rule, we warned that in the world. Mugabe openly espouses "The dictatorship of the proletariat which these petty-bourgeois formations sought vile anti-gay bigotry. For his part, has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and to work out an accommodation with ca~ ; Mbeki denies even that AIDS is caused very quickly confronted with tasks, the italism. not to destroy it. At the 1979 by the HIV virus. Yet while the Western fulfillment of which is bound up with Lancaster House conference in Britain, media hypocritically criticise such back­ deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois Mugabe and Nkomo set a "willing seller, ward views, the imperialists refuse to pro­ property. The democratic revolution grows willing buyer" scheme for land redistri­ vide the drugs and money to assist the over directly into the socialist revolu­ tion and thereby becomes a permanent .bution, offering ample compensation to many millions of HIV-infected people revolution." those whites who agreed to sell, while in Africa. - The Permanent Revolution and poor blacks got the most barren tracts. In countries such as Zimbabwe and Results and Prospects (1969) 'r !'

24

Election rally of Movement for Democratic Change (left), headed by trade-union leader Morgan Tsvangirai (right). Zimbabwean Cliffites help chain black workers to imperialist-backed party of white landowners.

This is the perspective, confirmed by the landlords, the proletariat advances the dustrial countries and an international experience of Lenin and Trotsky's Bol­ goal not of an equality of poverty but of planned economy, could the necessary shevik Party in the 1917 Russian Revolu­ an egalitarian communist society based resources and technology be provided to tion, which is fought for today by Sparta­ on enormous leaps in human productiv­ liberate rural workers from backbreaking cist South Africa. Especially in a small ity. In his "Principles of Communism" labour while absorbing in industry or country like Zimbabwe, a socialist revo­ (1847), Friedrich Engels explained: construction those former peasants. and lution would inevitably and almost imme­ "It follows from all this that the antithesis agricultural workers no longer required to diately pose the task of its international between town and country will likewise work the land. disappear. The carrying on of agriculture extension-in the first instance to neigh­ and industrial production by the same bouring South Africa, which supplies people, instead of by two different For a Black-Centred Workers most of Zimbabwe's petrol and electrical classes, is, even for purely material rea­ Government in South Africa! power, and beyond that to the imperialist sons, an essential condition of commu­ Explaining why Mugabe fell out of centres. nistic association. The scattering of the agricultural population throughout the favour with the imperialists, a South Afri­ In some measure thanks to the ISO, country, alongside the crowding of the can government think-tank analyst wrote: the lineup of class forces in Zimbabwe is industrial population in the big towns, is "Many African .and European govern­ the exact opposite of what Marxists seek a state adequate only to an undeveloped ments, and the United States, consider stage of agriculture and industry, an to achieve: The working class, instead of obstacle to all further development, the presence of Zimbabwean troops an leading the peasantry against the capi­ which is making itself very perceptible impediment to the establishment of their talists and landowners, is in their tow even now." own strategic presences in Congo. The against the landless peasant masses. And From the standpoint of a collectivised, unilateral intervention of Zimbabwe in the peasantry, in turn, has been mobilised planned economy, it makes no sense to support of Kabila has never been appre­ by the Mugabe regime against the agri­ divide Zimbabwe's large, productive, ciated by those who wish to do away with cultural and urban proletariat with the 'white-owned fanns into small, unproduc- the Kinshasa government. It is Zimba­ cynical promise of achieving what the tive plots. The conflict which has cur­ bwe's presence in Congo which led to the masses fought to win in the independ­ rently come to the fore between small­ IMF and the World Bank, under the influ­ ence struggle: land. holding peasants and the agricultural ence of' the US, halting all loans to In its election leaflet, the Zimbabwean proletariat can only be equitably resolved Mugabe" (Sunday Independent, 25 June). ISO calls for extending the land seizures in a revolutionary fashion, that is, by Mugabe's ZANU-PF government has and dismisses concerns about the breakup the expropriation of the landed estates since teetered on the brink. Petrol queues of the commercial farms, mainly tobacco and imperialist holdings. Soviets of farm snake through towns, power cuts loom plantations which account for 40 per­ labourers and poor peasants would dem­ and foreign currency reserves are virtu­ cent of the country's export earnings, ocratically detennine which lands would ally depleted. enthusing: "Throughout Africa and Asia be maintained as state farms and which The Mbeki regime has played a prom­ small-scale fanners are the maillstay of would be distributed to individual peas­ inent role in trying to pressure Mugabe agriculture." This is the outlook of a ants. A workers state would encourage to withdraw from Congo, which would petty-bourgeois democrat, at best. The poor peasants to join together in cooper­ open the road for South African inves­ difference between large-scale, lapital­ ative farms by providing tractors and tors, who are positioned for major exten­ intensive agriculture and small-scale, other technology. In South Africa, which sion into central Africa. The ascendance subsistence fanning-an increase in pro­ has no peasantry to speak of, a revolu­ of a layer of ANC politicians as black ductivity measured in orders of magni­ tionary workers government would sim­ front men for white capitalist rule, not tude-·is the difference between affluence ply expropriate the highly mechanised only in the government but in such major and starvation. While seeking to provide and capital-intensive commercial fanns. mining conglomerates as Anglo Ameri­ leadership to the struggles of the poor Only under an expanding collectivised can, has facilitated South Africa's push peasants for land as part of the revolution­ economy, based on a perspective of pro­ to join the renewed scramble by the ary overthrow of the big capitalists and letarian revolution in the advanced in- imperialist powers to divide up the Afri-

~ .' \~ " '1111 25 can continent's vast resources. Under the killed last year,' many of them in the by the nationalist ANC for massive ANC government, the racist South Afri­ northern KwaZulu-Natal area . where unemployment. At the same time, the can bourgeoisie, as a junior partner of. attacks on white farmers are openly , migrant workers are a living link be­ U.S. and British imperialism, has sharply' acknowledged to be a form of "indirect" tween the South African proletariat and increased capitalist investment in south­ land redistribution, The Sunday Inde­ workers throughout the region. It is cru­ ern and central Africa. pendent (23 April) editorialised: cial that the labour movement take up Acting under the auspices of the South­ "Just as Zimbabweans need to turn to the their defence against state repression: ern African Development Community land for food and survival security, so Down with the "Operation Crackdown" (SADC), the ANC regime invaded Leso­ are many black South Africans losing witchhunt! FuIl citizenship rights for all hope that they will ever be accommo­ tho in 1998 with the aim of securing dated in an economy driven by interna­ immigrants! the Highland Water Projects,a strategic tional dictates. These marginalised peo­ We fight for a socialist federation of source for all of Gauteng. 'South Africa's ple are returning to the rural areas to find southern Africa, in which there will be industrial core. Now Mbeki is ready to ," patches of land large enough to feed an equal place for all the myriad peoples join in enforcing the Lusaka Accord their families. But they are being forced of the region, including those whites higher and higher up the mountains which would balkanise Congo under the towards stony ground. When they look who accept the rule of a government aegis of the UN, whose earlier "peace­ down into the fertile val\eys, what do based centraIly on the black proletarian keeping" mission in that country presided they see? White farmers. That's the majority. This struggle is linked to a per­ over the CIA's assassination of national­ future reality that South Africans must spective for proletarian revolution inter­ ist leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961. But , face now, before it is too late." nationally, to open the road to the social the South African army is so rife with It is not only the land question that and economic emancipation of the conti­ racists that black soldiers have taken to unites the Zimbabwean and South Afri­ nent. The enormous industrial and min­ shooting white officers. as at Tempe can masses. The Ndebele people, for eral resources of South Africa will not be military base. Reflecting concern over the example, reside on both sides of the bor­ limited to "nation-building" south of the reliability of the army in military combat, der, artificiaIly drawn to suit the interests Limpopo River, but will be harnessed bourgeois press reports ask: "Will our of the British colonialists. Moreover, to the task of aiding the impoverished sons come home in body bags?" Zimbabweans make up a sizable propor­ masses of the entire continent to escape More fundamentally, the South African tion of the migrant workers who slave in from famine and desperate poverty. The bourgeoisie's regional ambitions have to the mines and on the land in South Africa. fight to build a South African Bolshevik reckon with a powerful and combative These workers face constant harassment, party is inseparable from the struggle proletariat at home, which is chafing roundups and deportations by the state to reforge an authentically Trotskyist under the attacks of the ANC regime. The and terror attacks from anti-immigrant Fourth International, world party of COSATU trade-union federation issued vigilantes, and are used as scapegoats socialist revolution .• out of convulsive struggles under the apartheid regime, which ultimately led to its downfall. But the COSATU leadership ;:: j~, soon came under the influence of the ref­ Hate TrotSkyism, .. ormist SACP, which has historically been Hate the Spartaclsts heavily intertwined with the ANC and .l>u'-d..;;;.,.....--. ties the strategic core of the black prole­ NUMBER 1 tariat to the bourgeois-nationalist ANC. A Reply to In response to the land seizures in Zim­ babwe, an April 25 statement by the the Workers International COSATU tops declared: "It is crucial, Vanguard League both for that country and the entire South­ ~ ern African region, that stability and the "LIIP'.s....u.""""'~ rule of law is installed in Zimbabwe." ~1tt.Inl~~No,8d1.:i!M4Ir Echoing these labour lackeys of neo­ apartheid capitalism is the pseudo­ Trotskyist Workers International Van­ guard League (WIVL) in Cape Town. While 'arguing that the MDC is "no friend of workers," the WIVL whines about the ..... ANC government's "quiet diplomacy ----.... - ...... ,.- approach" toward Mugabe and its failure =-~.. -- to "condemn his attacks or the land inva­ sions" (Workers International News, July Polemics on the Hate Trotskyism, 2000). WIVL should just say openly that South African Left Hate the Spartacists No.1 they want the squatters off the white letters and Articles presenting the A Reply to the Workers International farms and a return to the "rule of law"! Marxist pOSition on key questions Vanguard League What really worries the ANC and its of debate on the South African left. Publication of Spartacist South Africa, tails is maintaining the "rule of law" in Publication of the lel, April 1997 July 1998 South Africa, where millions of impover­ $1 (40 pages) $2 (36 pages) ished black people, many with family . 10'.. '.!' .,' ., ,., ....,~" .' • c"eckl""ya6Ie/m;lIfo~1' 'i'~r" "'~ ,n, ~."",jh~~:'I'''l ties to the urban proletariat, languish in 'MalCe . desPerate poverty in the rural hinter­ Spartacist Publishing.Co., Box ,1,~,7~53PO, New York, NY 10116 lands. More than 100 white farmers were 26 reprintedJrom Workers Vanguard No. 722,29 October 1999 .' ,.,Thousands 'C,o'me':O,ot: to· Stop Klan Terror , .

Photo The power of labor was evident as SSEU Local 371 members led march toward Foley Square under labor/black mobilization banner, 23 October 1999.

New Yorkers came out in their thou­ Able to show their faces only under the Union (SSEU) Local 371. Local 371 sands on October 23 determined to make protection of an army of cops, 17 Klans­ came together with members of Trans­ sure the KKK didn't ride in their city. men cowered outside the New York State port Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, They were mobilized by the call initiated Supreme Court, surrounded on all sides postal, construction, civil service and by the Partisan Defense Committee, "All by at least 8,000 determined anti-Klan many, many other trade unionists to form Out to Stop the KKK on October 23!" protesters. "Unmasked and Overwhelmed, the backbone of the mobilization to stop Hundreds of working people, students and the Klan Is Besieged at Rally," head­ the Klan. others joined in distributing 175,000 of the lined the New York Times the next day. As These unionists, who knew that com­ PDC's mobilizing leaflet in workplaces, these hooded-and-robed racists scurried ing to a mobilization to stop the Klan campuses and neighborhoods throughout back into the courthouse under police was serious business, were above all the city, escort barely midway through their what gave the mobilization its disci­ Thousands came out in defiance of the scheduled rally, the trade unionists and plined and determined character. They efforts of the Giuliani administration, its others assembled under the PDC "Labor/ acted as marshals to protect the mobili­ I cops and the courts to deny their right to Black Mobilization to Stop the KKK!" zation at 100 Centre Street. In the van­ mobilize to stop the Klan. They came out banner broke into nonstop chanting: "We guard was SSEU Local 371, led by its in opposition to appeals by the phony stopped the Klan! We stopped the Klan!" president, Charles Ensley, whose mem­ "friends of labor" in the Democratic Party Headed up by union marshals with bers stationed themselves right in front and self-appointed spokesmen for the their arms linked, they marched up of the speaker's platform and then led a black population who preached a "demon­ Lafayette Street displaying in victory the large contingent from 100 Centre Street stration for tolerance" for the "rights" of militancy, determination and defiance to Foley Square a block away, where the KKK They knew this wasn't an issue that was at the core of this mobilization thousands of others had drifted in the of "free speech" but of stopping Klan ter­ centered on the social power of organ­ hope of getting closer to the Klan. A ror and murder. They came out to drive ized labor. "We gave a message to the thousand edgy cops, with many more in the Klan lynchers off their streets. And city: This is not Klan country!" said a reserve, were restrained by this show of that's exactly what they did. member of the Social Service Employees labor power.

