The Internationalist No. 61 September-October 2020 50¢ Trump Looks to Cops and Fascists, Democrats Appeal to Pentagon Brass Repression Elections 2020 paeans to kill-crazed cops while conjuring You Can’t Fight up hordes of antifa pro- Internationalist photo Trump with testers invading white suburbs. The white- Democrats supremacist-in-chief vows that the only way OCTOBER 30 – U.S. capitalism is in a he could lose is if the heap of trouble, and as usual, the working vote is rigged, and re- class and oppressed are paying the price. fuses to say he would It’s about to get a lot worse. The country is hand over office. Mean- beset by a deadly plague, the worst in a cen- while, Republican op- tury, which is intensifying. The economy is eratives are recruiting in a new depression, the deepest since the armed “poll watchers” 1930s, with long-term consequences that to intimidate voters, are just beginning to be felt. An explosion particularly in black of outrage over racist cop brutality brought and Hispanic areas, and millions into the streets daily in the largest Republican lawyers are sustained protest movement in U.S. histo- gearing up to throw out ry, as the orgy of police murder continues mail ballots and jam unabated. The ruling class is sharply di- vote counts. Mean- vided after a failed impeachment process, while, Walmart, fore- while U.S. society is deeply polarized over seeing looting and civil Internationalist contingent at May Day march in New York City, 2018. just about everything. And now we are on unrest, as a “precautionary measure” has to-door canvassing, encouraging mail Repugnance for the immigrant-bash- the eve of an election which could easily pulled guns and ammunition off the sales ballots, relying on huge TV ad buys while ing, woman-hating, fascist-loving white – even likely – set off weeks of turbulent floors of its stores. Trump dominates social media. The Dems supremacist in the White House who is unrest and perhaps a constitutional crisis In answer to Trump’s “law and order” figure that anger over Trump’s COVID-19 running for reelection as president of the not seen since 1876. campaign, Democratic standard-bearer denial and revulsion against the racist mi- Confederate slavocracy is utterly justified. Of these many crises, the most imme- Joe Biden calls to shoot “rioters” in the sogynist president will be enough to win. Trump’s victory is a threat to the entire black diate is the election, not only for president leg (he just did it again) while his running They’re appealing to people yearning to population of the U.S., even as cynical mil- but also for control of Congress. President mate, Kamala Harris, brags she was Cali- return to “the way things used to be,” with lionaires like 50 Cent and Ice Cube back Donald Trump is stumping the country fornia’s former “top cop.” Biden & Co. nothing for workers who still haven’t re- him. But the Democrats, the party that has with incendiary speeches laced with rac- seem to be sleepwalking through the cam- covered from the depression following led every major war U.S. imperialism has ist appeals, shout-outs to fascist thugs and paign, holding no mass rallies, no door- the 2008 crash. continued on page 20 In Wake of Upsurge Against Racist Cop Terror Democrats’ Pro-Cop Ticket Vies with Trump Over “Law and Order” SEPTEMBER 18 – So this is what “democ- in the 1980 presidential elections between ing people in the heart, cops should “shoot racy” looks like, USA-style, as election a reactionary, segregationist Democrat and them in the leg.” season enters its final stretch: a hellscape a reactionary, openly racist Republican – With the choice for Biden’s running for the oppressed, workers and youth. Just both of them virulent anti-labor warmon- mate of Kamala Harris, California’s former being black can get you killed by the rac- gers – the newspaper then representing “top cop” (her words), the Democrats are Internationalist photo ist cops, as we keep seeing day after day. revolutionary Marxism headlined: “Rea- putting forward an ostentatiously pro-po- Amid unending fear of catching the coro- gan, Carter? Oh Shit!”2 lice ticket. They are vying with Trump for navirus, the threat of mass evictions looms. Today, after four more decades of who can best uphold the “law and order” If you’re not already one of the millions of capitalist decay, what is the “choice” being of racist U.S. capitalism. They are going workers who have already lost their jobs, presented? On one side is Donald Trump, all out to line up with the Pentagon brass there’s the constant worry that you could the vicious bigot, racist inciter and grifter dissed by Trump along with U.S. imperi- be next. In Wisconsin, anti-racist protesters who (as both liberals and old-line conser- alism’s intelligence apparatus. And they are gunned down by a white-supremacist vatives decry) has made the Republican pitch themselves as the more consistent vigilante. And now much of the West Coast Party his own. On the other is Joe Biden, warmongers against China, Russia and – of has gone up in flames, literally. the segregationist, saber-rattling Democrat course – North Korea. It’s not an apocalyptic movie out of who fueled mass incarceration. An exam- Far from a surprise, what we’re wit- Hollywood – it’s what the “death agony of ple that says it all: when Trump threatened nessing anew is how this Wall Street party 1 capitalism” looks like in 2020. Forty years anti-racist protesters by tweeting “when “for the people” operates. After millions ago, when voters were given the “choice” the looting starts the shooting starts,” come out in the streets demanding an end Biden’s response was that instead of shoot- 1 The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks to police terror; after “progressive” Demo- of the Fourth International, known as the 2 The headline is from the 25 July 1980 issue of crats (and their echo chamber on the re- “Transitional Program,” is the founding docu- Workers Vanguard; published by the then-revo- formist left) work overtime to channel ment of the world party of socialist revolution lutionary Spartacist League. The WV of that era protest into calls for “defunding” the cops; established by Leon Trotsky in 1938. was the forerunner of The Internationalist. continued on page 7 As U.S. Convulsed Over Racist Police Murder SL Silence = Capitulation to the Democrats OCTOBER 2 – Decaying American capi- in by Democratic governors, together with talism is mired in deep crisis. In the half- Democratic mayors, bringing massive police Internationalist photo year since mid-March, 200,000 people repression to bear against anti-racist protest- have died of COVID-19, the worst plague ers from Rochester to NYC to Chicago to in a century, due to the inability of the U.S. Portland, Los Angeles and innumerable other medical system to protect the population. cities across the country. Ditto. Since April, over 50 million people have ● Murderous provocations by racist and lost their jobs, and now temporary layoffs fascist groups in Portland, Oregon and in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a racist vigi- are becoming permanent unemployment. lante murdered two anti-racist protesters and For more than four months, the country wounded a third. Ditto. has been in uproar over the unending pan- ● Trump’s military mobilization against demic of racist police murder: 1,235 civil- anti-racist protesters in Washington, D.C.; ians killed by cops so far in 2020 (as of federal “snatch squads” and occupation forc- September 29), 760 since George Floyd es in Portland; a federal kill squad’s blatant was asphyxiated in Minneapolis in May. assassination of an anti-fascist activist from On top of this, we are now deep into Portland. Ditto. a putrid election campaign in which the ● Amidst the mass protests, concerted ef- Democratic and Republican parties vie forts by the Democratic Socialists of America over who can best carry out racist repres- and innumerable reformist leftists to snare sion, imperialist aggression and the con- newly politicizing youth via illusions in “de- tinued political subjugation of the work- funding” the police (or “abolishing” capital’s Internationalist contingent in in Brooklyn in June 19 march against racist ers and oppressed. The Democrats have repressive forces under capitalist rule). Ditto. police violence. answered mass protest against cop terror ● As election season has heated up, the by presenting the “law and order” ticket of talism?” in The Internationalist No. 60, website on the killing of George Floyd Democrats have escalated saber-rattling Joe “Shoot ’Em in the Leg” Biden and Ka- May-July 2020; and “Only Revolution or the mass protests against racist police threats and provocations against the Chinese mala “Top Cop” Harris. Exploiting mass Can Bring Justice!” in Revolution No. 17, terror. And this despite the fact that the deformed workers state, while lining up sup- port for Biden-Harris among the military and revulsion against Donald Trump’s bigotry August 2020). core issue posed is black oppression, intelligence “community,” including talk of and threats, they have gone into overdrive Contrast this with the Spartacist which the SL, from its inception, cru- the armed forces intervening if Trump tries to to line up labor, black people, Latinos and League, which once upheld revolutionary cially emphasized as key to proletarian revolution in the citadel of imperialism. steal the election. Ditto. youth behind the pro-cop duo. Most of the Marxism (and still claims to do so today) Their silence speaks volumes: the SL’s As we noted in our June article, the left goes with the flow. For those who lay but has had nothing to say about the mo- abject abdication is a declaration of po- SL has been undergoing yet another phase claim to the program and heritage of revo- mentous events convulsing U.S. society. litical bankruptcy.”2 in its endless internal crisis. Is its paraly- lutionary Marxism, the onslaught of bipar- Activists familiar with the U.S. left keep That was more than three months sis partly the result of the downward spiral tisan capitalist reaction makes more urgent asking us: What on earth is going on with ago. Since that time, the SL/U.S. still has of its ever more wacked-out internal life? than ever the fight for the political indepen- the SL? How is it that their shameful si- not uttered a peep. That certainly takes No doubt about it. Does its utter incapac- dence of the working class.1 lence continues month after month? There some doing, given the intensity and im- ity to respond to what’s happening in the So who has been fighting against is talk of a faction fight, but that is hardly portance of political events throughout real world outside its endless internal fever the Democratic Party and its “left” adju- an excuse for the sepulchral silence from this period. In rare encounters with down- dream display stunning incompetence by tants’ attempts to channel outrage over the moribund SL. Politically, their ab- cast SLers who go through the motions its leadership, and the emptiness of their racist repression into bourgeois politics sence from the battlefield destroys any re- of sheepishly peddling months-old issues claims to be building a revolutionary par- and fakery about “reforming” the police, maining pretense of providing leadership, of their paper, a few have now ventured ty? Self-evidently. and fighting for a revolutionary workers much less revolutionary leadership. These a new claim: that marching with revolu- But the root of it all is politics. The party? The Internationalist Group, U.S. ex-Trotskyists turn their backs on youth tionary slogans (including, prominently, SL’s inability to put forward a class pro- section of the League for the Fourth Inter- seeking to fight racist oppression. The “Democrats are the bosses of the rac- gram to fight racist capitalist repression is national has done so since Day One of the latter-day SL provides no opposition to the ist killer cops”) in mass protests against there for all to see. As we have detailed current wave of anti-racist protests, in our Democratic Party. On its epitaph, we can racist police terror means backing the in prior articles, this comes on top of one press, in polemics, placards and banners, read: when the U.S. blew up over racist Democrats. They are drilled to repeat this capitulation after another to “their own” in chants and speeches in mass marches. cop murder, they did nothing. cynical sophist blather to justify failing to imperialist bourgeoisie, as they have em- See, for example, our articles “To Uproot Back in June we wrote: fight bourgeois politics. So where were braced nationalism and outright chauvin- Racist Oppression: Socialist Revolution” “Amid the most massive protest move- you, SL, when Democrats were mislead- ism.3 From the SL’s vile “anti-American” and “‘Abolish the Police’ Under Capi- ment in decades, as it has continued ing millions into a dead-end, with a little baiting of the Internationalist Group for 1 See “Democrats’ Pro-Cop Ticket Vies with week after week, the Spartacist League help from their friends on the opportun- our Leninist call to defeat U.S. imperi- Trump Over ‘Law and Order’” (bottom of page has not published a paper, put out a leaf- ist left? Answer: the SL was AWOL. alism in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars 1 of this issue). let or posted a single statement on its How has the Spartacist League ab- (2001-2003); to its social-imperialist sup- dicated the elementary duty of even the port for Democrat Barack Obama’s inva- Visit the League for the Fourth International/ pretense of putting forward a revolution- sion and occupation of Haiti (2010); to Internationalist Group on the Internet ary position? Let us count (just some of) its grotesque opposition to calls to “Let http://www.internationalist.org the ways. Since the May 25 cop murder of Refugees In” (2017); to its silence amid George Floyd this has included: mass anti-racist protests sparked by the ● Silence on the continued protests against cop murder of George Floyd and its utter The Internationalist police terror and racist “justice” in the cases prostration in the face of the Democrats’ A Journal of Revolutionary Marxism of Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Jamel and reformist left’s drive to herd workers for the Reforging of the Fourth International Floyd, Jacob Blake, Dijon Kizzee and in- and youth into the “law and order” cam- Publication of the Internationalist Group, numerable others, all in cities governed by paign of Biden-Harris today, the politics section of the League for the Fourth International Democrats. The SL has not had a word to say behind the SL’s months-long silence is EDITORIAL BOARD: Jan Norden (editor), Fred Bergen, Julius Drago (production), Mark Lazarus, on any of this. capitulation to the Democratic Party of Tristán Mirabal (pamphlets), Abram Negrete, Marjorie Salzburg, Jay Wood, Ines Young ● The occupation of Minneapolis and U.S. imperialism. n The Internationalist (ISSN 1091-2843) is published 5 times a year by Mundial other cities by the National Guard, called Publications, P.O. Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A. 3 See, for example, “As ‘Chauvinist Hydra’ Telephone: (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 E-mail: [email protected] 2 “Silent Amidst Mass Upsurge Against Racist Subscriptions: US$10 for five issues. Oppression: Spartacist League Declares Bank- Devours SL/ICL: Some History Ex-Trotskyists No. 61 September-October 2020 ruptcy,” The Internationalist No. 60, May-July Would Like to Keep Hidden,” The Internation- 2020. alist No. 59, March-April 2020. 2 The Internationalist Police State Portland Mason TrincaNew Yorkfor The Times Cops and Feds Get Out!
Trump and Democrats Assault Protesters Federal agents emerge from the boarded-up federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, in the early morning hours of July 21, seeking to intimidate and disperse protesters against racist police brutality. The protests only grew larger. PORTLAND, Oregon, July 21 – Uniden- The feds’ provocative tactics and The pyromaniac in the White House “This Is What a tified federal agents in unmarked vans police-state measures have stoked mas- is throwing fuel on the fire, overtly seek- Police State Looks Like” cruising city streets, kidnapping protesters sive opposition, here and nationally. As ing to provoke explosions of unrest as For the past 54 days and nights, protests to haul them in for “questioning.” Others an election tactic, in order to pose as the outraged protests grew into the thousands, against police terror have shaken down- shooting unarmed protesters in the face “law-and-order candidate.” He wants to the mayor, governor, both U.S. senators town Portland. Across the U.S., millions with impact munitions. Feds holed up in from Oregon and virtually every other frame the vote as Trump vs. antifa. This is the sequel to his attempt to impose martial have joined in Black Lives Matter marches a boarded-up U.S. District Court, firing local and state official called for the fed- in at least 2,500 cities and towns (see “To through peepholes cut in the plywood that eral forces to leave Portland. The state at- law in Washington, D.C., in the first days of June.1 Yet at that same time, Democratic Uproot Racist Oppression: Socialist Revo- covers doors and windows, periodically torney general filed a lawsuit against the lution,” The Internationalist No. 60, May- charging out to attack protesters with tear Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mayors decreed curfews and Democratic governors mobilized National Guard units July 2020). In Portland, where police have gas. City police outfitted in camouflage, and other federal agencies for violating to put down protests over the racist police a history of working hand in glove with riot gear and gas masks, tossing flash-bang constitutional guarantees. Acting DHS murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis fascist groups like Patriot Prayer and even grenades and firing plastic bullets, work- chief Chad Wolf retorted that “I don’t cop on May 25. The bipartisan repression have officers who have celebrated Nazi ing in tandem with the feds. This scene need invitations by the state, state mayors, backfired, as Black Lives Matter marches war criminals, the repression has been par- that could be from a film about some U.S.- or state governors,” adding that the feds grew and spread spectacularly. Now, once ticularly vicious. Cops fired gas grenades backed Latin American military junta has were staying, “whether they like us there again, after Trump denounced protesters as against anti-racist protesters so wantonly been playing out in real time on the streets or not.” Next up: with 150 federal agents “anarchists and agitators” on Sunday, on that Democratic mayor Ted Wheeler, who is of Portland for days, as federal paramili- poised to go to Chicago, Trump yesterday Monday thousands converged on down- also in charge of the Portland Police Bureau tary forces and city cops have sought to took aim at New York, Philadelphia, De- town Portland, led by a “Wall of Moms”: (PPB), was nicknamed “Tear Gas Teddy.” intimidate protesters against racist police troit, Baltimore and Oakland, California, “I am the face of anarchy,” said one grand- Just about everyone wanted him gone. brutality – to no avail. “all run by liberal Democrats.” mother defiantly. But after demonstrators on June 13 tore Trump’s use of his Gestapo of secret down a statue of Thomas Jefferson in front police forces, assaulting protesters to sow of the high school bearing his name in an terror, is an ominous threat to the demo- historically black neighborhood of north cratic rights of all. It is a major step toward Portland, and then on June 18 toppled a stat- the imposition of direct military/police ute of George Washington, racist Republi- (“bonapartist”) rule. But while Democrats can president Donald Trump set his sights pose as heroes of the “resistance,” the real- on the city. Ranting about “anarchists and ity is that the vast majority of the thousands left-wing extremists,” Trump signed an ex- of arrests and innumerable brutal beatings ecutive order on June 26 announcing his in- of protesters in the last few weeks have been tention to prosecute “desecration” and “van-
David Killen / The Oregonian David Killen / carried out by police forces under the com- dalism” of federal property and monuments. mand of Democratic mayors and governors. The next day, federal officers in camo with The Democrats threaten lawsuits and leg- military-style helmets showed up at the fed- islation, but that won’t stop Trump and his eral courthouse, next to the Justice Center, stormtroopers. The Internationalist Group site of the Portland Police Bureau and Mult- calls for workers strikes and mobilizations nomah County Jail, where protesters have together with all the oppressed, against been rallying for weeks. The feds’ provoca- racist repression and martial law threats. tive presence stoked further protests. In the present sharp crisis, the IG and Class On July 4, as Oregon Public Broadcast- Struggle Workers – Portland raise the call: ing (19 July) reported: “After more than a Following the racist cop murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May “Cops and feds get out!” month of police using tear gas, impact mu- 25, there were massive “Black Lives Matter” marches in Portland that have 1 See “Trump and Democrats Stage Ominous Trial nitions and flash bang devices to disperse continued ever since. Above: July 10 demonstration against racist police Run for Martial Law,” The Internationalist No. enormous crowds and largely nonviolent brutality outside the Multnomah County jail and Portland police headquarters. 60, May-July 2020. demonstrations, the protesters on Inde- September-October 2020 3 pendence Day had a fireworks display of have ceased to intimidate. As a freelance