'II 27

The thousands who turned out saw this laborlblack mobilization as their own, and many had indeed helped build it. Workers at transit locations, hospitals and UPS depots, on buses and subways, at municipal office buildings took stacks of leaflets to distribute and poster. Many demonstrators brought their own hand­ made signs or made them on the spot. People cal1ed out suggestions for addi­ tional chants to the speaker's platform. Student governments from Borough of Manhattan Community Col1ege, Lehman, Bronx Community, Hostos, as well as students and student organizations from Columbia and New York University, Sarah Lawrence, Cornell and, many oth­ ers, endorsed and helped build the mobi­ lization to stop the Klan. Many studen~s organized contingents from their cam­ puses, which marched into the rally in WV Photos Trade unionists were the backbone groups. As the speaker for the Spartacus of NYC mobilization to stop the KKK. Youth Club-which helped build campus Right: Postal workers carried signs support-read off the names of the col­ honoring theIr brother Joseph lIeto, leges and college groups, students gunned down by fascist killer in Los cheered loudly. Angeles In July 1999. For hundreds of students, this was not only their first taste of mass political earlier this year over the killing of black the Marxist Spartacist League-initiated action, but their first sense of the social African Amadou Diallo by the NYPD. It the call which brought to bear the social power of labor organized in racially inte­ gave expression to the hundreds of thou­ power of labor and its strong, militant grated unions. Speakers from the student sands in this city-from unionized work­ component of black workers in defense of contingents spoke with fire and passion, ers to immigrant cab drivers and hot dog all the oppressed. That same power, those as exemplified by a young woman from vendors, CUNY students, artists, AIDS same forces which stopped the Klan from City College who declared: "We are here victims-who have had it with Giuliani's riding can organize the unorganized and to tel1 the KKK that you are cowards and mini-police state. It demonstrated an unemployed, can mobilize in defense of if you would like to come to Washington alternative to the Democratic Party politi­ the masses in the ghettos and barrios, can Heights, if you would like to come to cians, their black front men and labor crac}<. the "open shop" South-itself a Harlem, and if you'd like to come to flunkies, who worked as feverishly to try product of KKK anti-union terror. Brooklyn, we are waiting! Harlem is to demobilize any independent outpouring The successful laborlblack mobilization waiting, KKK!" of the working people and alL the enemies brought to life the connection between of Klan terror as they had dOl1e to contain labor's fight and the fight for black free­ A Workers Party in Action the protests over the Diallo killing within dom. Black oppression is the cornerstone What was seen in the streets of New the confines of electoral pressure politics. of racist American capitalism. There is no York City on October 23 was exactly what Many of the thousands who mobilized road to eliminating the special oppression the PDC had said was necessary to stop behind the anti-Klan rally were looking of black people other than the working­ the Klan: a powerful mobilization of the for the answer not only to stopping Klan class conquest of power. and there will be social power of the multiracial working terror but to fighting back against the no proletarian revolution to end class class, standing at the head of blacks, His­ entire system of racist capitalistexploita­ exploitation unless the working class panics, Asians, immigrants, Jews, Catho­ tion and oppression. Demonstrators lis­ actively takes up the fight for black rights. lics, gays, youth and all those the Klan has tened raptly to all the speeches from the The worlOng class has the numbers, the lined up in its sights. Our purpose was to platform. Many shouted, "That's right, organization and the power to win all give an organized and militant expression that's right" when PDC labor coordinator those things that the ruling class appropri­ to the massive outrage against the Klan. Gene Herson denounced both the Demo­ ates for itself-health care, education, It was a united-front mobilization, cratic and Republican parties as enemies decent housing, abortion rights. What is which allowed for the expression of many of labor and the oppressed. Calls for the lacking is the kind of leadership necessary diverse political viewpoints by all those working people to build their own class to fight-a leadership of the unions that who shared a commitment to the urgent party were met with applause. doesn't bow down to the bosses' laws, necessity to :;top the KKK. But it tapped What was seen on the streets of New parties and state agencies, a workers party into far more than that, intersecting the York City on October 23 was a micro­ that doesn't respect the property "rights" accumulated anger among the city's cosm of a workers party in action, i.e., the of the bourgeoisie. We need a workers working people, particularly blacks and working class mobilized in its own inter­ party that fights for a workers government Hispanics, who are fed up with being ests, acting independently of the govern­ to rip the means of production from the pushed around for years in the one-sided ment and parties of the capitalist class. capitalist class and institute a planned war against workers and the poor. The PDC-a class-struggle legal and socialist economy that operates not for the It galvanized the anger against the social defense organization whose pur­ profit of a few greedy exploiters but marauding, racist cops which exploded pose is in accordance with the views of for Ithe working people who produce t~e 28 wealth of society. That is the "kind of shows and call-ins on black radio stations, Wolkensteiil declared, "This deal is an workers party that we communists of the reportedly split union executive boards attempt to guarantee that only the Klan Spartacist League are fighting to build. and drove the Democratic Party est.ablish­ will be heard and not their intended vic­ ment to distraction. tims." She added, "The denial of a sound The Political Battle The Giuliani administration and NYPD permit to the anti-Klan rally is a provoca­ to Stop the Klan responded by setting to work in an tion against the mobilization organizers' Just as the mobilization to stop the Klan attempt to block this mobilization. Col­ ability to hold a militant, orderly mass in New York City on October 23 gave a luding with them was an unholy alliance . demonstration. A rally without centrally real taste of the social forces and leader­ ranging from the New York Civil Liberties located sound and leadership is like a car ship required for socialist revolution in Union's Norman Siegel, lawyer for the without a steering whee\." this country, it also starkly exposed the KKK, to Democratic State Assemblyman Even the right-wing New York Post (23 enemies and obstacles to organizing Scott Stringer and black Democrat Al October) denounced the court's decision struggles of the working class in its own Sharpton. The KKK's rally site was that the anti-Klan mobilization could not interests and in the interests of all those at secretly moved a block away to 60 Cen­ use loudspeakers at the same time as the the bottom of this society. These included tre Street, information that was not made KKK on the grounds that that would the capitalist cops, courts and Giuliani public for days. As it became clear that "snuff out the free speech" of the Klan. city administration; the American Civil thousands of New Yorkers were rallying Indeed, the court ruling was a graphic Liberties Union, which continued its behind the PDC's call, as tens of thou­ illustration of the race and class bias of revolting decades-long defense of "consti­ sands of leaflets were distributed over the the capitalist "justice" system-a free tutional rights" for the fascist terrorists; weekend of October 16-17, this cabal ride for Klan terror and no rights for the Democratic Party, whose calls for a moved into high gear. their intended victims! This was punctu­ "demonstration for tolerance" were aimed Stringer, joined by Sharpton and other ated by the fact that the courthouse was at trying to demobilize the working peo­ Democratic Party pols, called a press con­ literally used as a shelter for the KKK ple and others who wanted to stop the ference on October 19 to announce that when it staged its race-hate rally. Klan; Al Sharpton and the black establish­ he had applied for a permit for a "demon­ When the Klan's permit to rally with ment Amsterdam News, who grotesquely stration for tolerance" at 60 Centre Street, masks was retracted in a federal appeals filed a court brief on behalf of the Klan; where the Klan would stage its rally. That court on October 22, a disinformation the International Socialist Organization evening it came out, as a PDC press campaign was set in motion aimed at (ISO), who leapt into the camp of Giu­ release reported, that Stringer & Co. were convincing people there was no reason to liani, the Democrats, Sharpton, the ACLU "colluding with the Klan and the Giuliani come out the next day since the KKK and the Klan against the PDC-initiated administration to cut a deal to share a would not be there. A PDC press release laborlblack mobilization. sound permit with the KKK at 60 Centre that evening declared: "Whatever reports From the day that the Klan's rally was Street." The following day, Sharpton filed are circulating that the KKK currently publicly announced in a 13 October article his amicus brief on behalf of the Klan. We has no permit to stage its race-hate prov­ in the New York Post, there was a conten­ fought on behalf of the tens of thousands ocation, the working people of this city tion of two counterposed class forces­ of New York's working people who have no reason to trust the word of these those representing the interests of the cap­ wanted to stop the KKK, waging an racist terrorists or the Giuliani adminis­ italist ruling class and those representing incessant battle in the courts for their tration. The only way to guarantee that the interests of the working class and its rights to free speech and assembly. the Klan does not rear its head in New allies. The moment the PDC heard of the On October 21, a federal district court York tomorrow is if the streets are filled KKK's plans, it applied for a permit to gave the Klansmen everything they had with its opponents." hold a demonstration at the same time and asked for and the working people were And, on October 23, there were many same place as the Klan's announced rally told they were to be muzzled. The court thousands of determined opponents of the site, 100 Centre Street. The call for approved the deal cooked up by Siegel, Klan filling the area around Centre Street. a labor/black mobilization was issued Stringer and the Klan to share a sound Here was the answer to Sharpton'S defense immediately, and met with overwhelming permit and gave the KKK the right to of the Klan's right to "free speech." Many support when it hit the streets. This mobi­ stage their race-hate provocation in hoods of those who came out had personal expe­ lization had an impact on city politics not with masks. The judges denied a sound rience with the burning cross, the lynch seen in years. The issue captured the front permit for the laborlblack mobilization at rope, the shotguns through which the Klan pages of the tabloids, dominated talk 60 Centre Street. As PDC counsel Rachel "speaks." Despite being separated by hel- Reuters AP

Liberal and fake-socialist enemies of labor/black mobilization provided platform for KKK racist terrorists: NYCLU's Norman Siegel at Klan rally, Democrats AI Sharpton and Scott Stringer, ISO speaker next to pOlice banner at DemocratiC Party diversion. 29

·meted riot cops and police barricades at dif­ these ,social democrats whose Britisn bosses. Instead, they dismissed this strug­ ferent locations, they had come out not to paper once headlined "Are All Coppers gle as a battle between two wings of the show "tolerance" for the KKK as preached Really Bastards?" now ask. "Are all ruling class! With its utter contempt for by Stringer and the Democrats but in Klansmen really bastards?" the organized working class, PL's cries of response to the PDC call to stop the KKK. With the ISO acting as the donkeys for "Kick the bosses in the ass" and "Death the Democratic Party in trying to demo­ to the Klan" are little more than the bleat­ The ISO-Traitors Exposed bilize the mass labor-centered protest to ings of grandstanding liberals. Except for some of the Democratic stop the Klan, whatever pretenses it had Party faithful, like Local 1199 president to the cause of "workers power" have Linking the Power of Labor to Dennis Rivera, and a token endorsement been stripped bare. The ISO stands the Anger of the Ghettos by the leadership of the Central Labor exposed as the servants of capital against The clear intent of the liberal Demo­ Council, Stringer, Sharpton et aI.'s call the interests of the working class, black crats and their allies was to block any for "tolerance" fell on deaf ears. The only people and all the oppressed. independent expression of the power of organization to leap into Stringer's camp While the rest of the left did not play so labor and its allies to stop the Klan on with energy and purpose was the Interna­ forward a role as the ISO in serving the October 23. But they seriously miscalcu­ tional Socialist Organization, which did interests of the Democratic Party, most lated the outrage throughout this city its level best to give a cover to the Dem­ remained silent in the face of the deadly against the Klan rally and failed miserably ocratic Party-and the Klan-against the Klan threat until Stringer and Sharpton in their efforts. Throughout the building organized working class. started to call for a liberal diversion. The for this labor/black mobilization, the The ISO endorsed a meeting called by Communist Party endorsed the Stringer , Democrats and their labor lackeys evi­ a variety of lawyers and liberals to organ­ rally. Workers World Party (WWP) tried dently realized they COUldn't even try ize behind Stringer'S "demonstration for to have it both ways. Feigning some mock the usual. violence-baiting and red bait­ tolerance." When representatives of the independence, from the Democrats, they ing of the ,POC which has been attempt­ PDC intervened to call for uniting all called for people to assemble at Stringer's ed against previous PDC-initiated anti­ those who wanted to stop the Klan on site, but somewhat later than the official fascist mobilizations. That's not because October 23, there were no takers. While starting time. Then, on October 23, WWP they had any less fear of or hostility to Sharpton was outrageously defending the also had people at the PDC rally site, labor being mobilized behind a class­ Klan's "rights" in court, at the meeting the where they handed out placards that struggle program, but because they recog­ ISO enthused over what a good speaker called to "stop the Klan" and for a "new nized they couldn't openly- come out Sharpton was and how many people he trial" for black death row political pris­ against .the labor/black mobilization to Would draw to the Democratic Party oner Mumia Abu-Jamal. When SYC com­ stop the Klan in a city where the over­ diversion! As it turned out, Sharpton never rades pointed out that this sowed illusions whelming mass of the population is even showed up on October 23, doubtless in the very same courts that had sen­ directly in the cross hairs of the racist not anxious to face the jeers of the thou­ tenced Jamal to death and had upheld the terrorists. sands who had come out to stop the KKK. "right" to Klan terror, many of the people Many unions told us that they couldn't But the ISO was there with bells on. who had unwittingly taken WWP's plac­ endorse the PDC mobilization because While shamelessly enlisting with the ards traded them in for PDe placards their leadership was split over the question. Democrats, the ISO tried to cover its des­ demanding freedom for Jamal. tl Nonetheless, a number that didn't endorse picable role by issuing a little-distributed In a very unusual move, the Stalin­ asked for stacks of the POC's mobilizing leaflet under the heading "Stop the lovers of Progressive Labor Party (PL), leaflet to put in their union halls. Dennis Klan!" Since their main purpose was who smear "Trotskyites" as fascists, Rivera, who runs a well-oiled machine in opposed to stopping the KKK, this was called on people to assemble at the site of Local 1199, made no overt attempt to pure cynicism. On site on October 23, the the PDC mobilization, signing an en- ' mobilize his membership behind Stringer's ISO continued to try to deceive people dorsement form on the spot. Now a PI.. . "free speech" diversion. Likewise, the who had mobilized in response to the Internet statement crows how "thou­ hidebound craft-union bureaucrats at the PDC's call by steering them into the site sands" were "led by PLP" and asserts, "It head of the Central Labor Council who of the Democrats' location, which was a took the PLP to lead a breakaway march endorsed Stringer's "demonstration for tol­ police trap. When people discovered this of hundreds who really wanted to con­ erance" did not put out the word that trade deception, many who tried to leave found front the Klan." In fact, what PL did was unionists: should stay away from the their way blocked by the cops. "lead" itself straight into a line of riot laborlblack mobilization. Having been provided a temporary, if cops a short distance away. PL's whole What was reflected here was the fear unwitting, audience by the ISO's treach­ strategy of individual confrontations with of the labor bureaucrats and black Demo­ ery, Democrats like Senator Charles the cops and the fascists is based on a crats that by opposing the PDC's anti­ Schumer and others tried to turn the event rejection of the working class as a force Klan mobilization they could potentially into an election rally. They were repeat­ for social struggle. Giuliani's cops did detonate the anger building at the base of edly' booed by the angry protesters who arrest several anti-Klan protesters on the unions, the outrage in the ghettos and had not come out for election speeches or October 23. We demand: Drop all the barrios. But that didn't stop them from messages of "tolerance" but to stop Klan charges now! trying to head it off. terror. While the anti-Klan demonstrators The self-proclaimed redder-than-red In defending their legal efforts on understood the role of the cops in protect­ communists of Pl.-who can't tell the behalf of the Klan, the editors of the ing these nightriding terrorists. the ISO difference between a trade union and Amsterdam News grotesquely echoed speaker stood in front of the banner of the right-wing religious bigots like the Prom­ the racists who compared the Klan Latino Officers Association. This is not ise Keepers-are guided by absolutely no with Khallid·.Muhammad. Condemning unusual for the ISO, which has a long his­ class criteria. Thus, they expressed no this equation of the victims of Klan ter­ tory of viewing the cops as "workers" and solidarity with the, powerful Teamsters ror with its perpetrators, PDC labor coor­ upholding their "right" to organize. Will union during its strike against the UPS dinator Gene Herson, responded: "The '!"~'"" "" !!'1"'!:"!!'!!!!!III.!'I'; III ii li •• I, ••'ii!I! iiijj;Eiiiii!iiIji!;';!!!;i_.".,IiI_"•• __ ~_ I'" . ._'"".'"II ______.... _. ___ .______I