their own.” After cops shot randomly into journalist who had reported from Iraq Ted Wheeler/Twitter the crowd, volleys of fireworks were fired and is now tracking the far right in Port- at the “Justice Center” and courthouse, land commented: “nobody is scared of the which “had come to represent everything cops anymore. At a certain point of being the demonstrators were protesting: rac- subjected to police flash bangs and gas, ism, police brutality and an unjust crimi- you stop fearing it” (“50 Nights of Unrest nal justice system.” In the following days in Portland,” New York Times, 18 July). Portland was flooded with police from the Asked if the image of feds in unmarked DHS and other federal agencies, including vans, “which feels so nakedly authoritar- the Federal Protective Service, U.S. Mar- ian,” was “the purest example of American shals Service, Immigration and Customs militarized policing” or “something differ- Enforcement (I.C.E.), and the paramilitary ent,” the journalist, Robert Evans, replied: Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC). “It’s something different…. Portland is be- Using graffiti on federal buildings as ing used as a bellwether to see what this an excuse, federal officers have been run- administration can get away with. And also ning amok in downtown Portland. A video what works to quell protest. The police tac- shows heavily armed men in fatigues jump- tics don’t work.” ing out of an unmarked van and nabbing A spokesman for the Oregon chapter a suspected protester. A woman cries out, of the Council on American-Islamic Rela- “Who are you? Use your words.” Silence. tions (CAIR) said the same: “I think Port- Portland mayor Ted Wheeler and commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty in January “I was terrified,” Mark Pettibone told the land is a test case … they want to see what 2019. Wheeler unleashed the police who repressed protesters following the Washington Post (17 July), saying he “did they can get away with before launching murder of George Floyd while Hardesty initiated the curfew to squelch protests. not know whether the men were police or into other parts of the country.” Portland is far-right extremists” who often don mili- just the most recent instance. In June, heav- left tomorrow they would burn that build- military equipment). In the guise of “com- tary gear. The Nation (17 July) reported ily armed police in Columbus, Ohio, were ing [their bunker] down.” Maybe. munity policing” and fighting “terrorism,” that the kidnappers were from BORTAC. filmed tossing an arrested protester into an Wolf complains that federal agents the Democrats are directly responsible for A few days earlier, federal officers were unmarked van (Raw Story, 25 June). Key are getting bad press: “These police offi- the cop infestation of African American caught on video shooting 26-year-old Do- to this operation is cooperation with the lo- cers are not stormtroopers, they are not the and Latino neighborhoods and militarizing navan La Bella directly in the head with a cal police. While Mayor Wheeler pretends Gestapo.” (Kind of like Richard Nixon de- the police. And most Democratic Senators “less-lethal” projectile, fracturing his face the city is not cooperating with the feds, claring, “I am not a crook.”) Meanwhile, voted for the 2002 Homeland Security Act and skull and requiring him to undergo sur- the PPB said it provided “help” to federal liberal columnist Michelle Goldberg asks that Trump is using as the “legal” basis for gery. And on July 18, a video showed U.S. officers on the night of La Bella’s shooting, in today’s New York Times, “Can we call sending in the feds.2 Marshals beating and pepper-spraying a and police chief Chuck Lovell “confirmed it fascism yet?” This is a common liberal/ The actual fascist groups in the U.S. stoic Navy veteran, Chris David, 53, who the two forces share real-time plans with reformist conception, applied to any par- today are relatively small and populated wanted to ask them why they were violat- one another,” sometimes pushing demon- ticularly repressive regime. But as Bolshe- with bizarre figures (“Baked Alaska,” ing their constitutional oaths. strators down parallel streets (The Orego- vik revolutionary Leon Trotsky underlined “Based Stickman”), compared to the mass Voices of the capitalist establishment nian, 19 July). in “Bonapartism and Fascism” (1934) fascist militias of the 1930s. But fascist/ complained that this slap-dash army was not For Labor/Black/Immigrant and other writings on Italy and Germany, ultra-rightist forces have been emboldened trained in crowd control. Yet their purpose fascism is a movement based on the ru- by Trump and often (like the III Percenters) was not to “control” protesters but to terror- Mobilization Against ined petty bourgeoisie, or middle classes, interpenetrate with police forces, which are ize and provoke. The sight of snatch squads Racist Cop Terror from which Mussolini recruited his black- shot through with fascistic elements prom- in unmarked vans tooling around town Chapman Square is surreal. Federal shirt thugs and Hitler his Nazi brown- inent among cop “unions.” Moreover, the abducting protesters recalls the Argentine agents emerge at night from the barricaded shirt squads. Pinochet’s Chile or Franco’s marauding feds with their snatch squads military junta in the 1970s, as it dispatched federal court building to fire tear gas into Spain, on the other hand, were bonapartist send a signal to their fascist auxiliaries. As green Ford Falcons without insignia or li- the crowd, stand around for a while like military dictatorships based on the capital- U.S. capitalism’s “triple pandemic” of the cense plates to grab leftists off the streets. ghosts in the darkened park, then retreat ist state apparatus. deadly COVID-19 plague, mass jobless- This is what a police state looks like. And it’s as hundreds cheer. “Feds Gas Moms & It’s not just a matter of definitions: be- ness and racist police murder intensifies, not new. For years I.C.E. cops have prowled Dads” read the headlines (Portland Mer- hind labeling Trump an actual fascist lurks with tens of millions set to lose supple- immigrant neighborhoods across the U.S. cury, 21 July). Along with the several hun- the political program of forming an “anti- mentary unemployment benefits, there is a in unmarked vans, hauling off detainees in dred moms in yellow t-shirts, many with fascist” popular front chaining workers and potential for explosive social struggle, but unmarked buses for deportation. (The Na- helmets, masks and goggles, PDX Dads the oppressed to a wing of the bourgeois also for sharply increased repression. The zis deported people in box cars.) For the 15 now bring leaf-blowers to clear tear gas. ruling class. In the U.S., various Stalinists federal body snatchers could soon appear million undocumented immigrants and their PPB police cover their name tags with tape and social democrats, each in their own in a city near you. The outcome depends families living and working here, the U.S. bearing city personnel numbers, supposed- way, are looking to the Democratic Party, on the political program of those who seek was already a police state under Democrat ly to prevent “doxing” of officers (actually or sections of it. The Democratic Social- to wage effective struggle against the reac- Barack Obama . . . and continues to be so to make it difficult to sue them). City cops ists of America jump right in, running for tionary onslaught. today. Now the rest of the population is get- and feds justify attacking journalists and election as Democrats, while the eccentric, Everywhere and always, the key is ting a taste. legal observers on the grounds that their Maoist-derived “Revcom” personality cult to fight for working-class independence. But the feds have a little problem: the presence makes clearing the area “compli- and its Refuse Fascism front group, with This means: kick cop “unions” out of the fascist-infested Portland police have used cated.” A livestreamer is disappeared. DHS their calls to “drive out the Trump/Pence labor movement. Police are not workers such tactics so often in the past that they chief Wolf responds to “feds out”: “If we regime,” want to hook up with wayward but the armed fist of the ruling class, pro- liberal Democrats. Yet not only are Dem- fessional strikebreakers and enforcers of ocratic mayors “the bosses of the racist racist capitalist “law and order.” It means: killer cops,” as we have emphasized, but break with the Democrats. Today Demo- Democratic administrations have done as crats are cynically posing as staunch de- much or more than Republicans to beef fenders of the protesters. Mayor Wheeler up the police apparatus, while basing their called the feds “uninvited, untrained, and “resistance” largely on appeals to the U.S. unwelcome.” Governor Kate Brown’s Noah Berger / AP Noah Berger / military and intelligence apparatus. spokesperson called the arrests by federal For decades, in and out of the White officers “a violation of their civil liberties House, Democrats have been key to ramp- and constitutional rights.” Oregon Attor- ing up the forces and powers of the cen- 2 Having failed to get the Pentagon brass to tral apparatus of reactionary repression go along with invoking the 1807 Insurrection (which the fascist groups work to aug- Act, Trump is using that law for his police-state ment): the capitalist state. Barack Obama measures. Under 40 U.S. Code § 1315, the Sec- greatly expanded the Border Patrol and retary of Homeland Security can use DHS per- I.C.E. immigration cops, while the 1994 sonnel and deputize other “officers and agents” to “make arrests without a warrant for any of- Clinton-Biden “Violent Crime Control and fense against the United States” or for “any Law Enforcement Act” created the COPS felony cognizable under the laws of the United Feds fire tear gas at crowd besieging their bunker on July 21. Portland cops program, which has funneled $30 billion States.” All they have to do is claim reasonable have used gas and flash bang grenades so often while defending fascists to local police (and Clinton’s 1033 pro- suspicion. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chuck that protesters are no longer intimidated. gram provided them with billions more in Schumer and Ron Wyden all voted for that law. 4 The Internationalist Now Even More Police Are Occupying Portland PORTLAND, Oregon, August 3 – After Customs Enforcement) tactical squads, weeks of nightly attacks on anti-racist pro- U.S. Marshals and the Federal Protective testers by paramilitary forces operating out Service. of the barricaded U.S. District Court here, After a last violent foray by the feds Internationalist photo on July 29 Oregon governor Kate Brown storming out of their boarded-up fortress announced that a deal had been reached on Tuesday, June 30, for the next three days with the Trump administration for a phased police presence was limited at the nightly withdrawal of federal forces it had sent to demonstrations which continued to number the city. However, later that day, the act- over 1,000. On Saturday evening, partly in ing secretary chief of the Department of response to Trump’s declaration that the Homeland Security Chad Wolf told the feds would be staying, over 2,000 showed media that the feds would remain in Port- up. Supporters of the Internationalist Group, land for now, and on August 1 President Class Struggle Workers – Portland and Donald Trump tweeted that DHS would Revolutionary Internationalist Youth had a stay “until local police complete cleanup contingent at the meet-up point for the pro- of Anarchists and Agitators!” test at the Salmon Street Fountain, where The racist-in-chief had dispatched there was a drumline and some speakers. As more than 100 federal agents to suppress a sales team circulated through the crowd, Black Lives Matter demonstrators who we met members of the Pipefitters, Iron have protested daily in Portland since the Workers and AFSCME, which had called May 25 police murder of George Floyd in for a “union bloc.” We also met up with IA- Internationalist Group, Class Struggle Workers – Portland and Revolutionary Minneapolis. Portland Police Bureau cops TSE (stage hands) members who have been Internationalist Youth at August 1 protest against cop/fed occupation. repeatedly attacked protesters with baton livestreaming from the protests. part of maneuvering by the Democratic of management, lack of safety, stress, and charges and tear gas, so much so that a fed- As the demo kicked off, we marched Party looking to the November elections. Amazon’s decision to eliminate hazard pay eral judge issued an injunction against the to the courthouse, chanting “Only revolu- Overall, the white liberal support for the for their grocery employees who are still PPB gassing demonstrators. Far from ensur- tion can bring justice,” and “Break with the protests looks to be breaking up. Lots of working on the front lines during a pan- ing “law and order,” the feds went on a ram- Democrats, build a workers party.” Police illusions in the Democrats have been re- demic. Workers remembered co-workers page, gassing, pepper-spraying, beating and were conspicuously absent on the west stored, in spite of the continued presence who have lost their lives to COVID-19, firing impact munitions at demonstrators side and the feds hid out in their fortress. of federal, state, county and local police. stressing the need for sanitation and safety and abducting protesters in unmarked vans However, reports began flooding in of cops Portland may be heading towards a re- practices. The picket continued with chants (see “Police State Portland: Cops and Feds macing and pepper-spraying protesters at newed assault on the dwindling and largely against Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, the rich- Get Out!” The Internationalist, 21 July). By the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in black activists, with far less media atten- est man in the world, as well as “Defend now so much gas has been discharged that East Portland. In addition, Portland and tion than the WOMs attracted. Black Lives, Now’s the time to Unionize!” the city Bureau of Environmental Services Oregon state police were circling on their CSWP supporters spoke in solidar- Picket at Whole Foods Over is investigating whether it has contaminated riot vehicles. These “Ninja Turtle” vans ity, stressing the importance of forming a the water system. are outfitted with running boards holding Ban on Anti-Racist Buttons union and bringing out the rest of the la- The supposed “deal” with Washing- up to two dozen cops with riot shields and On Sunday, August 2, a walkout and bor movement to defend future pickets. We ton stipulated that “crowd control” in the batons, ready to hop off on signal to start picket was initiated by Whole Foods em- highlighted the need for workers to not look squares in front of the federal court, city/ beating protesters. The state version re- ployees over retaliation against employees to the National Labor Relations Board, an county “justice center” and federal office sembles the “Black Maria” vans used by wearing buttons with anti-racist slogans. agency of the bosses’ government, or the building would be taken over by state po- U.S. police in the 1920s. They have been Class Struggle Workers – Portland attended capitalist Democratic Party, but to rely on lice. But although Governor Brown claims repeatedly used to try to intimidate dem- the picket in solidarity with Whole Foods their own power and organization. As Sun- that the feds have “withdrawn,” Portland onstrators protesting fascist provocations workers, giving their picket a boost. Work- day afternoon shoppers arrived, picketers mayor Ted Wheeler declares himself “ex- in Portland. ers chanted, “We refuse to live in fear, rac- chanted “Loyal to the workers, never to cited” to move on, the police chief Chuck There has been some falling out in the ism has no place here!” The last half is a the boss, a picket line means do not cross!” Lovell says this should be viewed as a Wall of Moms, who marched away from slogan printed on company-issued buttons, alerting arriving customers that the store “victory,” and the bourgeois establish- the demo early on. The WOMs in their which employees are now being disciplined was being picketed. ment media sees “an opportunity to close yellow t-shirts have been lionized by the for wearing! Around the U.S., Amazon The walkout and picket was an important this chapter,” there is no evidence that the media as shielding BLM protesters. No (which owns Whole Foods) has banned step for Whole Foods/Amazon workers who feds gone away. On the contrary, Portland longer, it appears. The dispute is report- employees from wearing anything with the have been working under tremendous pres- is now occupied by the PPB police, Mult- edly over setting up a 501(c)(3) non-gov- slogan “Black Lives Matter.” So much for sure and are in desperate need of some relief. nomah County Sheriff’s deputies, Oregon ernmental organization for fundraising and cynical corporate BLM messaging. Drawing the fight against racism together with state police, and federal forces including a 527 Political Action Committee (referred Workers spoke out about their work- the fight for a union, these workers are strug- Border Patrol and I.C.E. (Immigration and to by their IRS tax code numbers). It’s all ing conditions, citing racism on the part gling on the front lines of labor. n ney General Ellen Rosenblum accused the Jo Ann Hardesty, the former president of the ror. Democrat or Republican, PPB or DHS, resolved in August 2016, on a motion put Trump administration of choosing Port- Portland NAACP, held a candlelight vigil the state with its forces of repression and the forward by supporters of Class Struggle land “to use their scare tactics to stop our and called on the mayor to put her in charge politicians who lead them are class enemies, Workers – Portland, that the union “does not residents from protesting police brutality of the police. Yet it was Hardesty who initi- wholly invested in maintaining capitalism’s support the Democrats, Republicans or any and from supporting the Black Lives Mat- ated the curfew to squelch protests in May: racist killing machine. While defending an- bosses’ parties or politicians,” and that “we ter movement” (The Oregonian, 18 July). “As the acting president while the Mayor tifa against the bourgeois forces (and their call on the labor movement to break from These bourgeois politicians must think was out of town last night, I was the one to reformist camp followers) who demonize the Democratic Party, and build a class- Portlanders have a short memory. call for a curfew this weekend” (The Orego- them, Trotskyists emphasize that mass ac- struggle workers party.” The same union, In the aftermath of George Floyd’s mur- nian, 31 May). And it was Governor Brown tion by working people and the oppressed a week after the election of Donald Trump, der, it was Wheeler and his rabid PPB cops who sent the National Guard to Portland is necessary to stop the fascists and thwart noted that “there has been a sharp increase who went after protesters with batons, tear to quell protests in June. Looking to these bourgeois state repression. We call for la- in racist and anti-immigrant attacks across gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades. Democrats or other capitalist politicians is bor/black/immigrant mobilization against the country in recent days,” and resolved The violence was so bad that Jami Resch a recipe for defeat. cop terror and to stop deportations. To pro- that it “stands ready to join with the com- had to resign as police chief and a federal The class-collaborationist politics of tect against racist/fascist threats and attacks, munity in mobilizing against the clear and judge issued an injunction limiting the use the popular front always spell defeat be- class-struggle militants should initiate the present danger that the KKK and other rac- of gas. Last summer, Wheeler requested cause they serve as a barrier to class strug- formation of workers defense guards. ist organizations pose to us all.” That call National Guard troops be deployed to Port- gle and a roadblock to the struggle for revo- Most importantly, the working class for independent working-class mobilization land against anti-fascist protesters, but was lution. Yet only a socialist revolution can must politically arm itself for the coming points to the road forward today. Cops and denied. Last weekend, City Commissioner bring justice and put an end to racist cop ter- struggles. Painters Union (IUPAT) Local 10 feds, get the hell out of Portland! n
September-October 2020 5 Cops Shoot Jacob Blake in the Back, Shackle Him to Hospital Bed Anti-Racist Protesters Murdered by Fascistic Gunman Cops, Feds and Fascists Unleash Racist Terror in Kenosha, Wisconsin number to 250 the For Mass Worker/Black/Immigrant Action! next day and again to A slightly abridged version of this Deadly Racist Rampage 500 by Wednesday, August 26. article was issued as an Internationalist The scenes from Wisconsin bear wit- Outrage and Group leaflet on August 29. ness to one more deadly rampage of white- indignation at the AUGUST 28 – Shot repeatedly in the back supremacist terror. In Kenosha, the young new racist atrocity by the cops, Jacob Blake lies paralyzed in white killer proclaimed himself to be a swelled. Profession- his hospital bed after being gunned down back-up to the official forces of “law and al athletes took the in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin. His order” – that is, of racist repression. And lead. On the night of “crime”: barely escaping death at the hands it was those forces that, once again, had August 26, players of the racist police who shot him on August shot down an African American for exist- from the Milwau- 23. And like an escaped slave, the wounded ing while black. kee Bucks refused 29-year-old black man was then shackled Almost three months to the day since to participate in their by ankles and wrist to his hospital bed, as George Floyd was choked to death on National Basketball his captors inflicted more racist torture on May 25 by a Minneapolis cop, the Keno- Association (NBA) him. Only after his father’s denunciation sha, Wisconsin police cut down Jacob playoff game. Players of this barbarity did the cops uncuff Blake, Blake. Seeking to de-escalate a dispute from the Oklahoma whose spinal cord was severed as at least on the street, he was tasered by police. seven bullets fired at his back. City Thunder, Hous- As he opened the driver-side door of his ton Rockets, Portland Then, two nights after the racist car, where his three sons – ages 3, 5 and maiming of Jacob Blake, anti-racist pro- Blazers and Los An- 8 – were sitting, officer Ruseten Sheskey geles Lakers struck testers in Kenosha were confronted by fired seven bullets at his back. Now para- National Guard troops, BearCat armored in solidarity. All three lyzed from the waist down, Blake’s liver Women’s National vehicles, city police, county sheriffs, and and kidney were damaged, and nearly his Basketball Associa- armed white racists of a fascistic local entire colon and small intestine were re- tion games, three Ma- militia group brandishing semi-automat- moved. Yet another black man marked for jor League Baseball ic rifles. Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, who was death U.S. capitalism’s racist repressive games and five Major with the militia and had been greeted by forces, Jacob Blake may – unlike George League Soccer games the police, shot and killed anti-racist pro- Floyd and so many others – survive lynch- were postponed as testers Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosen- law “justice.” Right now he is fighting for well. Japanese ten- baum, and seriously wounded medic his life. nis champion Naomi Gaige Grosskreutz. We say: Cops, Feds Dozens of Kenosha residents gath- Osaka, whose father and Fascists, Out of Kenosha! ered at the scene of the police crime on is Haitian, withdrew Jacob Blake with one of his sons. Despite millions marching in the August 23 to protest the racist shooting. from her match. The streets, day after day, night after night, Later that night, demonstrators took to next day, the New York Mets and Miami Fascistic Militias Aid Cops, in Black Lives Matter protests across the streets of the city of 100,000, a for- Marlins walked off the field, leaving a Guard and Feds the U.S. this summer, racist police re- mer auto industry hub on Lake Michigan Black Lives Matter t-shirt on home plate, As of today, nearly 1,000 National pression just won’t stop. To fight it, we south of Milwaukee. They marched on a and the National Hockey League post- Guard troops, including from Arizona, urgently need to bring out the power of police station, where a dump truck had poned playoff games. The impact of this Michigan and Alabama, and over 250 the multiracial working class. The Inter- been parked to block access, setting the solidarity by striking professional athletes federal agents have been deployed to nationalist Group calls for mass worker/ truck on fire along with a truck parked is huge. Billionaire sports franchise owners Wisconsin by Donald Trump, with the black/immigrant action against racist outside a courthouse. Police fired off tear stand to lose big bucks if high-profile play- agreement of Democratic Wisconsin terror. And that’s only the first step. The gas and rubber bullets. The Democrat- off games are postponed, especially after governor Tony Evers. Despite the foam- fight to unchain that vast potential power controlled city government, headed by months of inactivity due to the pandemic. flecked diatribes of the bigot-in-chief must lead to and be part of the struggle to Mayor John Antaramian, who has held the Above all, what’s urgently needed is to about Democrats supposedly being soft end, once and for all, the subjugation of job for a total of 20 years, declared a state mobilize key sectors of the working class, on anti-racist protesters, it is the Demo- the exploited and oppressed to the parties, of emergency. A racist curfew was im- whose labor makes the entire U.S. econo- cratic mayor who presides over Keno- politicians and institutions of this racist posed. Democratic governor Tony Evers my run. That includes fighting for work- sha police and who imposed the racist capitalist system. For black liberation deployed 125 troops of the Wisconsin Na- ers strikes against racist police terror, as curfew, and the Democratic governor through socialist revolution! tional Guard on August 24, doubling the the Internationalist Group has advocated who brought in the National Guard. during the mass upsurge of past months. This is what happened in one city after On Juneteenth (June 19), the International another as anti-racist protests flared in Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) May and June. provided a taste of that power by shutting By the second night of the Keno- down all 29 U.S. West Coast ports (plus sha protests, on August 25, the fascistic ports in Canada) against police brutality militia group Kenosha Guard had put and systemic racism. In 2011, Wisconsin out a literal call to arms on Facebook: unions brought out tens of thousands in “Any patriots willing to take up arms daily marches against Scott Walker’s union- and defend out [sic] city tonight from
Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP Kamil Krzaczynski / busting law, only to have the labor bureau- the evil thugs?” Another post from the cracy call off the struggle in favor of voting group that night addressed Kenosha for Democrats. Today Wisconsin labor must Police Chief Daniel Miskinis: “We are use its power, along with Midwest indus- mobilizing tonight and have about 3,000 trial unions (UAW, electrical workers), the RSVP’s…. I ask that you do NOT have ILWU and other dock and transport unions your officers tell us to go home under (ILA, Teamsters, TWU, ATU), municipal threat of arrest as you have done in the (AFSCME) and service employees (SEIU) past.” One user identified himself as a Protesters face off against National Guard behind fence in front of and teachers to spark powerful strike action “state officer” with the fascistic Three courthouse in Kenosha, August 25. to shut U.S. cities down. Percenters Original (TPPO) militia
6 The Internationalist oppressed cannot look to the official forces of state repression that gun down Democrats... black people almost daily while protect- continued from page 1
AP ing and often working with racist vigi- after these same “progressives” fall in line lantes. As for calls by Democratic lib- behind the upcoming nominee – the result erals for “gun control,” this slogan was is the most ostentatiously pro-cop Demo- coined to prevent black people from de- cratic ticket in decades. fending themselves against racist terror. With this latest round in the Demo- As revolutionary Marxists, we uphold crats’ endless cycle of deception and de- the right of armed black self-defense mobilization of mass protest, drawing the and have called for the formation of lessons is a life-and-death question, now workers defense guards, based on the more than ever. Facing accumulating dan- mass organizations of the working class, gers, in order to defend their most urgent against racist and fascist threats. needs, rights and interests, workers and the oppressed need to unchain their class pow- Solidarity with Anti-Racist er. To do this, they need to break free of the Protesters! bourgeois politics and politicians that sub- In the wake of the horrifying racist jugate them to this dying system. For la- shooting of Jacob Blake, and the killing Racist vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse (left) with fascistic militia members in bor, African Americans, Latinos and other of anti-racist protesters in Kenosha, scat- Kenosha on August 25, before he murdered Anthony Huber and Joseph doubly oppressed groups, as well as youth, tered solidarity actions have taken place Rosenbaum during Black Lives Matter protest of shooting of Jacob Blake. the central mechanism that U.S. capitalism so far in New York, Los Angeles, Minne- uses to divert and bury mass struggles has group, attempting to coordinate with people, but cops drove right by him. It apolis, Oakland and elsewhere. Yet these long been the Democratic Party. The basic the Kenosha Guard. In the Stand Up was only the next day that he was ar- do not even begin to approach the scale principle of Marxist politics is the political Kenosha Facebook group, another rally- rested, in Illinois. Fascist groups and of protests in May and June after Min- independence of the working class from ing point for armed reactionaries, posts fascistic right-wing militias often act as neapolis police murdered George Floyd. the bourgeois ruling class. In the U.S., this included directives to “start busting auxiliaries to the police – as has been the Why not? Because the Democrats worry means concretely to break with the Demo- heads” and to “shoot to kill folks.” case in Portland, Oregon. The day before they would be vulnerable to Trump’s crats and all capitalist parties and forge a Shoot to kill is exactly what Jacob Blake was shot in Wisconsin, Port- claims that they allow “anarchy” in the revolutionary workers party that fights for 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of An- land cops watched as Proud Boys and cities they govern. With the objective of a workers government. That is the only tioch, Illinois did. Claiming to be “de- Patriot Prayer fascists and armed militias “getting out the vote,” their organiza- genuine choice today. But you won’t find fending property,” on August 25 the assaulted antifascist demonstrators (after tional apparatus has sought to channel it on the ballot. self-proclaimed police supporter shot which federal agents pushed the leftists protest into “Commitment March 2020,” three anti-racist protesters, killing An- out). Even bourgeois media have docu- on the anniversary in Martin Luther King Trump Runs Against Antifa, thony Huber, 26, and Joseph Rosen- mented an increasing presence of such Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington. Offi- Biden Against COVID-19 baum, 36, both of whom leave children groups within the police and armed forc- cial civil rights groups and ministers told Breaking from the Democrats means behind. Video footage shows Ritten- es. Rittenhouse is a former youth cadet marchers that voting to remove Triump seeing through Donald Trump’s unhinged house with a group of armed men, about of the Grayslake, Illinois police depart- is “the first step toward a solution” New( press conferences and egomaniacal Twitter 15 minutes before the first shooting. Far ment, which “offers participants from York Times, 28 August). outbursts to discern the underlying conti- from telling them to go home, police in ages 14 to 21 ‘the opportunity to explore Yet the events of this past week have nuity his presidency represents. Virtually armored vehicles give the group some a career in law enforcement’ through shown once again that it is the Demo- every one of the sitting president’s policies bottles of water and tell them “we ap- ride-alongs with officers on patrol and crats who are the bosses of the racist kill- has direct antecedents in the Obama ad- preciate you guys, we really do.” Six firearms training, according to since-de- er cops in nearly every major U.S. city, ministration, which vigorously prosecuted minutes later, Rittenhouse fires four leted pages on its website” (Washington who unleash violent repression against whistleblowers, lavished Wall Street with shots at Rosenbaum, who is unarmed, Post, 27 August). those who protest the endless police ter- billions in bailouts, deported over 5 mil- striking him in the head as Rosenbaum Like Ricky Best and Taliesin Myrd- ror. Now two of the most blatantly pro- lion undocumented immigrants, built im- tries to take away the gunman’s rifle. din Namkai-Meche, murdered by a cop politicians on the national stage, Jo- migrant detention cages, and maintained Fleeing the scene, Rittenhouse is chased Nazi in Portland in 2017 as they came seph Biden and Kamala Harris, are the secret kill lists (including names of U.S. by a group of protesters. Anthony Hu- to the aid of two young black women, Democratic “law-and-order” duo vying citizens), all while delivering more than ber with his skateboard tries to stop the and Heather Heyer, the anti-racist pro- for the White House. Together they have a billion dollars of military-grade equip- racist killer. Rittenhouse then fires four tester murdered by an Ohio Nazi in a record of locking up black people and ment annually to local police departments. shots, hitting Huber in the chest and Charlottesville, Virginia not long after, blocking school integration that outstrips Upon leaving office in January 2017, the Gaige Grosskreutz in the arm. Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum even the likes of Donald Trump. The seg- last Democratic administration bequeathed Police in armored vehicles stationed join those who have been murdered for regationist Biden opposed school busing a legacy of ramped-up repression that the one block away looked on as Rittenhouse standing up against fascist and white- in the 1970s and crafted the 1994 crime current White House has continued with its calmly walked toward them. Bystanders supremacist rampages in recent years. bill that turbocharged the mass incar- trademark ranting, bluster and open incite- called out that Rittenhouse had just shot To defend themselves, workers and the ceration of African Americans and La- ment of racist violence and vigilantism. tinos. Kamala Harris spent her days as The racist-in-chief’s erratic, polariz- San Francisco district attorney locking ing style has ripped the veil of respectabil- up black people, and as California’s at- ity from U.S. bourgeois democracy. In the torney general fought to make sure they process, he has openly appealed to group- stayed behind bars, despite evidence of ings the bourgeoisie keeps in reserve to their innocence. supplement its central, official forces of The triple pandemic of economic repression, including fascistic and out- crisis, COVID-19 and incessant racist right fascist elements. His campaign has police murder casts a stark light on the made overt and explicit a series of rac- Internationalist photo fact that ruling class of this country is ist themes that Democrats themselves increasingly desperate to maintain its have long exploited with a wink and a decaying social order. Both Republicans nod. Whereas Hillary Clinton inveighed and Democrats have decided that this against “super-predators,” while Biden means increasing reliance on the forces opposed desegregation in the 1970s and of repression to head off and suppress now lectures audiences on who is really unrest, rebellion and revolt. Capitalism black, Trump has once more made overt is killing us. To defend our lives and the racist fear-mongering the centerpiece of most basic rights of all, to unchain the his campaign strategy. power of the working class in the fight As for a platform, on the eve of its against racist repression, is it urgently bizarre national convention the Republi- necessary to break with Democrats, can Party declared that it wouldn’t adopt Republicans and all capitalist parties one – instead it just pledged to “enthusi- and politicians! Build a revolutionary astically” support Donald Trump. Over Internationalist Group, Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and Transport workers party to fight for a workers the past weeks, Trump has been running Workers Against Racist Police Terror at downtown Los Angeles protest government! Only revolution can bring against “antifa” and “anarchist jurisdic- against the shooting of Jacob Blake, August 29. justice! n tions” in Democratic cities (where, as we September-October 2020 7 publican administrations took turns gutting proponents of Stalinist popular-frontism social welfare programs and trapping mil- like the Maoists of the Freedom Road So- lions of African Americans and Latinos in a cialist Organization (“Trump Must be De-
AFP mass imprisonment system. And for students feated,” frso.org, 7 September) and the Rev- and large numbers of poor people, Biden olutionary Communist Party, a/k/a revcom. promoted the draconian 2005 bankruptcy us, Refuse Fascism, The World Can’t Wait, “reform” bill ensured that they would remain etc.8 Whether it’s sold as antiwar, antifascist, in perpetual servitude to the banks.5 anti-racist or anti-Trump, the political thrust As for “foreign policy,” pitched as behind these appeals – to build class-collab- Biden’s strong suit, he continued to sup- orationist popular fronts with “progressive” port the imperialist slaughter in Iraq long Democrats – is shared by most of the left. after the public soured on it. As Barack Calling to “drive out” Republican ad- Obama’s vice president, he was co-respon- ministrations – and install Democratic ones sible for continuing that war, for the ongo- – has for years been a calling card of the ing colonial occupation of Afghanistan, for RCP. While it is an increasingly odd per- the U.S. terror-bombing of Syria, and for sonality cult around its vacuous leader Bob deadly drone strikes from the sky, from Avakian, its appeals for “unity” (against Pakistan to Yemen and Africa. Together Bush-Cheney, against Trump-Pence, etc.) with Obama he helped ramp up the mili- are common ground for reformists and the tary/spy apparatus, internationally and do- liberals they yearn to unite with. To main- Joe Biden and Kamala Harris launch their presidential campaign, August mestically. Now, as the Democrats hail the tain a minimal pretense of being “com- 12, wrapping themselves in the flag. FBI, CIA and NSA – U.S. imperialism’s munist,” following CPUSA tradition the have underlined, the Democrats are in fact law enforcement.” Meanwhile, they claim blood-soaked Murder Inc. – many mili- RCP used to avoid overtly calling to vote the bosses of the racist cops that Trump is the protests are really for “accountability and tary and security bigwigs return the favor. Democrat. But now the RCP has replaced praising to the skies). And, oh yes, Trump consequence for anyone who breaks the rules “More Than 70 Republican Ex-National the wink-and-nod approach with an open is also running on not being Joe Biden. or breaks the law” (ABC News, 23 August). Security Officials Endorse Joe Biden,” re- call by Avakian for “actually voting for the For his part, Biden is running against CO- ported the Huffington Post (22 August). Democratic Party candidate, Biden, in or- Biden-Harris: VID-19, and not being Donald Trump. Biden’s vaunted friendships with no- der to effectively voteagainst Trump” (rev- As was the case when Warren Hard- Blue Through and Through torious Jim Crow Dixiecrats – he gave a com.us, 1 August, emphasis in original). ing promised a “Return to Normalcy” in Presenting two virulently pro-cop, eulogy for arch-racist Strom Thurmond To justify backing back Democratic 6 his 1920 presidential campaign, the Biden lock-’em-up politicians who have inflicted – are well-known. This was no quirk – architects of imperialist war, racist cop ter- campaign is running on thinly veiled nos- untold misery on African American, Latino Biden went all-out to show that he is him- ror and mass imprisonment, they argue that talgia for pro-business social and political and poor people in the name of “law and self a segregationist, systematically carv- with Trump in office the U.S. is ruled by “a stability. In the Democrats’ bleak vision, order” is a deliberate choice for the Demo- ing out a profile as “a leading opponent of fascist regime.” If this were true – which the only choice for capitalism’s victims is crats as they seek to outdo Trump in order integrating schools through busing in the it is not, otherwise revcom (and the rest of to knuckle under and “vote blue no mat- to regain the White House. In the Demo- 1970s and the 1980s” (New York Times, 28 the left) would be behind bars – it would ter who,” even if it means strengthening crats’ 2020 campaign, “voting blue” means June 2019), when racist mobs were ram- be even more dangerous and absurd to 7 the very institutions – like the police – that going for candidates whose careers have paging against it. Biden even warned that pretend that you can fight fascism by back- keep them at the bottom of society. been based on identification with capital- non-“orderly” integration would lead to his ing a bourgeois “lesser evil.” In 1932, the Known for his phony “Lunchbox Joe” ism’s blue-uniformed enforcers. The idea children growing up in “a racial jungle.” German social democrats did just that, and shtick and hokey, fake-blue-collar, regu- that racist oppression can be fought by Last year, Kamala Harris made headlines the candidate they voted for (General von lar guy pose, Biden 2020 barely bothers to backing them is worse than a sick joke – it when she went after him on his anti-busing Hindenburg, army chief in World War I) pretend to offer the working class anything. is a sinister and dangerous deception. record in a primary debate face-off. -Re promptly turned power over to Hitler. Such He mouths platitudes about “building back Joe Biden’s selection as the Democratic minded of this last month, she cynically class collaboration, formalized in “popu- better,” even though workers’ discontent nominee was due not to his mediocre politi- laughed it off, saying: “It was a debate!” lar fronts” in which social democrats and Stalinists bound the exploited to their ex- with the way things were paved the way for cal skills, but to his staunch support for the Class Collaboration’s Fatal Logic Trump.3 Throw in a pledge to favor a $15 repressive apparatus of the capitalist state ploiters, literally led millions to their death. So while many organizers of Black Lives minimum wage, and promises to tinker with at a time of accelerating social instability. Today, the largest forces on what passes Matter protests this summer urged people to the tax code in favor of “Buy American” pro- His decades-long “service” in government for a left in the United States are those that vote (Democratic) in November, this is what tectionism – in line with the anti-China drive, is punctuated with paeans of praise to the built their brand by backing Bernie Sanders they get: a “shoot ’em in the legs” segrega- and echoing Trump’s poisonous economic police, together with demands to “crack for the Democratic nomination. In doing so, tionist for president and a “lock ’em up” top nationalism – and that’s pretty much it. down” on the “crime problem.” Numerous they went all out to channel youth and dis- cop for veep. Yet at a time when revolution- The Democrats’ first-ever virtual -con articles and videos feature his racist rants in satisfied working people into the Democratic ary working-class opposition has never been vention was a veritable celebration of “mod- the Senate calling to “lock the S.O.B.s up” Party. Now, as foretold (not least by Sanders more urgently needed, much of the “left” is erate” Republican policies and politicians, as he pushed for the sweeping 300-page himself), their hero is all in for Joe Biden. pulling in the opposite direction, once again even showcasing Ohio’s Republican ex-gov- crime bill he helped write in 1994. Some are still working hard to unsee or deny lining up behind the Democrats. It’s what ernor John Kasich. When so-called progres- The infamous 1994 Clinton-Biden law it all. Yet the plain fact is that boosting Sand- they do, and they do it over and over. sives did surface, as Bernie Sanders did on provided billions of dollars to fund new ers “socialism” fed right into the mechanisms The characteristic “fight the right” pitch the first evening, it was to grovel for “unity” prisons and police officers, expanded the that the Democratic Party has traditionally of the former Soviet-line Communist Party around the party’s right-wing pitch. The par- racist death penalty and instituted a new used to subordinate labor and the oppressed USA, which has regularly backed Demo- ty’s message to its liberal/“progressive” wing “three-strikes” provision mandating life to capitalist rule. Come November, their “po- crats since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, is clear: you did your job to rope people in – sentences. Among its blatantly racist pro- litical revolution” means aiding their hero sets the pattern. Echoing it are other open now you get zero, or more precisely a minute visions was criminalization of “gangs,” “Bernie” in once again handcuffing social movements to the “establishment” pols they and a half for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at leading to “gang data bases” used to in- 5 This “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention” law railed against last Spring. the convention show. discriminately repress black and Latino made it “vastly more difficult for struggling Figuring that voters will support Biden youth, and much stiffer penalties for crack- former students to rebuild their lives by dis- Going with the Flow for Joe simply because he isn’t Trump, the Demo- related offenses than for “regular” cocaine. charging [school loan] debts.” Representing Quite a few supposed Marxist groups crats have refused to give ground to even the Writing in 1994 from Pennsylvania’s death Delaware, where many of the largest financial sought ever-new opportunist pretexts for most modest demands of anti-racist protest- row, former Black Panther Mumia Abu- corporations are headquartered, Biden’s rela- their yearning to get a piece of the Sand- ers. “Defund the police”? As more police Jamal aptly dubbed Biden’s pet project a tionship with the credit-card giant MBNA (now ers action, helping him market illusions in shootings of black men, like Jacob Blake “Death Bill,” warning that it constituted a part of Bank of America) was so close that in reforming U.S. imperialism’s Democratic in Kenosha, ignite fresh waves of protest, “declaration of war on black men.”4 1999 he felt compelled to state: “I’m not the senator from MBNA” (“How Biden helped cre- Party. Putting the small fry aside, the Dem- Biden and Harris denounce Trump for “call- The escalation of that war in the 1990s ate the student debt problem he now promises to ocratic Socialists of America now claim- ing for cutting half a billion dollars in local was not a coincidence. Emboldened by the fix,” Guardian, 2 December 2019). ing 70,000 members (up from a nominal 1989-92 counterrevolutions in the Soviet 6 See, for example, “‘Segregationist’ barely begins 6,500 pre-Trump). Having done the donkey 3 See “‘Post-Traumatic Election Shock’: To Union and East Europe, the triumphal U.S. to describe the racist Dixiecrats that Joe Biden work of knocking on doors and stuffing en- Defeat Trump … And the Democrats, Fight imperialist rulers launched a major social of- worked with in the Senate,” Washington Post, 23 for Workers Revolution” and “The Myth of a fensive backed by bloody state repression. June 2019; “Joe Biden didn’t just compromise 8 Chiming in with the Stalinists is the deeply ‘White Working Class’,” The Internationalist Over the next 20 years, Democratic and Re- with segregationists. He fought for their cause in Stalinophobic League for the Revolutionary No. 46, January-February 2017; and “Demo- schools, experts say,” NBC, 25 June 2019. Party, which displays its complete demoraliza- crats Paved the Way for Trump: What Next, 4 “Voting for Your Own Repression,” reprinted 7 See “How Joe Biden Became the Democrats’ tion by beseeching people to vote Biden-Harris, After the ‘Election from Hell’?” Revolution No. in Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings Anti-Busing Crusader,” New York Times, 15 in line with its terminal project of “rethinking 13, November 2016. of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2015). July 2019. voting for capitalist parties.”