30

impOrtant: lessons for all those who want to struggle against union-busting, racism. poverty, homelessness. war and all the other hideous expressions of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppres: sion. Central is that the capitalist state is not neutral. It is the instrument for organ­ ized violence to ensure the rule of one class-the capitalists--over another class, the proletariat. As Marxists, we know that the bourgeois state at its core consists of special armed bodies of men-the cops, the military, the prison system and the whole "justice system"-whose job is to protect the profits and rule of the capital­ ists and to repress the workers. All histor­ ical experience has shown that the work­ ing class cannot reform the state and use poe banner on October 23. Mobilizing labor/black power to win Mumla's it in its own interests but must create its freedom is counterposed to reliance on Democrats, capitalist courts. own state, a workers state. The revolution­ ary fight for proletarian state power is the purpose of this is to conceal the real demonstration of class unity and unity of only road to black freedom and the eman­ enemy and deny the true nature of the the oppressed behind the social power of cipation of labor and all the oppressed. KKK. KhalJid Muhammad is an anti­ the multiracial working class. One chant We didn't invent the perspective on Semitic demagogue, but that's all he is. in particular resonated at the PDC mobi­ which our anti-Klan mobilizations are The Klan is a terrorist action group lization: "Asian, Latin, black and white­ based. It is the concrete application of whose purpose is genocide." Speaking Workers of the world, unite!" Everyone the experience of the Bolshevik Party at a PDC press conference on October 19, could see that proletarian power right which led the first, and only, successful Jim Webb of the Coalition of Black Trade before their eyes in this labor-centered working-class revolution in history-the Unionists added, "Khallid has never mur­ anti-Klan mobilization. October Revolution of 1917. Like the dered, lynched, burned churches, syn­ pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy in agogues and homes." The Fight for a this country which undermines the gains In its call initiating this mobilization, Workers America that were won through hard class strug­ the PDC noted that the Klan was making The Klan was born out of the bloody gle, the gains of the Russian Revolution a big mistake by thinking it could ride in reaction in the South following the defeat were betrayed by the Stalinist bureauc­ New York City, and October 23 proved of the slavocracy in the American Civil racy which hijacked the exercise of polit­ that. The thousands who turned out that War. These were the hooded-and-robed ical power by the workers. Paralleling the day sent a powerful message that the KKK agents of the former Confederacy, who policies of the AFL-CIO tops, the Stalin­ had better not try it again. This mobiliza­ carried out a campaign of terror, intimida­ ists pursued class collaboration, not inter­ tion was also a powerful response to the tion. mutilation and murder aimed at stran­ nationalist class struggle. Ultimately, this demagogy of Muhammad and his former gling the political rights that were won by led to the destruction of the Soviet Union mentor, Louis Farrakhan, who seek to the freed slaves during Reconstruction. by the forces of imperialism and domes­ channel the anger of the ghetto into big­ The KKK spearheaded the restoration of tic counterrevolution in 1991-92. otry against Jewish, Arab and Asian shop­ white supremacy in the form of the system Since then, the imperialist rulers have keepers in order that they can be the sole of Jim Crow segregation that held sway for been celebrating the "death of commu­ exploiters of the ghetto masses. This nearly a century. It heralded a resurgence, nism." But communism isn't dead-it is response was palpable in minority neigh­ reaching several million strong in the the program that expresses the class inter­ borhoods throughout the city. 1920s, with the lynching of Jewish busi­ ests of the workers and oppressed, grow­ A Korean shopkeeper in Harlem came nessman Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915. ing out of their aspirations and struggles out of his store to donate money and Today the Klan is the lowlife. terrorist for a society of genuine equality and hand out leaflets to build for the anti­ bunch held in reserve by the American social justice. What is needed to real­ Klan mobilization. In Chinatown, a mer­ capitalist ruling class. This ruling class, a ize those aspirations is a workers party, chant took a stack of leaflets and taught tiny minority which expropriates all the which can bring the consciousness to the PDC soapboxers how to say "stop the real wealth of this society, believes that working class of its social power and his­ Klan" in Chinese, immediately drawing everyone else has no rights which this toric interests in fighting the rule of cap­ sympathetic crowds. At the mobilization rich, white man's government is bound ital and every manifestation of the barbar­ itself, many black participants remarked to respect. This capitalist ruling class ity of this system. What is needed is a on the multiracial character of the turn­ needs the homegrown Nazis of the KKK, workers revolution, which will break the out and echoed denunciations of anti­ to be deployed to crush the organizations power of the few and liberate the many­ Semitism from the speaker's platform. of the working class when the masses the working people and their allies-who In contrast to the preaching of liberal can no longer be lulled by the lie that will employ the wealth created by their "diversity"-like Jesse Jackson's "rain­ their interests are represented by capital­ labor for the benefit of the majority both bow coalition" or David Dinkins' "beau­ ist "democracy." in America and around the globe. On

tiful mosaic"-which means acceptance I The political battle required to build the October 23, thousands of New York's of the racist status quo 'and Democratic laborlblack mobilization which stopped working people and minorities got a Party ethnic politics. thiS was a powerful the Klan from riding in NYC contains small taste of that workers power.•

I, Id , '1 III I 31

The first Labor Black Leagues were formed as a result of the Spartacist League-initiated, 5,OOO-strong laborl black mobilization that stopped the Ku Klux Klan from marching in Washing­ ton, D.C. in November 1982. We stand for mobilizing the masses of minority . ,and working people in militant inte­ grated struggle against the brutal system of racist oppression that is capitalist America. Initiated by and fraternally allied with the Spartacist League, a mul­ tiracial revolutionary Marxist organiza­ tion, the Labor Black Leagues are part of the revolutionary movement of the workers and oppressed against the bosses and for socialism. WV Photos If You Stand For- 1 Full rights for black people and for everyone else in jobs, Fight any and every attempt of the government to take away or housing and schools! Defeat the racist assault on affirmative cut back even more social programs such as Social Security, action! For union-run minority job recruitment and training pro­ Medicare, Medicaid, public health and aid to education and grams! For union hiring halls! Open up the universities to all­ housing! For a massive program of public works-high-quality for open admissions, free tuition and a full living stipend for all integrated housing, schools, libraries, hospitals for the working students. Free, quality, integrated public education for all! people and the poor! 2 A tighting labor movement-picket lines mean don't cross! 9 Down with the chauvinist ~oison of protectionism! For inter­ Defeat police scabherding and strikebreaking through mass national working-class solidarity! Support revolutionary strug­ pickets and union defense guards! For sit-down strikes against gles of working people abroad! Defend Cuba, Vietnam, China mass layoffs! Fight union-busting, keep the capitalist courts out and North Korea against capitalist restoration and imperialist of the unions! Organize the unorganized, unionize the South! attack! For labor action against U.S. imperialist war moves and Jobs for all-for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay with full military adventures! For the right of independence for Puerto cost-of-living escalator clause! Cops and prison guards out of Rico! U.S. troops out of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean! the unions! 10 Down with the Democrats and Republicans! For a revolu­ 3 Fight for women's rights! Defend abortion r;,\inics! Free abor­ tionary workers party that champions the cause of all the tion on demand; free, quality 24-hour childcare! Equal pay for oppressed! Finish the Civil War! Those who labor must rule! equal work! For free, quality health care for all! For a workers government to take industry away from its racist, 4 Full citizenship rights for all immigrants; everyone who incompetent and corrupt owners! Rebuild America on a socialist made it into this country has the right to stay and live decently! planned economy! Stop deportations! No to racist "English only" laws! Down with anti-Hispanic, anti-Semitic, anti-Arab and anti-Asian bigotry! - Join the Labor Black Leagues! 5 Down with anti-gay laws! Full democratic rights for homo­ Membership pledge is $3/year unemployed; $1 O/year employed. sexuals! Government out of the bedroom! For more information, write: 6 Mass laborlblacklHispanic mobilizations drawing on the CHICAGO (312) 454-4930 power of the unions against the racist terrorists. Stop the Nazis! Labor Black Struggle League Stop the KKK! Box 6938, Chicago, IL 60680 7 Abolish the racist death' penalty! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! NEW YORK (212) 267-1025 Free all victims of racist capitalist repression! No faith in the Labor Black League for Social Defense capitalist courts! No to gun control! Defend victims of cop terror and racist police frame-up! For class-struggle, non-sectarian Box 2502, Church St. Station legal and social defense; support the work of the Partisan New York, NY 10008 Defense Committee! OAKLAND (510) 839-0851 I 8 Unconditional opposition to every attempt to abolish ~elfarer' Labor Black League for Social Defense Down with slave-labor, union-busting "workfare" schemes!. Box 29497, Oakland, CA,94604 .. r.~::"'" .: 1' .. ;;:.::;;::j.;;;:,;;;;.O: ...... "i.;iiiiiiiioiiilll"_."IIII •• II., __~._. __•• ______

32 Statement of the New York Labor Black League for Social Defense and the Spartacist League, February 20()().

There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! February 25-They shot down and killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black man, in a barrage of 41 bullets. And today these four cops, part of the Street Crimes Unit which rampages through the ghettos and barrios under the slogan, "We Own the Night," walked out of court free men. The arguments by the attorneys for the police, the role played by the prosecution in whitewashing the cops, the judge's four-hour instructions to the jury and now the verdict itself are all blatant statements of what we in the Labor Black League for Social Defense have been saying from the start: There is no justice in the capitalist courts! Written in the blood of Amadou Diallo, the message is loud and clear. For the capitalist rulers of this society, the cops were simply "doing their job" as a racist occupying army in the inner cities. The rights of citizenship that are suppos­ Up to 8,000 people marched through Midtown Manhattan on 26 February edly granted to all in this society under 2000 to protest acquittal of four cops who gunned down Amadou Olallo. the U.S. constitution-the right to bear arms, to free speech and assembly-have onto the streets while condemning hun­ Sharpton and Dennis Rivera, president of been redefined to apply only to the cops dreds of thousands of women and chil­ SEIU Local 1199, came up with a ten­ whose purpose is to "serve and protect" dren to starvation by "ending welfare as point program to "reform" the cops­ the interests of. the tiny rich, white we know it." And if you want to see an including a demand that the killer cops minority who own and control the enor­ "investigation" by Janet Reno's Justice get a raise in pay! mous wealth of this society against the Department look no further than the No one heard Sharpton or Rivera raise vast majority at the bottom. It's the 21st incinerated corpses of 86 men, women a peep in protest when New York transit century version of the Dred Scott deci­ and children of the racially integrated workers, who were fighting to get their sion: the black population in the ghettos Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, pay raised, were met with strikebreaking have no rights that the cops are bound to Texas, who were sent to a fiery death on injunctions by Democratic Party state respect. And it's one that vicious racist Reno's order in 1993. attorney general Eliot Spitzer and mayor Giuliani is itching to enforce as Sharpton's appeals for "justice" to the Republican mayor Giuliani. At the same he mobilizes his cops on full alert. agencies of capitalist injustice are time, the union tops are busy gladhand­ Al Sharpton is preaching that the fed­ designed to try to stupefy black people, ing police "unions" and organizing cops, eral government. will intervene and turn the working class and all the opponents prison guards and other armed servants this verdict around. Tell that to Abner of cop terror. That's what he did last year of the capitalist state. We say: cops and Louima who has been made to relive his too when, together with other black prison guards out of the unions! hideous torture at the hands of the cops Democratic Party officials and trade­ The cops can't be reformed. Their job on the stand of a federal investigation. union bureaucrats, Sharpton sought to is to operate as the armed enforcers for The Democratic Party Clinton admin­ channel the mass outrage over the Diallo the rule of racist American capitalism. istration has poured thousands more cops killing into electoral pressure politics. The Feds aren't going to help you-they . No Illusions in Feds, Democrats! For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