8 The Internationalist velopes for Sanders in the primaries, after he dropped his campaign in April the DSA Democrats’ Response to Protests Against Racist Police Abuse tweeted: “We are not endorsing Joe Biden.”9 But, of course, the absence of a formal en- dorsement hardly means that the DSA has The Rap Sheet of “Top Cop” Kamala Harris somehow come to see the light about class Kamala Harris, the senator and for- independence against bourgeois politicians. mer state attorney general from Califor- Naturally the DSA’s super-star, Demo- nia, is a fitting vice-presidential choice cratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio- for a Democratic Party “law-and-order” Cortez announced: “In November, I’m go- campaign. Born to Jamaican and Indian ing to be voting for Joe Biden.” So, too, immigrants, she became a prosecutor in DSA Democratic state senator Julia Salazar 1990. For the next 27 years, Harris dedi- said months ago that she will “vote for the cated herself to putting people behind Democratic candidate,” adding: “I think bars, and particularly to keeping them a lot of DSA members will too” (Queens there. Endorsed by the San Francisco po- Daily Eagle, 20 April). That comes with the lice and deputy sheriff “unions,” in 2004 territory of being bourgeois politicians. But she was elected San Francisco District aside from the media stars in its firmament, Attorney running on a “tough on crime” how does the Democratic (Party) Socialists platform against the incumbent DA, Terry of America go with the flow for Joe while Hallinan, who was from a prominent SF kinda-sorta claiming not to? For starters, in “progressive” family. (He was a member the massive BLM marches, it pushed the of the Communist Party’s W.E.B. DuBois hype about “defunding the police” in order Clubs, his father Vince ran for U.S. presi- Kamala Harris, then California attorney general, with Long Beach police to join in with and strengthen its ties with dent in 1952 for the CP-backed Progres- chief Jim McDonnell (left), Los Angeles police chief Michel Moore, and liberal Democrats on the local level. sive Party.) Los Angeles interim county sheriff John Scott. There’s also what this outfit of tens Then, from 2011 to 2017, Kamala their children missed too many classes. ● Harris’ office fought for years against of thousands of activists nationwide is not Harris was California’s “top cop,” as she Today Harris says she’s for marijuana the release of Daniel Larsen, sentenced to doing. Ask yourself, where are the mass herself put it. In these days of bourgeois reform, but during her stint as the state’s 28 years to life for supposed possession of protests demanding continuation of the identity politics, Harris is billed as repre- chief “law enforcement” officer, more a concealed weapon, after his innocence $600-a-week supplemental employment senting women, black people and Asians, than 1,500 Californians were jailed for was determined by the Innocence Project, insurance, which kept the DSA’s millen- yet her career was based on unleashing marijuana-related offenses. a judge and an appeals court, and after he nial base afloat through the George Floyd the terror of the capitalist criminal “jus- Kamala Harris is the very embodi- was finally released, fought against him protests and whose cutoff threatens to tice” system against black people, poor ment of prosecutorial abuse. She wrote in being compensated for wrongful impris- onment.4 sink them (and innumerable others) with people and those doubly and triply tar- her campaign memoir, The Truths We Hold • And then there is Kevin Cooper, who, unpayable rent and student loans? There geted by capitalist oppression. Today she (2019), “America has a deep and dark as Judge William Fletcher of the U.S. aren’t any. Why? Because the Democratic paints herself as a “progressive” support- history of people using the power of the Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit wrote, “is Party wants things chill for the elections. ing bail reform, but as SF DA she fought prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.” on death row because the San Bernardino Instead they want you to e-mail, Facebook to increase bail costs, saying “people She added: “I know this history well – of Sheriff’s Department framed him.”5 message and fill the Twitter feeds of your come to San Francisco to commit crimes innocent men framed, of charges brought 1 Harris now says she supports obtaining Congresspeople with appeals to approve because it is cheaper to do it.” She has against people of color without sufficient advanced DNA testing of evidence used to the Democrats’ HEROES Act. Meanwhile, said she opposes the death penalty, but as evidence, of prosecutors hiding informa- convict him, a black man, of a quadruple they are out canvassing to send DSA Dem- state AG, she defended California’s death tion that would exonerate defendants, of murder that the sole survivor said was ocrats to Congress and to elect “socialist penalty even after it was ruled unconstitu- the disproportionate application of the committed by three white men. But as squads” of Dems in city council elections. tional by a federal court. law.” Yes, she knows it well, because she California AG she refused to order the Back in 2016, while not formally “en- From putting trans women in male was a prime perpetrator. dorsing” Hillary Clinton, the DSA said that prisons, where they are subject to sexual testing which could prove the innocence 2 The following are just some of the ex- “in swing states where we have the capac- assault and even murder, to enforcing of Cooper, who has spent 35 years on San amples of what this meant: 6 ity to make an impact” it expected chapters brutal mandatory sentencing minimums, ● In 2010, a state supreme court judge Quentin’s death row. to focus on “Dump Trump” campaigning to evading even token calls for requir- slammed the SF DA’s office for violating The nomination of Joe Biden (dsausa.org, 16 August 2016). Growing ing body cameras for police or a special defendants’ constitutional rights by with- and Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ rapidly through the Sanders campaign, the prosecutor to investigate deadly police holding information about a crooked drug lab answer to the mass movement against rejuvenated DSA moved ever deeper into shootings, Harris carefully cultivated technician. As a result, 600 drug cases were racist police terror, as they seek to show Democratic politics. Basking in the 2018 her “tough on crime” reputation. She dismissed. that they are the best and most effective election of AOC, it has run ever more so- took the lead in championing Califor- ● Then, as state attorney general, after the enforcers of capitalism’s murderous called socialists on the Democratic ticket. nia’s grotesque 2011 truancy law, which U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California’s “law and order” repression. n punished poor parents, largely black and prisons were so overcrowded that it violated Now that Bernie is ancient history, some 4 DSAers try to bury themselves in local Latino, with steep fines and jail time if the Constitutional prohibition of cruel and un- See “When Kamala Was a Top Cop,” The Atlantic, 28 August 2019, and “’Top Cop’ Ka- “base-building” or “mutual aid.” Here and usual punishment, her office fought against -re 1 https://www.businessinsider.com/kamala- leasing prisoners who were eligible for parole, mala Harris’s Record of Policing the Police,” there, some have opted for a bourgeois pro- harris-supported-raising-cash-bail-costs-dis- citing a need for cheap prison labor (the state New York Times, 9 August 2020. test vote for the tiny Green Party, but not in 5 trict-attorney-2004-2019-3 uses inmates to fight wildfires for $2 a day).3 Nicholas Kristof, “Was Kevin Cooper Framed a swing state where they could be accused 2 In 2013, Carmen Guerrero, a trans woman, for Murder?” New York Times, 17 May 2018. of being spoilers for Trump. was bound, gagged, tortured and murdered by 3 “Kamala Harris’ AG Office Tried to Keep 6 See “Protesters Warn of San Quentin Pris- Despite the qualms and collectively her cellmate in a California state prison (NBC Inmates Locked Up for Cheap Labor,” Daily on Death Trap,” Revolutionaries in the Class holding their noses, plenty of DSAers are News, 6 December 2019). Beast, 11 February 2019. Struggle, 15 May. now openly lining up behind Biden, as the DSA’s Jacobin (August 2020) gives help- June 2020). For opportunists, double-talk is decades of defeats of a labor movement ed States for a century and a half – whose ful hints on how Biden could “win big” and the name of the game. But the DSA is and saddled with a pro-capitalist bureaucracy misrule has created this horrendous situation. not “screw this up.” DSA apparatchik Da- always has been Dems. that chains the unions to the Democrats; The potential power of the multiracial, by endless imperialist wars abroad and multiethnic working class is immense. The vid Duhalde (a top honcho in Sanders’ Our The Only Choice: Build a Revolution operation) noted that while “de- ramped-up state repression “at home”; task of genuine Marxists is to help it attain feating Trump” in the election “does mean a Revolutionary Workers Party and by the mechanisms of control and the class-consciousness and organization President Joe Biden,” in fact “Biden likely The deepening decay of capitalism in cooptation of any movement that could needed to bring that power to bear in de- doesn’t want our public support” (In These the United States and internationally has even potentially pose a challenge to the fense of all the oppressed, to break from and Times, 17 June). But as the DSA’s Metro DC brought us to the 2020 triple pandemic of rulers’ profits and domination. defeat the parties of racist cop terror, pover- chapter wrote: “The DSA Isn’t Endorsing coronavirus, economic crisis and racist The crisis of working-class leadership ty and war. Basing ourselves on the program Biden. That Doesn’t Mean Their Members police terror. Now bourgeois politicians, is acute. To face the accumulating crises and of Lenin and Trotsky, the Internationalist Can’t Work for Him” (Washington Socialist, along with their leftist enablers and apol- fight for a genuine way forward for those Group says that the answer to the parties of ogists, are trying to shove the “choice” whose labor really is essential for society bankrupt U.S. imperialism is to undertake 9 This evoked an embittered scolding from some between two virulently pro-cop tickets to function, it is vital to unmask and politi- the difficult job of building the nucleus of a former Students for a Democratic Society lead- ers, calling on the DSA to “face facts,” follow down our throats: Trump, the embodi- cally defeat all those who call on the working workers party to fight for a workers govern- Sanders’ lead and “work hard to elect” Biden ment of capitalist rot, or Biden, the same- people yet again to back the very forces and ment and international socialist revolution. (“Open Letter to the New New Left from the old, same-old Cold War relic – pick your parties –the capitalist duopoly of Democrats For those on the receiving end of bourgeois Old New Left,” The Nation, 16 April). poison. This horror show was prepared by and Republicans that has governed the Unit- “law and order,” it’s the only choice. n September-October 2020 9 Mobilize Workers Action Against Racist State Terror! Los Angeles: Outrage Against Murder of Dijon Kizzee LOS ANGELES, September 6 – On August L.A. today – the port of Los Angeles/Long 31, 29-year-old Dijon Kizzee was gunned Beach is only a few miles from where Di- down in a hail of bullets to the back after Only Revolution Can Bring Justice! jon Kizzee was murdered. being stopped by sheriff’s deputies in West- Yet many liberals and pretend-social- mont, for supposedly riding his bike in an ists seek instead to divert struggles against “illegal manner.” The Los Angeles County cop terror into the dead end of trying to Sheriff’s Department claims they opened reform the unreformable police. They pro- fire when they spotted a gun drop tothe mote the dangerous illusion that somehow ground with a bundle of clothing Kizzee the enforcers of capitalist “law and order” had been carrying. Their “case” amounts to can be made “accountable” to the “will of an assertion that if a black man had a gun the people.” This summer, that was reflected – even if he no longer has it – that justifies in calls to “defund” and even “abolish” the summary execution. police under capitalism. Recently in L.A. But eyewitnesses report that there this has been seen in calls for “community was no gun at all. “‘He never had the gun. control” of the police/sheriff’s department. He had no gun. They said they heard a gun The Coalition for Community Control Over fall. What fell was his cellphone,’ said Deja the Police calls for “Local city and county Roquemore, who witnessed the shooting,” governments should amend their respective reported KABC Eyewitness News (1 Sep- charters to grant external civilian oversight tember). Planting a weapon on a victim bodies to make disciplinary, budgetary, hir- would be nothing new in the history of the ing and firing decisions.” racist capitalist state, particularly in L.A. It Hasn’t happened, won’t happen, even is doubly unsurprising when it involves the though calls for “community control of the LASD, which brutally lords it over the op- police” have been bandied about by liber- pressed black and Latino population of those als and leftists since the 1960s. Above all, parts of South Los Angeles outside the juris- the idea that the ruling class – the capitalists diction of the equally brutal Los Angeles Po- and their politicians – would let those whom lice Department. In the 1990s, the CRASH the police are intended to repress control the anti-gang unit of LAPD’s Ramparts Division Dijon Kizzee repressors shows a fundamental (and in the became notorious for unprovoked beatings, year, 619 of them since George Floyd was pent-up anger and mass outrage must lead case of would-be socialists, willful) miscon- shootings, extortion and planting false evi- murdered by a Minneapolis cop on May in the direction of socialist revolution. That ception of the nature of the capitalist state. dence, while the elite SIS (Special Investiga- 25. In those three months, LASD depu- requires mobilizing the power of the mul- As Friedrich Engels explained in 1885, the tion Section) acted as a virtual “death squad.” ties shot and killed Robert Avitia, Robert tiracial working class on a class-struggle state consists of special bodies of armed The day before the murder of Dijon Colvin, Jarrid Hurst, Michael Thomas, An- program, starting NOW. men, prisons, courts and other coercive in- Kizzee, a whistleblower’s testimony sur- dres Guardado, Terron Jammal Boone and The Internationalist Group calls stitutions to defend the ruling class. And as faced, shedding more light on a murderous now Dijon Kizzee (listed by attorney John for labor/black/Latino/immigrant mo- Lenin elaborated in The State and Revolu- gang within the LASD’s Compton station Raphling on Facebook). bilization against police terror. On May tion (1917), “A standing army and police called the “Executioners,” which recruits The police continue their endless rac- Day 2015, International Longshore and are the chief instruments of state power. But members based on their “success” in com- ist killing spree year after year with near- Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the how can it be otherwise?” How about electing sheriffs? This mitting racist murders in the streets (Spec- total impunity. They think they can get Bay Area shut down the Port of Oakland happens all across the U.S. Anyone who trum News, 30 August). In this report, the away with murder, and they do. Police, and led a march of thousands to City Hall thinks that makes any difference can June 18 murder of 18-year-old security sheriff deputies, prison guards and security demanding “Stop Police Terror.” Local just look at the racist sheriff Joe Arpaio guard Andres Guardado was identified as guards, courts and jails are key parts of the 10 also stopped work to protest the po- lice murder of Oscar Grant in 2010 and in Maricopa County, Arizona, who was having been committed by “prospects” of repressive apparatus of the capitalist state the slap-on-the-wrist verdict for the killer elected again and again. Or look at Cow- this sheriff’s gang who were “chasing ink” to “serve and protect” the ruling class and cop. And this past June 19 (Juneteenth), itz County, Washington, where the elect- (that is, seeking to get their Nazi-inspired enforce its laws against the mass of workers the ILWU shut down all West Coast ports, ed sheriff sent scores of deputies in riot deputies gang membership tattoo). Guar- and oppressed. Racist terror has been part from San Diego to Canada and Alaska, gear and an armored car with a gun turret dado was down on his knees with his back and parcel of this task ever since American denouncing police brutality and systemic against ILWU members and supporters to the sheriff’s deputies when they shot him capitalism was formed on the basis of geno- racism. The ILWU can play a key role in blocking a train during the 2011 strug- five times in the back in broad daylight. cide against the Native American popula- Some have illusions that the announced tion and chattel slavery of black Africans. federal inquiry will clean up the Compton That heritage continues today in the form of sheriff’s station and make its officers- “ac the racist death penalty, mass incarceration Internationalist photo countable.” Yet under the Democratic ad- and cop terror in the streets. ministration of Barack Obama, federal in- The Police Can’t Be Reformed vestigations were launched into the police – Black Liberation Through departments in Baltimore, Chicago, Fer- guson, Missouri, and other cities, but the Socialist Revolution! murderous racist actions of cops across the The black ghettos and Latino barrios country didn’t change one bit. And remem- of Los Angeles facing brutal racist terror ber that under the infamous COINTELPRO by the police and sheriff paramilitary forc- program the feds declared war on the Black es can become a powder keg of explosive Panther Party, murdering at least 38 Pan- righteous rebellion, as they have in the past thers, among countless others. (Watts, 1965; Rodney King, 1992). But Louisville, Minneapolis, Kenosha, what was the response of the ruling class? Syracuse, L.A.: the racist police murder It brought in the National Guard and feder- machine doesn’t stop. This summer, mil- al troops to suppress those rebellions. The lions of people took to the streets in Los bourgeoisie will stop at nothing to defend Angeles and across the U.S. to protest rac- the forces whose job is to guard the prof- ist police brutality. Yet as of September 4, its they squeeze out of poor and working Internationalist Group and Transport Workers Against Racist Police Terror U.S. police have killed 1,471 civilians this people. To have a positive outcome, the march in September 5 protest in South L.A. against cop murder of Dijon Kizzee. 10 The Internationalist gle against the scab EGT terminal (see “Showdown on West Coast Docks: The Battle of Longview,” The International- ist supplement, January 2012). Or look at Defeat Uber and Lyft Bosses’ Los Angeles County, where Sheriff Alex Villanueva (elected in 2018) simply re- fused to appear before the toothless Civil- ian Oversight Commission this May. Prop 22 in California! So how about black police chiefs, or California is the land of propositions, Proposition 20 is supported by the cops – if tion. We’re for lowering the voting age to 16, women police chiefs? In Minneapolis, which purport to allow “the people” to vote passed it would eliminate the right of parole so Yes on 18. a black police chief was in charge when on laws, as if under capitalism the ruling for many prisoners and require DNA collec- ● Proposition 21 allows local govern- George Floyd was killed. He followed a class won’t run and rig the vote. While tion for certain misdemeanors. No on 20! ments to adopt rent control on a greater num- Native American woman chief, who was on occasion some limited reforms may be ● Proposition 15 is a partial rollback of ber of housing units. Yes on 21. in charge when Jamar Clark was killed. As passed, more often the rulers use proposi- the 1978 Prop. 13, which led to huge cuts to ● Proposition 23 calls for increased staff- we wrote in an article about the Socialist tions to get popular “approval” for reac- education and social services. Prop 15 would ing and higher standards for dialysis clinics, Alternative (SAlt) city council member tionary attacks on workers, black people allow big commercial properties to be taxed which are a vital lifesaving treatment for Kshama Sawant in Seattle, who voted for and immigrants. In the 1990s, reactionar- at current market values. If passed it would workers and poor people. Yes on 23. black woman police chief Carmen Best: increase funding for community colleges ies pushed through a racist triple whammy, Voting down Prop. 22 will stave off “Since ghettos and barrios across the and public school districts, though charter with Prop. 187 in 1994, which sought to the attack by billionaire “gig economy” country erupted against racist police ter- schools would also get money. We say: No to exclude undocumented immigrants from employers, but securing labor rights will ror in the 1960s, the ruling class has al- charter schools, but Yes on 15. schools; in 1996, which banned require an intense unionization drive. lowed some black faces in high places, Prop. 209 ● Proposition 16 would repeal Prop. 209 This, together with the fight for quality insultingly hoping this could piece off the affirmative action for women and racial/ that banned affirmative action.YES on 16. education, housing and health care for all, black population that continues to face ethnic minorities in education; and Prop. ● Proposition 17 gives the right to vote to cop terror. This racist repression goes on 227 in 1998, which effectively banned bi- those who have finished their prison term but and to put an end to the racist system of today, regardless of whether the person lingual education. A generation earlier, in are on parole. Prisoners and convicted felons capitalist injustice, will never be solved heading up the institution enforcing it is 1978, Prop. 13 wrote strict limits on prop- should have full voting rights. Yes on 17. through the ballot box – what’s needed is black, a woman, or both. Just look at Bal- erty taxes, the main source of revenues for ● Proposition 18 allows 17-year-olds to hard class struggle leading to a socialist timore, where there was a black woman public schools, into California’s constitu- vote in primaries and special elections if they revolution that will establish a centralized mayor and black police chief, and almost tion. Together these propositions were a will be 18 at the time of the next general elec- planned economy. n half the cops on the force were black, massive attack on the right to quality edu- when the police murder of Freddie Gray cation for all. shook the city and the country.” This year there is a new reactionary –“SAlt’s Sawant Backs Seattle’s Top proposition on the ballot. A vote of na- Order Now! Cop,” The Internationalist No. 53, Taxi workers in New York and September-October 2018 tional importance for the working class is Proposition 22, which is written on behalf around the world are being Chief Best had to resign in August after the bled dry. In New York City explosion of protests against the racist re- of the bosses of the Uber, Lyft, Doordash and Instacart “app-based” taxi and delivery a number of drivers have pression by her cops. Yet SAlt has the gall commited suicide. Class to call for community control of the police, companies. The measure would roll back AB5, a California law enacted last year that Struggle International Workers to claim that cops are workers rather than has published this 48-page hired guns of the bourgeoisie, and to defend required app-based employees to be given the same rights and protections as any oth- pamphlet analyzing “Uber- the presence of cop “unions” in the labor Exploitation,” the “Medallion er workers under the labor laws (see “Fi- movement, so long as they pretend to be Taxi Racket” and their links to nally! California AB5 Law Says App-Taxi anti-racist – which the cops naturally refuse. Wall Street and the Democrats. Drivers Are Workers,” Internationalist No. Another group active in protests is the It presents a class-struggle 58, Winter 2020). Prop. 22 is a naked cyni- Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), program to unite all sectors of cal attempt by the gig economy bosses to which also calls for community control of this fragmented industry in an maintain the scam that their millions of the police. The PSL gives this a more left- all-out battle against capital. ist veneer, writing in an article titled “How employees are “independent contractors,” so that they can continue to dictate low pay will the police be abolished? A Marxist US$2 (includes postage) perspective” (Liberation, 11 July) that the and miserable working conditions. Vote No on Prop 22! police are one of the core institutions of the Order from/make checks payable to: Mundial Publications, Box 3321, capitalist state, that can’t be reformed and ● Other propositions on the California Church Street Station, New York, New York 10008, U.S.A. “must be abolished by means of a revolu- ballot where we recommend a position are: tion.” Right. But then these pseudo-Marx- ists turn around and say, “We support the him tried for homicide. We say there is no the rest of the season, Barack Obama person- migrant mobilization against racist attacks, demand of oppressed peoples for commu- justice in the capitalist courts. ally called LeBron James and other influen- deportations and evictions; to occupy unoc- nity control” because it represents a “pro- Meanwhile, with its Mao-Stalinist tial players to convince them to return to the cupied hotels, luxury apartments and sec- gressive yearning,” even though “every style “mass line,” the PSL calls demon- courts. While Democratic Rep. Maxine Wa- ond homes of the rich to house the homeless scheme to put the police under ‘civilian’ strations (as in Philadelphia on June 6) to ters made her celebrity appearance at a pro- and those in dangerously crowded housing; or community control … has never been “defund the police.” This is tailing after and test following the murder of Dijon Kizzee, to fight against the denial of pandemic sup- even partially won and implemented in the promoting the masses’ illusions, which bind the Democrats are, literally, “the bosses of port for undocumented immigrants, and for United States.” them to the capitalist politicians and parties. the racist killer cops” in L.A. and nearly ev- full citizenship rights for all! So rather than saying forthrightly that Nowhere in the PSL article is the Democrat- ery major U.S. city. Now “two of the most In the recent protests against the mur- calls for “community control of the police” ic Party even mentioned, although “progres- blatantly pro-cop politicians on the national der of Dijon Kizzee we have raised the calls are a liberal diversion, the PSL embraces sive” Democrats and their hangers-on, such stage, Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris, are “For Black Liberation Through Socialist the demand because it’s popular, while add- as the Democratic Socialists of America the Democratic ‘law-and-order’ duo vying Revolution!” and “Workers Revolution ing that, by the way, it’s not real. The PSL (DSA) – which has long called for commu- for the White House” (“Cops, Feds and Fas- Will Avenge Dijon Kizzee and A.J. Weber” article also has a lengthy justification for nity control of the police – have been work- cists Unleash Racist Terror in Kenosha, WI,” (18-year-old A.J. Weber was murdered its longstanding call to “Jail Killer Cops.” ing overtime to divert the protests into safe The Internationalist, 28 August). by sheriff’s deputies just two blocks from We have explained that, while these racist electoral channels. In contrast, the IG said We in the Internationalist Group call where Dijon Kizzee was killed). While murderers surely belong behind bars, for straight-out that calls to defund/disarm/abol- to break with Democrats, Republicans many leftists are getting ready to vote for leftists to promote the illusion that the state ish the police are “Opportunist Word Games and all capitalist parties and politicians. Biden/Harris while holding their noses, we will jail and convict its innumerable killer to Justify Tailing Democrats” (“‘Abolish the Amid the orgy of racist police murder, as insist that the struggle requires the leader- cops expresses confidence in the capital- Police’ Under Capitalism?” The Interna- pandemic capitalism has thrown masses of ship of a multiracial workers party fighting ist courts. How bourgeois rulers can coopt tionalist, July 2020). Real Marxists tell the poor, black, Latino and immigrant families for a transitional program leading to social- this demand, attempting to defuse protests truth to the masses. into total financial ruin and a tidal wave of ist revolution. In short, we need to forge a and direct them into pressuring the state, The Democrats are all over these pro- evictions looms, many can see that capital- proletarian vanguard, with a core of cadres was shown when the Democratic mayor of tests. When in the wake of the police shoot- ism is killing us. The fight must be to raise tested in the class struggle, like the Bolshe- Minneapolis quickly ordered the arrest of ing of Jacob Blake professional basketball the consciousness of the working class to the vik Party of Lenin and Trotsky which led the cop who killed George Floyd, and the teams in the NBA playoffs refused to take need to mobilize its power in defense of all the October 1917 Russian Revolution that Minnesota attorney general then ordered the court in protest and threatened to boycott of the oppressed: for labor/black/Latino/im- smashed the capitalist state. n September-October 2020 11 Brazil: Workers Power Candidacy Against Capitalist Rule The following article is translated from a special supplement of Vanguarda
Operária (October-November 2020), pub- Internationalist photo lished by the Liga Quarta-Internacionalis- ta do Brasil, section of the League for the Fourth International. On October 16, the Regional Electoral Court of the State of Rio de Janeiro (TRE- RJ), Brazil, denied the independent candi- dacy for mayor of Volta Redonda of Carlos Alexandre Honorato (Cerezo), spokesman of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Bra- sil (LQB – Fourth Internationalist League of Brazil), of the Class Struggle Commit- tee (CLC) and of the Union of the Work- ing Class of Southern Rio de Janeiro State (UCTSF); and of Geraldo Ribeiro, also of UCTSF, CLC and LQB, for deputy mayor. The electoral tribunal thus denied vot- ers the possibility of voting for these work- ing-class fighters running independently of the registered parties. We have appealed this anti-democratic ruling by the TRE-RJ At the gate of CSN steel plant during general strike, 28 April 2019. and are continuing to campaign. If that is justed for inflation. imposing a police-military type of “strong Today, the conservative bourgeoisie of refused we will call for a blank ballot. In the face of the constant killings of state,” constituting a threat to democratic the “centrão” [broad center, referring to the Despite the refusal of the capitalist the population (in particular black people) rights, the existence of the workers move- traditional right wing], together with impor- justice system, the campaign of revolu- by the police and the militias, we demand: ment and the very lives of black people, tant sectors of the capitalist state apparatus tionary struggle against the authoritar- Military Police, Military Firefighters Indians, slum dwellers, homosexuals and (the “justice” system, and others), offers it- ian bonapartist government of [Brazilian and all armed agencies out of the slum all the oppressed. self as an “alternative” to Bolsonarism. The president Jair] Bolsonaro, the conservative districts (morros e favelas), and police of However, the rise to power of the remnants of the popular front want to join right wing and the reformist popular-front all kinds out of the unions. bonapartist regime was prepared by 14 these “coup” plotters of yesterday in a mega left continues. We publish below the pro- In the face of the elimination of job years of government by the popular front coalition of class collaboration, within the gram of struggle of the Workers Power stability (“precariousness,” including jobs led by the Workers Party, which under framework of bourgeois parliamentarism. Candidacy Against Capitalist Rule. akin to slave labor) and the runaway in- Lula’s and Dilma’s governments at- Against all bourgeois parties, politicians crease in hours and speed-up, we demand tacked workers’ rights, strengthened the and alliances, our candidacy seeks to initi- Volta Redonda can and must be a six-hour work shift with no loss in pay, police apparatus (forming the National ate a revolutionary workers party to fight a stronghold of workers power in the continuing contracts for all workers and Security Force, putting Police Pacifica- for a workers and peasants government to national and international struggle for union control of hiring. tion Units in the favelas of Rio de Janei- expropriate capitalism in the framework of the emancipation of workers and all Against the attempts to destroy ro) and spread the lie of having created a socialist revolution and a Socialist United the oppressed! public education and gag teachers with “new middle class.” States of Latin America. n Against the contempt shown for the the “school without parties” law, we lives of workers and the poor in the midst demand that the schools be controlled Not the Way It Used to Be Nor How It Is Now of the COVID-19 pandemic, we demand by councils of teachers, students, par- free and rapid COVID-19 tests for ev- ents and school workers, under union eryone now and the immediate expansion leadership. Power to the of the public health system to provide Against the corruption and privatiza- high-quality hospital care to all the sick, tion of Petrobras, mainly carried out by under workers control and led by medi- the “neoliberal” job killer FHC [Fernando cal professionals. Henrique Cardoso, president of Brazil Working Class! Against the poverty wages and the from 1995 to 2002] and his minions in We who are signing this document list.”1 His running mate Geraldo, our can- fraudulent and wholly inadequate wel- other parties (as happened with CSN, the didate for vice-mayor, has been a city fare “bolsas” (stipends), both from the PT are not electoralists; we say it is crucial to mining giant Vale do Rio Doce, which worker for three decades and led the fight [Workers Party] and now from Bolsonaro, fight at all times on all issues involving the with criminal negligence buried an entire to oust police from the municipal work- we demand a huge increase of the month- interests of the working class. On the ba- city, Brumadinho [in the state of Minas ers union.2 He also played a leading role ly minimum wage to at least the level of sis of that daily struggle, those of us who Gerais], under a mudslide of mineral in struggles over the PCCS (salary steps the DIEESE [Interunion Statistical De- have followed this path make our own the waste. After those privatizations other for public employees) and other demands partment], i.e., R $ 4,342.57 [US$806] for phrase of the German poet Bertold Brecht: piratical privatizations took place, includ- against the government’s attacks, as when all, and a sliding scale of wages to be ad- ing of the telephone company and others. “Indispensable are those who struggle all the Popular Front mayoral administration We demand full state ownership of the their lives.” of Paulo Baltazar took over city hall [in oil and energy industry and the imposi- Unite Struggles from the 1993] and tried to lay off almost 3,000 tion by oil workers of workers control workers, an attack which the struggle suc- of production, to sell cooking gas to the City to the National and ceeded in reversing. CLC population at R$1 per liter. International Levels The Poder Operário candidacy main- Against the harassment of the super- Cerezo is a metal worker and the Pod- continued on page 15 exploited immigrant population, notably er Operário (Workers Power) candidate Peruvians, Bolivians and Haitians, we 1 See “Army Death List Targeted Brazilian for mayor of Volta Redonda in the No- fight for full citizenship rights for all im- Worker Militants,” The Internationalist No. 8, vember 2020 elections. He has a long his- migrants and against any participation by June 2000. Built in Volta Redonda in 1941 with Brazil in imperialist aggression and occu- tory of struggle in defense of the working backing from the U.S., the Companhia Siderúr- gica Nacional (CSN – National Steel Compa- pation, today against Venezuela, and in the class, starting well before the great 1988 strike at the CSN national steel company. ny), Latin America’s largest steel producer, was past against Bolivia and Haiti. state-owned until its privatization in 1993. The current government of Bolsonaro For his leading role in the 1990 CSN 2 See Internationalist Group pamphlet, Class and his imitators at the state and munici- strike and occupation, Cerezo was one Struggle and Repression in Volta Redonda, Bra- pal level represent a bonapartist danger, of of the activists put on the army’s “death zil (February 1997).
12 The Internationalist Close the Camps – Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants! Down with Racist Fortress Europe! Greece: Moria Fire Ignites More Racist Repression As flames engulfed the Moria - refu Armed Forces, the Police and the Coast gee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos Guard.” In January, the government an- Elias Marcou / Reuters on September 8, burning it to the ground, nounced plans to construct a “floating Europe’s “forgotten” crisis was made vis- barrier” in the Aegean to keep migrants ible once more. In the midst of a global out. “The 2.7km-long netted barrier will pandemic that has claimed over a mil- be erected off Lesbos…. The bulwark will lion lives, when 35 camp residents tested rise from pylons 50 meters above water positive for COVID-19, Greek authorities and will be equipped with flashing lights locked down the open-air prison with its to demarcate Greece’s sea borders” (The nearly 13,000 migrant refugees. After pro- Guardian, 30 January). tests against the lockdown, and pushed to But anti-migrant repression is not a the edge by spending many months and novelty of New Democracy. The prior even years in the notoriously squalid camp, bourgeois “left” government of SYRIZA, Europe’s largest, some camp residents set headed by former prime minister Alexis it ablaze. The desperate act of rebellion Tsipras, for four years carried out the EU’s was fueled by years of humiliation and de- racist Dublin III regulation, which prevents humanization carried out under the racist refugees from leaving Greece and Italy for immigration policies of the German-domi- Migrants flee the Moria concentration camp after fire reduced it to ashes. wealthier northern European countries. It nated European Union (EU) and its Greek From early 2015 until last year, Greece have an engine. They left us on this was on Tsipras’ watch that squalid condi- border guards, who at times crammed up was governed by the populist SYRIZA boat and took all our private stuff, our tions on Lesbos, Chios, Samos and other to 20,000 refugees into a facility meant to party, which despite its name (Coalition money, our IDs. We were on the boat migrant landing hotspots were allowed to house only 3,000. of the Radical Left) dutifully imposed the and we were dizzy. We were vomiting. fester, as he dutifully implemented Ger- Greece’s right-wing New Democracy harsh austerity measures dictated by the They [the Greek Coast Guard] didn’t tell many’s diktat to process asylum claims in (ND) government, headed by Kyriakos European central bankers. With the popu- us anything…. [W]e were in the middle Greece. Of course, many claims never got Mitsotakis, a Harvard- and Stanford-edu- lation exhausted by privations, in July of the sea. We called the Turkish Coast processed and some that did took years to cated former banker and member of one of 2019 the rightist ND won a majority in the Guard. They came and took our boat.” move through the state bureaucracy, effec- Greece’s oldest political dynasties, refused Greek Parliament on a national chauvin- Moreover, the Greek Coast Guard has tively stranding refugees on the islands. to let the displaced refugees off the island, ist, anti-immigrant program. It then spent been preventing migrants from even land- Likewise, it was under SYRIZA that except for a small number of children re- the next year unleashing a brutal wave of ing on Greek islands. One refugee recount- the hated “third memorandum” (with the quiring urgent medical care. Instead, the anti-immigrant repression. Appealing to ed how Greek officials stopped the boat she European Central Bank, European Com- authorities moved 9,000 to a nearby camp the electoral base of the fascist Golden was on, off the shores of Lesbos, removed mission and International Monetary Fund) and 1,000 onto a passenger ferry, with hun- Dawn (Chrysí Avgí), Mitsotakis undertook its fuel and towed it back to Turkish ter- of banker-imposed austerity was adopted, dreds more on two additional naval ves- a program of kidnapping refugees in the ritorial waters. Other migrants were inter- further pushing Greece’s already suffering sels. Thousands were left homeless and dead of night. They were then abandoned cepted at sea and transferred to flimsy life masses deeper into poverty. Tsipras vowed hungry after the fires, with many sleeping in engineless and rudderless dinghies in the rafts off the island of Samos, while in some to “rip up” the previous two memoranda, in the roads. Some local residents attacked Aegean, while the kidnappers made sure to instances refugees were abandoned on the only to then impose SYRIZA’s own aus- migrants fleeing the flames, preventing rob them of their belongings first. As of uninhabited island of Ciplak. terity measures after a phony July 2015 them from passing through a nearby vil- mid-August, at least 1,072 asylum seek- This is all part of the Greek govern- referendum in which “NAI” (yes) meant lage. Refugees held a protest near the town ers had been abandoned at sea since March ment’s plan to crack down hard on refu- austerity and “OXI” (no) meant austerity. of Mytilene against the construction of a 1, in at least 31 separate expulsions (New gees. In an interview with CNN Greece In contrast to the bulk of the Greek left new camp, for the right to leave the island, York Times, 14 August). (2 June), Migration and Asylum Minister (minus the Greek Communist Party, KKE) and calling for help from the German gov- One Syrian refugee described the har- Notis Mitarachi boasted that “the first which followed Tsipras in voting “no” in ernment. Their pleas were met with tear rowing ordeal to Human Rights Watch: step for us was to better guard the borders this “bait-and-switch” ploy, the League for gas and an insulting “promise” by German “[T]hey [Greek police] put us in a mili- and already in the last quarter the flows the Fourth International opposed all sides interior minister Horst Seehofer to take in tary boat and pushed us [from the deck] [of migrants] have been reduced by more in the fraudulent referendum and called 100-150 of the refugees. to a small [inflatable] boat that doesn’t than 90% thanks to the great effort of the on the workers to take action to block fur- Panagiotis Balaskas / AP Petros Giannakouris / AP Petros Giannakouris /
Thousands of displaced migrants and refugees stage protest outside the The Moria fire reduced the 3,000-capacity Moria refugee camp to ashes, town of Mytilene on Lesbos, September 11. leaving some 13,000 migrants stranded on Lesbos without shelter.