'"I 1'1 33 are the central executive committee of their capitalist' class exploiters and their this whole system of cop terror. Nor are ; political parties, be they Democrats or the cops going to be "controlled by the RepUblicans. community" for the simple reason that That kind of leadership was seen in they are servants of a ruling class whose action last October 23 at the head of the profits are derived from the exploitation COP~ ARE nearly IO,OOO-strong mobilization that of labor and the racist oppression of BOSSES· ran the Klan out of New York City. Initi­ blacks, immigrants and a11 minorities. ated by the Partisan Defense Committee Against Sharpton and the labor mis­ COPSOIJTOf and heavily built by the Labor Black leaders who seek to tie the working League and the Spartacist League this class, black people and a11 the oppressed THE UNIOIIS! ,{ mobilization, centered on the power of to their class enemies, particularly as labor, standing at the head of blacks, represented by the Democratic Party, the immigrants, gays and all the intended Labor Black League has a fundamentaJly victims of Klan terror, was an example different perspective based on mobilizing of a workers party in action. Standing on the power of our class, the multiracial the other side of the barricades, working labor movement. Massive protest and overtime to stop this independent mobi­ strike action by New York's powerful lization of the working class, was Al and integrated working class--transit, Sharpton and the Democratic Party hospital, city and hotel workers-would establishment who preached "tolerance" give an organized political expression' for the KKK lynchers. Now, Sharpton and social power to the outrage of the and the black preachers counsel toler­ Photo inner cities against cop terror. New York SL/LBL called for mobi­ ance for cop brutality telling black peo­ There wi11 be no end to police brutality lization of labor power at protests ple to turn the other cheek and pray. short of the destruction of the system of against OIallo killing while Demo­ It is through the leadership of a work­ capitalist exploitation and racist oppres­ crats pushed pro-cop whitewash ers party that the power of labor will be sion which the cops serve as armed schemes. welded to the anger of the inner cities to guard dogs. But a protest based on the uproot a system based on exploitation organized muscle of the labor movement Defense stands for mobilizing the masses and oppression enforced by racist cop would give the cops and their capitalist of black, minority and working people brutality. When those who labor rule we masters some pause. More importantly it for integrated struggle against the brutal will begin to build an egalitarian socialist would serve to imbue the working class system of race and class oppression that society where racist terror and oppres­ with the understanding that its interests is capitalist America. We fight to build a sion will be eliminated once and for all are inseparably linked to the defense of leadership that is based on a program of and the tremendous wealth of this soci­ the ghettos and barrios and the fight for class struggle-the understanding that ety will be used to provide a decent life black freedom. the interests of the working people are for the working people, blacks, immi­ The Labor Black League for Social irreconcilably counterposed to those of grants, the poor, the young, the aged .•

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34

What Diallo Really Means " The doorway execution of Amadou Diallo, and the subse­ what will be said after the election? This then, is the voice of quent acquittal of the four killer cops by a distant jury in the "New Democrat." One that sounds suspiciously like the Albany, New York in late February, 2000 is contributing to a Dixie Democrats, the voice that protects the status quo, firestorm of controversy and community outrage in New changing nothing, and promising to change even less. ' York, and in other parts of the country. The legendary R & B singers, the Temptations, used to Perhaps the most interesting responses have been the sing, in "Ball of Confusion," about the politicians who say political ones, which seem to suggest that the tragedy could "vote for me, and I'll set you free!" "New" politicians don't somehow have been averted, if only the city had been led by even promise freedom. They promise tolerance. As if the a Democrat. While it is undeniable that the repressive poor are beings of pestilence, who are to be "tolerated." regime of Torquemada Giuliani has contributed to the aura of They can't even promise "freedom" in this, the Prisonhouse police aggression against the people, that is not a distinctive of Nations, where 2 million souls groan in the American feature of Republicanism, as it is of statism, for the two Gulag. Indeed, they cannot begin to promise this, for they faces of the State wear Republican and/or Democratic garb. have been pivotal in the very construction, and consolida­ The interests of the state are power, and conservation of tion, of the Prison Industrial Complex, the status quo, no matter how unjust that status quo happens They are not the solution, for their only claim to fame is to be. to bring in some black management of this Menagerie of When one considers the behavior of the police under the Pain. A few high appointees, Some cabinet members. A new Democratic Dinkins administration, one finds the same kind diversity over the same system of repression. of brutality, of racist anti-Black police terror, and indeed, as It's time for us to look further for our political solutions. the infamous Police Riot in front of New York's City Hall We need to think in terms of new political configurations, demonstrated, where the target of cop ire was the Mayor that speak to our deeper social, racial, ethnic and class iden­ himself! tities. For, clearly, this has not, and does not promise to work. There, memory recalls, hundreds, if not thousands of cops The objective of all politics is power. likened their "commander-in-chief' (the Mayor) to a wash­ No major political party in America can even begin to room attendant! No mayor can claim an administration promise black folks in America the power to stand on their where there was a true dearth of police violence against the own doorstep, or ride their own car, or walk the streets of the poor, and the powerless, and against the Black and Latino urban center, without the very real threat of being "acciden­ communities. tally" blastedinto eternity. A politics that cannot, Of will not The dangers presented by the Diallo killing are twofold; 1) control the agents of that polity (that is, the police) is unWOf­ It is a harbinger of greater violence against unarmed Black thy of our support. and nonwhite life by the cops; and 2) It will be used to mobilize Democratic political campaigns for mayor, the 2 February 2000 Senate, or the Presidency. ©2000 Mumia Abu-Jamal The first, of course, is self-explanatory, but as to the sec­ ond, the danger lies in the illusion, that perhaps black life will somehow be safer in the city with Democrats in political Join the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Contact the control. Partisan Defense Committee. In New York: PDC, P.O. The depth of that illusion is illustrated by the tepid and Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013- weak comments that are uttered by many major white candi­ 0099; phone (212) 406·4252; e-mail: 75057.3201@ dates for political office on the Democratic side. compuserve.com. In Chicago: PDC, P.O. Box 802867, The Democratic senatorial candidate, Hillary Clinton, in Chicago, IL 60680-2867; phone (312) 454-4931. In the the aftermath of the Diallo killers' acquittal, issued a state­ Bay Area: PDC, P.O. Box 77462, San Francisco, CA ment to the effect that "police officers should work to under­ stand the community, and the community should understand 94107·0462; phone (510) 839-0852. the risks faced by police officers." This, in the afterglow of a Urgently needed contributions for Mumia's legal de­ whitewash quasi-prosecution and acquittal of four cops who fense, which are tax-deductible, should be made pay­ glocked Diallo to death in his doorway, for committing the able to the Bill of Rights· Foundation, earmarked capital crime of "standing while black" (SWB)! This, in "Mumia Abu-Jamal Legal Defense," and sent to the studied political reflection of a case where cops fired 41 Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, 163 Amsterdam shots at an unarmed man! Ave., No. 115, New York, NY 10023-5001. If you wish to Do you really think that this is a promise of safety if and correspond with Jamal, you can write to: Mumia Abu­ when she gets elected? If this is what she says when she Jamal, AM8335, SCI Greene, 175 Progress Drive, wants and presumably needs Black and Puerto Rican votes, i Waynesburg, PA 15370.

".n" .. ' 1111_11 35 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 736, 19 May 2000

, SL/SYC Revolutionary Contingent at Bay Area RaUy . t 1'1' 11"1#1 Free Mumia! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

More than 3,000 people rallied As the Bay Area SYC contingent call The liberals and reformists seek to in defense of death row political pris­ reprinted below makes clear, the liber­ ,turn Jamal into a poster boy to illustrate oner Mumia Abu-Jamal in San Fran­ als and reformists-such as Socialist that this racist capitaHst system is inher­ cisco on May 13, while smaller protests Action, Workers World Party, Interna­ ently fair. This was captured in a full­ took place in Chicago, Philadelphia and tional Socialist Organization, Revolution­ page ad in the New York Times (7 May) other cities. A week earlier, some 6,000 ary Communist Party/Refuse & Resist!­ signed by prominent academics, which people packed New York's Madison did not organize these protests around the concluded: "While there are those who Square Garden theater for a rally there. Mumia's cause was also featured­ through speeches taped from his cell on death row-at commencement ceremo-

nies at Antioch College on April 29 and five days later at a 25th anniversary com­ memoration at Kent State of the National Guard killing of four student protesters against the Vietnam War. Many youth have taken up Mumia's cause because they see the fight for his freedom as part of a struggle against social injustice and racist oppression, But the liberal and reformist organizers of the protests consciously formulated the rally slogans to foster illusions in the capitalist injustice system. While a handful of speakers at the SF rally mouthed the words "there is no justice in the courts," none took exception to the huge banner behind them emblazoned with the call "New Trial Now!"-pushing the notion Young Spartacus that Jamal will get justice in the capitalist San Francisco, 13 May 2000: Revolutionary Contingent called for mobilizing courts that framed up this innocent man labor's social power to free Mumia. Against liberal appeals for "new trial," we and sent him to death row. say: "There is no justice in the capitalist courts!" Many young protesters in San Fran­ cisco found what they were looking for in call to "free Mumia" because they seek a believe Mumia is innocent and should be the Revolutionary Contingent built by the bloc with liberal Democrats who won't freed now, and others who have no opin­ Spartacus Youth Club, the Spartacist call for freeing a convicted "cop killer." ion about his innocence, we are all League and the Labor Black League. Pro­ These liberal capitalist politicians merely united in viewing Mumia's 1982 trial as a testers literally tossed away the signs they want to clean up the more embarrassing travesty of justice, and affirm that he had been given that appealed to the racist aspects of Jamal's 1982 frame-up trial on MUST have a new trial!" Likewise, lib- injustice system for a "new trial," leaving bogus charges of killing a Philadelphia . eral Democratic Party SF Board of Super­ them in a pile on the ground, and joined policeman. Many of the SF protesters . visors president Tom Ammiano told the . our contingent of nearly 100 behind the joined us when we chanted, "Democrats crowd that Mumia is "a man who may Partisan Defense Committee banner read­ and Republicans starve the poor! For a be innocent," for which he was rightly ing "There Is No Justice in the Capitalist workers party to wage class war!" and booed. Courts! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish "Capitalism means racism and war! So­ At last year's April 24 "Millions for the Racist Death Penalty!" cialist revolution is what we're for!" Mumia" rally, a handful of small-time 36

Bay Area labor fakers like Jack Heyman ist exploitation, who oppose imperial­ 'We start with the Marxist understand­ of ILWU longshore Local 10 and Bob ist mass murder from the Balkans to ing that the capitalist state, based on the Mandel of the Oakland teachers union, Iraq. The Partisan Defense Committee' cops, courts and prisons, is a force for joined by the slimy Bolshevik Tendency, calls on working people, minorities, organized violence against the exploited acted to camouflage their appeal to the youth and all opponents of capitalist and oppressed working class. While 'we liberals in defense of the "fairness" of the repression in the U.S. and around must pursue every means of legal capitalist courts by tacking "Free Mumia" the world to demand: Freedom now for redress, the fight to free Jamal must be onto the call for a new trial. This year, Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist mobilized independently of the racist even the "left" fig leaf was largely gone; death penalty! There is no justice in the capitalist state which has worked for as one protester said to a WV salesman at capitalist courts! March with the Sparta­ years to frame him up. the rally, "It's an election year, what do cus Youth Club in a revolutionary contin­ We put all our confidence in the social you expect?" gent based on these demands on May 13! power of the multiracial working class. The reformists subordinate the issue of Instead of demanding freedom for Workers unions are the only significant Mumia's innocence and freedom to their Mumia, the liberal and reformist organ­ force for integration in the workplace attempt to make the Democratic Party izers of the May 13 demonstration have and on the factory floor in racist Amer­ more palatable by cleaning up its image, watered down their demands in order to ica. Unlike students, the working class in in order to better tie the workers to their attract hypocritical Democratic Party pol­ the trade unions has the social power and capitalist exploiters. This was clear at a iticians. They say only: "Stop the execu­ potential to become a battalion in the May 12 "Labor Conference for Mumia" tion!" and "New trial for Mumia'" or "Let struggle against racial oppression and in Oakland organized by the Labor the evidence be heard!" Do not be put off exploitation and to shake the foundations Action Committee, which passed the fol­ by the watered-down politics ofthe organ­ of decaying world imperialism. The fight lowing motion put forward by Mandel: izers of this demonstration. Mumia's life to free Mumia, to abolish the racist death "WHEREAS [Philadelphia mayor] Ed depends on the broadest mobilization, penalty, if undertaken with a mobiliza­ Rendell has been appointed the chair­ particularly by the multiracial working tion of the union movement, would be a man of the Democratic National Com­ class that has real social power. All out on first, giant step in that direction. But to mittee and wil1 playa leading role in the Democratic convention in LA in August May 13! undertake this struggle, labor must break 2000 and To wage an effective fight for Jamal's the hold of the current pro-capitalist "WHEREAS Ed Rendell was the Phila­ freedom it is vital to understand what AFL-CIO misleadership, which ties the delphia District Attorney when Mumia we are up against: who our enemies are, working class hand and foot by preach­ was railroaded and has continued to play who our real allies are. Mountains of evi­ ing reliance on the capitalist Democratic an active role in seeking his execution .... dence refuting the frame-up and proving Party. The fight to free Jamal must be "THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that Jamal's innocence have been heard time mobilized not only against the capitalist this conference condemns Rendell's and again. Obscenely the pro-Democratic state, but against the capitalist parties appointment." Party reformists even tell us to pressure that run it. Mandel, one-time supporter of the SL, Janet Reno, the mass murderer of 86 men, On 23 October 1999 a powerful multi­ longtime virulent Spartacist-baiter and women and children in Waco, Texas in racial labor-centered mobilization of up-and-coming junior union bureaucrat, 1993, to "investigate" Mumia's frame­ , 10,000 initiated by the PDC ran the KKK is now openly embracing a perspective of up. Bourgeois liberals try to paint the race-terrorists off the streets of New York putting a better face on the Democratic frame-up of Jamal as an exception, a City-against the opposition of the Dem­ Party. Exposing these pro-Democratic "miscarriage of justice," in the same way ocratic Party that defended the "rights" of Party labor fakers, an SL supporter said they try to pass off the killing by racist the KKK murderers. This was a powerful from the floor of the May 12 conference, cops of African immigrant Amadou example on a small scale of a revolution­ "In order for the working class to exercise Diallo in a hail of 41 bullets as an "aber­ 'ary workers party in action--mobilizing its power, it must be mobilized politically ration" in an otherwise just system of all the oppressed behind the working independently of its class enemies, the "democracy." Behind the call for a "new class in opposition to the capitalists, their Democratic Party." trial" is a reformist political program parties and their state-as opposed to the premised on the belief that the brutal union misleaders who tie workers and racist capitalist state---whose sole pur­ blacks to the Democrats. Join the Revolutionary pose is to defend the "right" of the capi­ When he was granted a stay of execU­ Contingent! talist ruling class to reap profits off the tion in August 1995 Mumia wrote. "Let The notorious frame-up of Mumia labor of working people---can be pres­ us utilize this precious time to build a Abu-Jamal symbolizes what the barbaric, sured and reformed to be "just." stronger and broader movement, to not racist death penalty is all about in capital­ This is a dangerous illusion! Look 'stay' one execution, but to halt them all! ist America. The capitalist forces of "law what happened to Hurricane Carter.' Down with the racist U.S. death pen­ and order," represented by both the Dem­ Framed up on false murder charges in the alty!" Black oppression is an integral part ocratic and Republican parties, want mid-1960s because he was an advocate of of racist American capitalism. To sweep Jamal dead because they see in this elo­ the right of armed self-defense, Carter away the entire apparatus of capitalist quent journalist, MOVE supporter and finally won a new trial in 1976 after an repression, to end their whole system of former Black Panther Party spokesman international protest campaign. But when racial oppression, exploitation and war. the threat of black revolution, a symbol he was convicted again, the liberals fled requires a multiracial revolutionary work­ of defiant opposition to their system of his cause and Carter spent another ten ers party to lead the fight for a workers racist oppression. They want to execute years in prison. Don't let those who government which will take industry this innocent man as a warning to all preach reliance on the "neutrality" of the I away from its capitalist owners and those who fight against racism and racist, imperialist U.S. state keep you rebuild America on a socialist planned vicious cop repression in the ghettos, who away from demonstrating your determi­ economy. Finish the Civil War! Forward 'defend the working class against capital- nation to free Mumia! to a workers state!.

'II 1 37 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 728, 28 January 2000

Down With the Confederate Flag of. Slavery! In the largest protest protest, which was endorsed against racism in the South by the president of the state since the civil rights move­ AFL-CIO. ment, up to 50,000 people On the day of the march, marched in Columbia, South Democratic presidential con- Carolina on January 17 to . tenders Al Gore and Bill demand the removal of Bradley both called for the the Confederate flag from removal of the flag from the above the statehouse. From statehouse to score points throughout the state and . against Republicans George throughout the South, pro­ W. Bush and John McCain, testers turned out on Martin who openly sided with the Luther King Day in numbers racists in South Carolina. far exceeding organizers' Bill Clinton chimed in to predictions. They came be­ announce his opposition to cause they know what the the flying of the Confederate Confederate flag stands for: flag. black enslavement and racist Aiding Clinton & Co. in murder, KKK cross-burn­ this cynical hustle is the lib­ ings and church bombings, eral NAACP, whose national the lynching of any who president, Kweisi Mfume" is would fight for the rights of himself a former Democratic . blacks and labor. Every­ Congressman and head of where it flies, from Southern the Congressional Black state capitols to KKK and AP Caucus. The NAACP, one of Columbia, South Carolina, 17 January 2000: In largest the organizers of the January Nazi skinhead rallies, it is an protest in South since civil rights movement, up to 50,000 incitement to racist terror. marched to demand removal of banner of slavery and Klan 17 protest, has initiated an The Democratic Party, terror from statehouse. economic boycott of South headed by the Southerners Carolina until it removes Gore and Clinton, has cyni- the racist flag from the state­ cally seized on the wide­ Fjnjsh :the;!"~iVM'iWa,~:IOfc!B~;IUbu.atJon house. Likewise, Jesse Jack­ spread revulsion toward son's RainbowlPUSH Coali­ the Confederate flag to try '." '.-0' " Thr... M~~~R.ev,olui~iiln! .;, ;. . tion has called for a boycott to boost its prospects in the of Georgia, Whose state flag 2000 elections. The Democratic South who presided over 'decades of .Tim Crow incorporates the Confederate emblem, Carolina state government hoisted the segregation in the South through naked and is organizing a protest in front of the Confederate flag in 1962 as a symbol of dictatorship abetted by the terror of the Super Bowl in Atlanta on January 30. racist defiance of the mass civil rights KKK-a system to keep black people "in These black Democrats fear the indepen­ struggles for black equality and integra­ their place" and trade unions out. dent mobilization of working.people and tion, in the same spirit as the forces of The inseparable connection between therefore seek to channel outrage against slavery who fired on the Union flag at the struggle for the rights of blacks and racism into the trap of Democratic Party' Fort Sumter a century before. Nine days labor in "open shop" South Carolina was electoralism, as they did when many thou­ before the Columbia march, a rabble of brought home with a vengeance on Janu­ sands bravely fought during the civil some 6,000 racists had turned out to ary 20 in Charleston, as 600 state and rights movement to tear down Jim Crow. uphold this racist banner as a symbol local police viciously attacked a mass With such stone racists as Republi­ of Southern "heritage." On January 17, picket by the overwhelmingly black can South Carolina State Senator Arthur marchers carried signs reading, "Your International Longshoremen's Associa­ Ravenel denouncing the protesters and Heritage Is My Slavery." It is the "heri­ tion (ILA) Local 1422. Just three days railing against the NAACP as the "Na­ tage" of the slaveholders who lost the before, Local 1422 had sent a bus­ tional Association for Retarded People," it Civil War, of the Dixiecrat Democrats load of its members to the Columbia is scarcely surprising that Clinton & Co. I I 1111 1111111111111..1. I J 1.llllj 1111111.111111 II 11111 111111_1.1_111 111.1111_1111._.'11111_11111_.1_"_"_'__ • ____'.'''_.'' __''''''''_' __ ,.,._. ______• ______. ___ .• ______

38 can, with the crucial aid of the black gence of dass struggle is to break' from Democrats, posture as defenders of black the politics of "lesser evilism." Only by people on this issue. But let us not forget freeing itself from the grip of the capital­ that it is the Clinton administration ist class and its parties can the working which, even more than its Republican class go forward. The struggle for union­ predecessors, has from its first days in ization, against police brutality and the office carried out a wholesale assault on mass incarceration of young black men the lives and livelihoods of the black pop­ must be linked to the fight for a workers ulation. Clinton entered the White House party, a party based on the independence with a vow to "end welfare as we know of the working class from all reliance on it," and has carried through on that, con­ the class enemy and fighting for the per­ signing millions of white, black and im­ spective of a workers government, where migrant women and children to starvation those who labor rule. and homelessness. In concert with the RepUblicans, the Clinton White House Democrats Shield has vastly expanded the forces of racist KKK lynchers repression, from putting tens of thou­ Seeking to court the black vote, the sands more killer cops on the streets, to Democrats try to posture as opponents of throwing hundreds of thousands of black the Confederate flag above the South Car­ people into prison, to continually speed­ olina statehouse. But only last October, ing up the nation's death rows through the Democratic Party pulled out all the measures like the 1996 "Anti -Terrorism stops in an effort to ensure that the Amer­ and Effective Death Penalty Act." ican Knights of the Ku Klux Klan would White supremacy and the racist oppres­ be able to wield the Confederate flag in a sion of black people-symbolized by the rally to inspire and organize racist terror blood soaked Confederate flag-have in the heart of New York City! From always been the bedrock of American racist "law and order" Senator Charles capitalism. The issue of slavery was set­ John Herman Williams Schumer to black Democrat AI Sharpton, tled through blood and iron in the Civil Robert F. Williams (center) organized the New York State Democratic Party War. But the promise of black freedom armed self-defense against KKK ter­ establishment acted as the main force was betrayed by the victorious Northern ror in Monroe, North Carolina in late against the massive mobilization of inte­ capitalists, who sealed an alliance with 1950s. grated working-class power that rode the the ex-slaveholders by withdrawing Union KKK and their Confederate flags out of troops from the South following the Com­ "lesser evil" politics which binds working town on October 23. The Democrats promise of 1877, marking the defeat of people and the black masses to the capi­ called for a demonstration of "tolerance" Reconstruction. The emancipated slaves talist Democratic Party. The AFL-CIO for the hated KKK and offered to share were left defenseless against the land­ labor bureaucracy reinforces these illu­ their sound permit to allow the fascists to owners and the rising racist terror exem­ sions through its service as representa­ spew out their incitements to race war, plified by the Ku Klux Klan. At the same tives of the interests of the capitalist class working behind the scenes with Republi­ time, the smashing of slavery laid the enemy within the organized labor move­ can mayor Giuliani, the cops and the basis for the eventual integration of black ment As such, the labor tops routinely try courts. Sharpton and the black establish­ workers into the expanding industries in to prevent, derail and sell out trade-union ment Amsterdam News went so far as to the North, although forcibly segregated at struggles. file a "friend of the court" brief on behalf the bottom of capitalist society. At the political level, the AFL-CIO of the Klan's "right" to rally for genocide. Today, black people make up a large bureaucracy has been a structural compo­ The laborlblack mobilization against and strategic part of the multiracial nent of the Democratic Party since Frank­ the Klan was initiated by the Partisan working class in the most powerful lin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" coalition Defense Committee-a legal and social industrial country in the world. In fact, a of the 1930s. Its program is class collab­ defense organization associated with the larger percentage of black workers are oration, and its policy is to present the Spartacist League-and energetically unionized than white workers. Nowhere Democrats as more sympathetic than the built by hundreds of trade unionists and is the strategic weight of black workers RepUblicans to the interests of workers youth. It was a powerful demonstration of more apparent than in the South, where a and blacks and to act as merely a pressure the social power of the working class, as unionization drive would mobilize the group within this capitalist party in order up to 10,000 working people mobilized to entire black community against the white to quell any outbreak of labor or black stop the KKK, against the efforts of the ruling class, the police and KKK. I unrest. But the Democrats serve only one Democrats to defend the "rights" of the The struggle for black rights can only master, the bourgeoisie. It is because Klan. What was seen in the October 23 go forward through the independent of the Democrats' influence over trade laborlblack mobilization led by Marxists mobilization of the social power of the unionists and black people that it is the was an example of a workers party in multiracial working class in a struggle preferred war party for U.S. imperialism. action, with the working class mobilized for workers power. The labor movement The massive turnout on January 17 is in its own interests and independently must fight to overcome the racist divi­ one of many recent indications, begin­ of the government and parties of the sions which are fostered by America's ning with the .1997 Teamsters strike capitalist class. The Democratic Party rulers to obscure the fundamental class against UPS, that the widespread anger acted in its class interests as a party ,divisions in society and to head off united at the base of this society is beginning to of racist American capitalism. Above working-class struggle. The chief obsta­ break through the surface. But the first all, these ,capitalist politicians fear and cle to such struggle is the illusion in and most important task in the resur- oppose the mobilization of labor power.