September-October 2020 13 Aris Messinis / AFP Aris Messinis / AFP Aris Messinis /
Migrants from Gambia and the Republic of Congo land on the shores of Thousands fleeing imperialist-sponsored wars and devastation brave the Lesbos via dinghy, February 2020. Mediterranean each year to seek refuge. LFI says: let them in! ther austerity.1 Now Mitsotakis and New calls to shut down the concentration camps, OKDE-Spartakos, affiliated with the for asylum for refugees and raises no de- Democracy are pushing labor “reforms” free all migrants and allow them the same International Committee of the Fourth In- mands on behalf of the refugees trying to to “free up” Greece’s domestic market to freedom of travel as everyone else while de- ternational (ICFI, formerly United Secre- enter Greece. We have earlier polemicized foreign investment and further appease the manding asylum for refugees and full citi- tariat) of the late Ernest Mandel, calls for against these “‘Communists’ Who Oppose eurobankers, continuing the work of his zenship rights for all immigrants. We also “joint labor struggles” of locals and immi- Calls for Asylum for Syrian Refugees,”2 “leftist” predecessor. call for workers action against racist attacks grants, as well as international mobiliza- but here their line is shown in stark relief. The 26,000+ refugees currently lan- on immigrants. And for those refugees flee- tions. In a statement on the Moria fire, they The T.O.E./ICL reported that Mitsotakis guishing in Greek detention camps have ing the devastation caused by imperialism call for “free movement and integration of had “dispatched army units and riot police to fled devastation and privation in the Middle who want to move on to northern and west- refugees and migrants, without limits,” for the Evros border region, where state forces East, Africa and parts of Asia wrought by ern Europe, we say: let them in! “open borders and documents for all, their have used tear gas, stun grenades and water imperialism, as did the millions who tried These are not easy demands to raise integration into the cities in commandeered cannons to drive back migrants,” and that a to enter Europe in 2015 and 2016. Many of in the present reactionary political cli- buildings with decent living conditions,” to video showed a “coast guard vessel firing into the migrants currently on Lesbos are flee- mate. Class-conscious workers and fight- “repeal the Greece-EU-Turkey agreement” the sea near a refugee dinghy and attempt- ing Afghanistan, a country blighted by de- ers for the oppressed must stress that the and “jobs for the whole working class.” ing to capsize it as it approached the island cades of U.S.-imperialist occupation under same reactionary anti-immigrant forces are Calls for local and international labor action of Lesbos.” So does the ICL call to let those a “war on terror” that has been waged by also mortal enemies of the Greek working are correct and necessary, yet the Mandel- refugees braving gas, grenades and gunfire three consecutive American presidents, Re- class. Along with a push to expel refugees, ites, too, fail to call for full citizenship rights into Greece? It does not. Or does the ICL de- publican and Democratic. Moreover, many the ND government is seeking to enact while their utopian-reformist call for “open nounce the brutal chauvinist repression being of the Taliban jihadists that U.S. forces have unrelenting austerity and anti-union labor borders” fosters illusions that the capitalist unleashed against refugees just as they reach been fighting since 2001 were originally “reforms.” The Greek proletariat, although state – which cannot exist without borders – Greek territorial waters? It does not. Do these mujahedin financed, trained and armed by diminished by the draconian cuts, has the would somehow magically disappear. pseudo-Trotskyists even bother to denounce the CIA (under its “Operation Cyclone”) power to defeat racist repression and bust Meanwhile, the Socialist Workers Par- the Greek government’s kidnapping of refu- to fight a holy war in the 1980s against a the union-busters. Port workers of Piraeus ty (SEK), affiliated with the British Socialist gees “who have made it to Greece” to push Soviet-backed Afghan reform government. (and Thessaloniki) along with transporta- Workers Party, heirs of the anti-Trotskyist them into the sea? They do not. Whether SYRIZA or New Democra- tion and refinery workers, healthcare, edu- renegade Tony Cliff, called for “asylum and The ICL (which went along with Tsip- cy, “left”- or right-wing, capitalist govern- cation and tourism workers have the power shelter for all,” to close the camps and “con- ras’ referendum ploy in 20153) once again ments serve the interests of capital. In this to bring Greece’s economy to a screeching nect the labor demands with the demand for denounced calls for abolition of the racist epoch of decaying imperialism, amid the halt, as is shown every time ferry workers asylum and housing for refugees” and, of Dublin III accord, suggesting – in one of proliferating wars following the counter- strike. But to win requires going beyond course, “open borders so that refugees are their trademark straw-man arguments – that revolution that destroyed the Soviet Union, the borders of a nation of 11 million people. welcomed here and throughout Europe.” A opposition to a “particular EU regulation” millions have been forced to flee their The key is forging the nucleus of a similar position is put forward by the EEK amounts to “tacit support to the EU.” Yet devastated homelands. As a result, after genuinely Leninist-Trotskyist workers (Revolutionary Workers Party), once allied they themselves admit that Dublin III means the flood of one million Syrian refugees in party to lead the struggle for socialist revo- with Jorge Altamira of the Argentine Par- “thousands of refugees languish in concen- 2016, the borders of racist Fortress Europe lution in Greece and Turkey, the Balkans, tido Obrero (which expelled him last year). tration camps in Greece and elsewhere, set have been beefed up to keep refugees out, and all of Europe and the Near East. After pious vows to “stand by the refugees, up at the behest of German imperialism.” in order to meet all their demands and live And since their article admits that areas of while the eurobankers continue to impose Mobilize Workers to Defend austerity to shore up the profits of the shaky with dignity and freedom,” the EEK calls Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria from which German banks. Greece’s gross domestic Immigrants and Refugees for: “Opening the borders to the freedom of refugees have fled “have been reduced to product (GDP) fell by 33% from 2007, at What has been the response of the movement of refugees and at the same time rubble by wars carried out by the U.S., Brit- the start of the world capitalist economic Greek left to the events in Moria? The welfare measures for health, housing and ish and French imperialists in particular, im- crisis, to the end of 2018 (MacroPolis, 6 Communist Party of Greece (KKE), the work” (Nea Prooptiki, 9 September). While pelling millions to seek asylum elsewhere,” March 2019). Now, due to shutdowns be- largest remaining mass Stalinist party in saying that such measures are “incompat- does the ICL demand that the U.S., Britain cause of the coronavirus pandemic, it fell the capitalist world, with tens of thousands ible with the government of enemies of peo- or France admit these victims of imperialist another 15% in the first half of 2020. of supporters and its own trade union fed- ple’s lives,” – i.e., with New Democracy – it slaughter? It does not. Instead it claims that More than 400,000 people have emi- eration (PAME), called to “close Moria, no says nothing about revolution to overthrow any “call to ‘open borders’ to refugees” will grated from Greece over the last decade, new camps,” to “release the refugees and the capitalist state. “promote illusions in the Greek bourgeoisie half of them youth. Now with the official immigrants from Lesbos” and to transfer Standing notably to the right of much and in the ‘humanitarian’ face of the imperi- unemployment rate at 18% (the highest in refugees and migrants to safe facilities of the Greek left is the Trotskyist Group of alists in the EU.” the European Union) and youth unemploy- in mainland Greece “to facilitate by any Greece (T.O.E.), of the ex-Trotskyist Inter- But if you look carefully, it turns out ment a stratospheric 38%, plus a coronavirus means their transition to other European national Communist League (ICL) led by that the T.O.E. had some trouble with the slump in tourism, the crisis over the refugees countries, for which they emigrated” (Rizo- the Spartacist League/U.S. The T.O.E.’s chauvinist line of the ICL, even after four crammed into the overcrowded detention spastis, 10 September). But what if other last published article dates from March years of spouting it. Alerted by the reference camps has come to a head. With a rightist European countries don’t let them in, what 2020, of which a “revised” translated to a “revised” version of the article, we took government and outright fascists cooperat- if they want to stay in Greece? In the ab- version was published in Workers Van- a look at the Greek version on the ICL web ing in immigrant-bashing rhetoric and ac- sence of a call for asylum for refugees and guard (29 May), which in turn is the last site. There we read a footnote saying: tions, the League for the Fourth International full citizenship rights for all immigrants, the world has heard from the SL/U.S. The “* In the previous version we wrote: ‘As demands that genuine Marxists – Trotsky- WV article titled “Down with the War on 1 See “Greek Workers: Defeat the Bankers’ Dik- 2 See our article “Strange Encounters with the ists – have championed for decades, the tat, Occupy the Banks and Ports!” and “What Refugees!” has as its main demand: “Full ICL,” The Internationalist No. 44, Summer 2016. Road for Greece: Perpetual Debt Peonage or reformist KKE’s position amounts to a Citizenship Rights for All Who Have Made 3 See “The ICL on Greece: Goodbye Trotsky, Workers Revolution?” in The Internationalist barely disguised chauvinist call to get the It to Greece!” An interesting and telling Hello Minimum Program,” in The Internation- No. 41, September-October 2015). refugees out of Greece. call, as the article pointedly does not call alist No. 41. 14 The Internationalist Marxists, our prospect is to mobilize the was a culmination of a years-long trial that the qualifying exams; immediate expro- Rio.4 We have fought against the pollu- multinational working class in the fight started with the brutal murder of Greek an- priation of the CSN central office building tion of working-class and poor people’s against all the racist laws of the capital- ti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2013 by (a white elephant used for pure and simple neighborhoods, particularly in the Volta ists on immigration.’ The above propos- Golden Dawn member Giorgos Roupakias. real-estate speculation) and its conversion Grande I, II, III and IV neighborhoods; al contradicts our line in the rest of the Rouopakias was found guilty of murder into a field hospital for the fight against CO- and against the terribly unhealthy work- article, implying an open border position and sentenced to life imprisonment, while VID-19 and other deadly diseases. ing conditions for city workers. in relation to the bourgeois state….” 15 others were found convicted as accom- Capitalist society worldwide is in deep The Comitê de Luta Classista (Class So the simple statement by the T.O.E. call- plices. Another five fascists were convicted crisis. We need to fight unemployment in Struggle Committee) and the Liga Quarta- ing to mobilize workers to fight against of attempted murder of three Egyptian fish- order to provide work and shelter for all, Internacionalista do Brasil, of which Cerezo all racist capitalist immigration laws was ermen in 2012 and four more were found including the artists from many parts of and Geraldo are members, have fought tooth slapped down by the ICL leadership! “Al- guilty of assaulting members of the KKE’s Latin America who have come to our city; and nail against the municipal governments though we oppose racist laws,” the footnote PAME trade union in 2013. and to fight against repression and the at- of Baltazar, Antônio Neto, Gothardo Netto piously claims, the ICL’s empty “opposi- Criminal murderers they certainly tacks on the rights and conquests of the and Samuca Silva, to make city hall pay up tion” is limited to “those who have arrived are, and fascist organizations are a deadly workers and oppressed in Brazil and other the salary steps for municipal workers. We in the country.” So while the KKE wants to threat to all the oppressed. But while the parts of Latin America, linking this with are also fighting for CSN to pay the cost-of- quickly hustle refugees out of Greece, the ND government for its own reasons may the case of George Floyd and the massive living raises, which are now in the process ICL wouldn’t even let them in!! Different go after Golden Dawn, which lost all its anti-racist protests in the United States. of being paid out. It is particularly important brands, same social-chauvinism.4 parliamentary deputies in last year’s elec- Here in Volta Redonda, the “Steel to point out that at the same time, it has been As we have noted before, “back when tion, the bourgeoisie will keep the fascists City,” the proletariat has a tradition of necessary to struggle against the pseudo- the Spartacist League stood for revolution- in reserve. Other racist ultra-rightist groups combating the bourgeoisie, but the Popular leftist parties, the PT, PSOL, PCdoB, PSTU ary Trotskyism,” its call for full citizenship 5 have appeared, including Elliniki Lysi Front has always been a roadblock to this and PCO, whether for their omissions, their rights for everyone who made it here was (Greek Solution), which already has ten struggle. Today, facing great dangers, it is sabotage or at times their open opposition in a call for equal rights for all, and “went to- urgent that the power of the working class those struggles. gether with calls for asylum for refugees, members of parliament. Moreover, charges of leading and participating in a “criminal be strengthened, mobilized and provided Against racist discrimination and the from Haiti, Central America, Sri Lanka with a class-struggle program. In order to oppression of women, we led the defense and elsewhere.”5 Now the ex-Trotskyist organization” are conspiracy laws that can and will be used against the left and labor, do this, it is crucial to draw the lessons of of city worker Regina Célia and – facing a ICL has turned this inclusionary call into these struggles in order to break with popu- campaign of repression from the police and a policy of exclusion of those who haven’t as RICO (Racketeer-Influenced Crimi- nal Organization) laws have been against lar-frontism and every kind of class collab- popular front – we carried out the historic “made it here.” The LFI explains, as did oration, which have led to terrible defeats. 1996 struggle to expel police from the union. the then-revolutionary ICL, that borders unions in the United States. Such broad and vaguely worded laws would doubt- We are not electoralists: our candidacy One of the municipal cops was responsible cannot be abolished under capitalism or is fundamentally different from all others. for the murder of Ernane da Silva Lúcio, a even in the period after a revolution (which less be wielded against workers defense guards. The working class must bring out We of the Poder Operário candidacy refuse black child, on 22 October 1995. Today the will have to defend itself against counter- to accept even one real [the Brazilian cur- demand for cops out of the unions is being revolution) but only in a stateless, classless its own power to defeat the fascist threat, not look to the capitalist state. rency] in campaign financing from the put forward by anti-racist protesters in the socialist society with abundance for all. state. We would not govern from the easy United States and other countries. Until we get there, we indeed seek to mo- The coronavirus pandemic and the un- folding global economic depression have chairs of city hall, based on the apparatus An Internationalist Fight bilize workers against all racist, capitalist of the bourgeois state that always represses accelerated the decay of imperialist capital- immigration laws, and when the desperate us. On the contrary, we struggle to form Against Oppression ism. Today, a class-struggle fight against victims of imperialist depredation are at workers councils in the factories and the We brought to Brazil and all of South xenophobic and fascist reaction in Greece the door, we say “let them in.” proletarian neighborhoods, as the basis America, for the first time, the case of Mu- urgently needed. Yet the Greek pseudo-left, for a workers and peasants government. mia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther Bring Out Workers Power to and particularly the Stalinist-reformist KKE, The goal of our campaign is to advance this imprisoned in the U.S., and organized the Stop Fascist Attacks! have mired their supporters in the morass of work of organization and promoting class first strike for his freedom anywhere in Despite heavy attack by the banks and bourgeois politics for decades, and they con- consciousness, to put forward a revolution- the world, by the education workers of the capitalist rulers, Greek workers are fight- tinue to do so. To combat the ever-increasing ary and internationalist program for the state of Rio de Janeiro in April 1999, an ing back. On September 24, five maritime repression against refugees and immigrants, 6 emancipation of the exploited masses. example which spread to the U.S. unions held a 24-hour strike for a “new and the continued attacks on the working In line with these points, the six-hour We fight intransigently against the collective labor contract, wage increases class, the most urgent task is the formation of workday which features in our program is campaign that Yankee imperialism, Bolso- and better benefits for unemployed sail- a genuinely Leninist-Trotskyist workers par- part of this great tradition of struggle. The naro and Co. are carrying out against Cuba ors” (ekathimerini.com, 21 September). ty that can lead the struggle for international beginning of Brazilian bourgeois “democ- and China. Our demand for Brazilian troops That same week, aviation workers went on socialist revolution to do away with capitalist racy” was marked by the military repression to be driven out of Haiti was adopted by the strike against “unfair income deductions,” barbarism once and for all. n unleashed against the workers occupation Rio education workers union. We also orga- grounding 58 domestic flights. On October of CSN in 1988, when we won the six-hour nized the solidarity actions with the coura- 15, public employees held a 24-hour strike Brazil... day. Later we fought to defend it against the geous Mexican teachers strike in 2016. for better pay for health and education continued from page 12 bourgeoisie and the sellouts of the union Under the red banner of the inter- workers and more hiring during the pan- tains that it is crucial to know how to com- bureaucracy. With a class-struggle program, national working class, we fight to carry demic. In June, hospital workers flooded bine the most basic struggles in Volta Re- we fought the privatizations, at CSN and through the great motto: Workers of the the streets of Athens in a 24-hour strike, donda with the more complex ones at the the FEM (Metal Structures Factory) in par- World, Unite! Our program is the only path and back in February, public sector work- national and international level, bringing ticular, and the mass layoffs. We fought and forward for putting an end to capitalism. ers and transport workers went on strike together the interests of the downtrodden won amnesty for the CSN strikers, against Long live socialism! It is the only solution against a pension bill that “privatizes social n who are systematically crushed by capi- the resistance of the popular-front govern- that can save humanity from barbarism. security and pushes thousands of young 4 talist oppression and exploitation. A key ment. This poorly paid, largely black workforce was part workers to seek private insurance” (Greek example is the emphasis that must be put On the health question, which is so of Rio de Janeiro’s campaign against dengue fever. Reporter, 18 February). 5 on saving our lives, as is the case with the central now amidst the COVID crisis, we For more information on groups mentioned These labor actions must be linked up COVID-19 pandemic. It is ridiculous that fight to end the privatization of health here, see “The Electoralist Campaigns of the with the struggle against racist, anti-immi- Brazilian Left,” The Internationalist No. 53, health workers who are risking their lives care being pushed through contracts grant repression and nationalist chauvin- September-October 2018. The PT is the reformist are not even getting paid on time. They are with “social organizations,” a central ism. The recent court ruling against former Workers Party of former presidents Luiz Inácio being treated like playthings by President topic in the impeachment of Rio gover- Golden Dawn MPs for “leading a crimi- Jair Bolsonaro, whose absurd denial of the Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff; PSOL, Party nor Witzel, currently underway. With the of Socialism and Freedom, an equally reformist nal organization” and “participating in a pandemic is passed along by the governor same emphasis on defending the work- split from the PT; PCdoB, formerly Maoist, now criminal organization” was widely hailed of Rio de Janeiro state, Wilson Witzel. Both ers’ health, as shown in our posters, leaf- social-democratized Communist Party of Brazil; by leftists of different tendencies. Golden have been denounced for pulling off con lets and other publications, at the CSN PSTU, United Socialist Workers Party, part of Dawn leaders, including its “neo”-Nazi jobs with public funds that were supposed we exposed the company’s anti-working- the International Workers League (LIT) notori- founder Nikolaos Michaloliakos, were to be used for dealing with the pandemic, class and racist lies about leukopenia.3 ous for pro-imperialist positions; PCO, Workers sentenced to 13 years in prison. The verdict Cause Party, a satellite of the PT formerly associ- acting in tandem with the current mayor of We were in the forefront of the fight to Volta Redonda and “Pastor Everaldo” [of ated with the Argentine Partido Obrero. 4 rehire the 6,000 “mosquito killers” in 6 As we have previously reported, at a meeting the Assembly of God church], who notori- The day after the strike in Brazil, the Internation- 3 of the ICL leadership last year, two members ously sells votes to the big political parties. This medical condition, in which white cells in al Longshore and Warehouse Union shut down all who had been involved in the work of the T.O.E. the blood are reduced, affected many steel workers West Coast ports in the U.S. for 10 hours demand- We demand the immediate establish- were ousted on accusations of “racist” conduct. because of exposure to benzene gas produced in ing Mumia’s freedom. (See “Brazilian Workers See “Spartacist League Declares Bankruptcy,” ment of adequate working conditions and the coke ovens. Company officials claimed it was Mobilize for Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal” The Internationalist No. 60, May-July 2020. wages – paid on time – for health care work- a “black disease.” See “Brazilian Metal Workers and “ILWU West Coast Port Shutdown Showed 5 See “Spartacist League vs. Refugees,” The In- ers; cutting the workday with no loss in pay; Struggle Against Racism” in “Class Struggle and Labor’s Power in Fight to Free Mumia,” The In- ternationalist No. 47, March-April 2017. immediate hiring of those who have passed Repression in Volta Redonda, Brazil.” ternationalist No. 8, June 2000.)