I I I , ' The capitalists hold the homegrown Nazis main party of the Southern slavocracy, a paid· government' i"infonnant," opened of the KKK in reserve, to be deployed to ruled the Jim Crow South with an iron fist fire on ,an anti-Klan protest tin North crush the organizations of the working supplemented by KKK terror. It was Carolina, killing ,five leftists and union class in the face of a proletarian challenge under Democratic Party state govern­ organizers. , to capitalist class rule. ments that Southern sheriffs savagely , : After 12 years of the Republican Rea­ In 1984, on the eve of the Democratic attacked civil rights marchers in the , gan and Bush administrations, Clinton National Convention in San Francisco, it 1950s and '60s. It was a Democratic gov~ and his Democratic Leadership Council was Democratic Party mayor and current ernor who brought out the flag of slavery got the, White House back, in~' 1992 U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein who raised in Georgia in 1956 to signal defiance of through his efforts to win back "Reagan the Confederate battle flag in Civic Cen­ the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Democrats." To this 'end, he Ideliberately ter to placate the Southern Democrats. Board of Education decision against seg­ attacked black rap artist Sister Souljahas The Spartacist League and the Labor regation in public schools. Alabama fol­ being I"anti-white". in order to:embarrass Black League for Social Defense, which lowed suit, while Virginia simply closed Jesse Jackson, the leading black figure ~n is fraternally allied with the SL, repeat­ down all public education for two years , the Democratic Party, and took time dur­ edly mobilized to tear down that racist rather than see black and white children ing his campaign to fly back to Arkansas banner. Wearing the uniform of a Union together. As Malcolm X said at the time, to personally oversee the execution of a soldier, a black SL supporter scaled the "A vote for a Democrat is a vote for a brain-damaged black man, Rickey Ray 50-foot flagpole in April 1984 and shred­ Dixiecrat." Rector, posing with the cops at the prison ded the Confederate flag, hurling it to the The civil rights movement profoundly for a photo op.IRecognizing that Clinton ground where it was burned! altered the. shape of bourgeois politics, was appealing, to white: racist voters far Feinstein, consciously playing the blowing apart the Democrats' New Deal more than his Democratic predecessors racist card in her bid for the party's vice alliance between organized labor, North­ in the 1980s had done, many blacks presidential nomination, repeatedly re­ ern liberals and Southern segregationists. responded by staying away, from the placed this emblem of the KKK after it The 1964 Republican presidential candi­ polis. After the Republicans won control was torn down. Only when the flagpole date, Barry Goldwater, who voted against of Congress in 1994, Clinton cynically itself was found cut down by an acetylene the Civil Rights Act, authored the "South­ turned for support to the Democratic torch was she finally forced to replace the ern strategy," persuading Southern Dixie­ Party's traditional constituencies oflabor Confederate flag with that of the "Cali­ crats to defect to the Republicans. In "and blacks, bringing Jesse Jackson back fornia Hundred," the first 100 volunteers every presidential election since then, the into the inner circle. Jackson, of course, from the state to fight with the Union Democrats have centered their campaigns eagerly embraced his role of bringing Anny. We wrote in the midst of this cam­ on getting back the white vote, desper­ back black voters to the Democrats. paign. "It is a telling verdict on the capi­ ately seeking to reverse the perception It is the role of black Democrats like talist system and the anti-progressive role that they were beholden to blacks, labor Jackson, Mfume and Sharpton to keep the of the bourgeoisie today that it falls and other "special interests." black masses fJtmly in line behind the , squarely to the communists to uphold the The Democrats developed their own Democratic Party despite years of unmit­ verdict of American history against slav-­ Southern strategy, successfully running igated attacks under Democratic adminis­ ery, while Democrats like 'Dixie Dianne' Georgia governor Jimmy Carter for pres- trations, going back to the Kennedy years uphold the banner of black oppression" , ident in 1976. During his campaign, this when beleaguered civil rights field 'work­ ("Black Militant Puts Dixie Flag on "born again" racist publicly proclaimed ers who mistakenly sought help from the Trial," WV No. 357, 22 June 1984). his allegiance to "ethnic purity," a code FBI had the phone hung up on them by word for racial segregation. Indelibly , Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The Dixiecrats Old and New marking the Carter years was the Novem-, black bourgeois politicians have also For the better part of a century, the ber 1979 Greensboro Massacre, when a served in the vanguard of the racist "war Democrats, who had earlier been the caravan of Klansmen and Nazis, including on crime" and "war on drugs." Continu­ ing where his Republican predecessors left off, Clinton has presided over a qual­ itative rise in the prison population, par­ ticularly of black and Hispanic men, who make up a majority of prisoners. One-third of young black men are either imprisoned or .in some other way en­ snared in the racist injustice system; 35 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, fully one in,eight black men do not have the right to vote because of a felony conviction. By next month, the number of those' entombed in "democratic" America's prisons is due to reach two million, fully one-quarter of the world's prison popula­ tion (Justice Policy Institute, ''The Pun­ Democratic Alabama ishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates 'governor George Wallace at the Millennium"). By some estimates, : yowed, "Segregation forever." nearly half a million are behind bars for Birmingham police attack drug offenses, many on charges as minor civil rights protesters, 1963. as simple possession of, marijuana. We 40

call for the decriminalization of drugs and burgeoning protests against the imperial­ Williams' policy of organized armed 'demand an end to all laws against consen­ ist war against the workers and peasants· self-defense against KKK violence ran, sual "crimes without victims." Alongside of Vietnam, the U.S. rulers moved to counter to the passive resistance philoso­ the astronomical growth of the prison restabilize SOCiety-and the credibility of phy and liberal perspective of King & Co. population has come a massive increase the Democratic Party-by co-opting a The liberals preached "nonviolence" to in the rate of state murder by executions layer of black liberals and nationalists black youth facing the deadly violence and expansion of the death penalty, which while unleashing murderous repression of the Southern sheriffs and Klansmen

is a legacy of slavery and Southern lynch against the Black Panther Party and other and sought to contain the civil rights I law. Abolish the racist death penalty! radicals. struggles within the framework of "respect­ While Gore and Bradley mouth pious Today, Mfume's NAACP joins with able" bourgeois politics. They presented statements against racism, both capital­ city administrations throughout the coun­ the brutal beating and murder of civil ist parties agree on pushing the racist try, and with many black politicians, to rights militants as a ''moral example" to • death penalty and beefing up the number push for stricter gun control measures and pressure the liberal wing of the Demo­ of racist cops terrorizing the ghettos. for lawsuits against handgun manufactur­ crats against the Dixiecrats, promoting Joining black Democratic politicians in ers. This is in the service of the racist reliance on the federal government under pushing the "anti-racist" credentials of rulers' attempt to disarm the victims of the Kennedy and Johnson administra­ Bradley and Gore are "progressive" intel­ racist attacks and the working class in tions. In this way, a mass movement for lectuals like Harvard's Cornel West, a general by eliminating the already atten­ racial equality was derailed into bour­ member of the Democratic Socialists of uated right to bear arms. The whole his­ geois electoral politics. Many of the black America, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. West tory of this racist society shows: gun con­ activists of those years went on to become has been stumping for Bradley, while I trol kills blacks! elected Democratic Party officials. Gates has come out for Gore. It was We remember the very different This was the period when the Sparta­ Gore who played the "race card" by first NAACP of Monroe, North Carolina, cist League originated as the Revolution­ making an issue of Willie Horton, a fur­ which under the leadership of ex-Marine ary Tendency (RT)-a left opposition in loughed black prisoner who then alleg­ Robert F. WilIiams successfully organ­ the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) fight­ edly committed a murder, in the 1988 ized armed self-defense against KKK ing to uphold the Trotskyist program of Democratic presidential race against nightriders in the late 1950s in defiance revolutionary proletarian international­ Massachusetts governor Michael Duka­ of the liberal-pacifist civil rights leaders ism against the rightward-moving party Ii kis. Gore baited Dukakis for being "soft like Martin Luther King Jr. and national leadership. A central component of the: on crime," by which he meant soft on NAACP head Roy Wilkins (see "Robert RT's opposition to the SWP leadership black people. Horton then became the F. Williams, 1925-1996: Courageous was the struggle for a revolutionary inte­ focal point of a viciously racist campaign Fighter Against Racist Terror," WV No. grationist perspective, linking the tumul­ by George Bush Senior on his way to 655, 8 November 1996, reprinted in tuous struggles for black equality to winning the election against the "liberal" Black History and the Class Struggle No. labor's fight against capitalism. Counter­ Dukakis. 14, January 1997). In his Negroes with posed to liberal integrationism-the false Guns (1962), Williams recounted how he view that blacks could achieve social For Revolutionary organized his chapter of the NAACP: equality within the confines of the Amer­ Integrationisml "We began a recruiting drive among ican capitalist order by pressuring the Jackson, Mfume and other black laborers, fanners, domestic workers, the Democratic Party-revolutionary inte­ Democrats are representative of the thin unemployed and any and all Negro peo­ grationism is premised on the under- , layer of middlecclass blacks who materi­ ple in the area. We ended up with a chap­ ter that was unique in the whole NAACP standing that black freedom requires ally benefited from the civil rights move­ because of working class composition smashing the capitalist system and con­ ment. With American society racked and a leadership that was not middle structing an egalitarian socialist society; by the fight for black equality and the class." where white supremacy and racism, no longer serving the purpose of dividing· the working class, will be things of the past. When the enormous productive re­ I Marxist Bulletin No.5 Revised sources of this country are used for the I Key Documents and Articles Marxist BulIe~~_ I benefit of those who labor to produce· J 1955-1978 them, the foundation will be laid for the I Contents Include: full integration of blacks and the eradica­ tion of all social inequalities. • For the Materialist Conception WHAT STRATEGY I ~f the Negro Question Having abandoned a revolutionary per­ spective, the SWP refused to intervene I, • For Black Trotskyism FOR BLACK UBERATION7 into the Southern civil rights struggles I • Rise and Fall of the Panthers: TrotsQlsm while initially tailing the liberal-pacifist End of the Black Power Era vs. King leadership and later advocating • Soul Power or WElrkers Power? BlaCk Nallonallsm black nationalist separatism. Expelled • The Rise and Fall of the League of from the SWP in 1963, the RT, within the Revolutionary Black Workers limits of its small numbers, sought to Key documents andarticlee intervene in these struggles in the North , $1.50 (72 pages) 1955-1978 and in the South. We counterposed our I I Make checks payable/mail to: proletarian program for black freedom to Spartacist Pub. Co., Box 1377 GPO the liberals' reliance on the Democrats New York, NY 10116 I --"~Co ... qnl3f'O,"''Itft,Nl'tOIlI I and intersected a . layer of civil rights -- militants fed up with King's liberalism..

;1,.11 I , 1..1.._. 41 ,. lina, where a bare 4.5 percent of wage and salary workers are in unions. What this means for the bosses' bottom line can be seen in the fact that the average manufacturing wage in South Carolina­ $10.54 per hour-is almost 25 percent lower than the national average. The inseparable connection between labor's rights and black rights in the South was brought home during a union organizing drive at a Perdue chicken plant in Alabama in 1995, when plant supervisors burned a cross on company property to intimidate workers into voting against the union. But the bosses' "labor lieutenants" in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, SL supporter because of their ties to the Democratic cuts down hated Party, refuse to mobilize union power in flag of slavery defense of black rights, thus reinforcing flying In San the deep racist divisions which the capi­ . Francisco Civic talists have long used to poison workers' Center, 1984. consciousness and divide and weaken their struggles. There are important anchors of union power in the South which can serve as launching pads for organizing drives throughout the region, including the Charleston ILA local now under attack by the government. Last year, United Steel­ workers Local 8888 at the Newport In the South, we advocated organized a party would necessitate a rank-and-file News shipyard, a major military contrac­ anned self-defense against the racist revolt within the organized labor move­ tor, fought off management in a bitter ment to overthrow the present labor nightriders, publicizing and materially bureaucracy." four-month strike waged in the heat of the supporting such groups as the Deacons U.S.INATO war of imperialist aggression for Defense in Louisiana under the slo­ Organize the South! against Serbia. Workers Vanguard teams gan, "Every Dime Buys a Bullet!" We noted that you didn't see the Confeder­ called for a "workers united front against This program is as vital today as it ate flag anywhere near the picket lines federal intervention," opposing both the was over 30 years ago. The crucial of this integrated union. use of federal troops to put down militant importance of organizing the South is Last summer also saw the organizing black struggles and the imposition of accentuated by the continuing flight of victory of the UNITE textile workers in government anti-labor measures such as industrial production from the North and the anti-union bastion of Kannapolis, wage controls and anti-strike bills. We Midwest to the South to escape unions. North Carolina. This victory for labor in raised a series of transitional demands One measure of changing demographics the South was a contributing factor to the such as the call for a "Southern organiz­ is that the majority of the black popula­ growth in union membership nationally ing drive backed by organized labor." In tion once again lives in the South, with last year, which climbed by more than a the 1966 document "Black and Red­ many returning from Northern and Mid­ quarter million. Many of these newly Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom" west states following jobs as industry unionized workers, in Kannapolis and (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No.9), the shifted. By 1990, North and South Caro­ elsewhere, are recent immigrants from Spartacist League stated: lina combined had more manufacturing Latin America, who are also in the cross "The struggle for black freedom de­ production workers than any state except hairs of the KKK terrorists. This points to mands the total break of the Negro peo­ California, with both U.S. corporations the crucial need to combat anti-immigrant ple from the Democratic Party .... and foreign firms like BMW flocking to chauvinism and to mobilize labor against "Only by the development of a working­ take advantage of low wages and anti­ racist deportations and for full citizenship class program and by explicitly opening union "right to work" laws. A factor the door to support by white workers can rights for all immigrants. real political independence. be main­ behind opposition by some South Caro­ Nevertheless, as we noted in "The tained, real gains won and the basis laid lina corporate leaders to the Confederate Fight to Unionize the 'Open Shop' for eventual working-class political unity. flag is that the tumult over this bloody South" (see page 43), "Unions are built This unity will come about when the rag is bad for business. exploited section of the white South is in struggle, not through ballots. And this driven into opposition and is compelled Any struggle to organize unions in the is particularly evident in the South, with to forego color prejudice in order to "right to work" South will run head-on its panoply of anti-union 'right to work' struggle along class lines against its into the entrenched racism and extralegal laws enforced by vicious racist terror." In real enemies-the owners of land and terror which has long served to keep this the main resolution of the Spartacist industry. area union-free and greatly profitable for "The creation of a South-wide Freedom League's Ninth National Conference in Labor Party would serve as a tremen­ the capitalist exploiters. Only North Car­ 1994, we wrote: dous impetus for similar action by olina has a lower proportion of unionized "The unionization of the South cannot Northern workers. The struggle for such workers-4.2 percent-than South Caro- and will not have a narrowly economist 42

character, nor will it likely emanate from the top echelons of the AFL-CIO. On the .... _lit one side, the entire black community . ~, .~ will tend to rally behind racially inte­ I, grated workers fighting the local white UNIONIZE power structure. On the other side, the Southern branch of the American ruling class will resort not only to the police, 'DE.NNY'S! company goons and professional strike­ FOR breakers but, if hard pressed, also to the GOOD WAGE.S Klan and its ilk, while using racist dema­ ~HT AtfD gogy to turn backward white workers against the labor movement. In short, a ICAROI/NJ WOR\QMG COMDtnotiS union organizing drive in the South will S HQ·t faA. DE~tiV·t. WORKERS! become a major arena of political strug­ i~>\ ,:;j#t CCNTER OF ~;~::~« gle between the oppressed black masses f> ~.SPARTAClsr lEAGUE and the white ruling class." This perspective requires a sharp strug-. gle inside the unions against the pro- . capitalist labor bureaucracy, which has never undertaken a serious attempt to organize the South. Here more than any­ where else in the U.S., the support of the union tops to the Democratic Party serves to perpetuate violent racist oppression and brutal exploitation. It is necessary to fight for a new, class-struggle leadership in the unions committed to the cause of black freedom and the political indepen­ July 1993 protest In Atlanta was part of nationwide campaign organized by dence of labor from the Democrats and . SL and Labor Black Leagues to demand "Down with Jim Crow at Denny'sl" the capitalist government. Break with the Democrats-Forge a workers party! For lina-to protest their racist abuse of everywhere that banner flies is a remin­ a workers government! black and other minority customers. In der that there is much unfinished business A revolutionary workers party must contrast, .the petty-bourgeois NAACP from the Civil War-the second Ameri­ act as a tribune of the people, fighting and Urban League sought "empower­ can Revolution-to take care of. While against every manifestation of injustice ment" by demanding black representa­ the civil rights movement of the 1950s and oppression. Exemplifying this under­ tion on Denny's board of directors, and ' 60s led to an end to formal Jim Crow standing was the nationwide united-front which would do nothing to change the segregation, it is an indication of how lit· campaign organized by the Spartacist restaurants' degrading treatment of thou­ tIe has fundamentally changed for. the League and Labor Black Leagues in sands of black customers. black masses in the "New South" that the 1993 to demand "Down with Jim Crow One speaker at the January 17 Colum­ hated banner of slavery continues to fly at Denny's!" We organized pickets of bia protest said that removing the Con­ throughout the region. There is no road to restaurants of the Denny's chain-head­ federate flag from the statehouse would eliminating the special. oppression of quartered in Spartanburg, South Caro- "bring an end to the Civil War." Indeed, black people other than the working-class conquest of power, and there will be no proletarian revolution unless the working class actively takes up the fight for black rights. II!.11S RSSliARCII SERIES .3 To achieve black freedom will require a third American revolution, placing in Prometheus Research Series power a workers government committed No.3 to building a socialist economy with gen­ uine equality. One of. the first acts of A memorialtocomrade . In Memoriam a revolutionary proletarian regime would Richard S. ~raser (1913-1988), be to tear down every last Confederate who pioneered the Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser flag and monument and replace them understanding of black with the red flag of the working class and oppression in the United States, AI "_1aUe1.,H ...... In ...... monuments to our heroes: from Denmark fighting for the perspective of Vesey, an emancipated slave executed in 1822 for organizing a slave insurrec­ revolutionary integration. tion in Charleston, to the radical aboli­ tionist Grimk6 sisters, to the black Union $7 (includes P9stage) 110 pages troops of the Massachusetts 54th who fell in heroic battIe on the South Carolina Make checks payable/mail to: . coast in 1863, to the countless working Spartacist Pub. Co" Box 1377 GPO men and women who gave their lives New York, NY10116 in the fight to establish unions in the South .• i,I "~______.---_---.---~....,..--- .. _.. ___.v,,. - 43 reprintedfrom Workers Vanguard No. 720, 1 October 1999

The· Fight to Unionize the "Open .. Shop" South The-success last June in the long pledge by DairnlerChrysler manage­ struggle for union recognition by ment to remain "neutral" in unioniza­ the. heavily immigrant workforce at tion efforts at the key Mercedes plant Fieldcrest Cannon in Kannapolis, in Vance, Alabama. North Carolina-the country's largest The fundamental starting point for textile complex and a symbol for gen­ a serious union organizing drive erations of the racist anti-union South­ Because of their program of class col­ must be the understanding that this cap­ was an important victory for labor laboration, the labor bureaucrats are tied italist society is divided between two throughout the country ("Big Win for by a thousand threads to the class enemy hostile classes-the workers who have Unions in 'Open Shop' South," WV No. and are utterly incapable of waging the to sell their labor power and the bour­ 716,9 July). But the vote in favor of the kind of class-struggle campaign. needed geoisie who owns the means of produc­ Union of Needletrades, Industrial and to unionize the growing ranks of indus­ tion-whose interests are irreconcilably Textile Employees (UNITE) is only a first trial workers in the South. Their depend­ opposed. The American labor bureauc­ step. Unions are built in struggle, not ence on the good graces of the National racy openly supports the capitalist sys­ through ballots. And this is particularly Labor Relations Board (NLRB), whose tem and is. duly rewarded for this with evident. in the South, with its panoply of very purpose is to bind the unions to certain social and political privileges. anti-union "right to Work" laws enforced the state, has repeatedly caused organ­ Hence the union tops stand for collabora­ by vicious racist terror. izing drives to flounder on the endless tion with the bosses, not class struggle Thus, even though workers at New delays built into the law, setting up pro­ against them. Orleans' Avondale Shipyards voted for a union workers to be victimized. A for­ But class struggle is the only way to union more than six years ago, manage­ mer head of the AFL-CIO'sOrganizing bring down the "open shop" bastion ment has succeeded in'keeping the union Department vowed to "work better with which is the South: This was made clear out through _repeated appeals in the employers in respecting their right to by a spokesman for the employers in bosses' courts. United Steelworkers Local exist and make a profit," and pleaded: South Carolina, which has the lowest 8888 at Newport News Shipbuilding in "In exchange, we ask that employers rate of unionization of any state in the the Virginia Tidewater area, the biggest respect our right to exist" (South Caro­ country. Writing in the South Carolina "integrated industrial union in the South, lina Business Journal, June 1996). The Business Journal (September 1997), pub­ was consolidated well after the union United Auto Workers (UAW) tops are lished by the state Chamber of Com­ won recognition-through bitter struggle currently trumpeting the contractual merce, a lawyer who specializes in on the picket lines in 1979. The recent four-month strike by Local 8888 pointed to the critical need to link defense of the union with the fight against racist dis­ crimination. But the pro-capitalist USWA bureaucracy scuttled the strike, diverting it into impotent corporate lobbying and red-white-and-blue chauvinist appeals to Bastion of the government. This underscores what Industrial unionism In we wrote following the union vote in the South: Kannapolis: four-month "With their legalistic, pro-Democratic Party policies, the AFL-CIO misleaders strike In 1999 are incapable of undertaking the kind of by United militant mass organizing drive needed to Steelworkers unionize workers throughout the South, Local 8888 where the racist cops and KKK lynchers against have been instrumental in keeping unions Newport News out. It is necessary to unleash the social Shipbuilding power of the working class, beginning was scuttled by with existing beachheads of integrated pro-capitalist union power in the South-from mainly black longshoremen in the Southeastern labor tops. and Gulf ports to shipyard workers and Teamsters truckers." ··-----llllfIfTmmr______

44 company anti-union campaigns declared: clear that the support of the pro-capitalist movement in this country since the late "Almost any South Carolina company union bureaucracy to the Democratic . 1970s has been the massive transfer of should be able to defeat the union if they Party perpetuates violent racist, oppres..: . industry from the North and Midwest have 'prepared for the war'." And if you sion and the brutal exploitation of the to the "open shop," low-wage South and think they're not serious about war, con­ working class. In the main resolution Southwest, particularly centered on the sider the case of Gary McClain, a worker adopted at the Ninth National Confer~ 1-85 industrial corridor in the South. By at Tenneco Packaging in Beech Island, ence of the Spartacist League in 1994 1990, North and South Carolina com­ South Carolina, who stood up in a plant .(Spartacist [English-language edition] bined had more manufacturing produc­ meeting called by management last July No. 51, Autumn 1994), we wrote: tion workers than any state except Cali­ and suggested that the union attempting ''The unionization of the South .cannot fornia. A few years ago, Philip Morris to organize the plant be given equal time and will not have a narrowly economist was blocked from building a $100 mil­ character, nor will it likely emanate from to address the workers. While driving the top echelons of the AFL-CIO. On the lion plant in South Carolina for fear that to work a few days later, McClain was one side, the entire black ,community the workforce would be unionized. pulled over by six sheriff's patrol cars; will tend to rally behind racially inte­ The harsh laws and practices enforc­ taken from his car at gunpoint, and invol­ grated workers fighting the local white ing wage slavery in the South today are untarily committetl to an insane asylum! power structure. On the other side, the Southern branch of the American ruling rooted in the black chattel slavery of Above all, the crucial battle to organ­ class will resort not only to the police, the old South before the Civil War. The ize the South must go hand in hand with company goons and professional strike­ reestablishment of legalized racial segre­ the fight against racist discrimination. breakers but, if hard pressed, also to the gation following the betrayal of Radical Only through an all-sided struggle against Klan and its ilk, while using racist dema­ Reconstruction by the Northern bour­ gogy to turn backward white workers black oppression can the working class against the labor movement. In short, a geoisie in league with the Southern carry out the kind of integrated class union organizing drive in the South will landed aristocracy entailed the suppres­ struggle needed to defeat the bosses' become a major arena of political strug­ sion of any attempt to organize labor, attacks. America's rulers foster racial gle between the oppressed black masses white as well as black. The heroic efforts divisions in the North and South in order and the white ruling class." of the syndicalist Industrial Workers to obscure the division between classes, For this perspective to become a reality of the World (IWW) in the early years which is fundamental to capitalist soci­ will require a sharp political struggle of this century to organize white and ety, and to head off united working-class against the politics of class collabora­ black workers in the South into "one big struggle. The special oppression of black tion and to oust the sellout labor lieuten­ union" was met by laws against "crimi­ people as a race/color caste is a corner­ ants of capital who tie the unions to the nal syndicalism." The "right to work" stone of American capitalism. The mass Democratic Party. It is necessary to forge laws passed after the Second World War, of the black population is kept at the bot­ a class-struggle leadership within the which have perpetuated the South as the tom of this capitalist society. At the same unions as part of the fight to build a revo­ main regional bastion of social and polit­ time, doubly oppressed black workers lutionary workers party. ical reaction in the United States, were form a strategic component of the Amer­ the outgrowth of an entrenched appara­ ican proletariat. Won to a revolutionary Class Struggle Built tus of segregation arid oppression, from program, black workers will play a lead­ Industrial Unions the post-Civil War "Black Codes" and ing role in the struggle to emancipate the A massive organizing drive in the "anti-vagrancy" laws to the sharecrop­ black masses and all working people by "open shop" South, where conditions are ping system and prison chain gangs. sweeping away the entire system of capi­ ripe for unionization, is vitally necessary Every major organizing effort in the talist exploitation. if the U.S. labor movement is to regain South has involved massive confronta­ In the South, more than in any other its strength in manufacturing. A major tions with the capitalist state-the cops, region of the country, it is especially factor behind the gutting of the union troops and courts which are at the core of this apparatus of repression through which the bourgeoisie defends its profits and class rule. Yet the pro-capitalist offi­ cials of the AFL-CIO cannot conceive of going up against. their "friends" in the bosses' Democratic Party and the capi­ talist government. So strong are the bureaucrats' ties to the capitalist order that they have renounced the very means Sit-down strike at by which mass industrial unions were American Casting built in this country: sitdown strikes to Company In occupy the plants and keep out the scabs, Birmingham, mass picket lines that defy injunctions, Alabama which secondary labor boycotts (refusing to won union handle struck goods). recognition In In 1934, a unionization drive led by the 1937 was led by Communist United Textile Workers Union of the organizers. American Federation of Labor (AFL) was capped by a national textile strike involv­ ing more than 400,000 workers. Battling cops, company goons and National Guard troops, flying squads of strikers closed hundreds of mills along a broad front " ....------_., ._..... _.. ,., ... _------

45

from Gastonia, North Carolina to Green­ ville, South Carolina. In Georgia, the governor declared martial law and had troops throw strikers and their families into concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire. Though 16 workers were killed and hundreds wounded nationwide, the strikers held firm. But textile union leaders cravenly called off the strike at the request of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt for nothing more than his cynical promise to "survey" con­ ditions in the industry. The mass labor upsurges of the mid to late 1930s, often led by communists or socialists, brought together black and Heavily Immigrant white workers in major class battles workforce celebrates pro­ against the capitalists and their state, union vote at Fleldcrest forging the mass integrated industrial Cannon textile complex unions that changed the face of Ameri­ In KannapoliS. can society. Breaking down the racial and ethnic job-trusting and segregated union. Mass meetings are seldom held, nist Party (CP), chained the new unions union locals of the old AFL, the Con­ except in large cities, and unionists in the to Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democratic gress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) same village may not even know their fel­ Party and its "New Deal" coalition. By sought to mobilize black workers, who low union members. In many. areas, mill the mid-1930s, the Stalinized Communist were critical to organizing most basic workers provide union organizers with Party had embraced a reformist strategy industries. United Mine Workers' efforts day and night body guards for there have of support to a liberal wing of the capital­ in 1934 to organize the Alabama coal­ been beatings and shootings by mill ist class. The New Deal coalition-which fields relied heavily on black miners, police, thugs, and vigilantes" (quoted in literally extended from white Southern who composed 60 percent of the mem­ Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the sheriffs. who were members of the Ku bership of the locals organized there. Black Worker: 1619-1973 [1974]). Klux Klan to black union organizers who In 1936, black steel workers in Bir­ The. formation of integrated industrial were members of the CP-put organized mingham, led by Communists," won a unions represented the biggest gain for labor in a self-defeating alliance not only strike by organizing Alabama's first black people since the .Reconstruction with its liberal class enemies in the North plant sitdown. This challenge to the period following the Civil War. Where but also with the Southern Dixiecrats, to capitalists' private property terrified .the barely 50,000 black workers nationwide whom Roosevelt gave a free hand to wage bosses. Throughout this period, Commu­ were union members in the early 1930s, naked racist terror against blacks and nist union organizers were beaten, jailed by the 1940s there were 500,000; and by unions. This was accompanied by ener­ and tortured by the Klan and cops, but the mid-1950s, almost two million black getic efforts by the capitalists, seeking to their defiance attracted the downtrod­ workers were unionized. But while the suppress the tremendous wave of class den black masses. When the fascists CIO brought better pay and working con­ struggle sweeping the country, to create a warned, "Negroes Beware-Do Not ditions along with some measure of job body of laws. and measures (for example, Attend Communist Meetings-The Ku security for those blacks who had indus­ the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, Klux Klan Is Watching You," black Com­ trial jobs, the CIO leadership generally which set up the NLRB) aimed at legally munists responded with their own leaflets shied away from tackling head-on the subordinating the new unions to the bour­ declaring: "KKK! The Workers Are pervasive racist discrimination in hiring geois state. Watching You!" In his history of Alabama and in the skilled trades. In 1940, three Communists during the Depression, years after the UAW victory in the Flint Break with the Democrats! Hammer and Hoe (1990), Robin D. G. sitdown strike, Jim Crow still reigned at Organize the South! . Kelley noted that Birmingham blacks saw GM plants, from the total exclusion of At its founding congress in 1937, the fight for industrial unions "as a cru­ blacks at Fisher Body to the restriction of the CIO launched a new organizing sade for racial justice" and poured into the blacks to foundry jobs at Buick. drive focused on the textile industry in new CIO unions. The tremendous working-class upsurge the South. But from the start, the pro­ Union organizers-black and white­ of the 1930s was accompanied by a polit­ capitalist CIO tops undercut any chance confronted the same brutal terror that for ical radicalization which opened possibil­ of success by aiming to "avoid strikes decades had been used to keep blacks "in ities for forging an independent workers and show employers the value of unions" their place." A CIO organizer in Flor­ party. This was clearly indicated in 1934 (F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South. ida signing up black workers was kid­ as three city-wide general strikes-in [1967]). The black and white union napped by the KKK, castrated, tarred and Minneapolis, Toledo and San Fran­ organizers who braved beati~gs and kid­ feathered, dipped into the boiling tar and cisco-were led by reds. To head off the nappings by cops and Klansmen suc­ left to die from his wounds. In 1938, the organization of the working class by left­ ceeded in organizing a number of key CIO reported: "Often an organizer dares ist radicals, a section of the AFL bureauc­ mills, but these were the exception rather not to enter a town in daylight; he relies racy, led by John L. Lewis, split and than the rule. By the end of the decade upon a union-minded merchant or a hand­ launched a mass unionization drive. only five percent of the South's spindles ful of key men to keep in touch with But the CIO leadership, including the .were estimated to have been affected by those workers who are sympathetic to the reformist social democrats and Commu- union contracts. 46

AP Young Socialist Police attack civil rights march, Birmingham, 1963 (left); striking sanitation workers In Memphis, 1968. Defense of labor's Interests cannot go forward without struggle against racist oppression and terror.

At its November 1941 convention, the Salem, rather than see them led by reds. sents for the capitalists underlines why CIO again resolved to launch a campaign Meanwhile, the union tops'loyalty to the the bourgeoisie is determined to main­ to organize the South. But just two Democrats made them incapable of wag­ tain this vast area of low-wage,non­ weeks after the convention came the ing a fight against the Jim Crow white unionized labor. ,I, . bombing of Pearl Harbor, which led to power structure, which was run by the The intimate link between the fight for Washington's formal entry into World Dixiecrats and their KKK auxiliaries. unionization of the South and the fight War II. The fine words about organizing The CIO's abandonment of any effort against black oppression is graphically the South were all laid aside as the union to organize the South was part of an illustrated by the history of the "right to leaders, the Socialist Party and the CP overall retreat and weakening of the work" laws. These' statutes were largely joined the capitalists in subordinating labor movement in this period. The onset enacted during and immediately follow­ everything to the American/Allied impe­ of the Cold War against the Soviet Union ing World War II as a counter to the rialist war effort-from imposing a no­ was accompanied by an anti-labor offen­ expansion of unionism during the war. strike pledge to opposing the fight for sive On the home front, in' part as a Also passed in that period were "anti­ black rights. The reformist misleaders response to the massive strike wave of violence" bills to curb picketing, as well painted this as a "war against fascism." In 1945-46. The main legal .instrument of as measures requiring union organizers fact, for the U.S. and all the imperialist this union-busting offensive· was the to register with state governments. In powers, World War II was a conflict for 1947 Taft-Hartley Act which mandated Georgia, a local ordinance required union division of the world's markets, sources the purging of Communists and other officials to foreswear belief incommu­

II, of raw materials and cheap labor, as was radicals from union leadership, outlawed nism and "in the overthrowing of the the case in World War I. secondary labor strikes (a key tactic in municipal or state laws in regard to seg­ In contrast to the social-patriots, the extending unionization, especially in the regation" (quoted in Labor in the South). then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party South) and legitimized state "right to The organizations pushing for these (SWP) opposed both blocs of compet­ work" laws. Almost the entire AFL and reactionary laws combined vicious anti­ ing imperialist powers while calling for CIO leadership stated that they would unionism with virulent racism. One of unconditional military defense of the So­ "live with" Taft-Hartley despite strong these groups, the Southern States Indus­ viet Union, a bureaucratically degener­ sentiment within the ranks to defy it. trial Council (SSIC), headed by the pres­ ated workers state. The SWP opposed the ident of the Tennessee Association of no-strike pledge and gave its full support "Right to Work" Laws Manufacturers, was formed in 1934 in to the fight against racist discrimination and Racist Reaction opposition to the New Deal. The SSIC in industry and "Jim Crow" segregation The so-called "right to work" laws, railed against unions, immigrant work­ in the military. For their revolutionary which outlaw the "closed" union shop, ers, and "dilution of racial purity" in the opposition to U.S. imperialism, 18 Trot­ are at the center of the reactionary legis­ workforce (John Egerton, Speak Now skyist leaders were jailed under FDR. lation that Southern rulers use in trying to Against the Day). Another prominent The last, feeble attempt by the CIO to keep the region "free" of unions. Not promoter of the "God-given right-to­ organize the South following World War coincidentally, among the 21 states with work" was Christian America, a Texas­ II, grotesquely called "Operation Dixie," "right to work" laws-which includes based outfit which had fanned the flames was quickly shipwrecked on the shoals practically the entire South as well as a of racial and religious bigotry from its of the Cold War red purges, racism number of plains and Rocky Mountain inception in 1936. and the bureaucrats' ties to the Demo­ states-are those with the lowest levels of A measure of the all~sided reactionary cratic Party. In many cases, the anti­ unionization. The average pay in these nature of these racist Southern Bour­ Communist labor bureaucracy worked to states is fully 15 percent lower than in bons was' provided in Robert ~herrill's destroy integrated union locals in the . the rest of the country. The billions of Gothic Politics in the Deep South (1968), South, like at R. J. Reynolds in Winston- dollars in super-profits that this repre- which describes Roger Milliken, the boss i II ,I ·'".."lI'1"' ______~_ ...... ,....---...... ,----~~------'~- ___ 47 of the Deering-Milliken textile chain in white workers in the South has not funda­ ) the South by the Immigration and Natu­ the early 1950s: mentally changed since the days of Jim ralization Service in the 1995 "Operation "He is a great advocate of what he calls Crow segregation. South PAW" ("Protect American Work­ VOluntary unionism, which sounds fair And efforts to organize labor are still ers") came after the Atlanta Labor Coun­ enough, but to Milliken, ~d in S~uth Carolina it has a special meamng: met with police-state measures abetted cil called for raids against undocumented Shortly before Christmas 1?56 he closed by fascist terror. Witness the 1979 killing workers there. The fight for full citizen­ the Darlington Manufactunng Company, in Greensboro, North Carolina of five ship rights for all immigrants is a crucial throwing 500 workers on the street, members of the Communist Workers part of mobilizing the power of labor in because they had voted to unionize. Des­ Party, some of whom were trying to struggle against capitalist exploitation. perate to get back on a payroll, on any terms, 83 percent of the workers signed a unionize textile mills in the area, by Klan Racist divisions within the working petition swearing never to even mention and Nazi terrorists acting in collusion class remain the fundamental barrier to unionism again if he would keep the plant with state and local officials. That same . political class. consciousness in the open and keep their jobs going. It wasn't year, cops rampaged against Newport American proletariat and the chief rea­ enough to please Milliken. He wouldn't be satisfied, he said, if only 17 percent News picket lines. Strikers were dragged son today why there is no mass workers 'hard core' union people were left on the off in handcuffs as snarling police dogs party in this country. Because of the payroll; he didn't want any. He auctioned bit their arms and legs. Just a few years experience of both racial and class off his machinery and moved out of town. ago, a burning cross was ignited by plant oppression, black workers are among the People don't taIk unionism and liberalism managers in Alabama to intimidate most conscious ,and militant sections of in Darlington and nearby towns like they used to before the strike." workers from joining a union. the U.S. proletariat. We fight for revolu­ The AFL-CIO bureaucracy's "America tionary integration: T,he understanding The SWP's Militant reported how first" protectionism, which will only get that the struggle for integration of black a Steelworkers organizer from Bir­ more virulent as interimperialist competi­ people into American society on the mingham, Alabama told the 1941 CIO tion intensifies, not only poisons the basis of full economic, social and politi­ convention that "it was the poll tax sena­ needed international solidarity between cal equality'can only be realized through tors in Congress, representing those areas workers in the U.S. and their' class broth­ a proletarian revolution which uproots where the workers were unorganized and terrorized, who were the strongest advo­ ers and sisters abroad but also fuels the capitalist system and ushers in an racism against black and immigrant egalitarian socialist society. cates of vicious anti-labor legislation." workers here. Complaining that workers As Karl Marx wrote at the time of the The Militant continued: "Any serious struggle to smash the open­ in other countries are "stealing" Ameri­ Civil War, "Labor in white skin cannot shop rule of the suuthern land and indus­ can jobs, the labor bureaucrats tie the emancipate itself where the black skin is trial barons will inevitably lead to a clash interests of the working class in the U.S. branded." There will be no effective resis­ with the whole apparatus of the United to maintaining the competitive edge of tance to the immiseration of American States government, including president American imperialism. working people without the unity in Roosevelt himself.. .. "The most uncertain factor bearing on In fact, in numerous struggles across struggle between the trade unions and the ultimate success of this drive is the the country-not least in the South-His­ the black, Hispanic and Asian poor. This ~political tie of the CIO leadership to the panic, Asian, and other immigrant work­ requires a revolutionary workers party \ / Roosevelt administration and its war pro­ ers have breathed new life into unions forged in opposition to the Democratic gram. This political attitude confronts crippled by the betrayals of the labor Party, which is supported by the labor the CIO leaders with a fundamental con­ tradiction. In the showdown fight that bureaucracy. But the bureaucrats have not lieutenants of capital in the AFL-CIO must ensue in any effective union only refused to defend the rights of immi­ bureaucracy~ and committed to the strug­ organization drive in the South, they grants but have called for increased state gle for a workers government, which will in all likelihood meet the opposition repression against "illegals." The seizure alone can provide a decent life for all of the government. The CIO has the choice of successfully organizing the of thousands of foreign-born workers in through a planned, socialist economy.• South and smashing the greatest reser­ voir of open-shop strength, thus facing a break with the administration, or water­ ing down the drive and retreating on the basis of the CIO leadership's political commitments." - C.L.R. James, et aI., Fighting Racism in World War /I (1980) For a Revolutionary Leadership of the Working Class Today, the "New South" of the likes of Bill Clinton and Al Gore tries to project a more "respectable" image than the openly segregationist Dixiecrats and vicious sheriffs of a generation ago. As a result of the civil rights movement, a section of the black petty bourgeoisie was recruited into the governmental administration and bureaucracy to help pacify the black masses. A black mayor of Atlanta is now a local institution. However, despite a Greensboro Daily News substantial degree of industrialization, the Greensboro, North Carolina, 1979: Five Communist Workers Party members, economic condition of black as well as including union organizers, were shot and killed by Klan and Nazi terrorists. ~-.e3 ...... SplnlcillPubIIIt*IgCo..ec.1377BP'O, ... 'l'llltl.HY1011.

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