September-October 2020 15 CLASS STRUGGLE EDUCATION WORKERS Prepare a Joint UFT/AFSCME/TWU Strike Against “Doomsday” Cuts NYC Teachers: Use Your Union Power to Make Schools Safe to Reopen By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT Internationalist photo SEPTEMBER 6 – New York City may- or Bill de Blasio’s plans to reopen city schools on September 10, after they have been shut down since March due to the coronavirus pandemic, sparked widespread unrest among teachers and other school employees. Many are concerned over un- safe classrooms, others want the schools to stay closed until there are no cases of CO- VID-19. The pressure from the ranks was so strong that, on August 19, United Fed- eration of Teachers (UFT) leader Michael Mulgrew held a press conference in which he presented a checklist of conditions to be met before reopening and vowed that “ev- ery single person, both adult and child, who Class Struggle Education Workers, the Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth on August is to enter a New York public school must 3, protesting against NYC mayor de Blasio’s plans for unsafe school reopening. have evidence that they do not have the of “blended learning” (with staggered days too limited. A spokesman for Class Strug- headquarters in Tweed Courthouse – must COVID virus.” If the UFT’s demands were of in-person and remote instruction) were gle Education Workers insisted that “every approve the reopening in detail, after union- not met, the UFT leader said, “the union is discussed, parents were polled on whether classroom in New York City has got to be led inspection together with outside experts. prepared to go to court and/or go on strike they would send their children to school or made safe, every school building has to be If the necessary repairs have not been if we need to.” The UFT has not struck in opt for “remote-only.” But on September 1, approved by a committee of educators and made, if ventilation is still inadequate, if ad- 45 years, and doing so would clearly vio- Mulgrew and de Blasio announced a deal to families in that school,” that “we need thou- ditional staff has not been hired to ensure late the state’s vicious Taylor Law banning delay reopening until September 21, while sands of new teachers and educators hired,” small class sizes, with limits specified in a strikes by public employees. teachers (except those with medical accom- and it should be a joint strike with transit formal agreement to be adhered to in the fu- De Blasio’s July 31 submission to state modations) were told to report to the schools workers and all city employees that could ture, then strike action by the unions, with education authorities of unspecific plans on September 8. The tabloids declared that shred the Taylor Law (see “Get Ready to mass pickets joined by students and parents, for school reopening had set off weeks of the mayor “backed down” (Daily News) and Strike to Make NYC Schools Safe to Re- should block any attempt at an unsafe re- turmoil. AFSCME District 37, which repre- was “outclassed again” (New York Post). open,” The Internationalist, 30 August). But opening. And when the schools are ready sents school staff, objected that conditions In reality, it was the UFT leader who the deal between the unions and the city is to open, then point-of-care rapid testing in the schools were not safe, principals rep- caved. Schools were clearly not ready any- not the final word. Educators can still use for COVID-19 should be required for all. resented by the Council of School Supervi- way, but the union negotiators abandoned their power to make schools safe. UFT members are the union, not Mulgrew sors and Administrators said they were not demands that everyone be tested before Class Struggle Education Workers and some bureaucrats at 52 Broadway. If ready. As the deadline approached, the UFT reopening. Instead no tests will be required calls on union chapters of teachers and staff the education workers who make the public and NYC Department of Education (D.O.E.) at reopening. Ventilation reports from the at each school and every building, working schools run hang tough, we can win. Teach- announced separate teams to inspect the D.O.E. or the UFT are still unavailable. But together with parents and students, to insist ers unions right now have power like never schools, plans for a chaotic “hybrid” model even the union’s original demands were far that they – and not some educrats at D.O.E. before – we have to use it. n A Class-Struggle Program to Reopen New York City Schools Safely By Class Struggle Education by the Movement of Rank-and-file Educa- Remote Learning: An Oxymoron Democrats, Republicans – Enemies of Workers/UFT tors (M.O.R.E.), where our presence was Vygotsky: “Education Is Social” Public Education: For Teacher-Student- palpably unwelcome, Class Struggle Edu- Parent-Worker Control of Schools UFT: Stand Up for Teachers & Kids Not We in Class Struggle Education Work- cation Workers, together with the Interna- the Mayor & Chancellor ers seek to mobilize the unions’ power at this tionalist Group and Revolutionary Interna- Profit-Driven Capitalists: Hands Off Our For Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker crucial moment not to keep New York City tionalist Youth, brought out a contingent Schools! No to Mayoral Dictatorship! Control of Schools schools closed but to make them safe to re- with signs including: Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker Control open, and in the process fight for fundamen- Make Schools Safe, At Every School of Schools tal gains. We can do so now because this is a Where Pandemic Is Raging Keep Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker In the wake of the September 1 agree- crucial juncture when parents and masses of Schools Closed – For Teacher-Student- Committees Must Approve Reopening ment between union leaders and the mayor, working people are acutely aware that their Parent-Worker Control Make Schools Safe the United Federation of Teachers Delegate children’s future depends on it. A class-strug- Where Infection Rate Is Low Schools ● Class Size: 10-15 Tops Assembly dutifully voted by 82% to approve gle program must be enforced by union pow- Should Reopen Safely With Billions for: ● HEPA Air Filters the agreement, sight unseen. M.O.R.E. is- er, including strike action, and based on the ● Sanitation & Ventilation ● Rebuild Bathrooms sued a statement rejecting the “backroom principle that those directly involved in the ● Triple Classrooms Now ● Hire Thousands of Teachers, Staff, deal” by the mayor and Mulgrew (actually, schools – the educators, students, parents and ● No Hiring Freeze, Hire Thousands Custodial in the latter’s account it was a cellphone deal workers – make the decisions about what is while he was driving) and reiterating its call 114,000 Homeless Students – No Laptops, safe and how teaching should be carried out, Capitalists Using Pandemic To Gut Public for “no full reopening of in-person schools No Wi-Fi – They Need Real Schools not some educrats in distant offices, highly Education – Expropriate Private Schools, until 14 days of no new cases.” While we re- Police Out of the Schools and the Unions paid consultants, charter-school profiteers or Turn Charters Into Public Schools ject such reactionary calls to just keep NYC capitalist politicians. Who needs the suits? “Remote Learning” Widens Racist Gap Hybrid is Chaos, Students Can’t Learn, schools shuttered, the demands of the UFT At the August 3 NYC demonstration in Education Parents Can’t Work, Teachers Overworked bureaucracy are far from what’s needed, and 16 The Internationalist to keep windows open and high schools. Now, due to the coronavi- compared to 11% of teachers who are age Break with the Democrats, Build a even in winter. But rus crisis, with “social distancing” guidelines 57 and older) and 85% of whom are African many of the windows of 6 feet between student desks, typical NYC American or Latino), and thus at greater risk. Class-Struggle Workers Party are nailed shut, or open classrooms can only hold a third of the previ- It would demand air conditioning, greatly only a crack. And then ous capacity. Union militants should demand improved ventilation and rearranging there are the inside that the UFT and DOE contractually specify school kitchens, where 9,000 workers toiled classrooms, sometimes that classes should be limited to no more than through the spring and summer in crowded in a basement, and en- 10-15 students, or teachers don’t go back. At conditions and often brutal heat (tempera- tire schools (MLK in this moment they would win massive support tures up to 135°) preparing over 1 million Manhattan) with no from parents and students. “grab-and-go” meals for children and others. outside windows. Massive hiring: That would require Class-struggle militants would de- Coronavirus in- hiring tens of thousands of teachers and staff mand to get cops out of the schools, as we fections occur over- for New York City schools, at a time when and many others called for in this summer’s
Internationalist photo whelmingly indoors, in the Democratic Party political leaders have millions-strong marches against racist police closed spaces, so good imposed a hiring freeze and are threatening terror. In NYC, the mayor and City Coun- ventilation is key to tens of thousands of layoffs. A massive hiring cil went through a charade of switching preventing contagion. drive would be bitterly opposed by Cuomo school cops from the NYPD budget line to Standard recommend- and de Blasio, both of whom are closely tied the D.O.E.’s (in 2021!), but police are still ed airflow levels for to real estate interests, and by billionaire ex- in the schools and in uniform. In a school school classrooms are Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg, now system where 60% of all students are either that the air in a class- once again a Democrat, and his Wall Street immigrants or children of immigrants, in room should change at cronies. They plead poverty, saying city and which 125,000 students are foreign-born and least every 20 minutes, state coffers are empty, and blame it all on 40,000 undocumented, another key demand but in many New York Trump and the Republicans in Congress is to keep immigration police away from the schools the air change who refuse to pass the “HEROES Act” for schools. CSEW supporters in 2017 initiated rate is at best once a second, $3 trillion “stimulus” package. But committees to defend our immigrant students an hour. The HVAC they, as well as Trump, need to get the econ- (and fellow workers), vowing to block any systems are inspected omy back in gear, and for that they need the attempt to grab them and calling to mobilize annually, and the NY schools to be open and functioning so parents labor against raids and deportations. the deal with de Blasio is even more insuf- Daily News (9 August) analyzed 1,500 of can go back to work. The challenge and problems posed in ficient. Specifically: these reports, finding that 630 schools had “Hybrid” is chaos: The school sched- reopening schools are a key moment to fight Testing: Despite Mulgrew’s demand in deficiencies. Even the elite Stuyvesant High ules are impossible. De Blasio finally agreed against mayoral dictatorship, and for edu- his August 19 press conference that everyone School had 25 defective exhaust fans. To de- that no teacher should have to do both remote cator-led control of the schools by councils entering a New York City school must have fend against COVID-19 infection, a Harvard and in-person instruction, but principals said of teachers, students, parents and workers. evidence that they don’t have COVID-19, 2 School of Public Health report calls for bring- they don’t have the staff. The vast majority This was a vital component of the education- when it came to specifics, he called for ev- ing in plenty of fresh air, upgrading HVAC of students will fall further behind with re- al policies of the early Soviet republic fol- eryone to get a COVID test within ten days filters to MERV13 levels or above, and using mote classes, and the schedules will be im- lowing the 1917 October Revolution. In his before a school opening, which is much too portable air cleaners with HEPA (MERV17) possible for working parents, varying from 2002 campaign for mayoral control, Bloom- long a time frame, or for adults to get anti- filters, which block particles as small as 0.3 day to day and week to week. And if their berg said of government by councils, “the body tests, which are notoriously inaccurate. micrometers. Bolsheviks tried that, and it didn’t work.” children’s days in or out of school don’t co- Now the agreement with the city has no re- The D.O.E. claims it is installing On the contrary, it spurred active participa- incide, what’s a single mom to do? De Blasio quirement that anyone be tested before start- MERV13 filters in all schools, checking tion of all those involved in education. Today, responded on TV that New York City parents ing school. Instead there will only be random CO levels and bringing in 10,000 portable we fight for teacher-parent-student-worker 2 are resourceful! We say: All students should testing of 10-20% of people in school build- air purification units. The union says it is do- control of school reopening, independent of be able to return to school full-time if they ings on a monthly basis. That is hardly ensur- ing its own inspection: good, but not enough. the D.O.E., to ensure safe conditions, and to wish. A massive expansion of university ing the safety of the schools. Teacher-student-parent-worker committees counter attacks by those who would set par- teacher-education courses at the City Uni- In fact, there are existing “point-of-care” should bring in independent ventilation ex- ents and the community against the teachers. versity in conjunction with existing UFT tests that produce results in as little as 15 min- perts to inspect and certify adequate airflow Where’s the money to come from? educational programs, enabling new teach- utes. They’re used to test NBA basketball and air quality in every classroom. That’s their problem, of the bosses and ers to start immediately, would find many players, well-heeled party-goers in the Hamp- Bathrooms and handwashing sta- their political hacks. Don’t tell us that in eager takers among the tens of thousands of tons or anyone who comes into contact with tions: To the extent that the coronavirus the center of international finance capital unemployed college graduates in NYC. President Trump. Questions have been raised is transmitted by touching surfaces, bath- they can’t find the dollars. There are many other concrete issues about the accuracy of some tests, like the one rooms are a prime area where infection The reality is that teachers are today in posed by the reopening of New York City used in the White House, but two other compa- could take place – and many New York the strongest position we have been in for at schools. De Blasio has promised 400 more nies are producing point-of-care antigen tests, City school bathrooms are in miserable least half a century, and possibly ever, to force and more are in the works. One of the rapid- shape. Toilets that don’t flush, faucets that nurses, so that there would be one in every the capitalist rulers to pay up and fund public result test companies is already turning out don’t work, and a general lack of cleanli- building. Yet already there are reportedly education, to make the schools safe to reopen. over millions of tests a month for clinics.1 So ness. Many older buildings have inad- 300 unfilled positions for school nurses, The Wall Street Journal (3 August) has figured why can’t those be used to screen the 800,000 equate numbers of bathrooms or stalls. and some large schools certainly need more that out, accusing teachers unions in an editori- students, teachers and staff expected to be in As in just about everything else, there are than one. There has been much talk of hold- al of “School-Opening Extortion.” Of course, NYC schools? It’s certainly a national priority. state regulations about bathrooms, which ing classes outdoors, in schoolyards, parks if American Federation of Teachers president The answer is money, and neither Democrats are regularly ignored. Teacher-student- and adjacent streets. Half the schools have Randi Weingarten said “safety strikes” could nor Republicans will come up with it. parent-worker committees at each school reportedly filed plans for such classes. But happen, and UFT leader Mulgrew threatened Nevertheless, teacher-student-parent- should inspect the bathrooms, and if where is the financing? De Blasio suggested to call one, these mainstream Obama/Clinton worker committees at every site should in- they are not in good condition, insist that maybe the richer PTAs could chip in! All Democrats are only talking tough because of sist that everyone get tested on the spot for they must be rebuilt before school opens. such classes must be centrally funded. The pressure from the ranks, and as a bargaining COVID-19 before opening a school. Handwashing stations in the halls, sched- city promised daycare for children of par- tactic. But the liberal Sanders Democrats of Ventilation: There are 1,800 public ules for hourly cleaning and resupplying ents who had to work, but it is only planning M.O.R.E. likewise only wanted a “credible schools in New York City housed in 1,400 soap, and workers hired to carry it out. for 100,000 slots, and even those are being strike threat,” and their talk of “taxing the rich buildings, many of them over a century old. Class sizes: For years, those fighting prioritized for D.O.E. personnel and “essen- and Wall Street” is so much hot air. Less than half have integrated HVAC (heat- against the privatizing education “reformers” tial workers.” So long as schools are on the As we have always said, labor’s gotta ing, ventilation and air conditioning) systems. have emphasized that far smaller classes are crazy hybrid model, daycare must be pro- play hardball to win. The bosses certainly The D.O.E. claims teams inspected every needed to provide effective instruction. Elite vided for hundreds of thousands of children. do, with decades of union-busting. But right classroom in 1,600 schools in a week. But as private schools have always had small classes A class-struggle offensive would also now, teachers unions have the bosses over a one could see in a viral video, this consisted of of 10-15 students, with student-teacher ratios demand the expropriation of private schools barrel. Instead of just demanding to keep the clipping a piece of toilet paper to a yardstick of between 5 and 6,3 whereas the ratio in NYC and to turn charters into public schools. In schools closed, in those places where they and holding it next to a ceiling vent to see if public schools is more than double that, with NYC it would call to expand eligibility for can be opened – like New York City – unions enough air was coming out to make it wave. class sizes of around 30 students in middle accommodation for risk factors, particularly should demand safety changes like the above for paraprofessionals, who had a dispropor- In the video, if only one vent of several was 2 Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, be implemented now, or else no school. working, the room was okayed. In quite a few Schools for Health: Risk Reduction Strategies tionate number of deaths from COVID-19, Where in-person instruction is precluded by older schools, the only way to get airflow is for Reopening Schools (June 2020). and for school aides and food service work- high COVID-19 transmission rates, unions 1 “A New Generation of Fast Coronavirus Tests 3 “A Guide to Reopening NYC’s $50,000-a-Year ers represented by AFSCME Local 372, who should demand that the needed measures Is Coming,” New York Times, 7 August. Elite Private Schools,” Bloomberg, 16 August. are generally older (one-third are over 55, continued on page 20 September-October 2020 17 Capitalism Is Killing Us Homelessness and Coronavirus in New York City Much of New York City ground to a tens of thousands of trailers to house them, standstill amid the coronavirus pandemic which then had to be abandoned because of as Governor Andrew Cuomo’s March 20 toxic levels of formaldehyde. “New York State on PAUSE” executive or- Reuters After Hurricane Maria devastated Puer- der mandated the shutdown of all but “es- to Rico in 2017, knocking out the island’s sential” businesses. State and city govern- entire electrical system, FEMA’s local ments appealed to the population to “Stay warehouse was nearly empty. It left medi- Home, Stay Safe.” This posed a problem in cal clinics without generators, left thou- lower-income neighborhoods where most sands of trailers loaded with food, water and “essential workers” live: they had little medicine parked on the San Juan docks and choice but to go to their jobs, at great risk provided far less support than for hurricane- every day. At the same time, it was impos- stricken areas of Florida and Texas. This is sible for 4,000 homeless people living on the same agency that Ronald Reagan tasked the street, as well as for another 79,000 in in 1984 (in “Operation Rex-84”) with plan- city shelters, who have no place where they ning for the detention of 400,000 undocu- can safely “stay home.”1 Their plight was mented immigrants at military bases in a thrown into sharp relief as city and state “state of domestic national emergency”6 (as authorities ordered a late-night shutdown Trump has now declared over the coronavi- of the NYC subways, where many home- rus pandemic). And this is the outfit NYC less sought refuge. 2 mayor de Blasio is looking to for funding Early figures show 961 confirmed Police remove woman from New York City subway on May 7 during late-night hotel rooms for the homeless?! COVID-19 cases in homeless shelters shutdown aimed at forcing the homeless off the trains and out of the stations. De Blasio and the Homeless: (two-thirds of them in large single-adult into the freezing rain. It was cold out. rooms are not for the homeless, who have Endless Plans, No Action facilities with dozens of beds in cramped There are no outreach, no buses, and no to contact another agency, the Department spaces), of whom 76 have died from the supplies, certainly no access to the thou- of Homeless Services (DHS). Yet accord- In 2013, Democrat Bill de Blasio ran disease (Daily News, 18 May). Even the sands of empty hotel rooms right down ing to a March 26 letter from the Legal Aid for New York City mayor with a campaign numbers of the officially homeless greatly the street in downtown Brooklyn. What Society, “In response to the crisis, the City centered on combatting inequality and pov- understate the scope of the problem. An there was were police officers, telling has effectively denied access to shelter erty. Front and center was the fight against annual survey of New York City schools people they had to leave because the sta- to COVID-19-positive or likely positive homelessness, which had ballooned un- showed that more than 114,000 students tion was closed. Some ppl were asking homeless single adults who have not had der Republican plutocrat mayor Michael police questions – Where am I supposed were homeless at some point in the year, recent prior contact with DHS.” Bloomberg, under whose administration to go? Are there buses? Is there help? one in ten of the total enrollment, a hor- Conditions in the shelters are terrible. the number of homeless in the shelter sys- Do you have a mask? The answer was rifying number. Significantly, while 34,000 According to one account, “In a small tem increased by 64% while the number of always ‘no.’ There is no help at all at the 7 had been in shelters, twice that number homeless families was up 80%. De Blasio 95% of subway stations that are not ‘end dorm, there were 100 people squashed to- (74,000) had been “doubled up” in tempo- talked of easing DHS restrictions on quali- of line’ stations. Even at end of line, we gether. There was no soap, no sanitizer; the fying for shelter, creating new rent subsidy rary arrangements with relatives, friends or know that what is being offered is gross- toilets were flooded all the time” (The In- 3 programs and building 100,000 new low- others. Such “hidden homelessness,” not ly insufficient – the offer of dangerous tercept, 1 May). Currently, an emergency shown in official statistics, is particularly crowded shelter w/no social distancing bill is before the NYC City Council which income housing units. At the same time, dangerous in this pandemic as the virus in the middle of a pandemic.” would require the city to place all homeless the liberal Democrat was closely tied to spread like wildfire in packed apartments In Manhattan, Citicare minibuses, persons in hotel rooms, which the mayor’s real estate speculators responsible for the and overcrowded buildings. yellow school buses and Access-a-Ride office is vociferously opposing. A spokes- skyrocketing rents, and received campaign In motivating the late-night subway minivans littered the streets, dropping off man for the Department of Social Services contributions from slum landlords who run shutdown, in addition to calling subway cars the homeless at packed shelters. The main denounced the bill as a “one-size fits all” lousy for-profit shelters (“Hidden City,” filled with homeless people “disgusting,” destination was the cavernous 850-bed 30th approach that is “ham-fisted and reck- New Yorker, 28 October 2013). Cuomo claimed that this was “an opportu- Street men’s shelter, infamous for rampant less, self-defeatingly unilateral and ill-in- Blasio quickly fell into what has be- nity to engage homeless men and women violent incidents (and lately asbestos con- formed, and legally questionable and ama- come his M.O.: making big promises, who have been sleeping on trains, some of tamination), where staff and residents strug- teurish” (New York Post, 15 May). What’s failing miserably with one janky program them for years.” In response to complaints gle to maintain social distancing. Many of actually at issue is none of the above, but after another and then ignominiously pack- about city shelters, NYPD officials said that those dropped off there did not go in. Also, who would pay for the estimated $500 mil- pedaling. This was the case with his initial 1,000 new Safe Haven beds (overnight beds city hospitals stopped allowing homeless lion cost, the city or the Federal Emergen- opposition to charter schools, where he in churches and community centers with people to seek refuge in waiting rooms dur- cy Management Administration (FEMA). folded under attack by the well-connected less extensive regulations and requirements) ing cold weather. They have also been trans- FEMA is the federal agency that after charter lobby. The same pattern was shown would be offered. Yet those were only avail- ferring patients without a known address Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans more recently over integrating New York able to those contacted by street outreach who tested positive for coronavirus but did in 2005, systematically blocked efforts to City schools, the most segregated in the teams. And having ample experience with not require acute medical care to the shel- aid the victims, issuing a bulletin order- country, as de Blasio backtracked on elimi- the NYPD, the homeless are all too famil- ters. There they had to confront the labyrin- ing first responders not to respond. FEMA nating gifted-and-talented programs and iar with what “engagement” really means. thian COVID-19 intake protocol. turned back trailer trucks with water; pre- screened admissions. On the homeless, in Eyewitness accounts of the first week of the So what about housing the homeless vented emergency medical teams and a 2014, de Blasio produced a 117-page plan, sweeps from the Safety Net Project of the in the tens of thousands of hotel rooms 113-bed mobile hospital from reaching the Housing New York: A Five-Borough, Ten- Urban Justice Center told the real story: now standing empty? Very belatedly, the city; stopped a fire-fighting team from Tex- Year Plan, to “build or preserve nearly “Tonight at Atlantic Terminal, at least Office of Emergency Management (OEM) as at gunpoint and diverted 1,400 firefight- 200,000 affordable units” and institute “a 15-20 homeless people were kicked out contracted for 11,000 hotel rooms for ers from across the country on their way pilot rental subsidy program for homeless 1 The figure of 60,000 or so in NYC homeless healthcare workers, those discharged from to the stricken city; kept the USS Bataan families.” However, only 15,000 of the shelters is often cited, but that is only for facili- hospitals and those with symptoms living with a 600-bed hospital and capacity to projected units were for “supportive hous- ties administered by the Department of Home- in cramped quarters where “social distanc- produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a ing” with services for the homeless. less Services. day offshore; cut off a flotilla of 500 boats In 2015, after a scandal-mongering 2 ing” is impossible. Thousands of those See “Shutting Down 24/7 Service Is No An- rooms are still empty as hospitals continue from rescuing people in the flooded city, campaign in right-wing media over a rise swer to NYC Subway Crisis,” The Internation- and more.5 Rather than helping black resi- alist, May 2020. to send symptomatic people and recov- 6 See, “American Gestapo,” The International- 4 3 Advocates for Children of New York, “New ering patients home. In any case, those dents return to their homes, FEMA bought ist No. 19, Summer 2004. Data Show Number of NYC Students who are 4 See “A Tale of Two Cities: Wuhan – New 5 See our article, “New Orleans Police State: 7 Coalition for the Homeless, Rising Family Homeless Topped 100,000 for Fourth Consecu- York,” The Internationalist No. 59, March- ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ American-Style,” The In- Homelessness in NYC: What the Next Mayor tive Year” (28 October 2019) April 2020. ternationalist No. 22, September-October 2005. Can Do (November 2013). 18 The Internationalist in street homelessness, de Blasio’s focus NYCHA residents were left “without elec- switched to police action. A $22 million tricity, heat and elevators for weeks – mak- program was launched called NYC-SAFE, ing some residents virtual prisoners in to support “New Yorkers with untreated their homes.” Today, out of 200 NYCHA serious mental illness who pose a concern buildings requiring extensive repairs after for violent behavior.” This was combined Sandy, in only two have the repairs been with Home-STAT (Homeless Outreach and completed (The City, 29 October 2019). Mobile Engagement Street Actions Teams) The “temporary” boiler trailers outside to track the homeless daily in Manhattan. Red Hook Houses are still there. Yet de The NYPD was to act as “service request Blasio seems more interested in privatizing professionals” to “engage” the homeless. Ben Fractenberg/The City NYCHA housing than fixing them. From Meanwhile, the mayor and then city po- 2013 to 2015, NYCHA sold “54 plots with lice commissioner, William J, Bratton, the 441,000 square feet of public land to de- racist enforcer of “broken windows” and velopers,” including “parking lots, green “stop-and-frisk,” bragged to the media space and playgrounds,” to ease city bud- about recently breaking up 50 “service re- get woes (Daily News, 29 March 2015). sistant” homeless encampments. This February, NYCHA struck a deal In 2017, in another switch, the de Bla- with five developers to privatize 5,908 units sio administration churned out a 128-page in East New York, Williamsburg, Washing- document, Turning the Tide on Homeless- ton Heights and Harlem. The plan is moving ness in New York City, announcing plans New York City mayor Bill de Blasio presents his latest plan to end street forward, with an expected 62,000 units to be to build 90 shelters across the city. Predict- homelessness, 17 December 2019. brought under private management through ably, this set off a racist NIMBY (Not In state lines (and to Puerto Rico!) under the concentrate African American and Latino the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) My Backyard) blowback against at least 15 guise of compassionate reunion with their populations there, depriving them of sub- program enacted by the Democratic Obama proposed shelter sites, including from the families. In 2017, a “Special One-Time sidized loans and mortgages, while exclud- administration. RAD doesn’t mean more re- liberal Upper West Side and from people Assistance Program” was launched, under ing racial minorities from whites-only ar- pairs or better living conditions, mind you, vowing good intentions to house the home- which over 5,000 homeless families (12,482 eas or mega-projects (such as Starrett City nor is it meant to salvage public housing. less, but only so long as it didn’t affect people) have been sent packing to 373 cities in Brooklyn). All this began even before In fact, the intended result is the exact op- property values. In Ozone Park, hundreds across the country, supposedly with a year’s the post-WWII federal subsidies that pro- posite – more evictions – which will mean of residents packed town-hall meetings rent.8 Hundreds of families have returned, moted home ownership in lily-white sub- increased homelessness. Residents are wor- fiercely opposing a proposed men’s shelter, and some are suing for being dumped in un- urbs.9 Now the banks are flooding some of ried, and rightly so. With $13 billion worth recycling the dangerous trope portraying livable conditions. City rulers would rather the same inner-city neighborhoods with in- of pending repairs, the de Blasio administra- homeless men – mostly African American export the problem than house the home- vestments bringing in wealthier residents, tion would rather let private developers deal and Latino – as violent. (Homeless men less. For NYC mayors, the watchword is: “gentrifying” and effectively driving out with NYCHA buildings, or demolish them, are often actually the victims of brutal and Not in my city, not my problem. poorer black tenants in places like Crown as city officials propose to do with Fulton senseless crime.) As of January 2020, only De Blasio has issued plan after pro- Heights, Brooklyn. Houses in Chelsea. gram after initiative, claiming there will After the 2008 stock market crash, as 30 new shelters have opened. Housing the Homeless – In July 2019, a Subway Diversion Proj- be quantifiable advances in five, ten or inequality skyrocketed, investors out for ect went into effect, in which the police, perhaps 12 years’ time. Yet the numbers surefire cash switched from toxic subprime It Will Take a Revolution working together with Home-STAT, would in DHS homeless shelters keep increas- mortgages to high-end residential projects According to the 2017 New York City daily canvass “every block from Canal ing, from 24,000 under Giuliani, to 31,000 catering to affluent international buyers Housing and Vacancy Survey, there were Street to 145th Street” in Manhattan, “offer- under Bloomberg, to 57,000 today, plus with money to blow during the recession. then 75,000 pieds-à-terre in New York City. ing alternative pathways off the streets into another 26,000 when you add the other Thus the 2010s saw increased construction This is the traditional bourgeois name for transitional and permanent housing.” But city shelters and street homeless. In the of glitzy luxury full-floor residences, pent- second, third, fourth or even fifth residences there’s always a caveat. These services are words of James Baldwin, as depicted in the houses, and massive condo towers with ex- used as vacation homes or investment prop- offered “in lieu of civil summonses.” Those film I Am Not Your Negro, talking about clusive amenities, like Midtown’s Billion- erties, with billionaire buyers from all over: who refuse to be taken to intake centers are gradualism and black oppression in the aire’s Row – eight skyscrapers with Central Britain, Monaco, Nigeria, Russia, China . . handcuffed, fined and given a summons for United States: “You always told me, ‘It Park South views and a median $9.8 mil- . or Texas. Towering skyscrapers sit mostly court proceedings. Today, the Street Home- takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my lion sale price. During 2009-2019, 54,849 desolate, as owners use these condos on oc- lessness Joint Command Center (JCC), op- mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my broth- condo units were built in NYC. Meanwhile, casion for a few months or only a few days’ erated by the NYPD and DHS, surveils the ers’ and my sisters’ time. How much time in gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn, resi- stay out of the year. With rampant real es- street homeless in real time, 24/7, through do you want for your progress?” dents have seen a 54% increase in rent since tate speculation, prices soared into the tens 2010, as many have been displaced or ush- of millions of dollars. But in recent years the 20,000 police street cameras. Rather than Empty Condos, Full Shelters assisting those in need, providing safe and ered into homelessness. ultra-luxury market has gone bust, so that stable homes, Democrat de Blasio, like his and Run-Down Public Housing But now most of these units sit empty “Nearly half of new condo units in Manhat- Republican predecessors, is criminalizing At a press conference on the planned because the wealthy aren’t buying, and tan that came to market after 2015 … remain homelessness. late-night subway shutdown, Governor investors are scared to sell at decreased unsold” (New York Times, 12 January). Now In December 2019, de Blasio an- Cuomo said, “You’ve always had a certain prices, awaiting a turn in the fluctuating that the coronavirus has hit, a ruinous real nounced yet another plan, The Journey number of people who were homeless for market. “In Manhattan, the homeless shel- estate meltdown looms in the global center Home, “enhancing Police Officers’ ap- one reason or another going back decades.” ters are full, and the luxury skyscrapers are of finance capital. proach to engaging and offering services It’s certainly true that there have been large vacant,” begins a perceptive article in The In 2011, Picture the Homeless, a grass- to unsheltered New Yorkers.” Seeking to numbers of homeless people in New York Atlantic (16 January). Festering poverty roots advocacy organization, in partnership soft-soap the message, de Blasio said, “I for a long, long time. But it’s not because and the ever-heightening apex of the NYC with the Hunter College Center for Commu- do not want people lost in the past think- of some random “one reason or another.” skyline highlight the dramatic contradic- nity Planning and Development and the NYS ing of what the NYPD was. Today’s NYPD There was the closure of state psychiatric tion marking life for millions of New York- Department of Health trained volunteers are trained officers engaged with the home- hospitals in the late 1970s that threw thou- ers. Along with the homeless, 400,000 peo- from high schools and colleges to canvass less, working with medical professionals.” sands of patients onto the streets. There ple live in notoriously neglected NYCHA New York City’s five boroughs by foot look- But anyone who has witnessed the racist was the curtailment of Section 8 rent subsi- (New York City Housing Authority) pub- ing for vacant properties – a creative ven- cop brutality against black people, the mis- dy vouchers. There is the decline of public lic housing, which has been the target of ture. They found quite a few: 3,551 vacant treatment and persecution of immigrants, housing. There are unaffordable rents. The austerity measures for decades. Repairs buildings that could potentially house 71,707 or police officers banging their batons on root cause is capitalism, which necessarily take months, elevators in 23-story towers people (“Banking on Vacancy: Homeless- subway car bars to boot the homeless from generates a housing shortage, driving up are out for days, buildings are filled with ness and Real Estate Speculation,” Picture the trains, knows that this is not a matter of rents and (as there is no way that housing rodents and other pests and fail lead paint the Homeless [2011]). And then there is the who the police were, but of what the police for the poor can be profitable) therefore and mold inspections, heat and hot water hotel industry, where occupancy rates in the are. What they are is the repressive armed producing mass homelessness going back are inconsistent. city’s 120,000 hotel rooms have fallen from apparatus of the racist capitalist state. centuries. In 2015, de Blasio announced a $3 70% to 30% during the pandemic, and over Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani In the Big Apple, the real estate lob- billion FEMA grant to “rebuild and up- 60 hotels have shut down. summed up his policy on the homeless as by – along with Wall Street – calls the grade city public housing developments Meanwhile, both business and residen- “you chase ’em, you chase ’em, you chase shots. For decades, real estate barons like slammed by Superstorm Sandy in 2012,” tial tenants are unable to pay rents. Major ’em,” and if that doesn’t work, “you chase Fred Trump “redlined” neighborhoods to mainly NYCHA complexes. Some 80,000 realty trusts have reported that from 50% ’em out of the city.” Continuing this tradi- 8 “NYC Secretly Exports Homeless to Hawaii 9 See Charles Brover, “American Apartheid’ to 80% of their commercial clients have tion, in 2014 de Blasio’s administration and Other States Without Telling Receiving by Design,” Class Struggle Education Workers not paid their leases since the onset of the expelled 1,412 homeless people across Pols,” New York Post, 26 October 2019. website, November 2018. crisis, while the association of landlords September-October 2020 19 of rent-stabilized apartment buildings says tions, take over unoccupied apartments, that 25% of tenants did not pay rent in May. investment properties and second homes Class Struggle... Elections 2020... The group’s executive director warned that of the wealthy and occupy hotel space continued from page 17 continued from page 1 unless the government provides relief, “we to provide housing for the homeless in- be agreed to in advance of reopening. Thus waged, from the A-bombing of Hiroshima are going to see a housing disaster the likes stead of the huge profits of speculators in Los Angeles, where the contract with the and Nagasaki to the napalming of Vietnam of which we have never seen” (New York and price-gougers.” LAUSD allows for absurdly large class sizes to Barack Obama’s kill list of drone strikes Times, 22 May). Across the country there –“CSWP Calls for Workers Action in of 45 students, teachers should demand that in the Middle East, are just as much the en- have been embryonic rent strikes, with the Coronavirus Crisis,” The Internationalist this be cut by two-thirds, or more. emies of the poor, oppressed and working hashtag #CancelRent and demands for “No No. 59, March-April 2020 Liberals can publish Diane Ravitch people, and all the more dangerous because Work, No Rent.” The demand has been House the homeless? Absolutely. There columns and statistics-rich studies laying many have illusions in them. endorsed by Congresswoman Alexandria are plenty of rooms to be had in empty ho- out the disastrous effects of corporatiza- As revolutionary Marxists – support- Ocasio-Cortez, and organizers want to turn tels and vacant luxury apartments. They tion, privatization and charterization of the ers of the politics of V.I. Lenin and Leon it into a mass movement like the Occupy should be occupied now! But that raises the schools and calling on the Cuomos and Trotsky, the leaders of the 1917 Bolshe- Wall Street protests after the 2008 crash. question: for how long? And what then? As de Blasios to “do the right thing,” but that vik Revolution – we speak the truth to From destitute longtime homeless in- the CSWP statement underlined: won’t stop the bipartisan capitalist war on the masses. And the truth is that neither 4 Republicans nor Democrats will or can do dividuals and families to suddenly unem- “Ultimately, it will take a planned econ- education. As we have pointed out, this as- away with the terrible scourges brought ployed millennial roommates paying sky- omy capable of redirecting production sault on the public schools is the result of de- upon us by the decaying capitalist system high market-rate rents, millions of people and distribution of medical equipment, caying imperialism, whose results are now of war, poverty and racism which they rep- across the country are staring a housing safety equipment and basic necessities being vividly played out before our eyes in resent. The workers and oppressed should disaster in the face. New York City, with for a large-scale outbreak, with work- the devastation wrought by the deadly coro- places organized with the safety of not give one vote for Democrats, Repub- the largest numbers of renters (2.2 million) navirus pandemic, the mass unemployment workers as a central priority, in order to licans or any capitalist party or politician. and homeless people in the country, will resulting from it, and the onslaught of police effectively fight a pandemic. That means We need a party to defend those victimized be the epicenter, as it has been for the CO- violence seeking to quash opposition to rac- a fight to end this capitalist system of by the bourgeois rulers, including women, VID-19 pandemic. As soon as temporary ist U.S. capitalism. profit-driven chaos, incompetence, - rac gay, lesbian and transgender people, survi- bans on evictions expire, this time bomb The fight to defeat the forces that ism and exploitation, and establish a vors of the racist injustice system. We need will explode. Various “progressive” Demo- would destroy public schools, as well as workers government.” a workers party to fight all the bosses’ par- crats like “AOC” and opportunist pseudo- the struggle of educators to provide an en- If the bankruptcy of capitalism wasn’t ties on a revolutionary program to sweep socialists who tail after them have called riching education that can actually aid the painfully clear before the pandemic cri- away the entire capitalist system that is the for moratoriums, “tax the rich” and the students from working-class, immigrant, sis, it surely is now. Whether to resolve source of our misery. like. De Blasio and/or the NYC City Coun- poor and doubly oppressed communities mass homelessness or produce desper- At the same time, while giving no po- cil will produce another plan. In places like who make up the vast majority of those in ately needed ventilators, what’s required litical support to bourgeois parties, class- Portland, Oregon there are movements for the NYC public schools, must be a political is to smash the moribund system in which conscious workers fight against all attacks rent control. But NYC has had rent control struggle against the capitalist system which production is for profit, not to fill human on democratic rights such as we face today. since the 1940s, and it hasn’t prevented breeds poverty, racism and war. It requires a needs. To lift the impoverished out of the this crisis. break with the Democrats and all capitalist destitution to which they are condemned Election Campaign: So long as the economy is laid low, parties, and the forging of a class-struggle in this barbaric society that lets 100,000 A Festival of Reaction governments at every level – city, state workers party to fight for socialist revolu- lives be snuffed out in two months, it will n The election campaign has been a fes- and federal – won’t, and in fact can’t, tion, here and internationally. take nothing less than international social- 4 tival of reaction, with both the main parties resolve this impending catastrophe. The See “Defeat the Capitalist Onslaught Against ist revolution. To lead that fight, we must of U.S. imperialism wrapping themselves Federal Reserve would have to issue end- Public Education!” (2001) in The International- undertake the difficult task of forging a in the flag, Democrats and Republicans less trillions in IOUs (Treasury bonds) in ist special supplement, Marxism and the Battle revolutionary workers party. n Over Education (2008) alike calling to “get tough on China,” and order to shovel money to the parasitic real competing with each other in hailing the estate moguls in order to keep the banks repressive forces of the capitalist state. Yet that hold their mortgages from collaps- dreading four more years of Trump and his ing. Not to mention “bailing out” every Friedrich Engels on gang of all-round reactionaries, millions of other industry facing bankruptcy. The $16 young people, African Americans, Latinos, trillion the feds doled out to rescue Wall women and many union workers have been Street following the 2008 stock market the Housing Question waiting hours in line at early voting sites to crash would look like chicken feed. The A century and a half ago Friedrich how COVID-19, which did not start out cast a ballot for Biden-Harris, while hard- coronavirus depression will shake capital- Engels, who together with Karl Marx as a disease of the poor, quickly became core Trumpers are focusing on November 3. ism to its core. Democrats, Republicans authored The Communist Manifesto, that as it ravaged the poor and immigrant Now we’re down to the wire, and everyone and the entire bourgeois class vehemently wrote a study of The Housing neighborhoods where working people is focusing on Election Day … and the days defend that system, with the police and Question (1872). In Part II on “How live jammed together in narrow spaces. and weeks of turmoil likely to come after. their guns, the courts and the jails – in the Bourgeoisie Solves the Housing Engels stresses that this is inherent in Trump has more than once proclaimed short, the capitalist state – at the ready to Question,” Engels connected the capitalism: that as president he has “total” authority, enforce the dictates of capital. miserable housing conditions of the “In such a society the housing that he “calls the shots,” that states “can’t So it is we who will pay the terrible workers with epidemics: shortage is no accident; it is a do anything” without his approval, that “I crisis, which is why the working class must “Modern natural science has proved necessary institution and it can be have the power to do whatever I want as rise up at the head of all the oppressed, lead- that the so-called ‘poor districts’ abolished together with all its effects president.”1 In June Trump tried to invoke ing to a revolutionary struggle for power. in which the workers are crowded on health, etc., only if the whole the 1807 Insurrection Act against anti-racist social order from which it springs is Though triggered by a virus, it comes on together are the breeding places of protesters in Washington, D.C.; in July he fundamentally refashioned.” top of the post-2008 depression from which all those epidemics which from time dispatched federal snatch squads to Portland And he sums up the bourgeois “solution” world capitalism never fully recovered. (In to time afflict our towns. Cholera, in an attempt to impose martial law; in Au- to the housing question: fact, many indicators were pointing to a new typhus, typhoid fever, small-pox and gust he put Kenosha, Wisconsin under Na- “The breeding places of disease, the major downturn even before the pandemic other ravaging diseases spread their infamous holes and cellars in which tional Guard occupation; in September he began.) Mass unemployment will persist, germs in the pestilential air and the the capitalist mode of production sent a hit squad to Washington state to gun and with it the food lines and growing num- poisoned water of these working- confines our workers night after down an antifa activist from Portland. bers of homeless. A couple of generations of class quarters. In these districts, the night, are not abolished; they are Trump figures he can count on the young people face a future with dismal job germs hardly ever die out completely, merely shifted elsewhere! The same I.C.E. immigration cops and other Depart- prospects as the “gig economy” dries up. and as soon as circumstances permit economic necessity which produced ment of Homeland Security forces (Border The toll it is already exacting on the young- it they develop into epidemics and them in the first place, produces Patrol, Federal Protective Services, U.S. est is incalculable, as public education has then spread beyond their breeding them in the next place also. As long Marshals) who act as his private police effectively been canceled for the poor, im- places also into the more airy and as the capitalist mode of production invading other jurisdictions. Plus his attor- migrants and others who lack the necessary healthy parts of the town inhabited by continues to exist, it is folly to ney general William Barr is busily lining resources and skills. the capitalists. Capitalist rule cannot hope for an isolated solution of the up local police around the country. Sce- allow itself the pleasure of creating In a call for action in the pandemic, is- housing question or of any other narios are not hard to foresee: “security” epidemic diseases among the working sued on March 18, our comrades of Class social question affecting the fate of forces signed up by Republican PACs, class with impunity; the consequences Struggle Workers – Portland wrote: the workers. The solution lies in the along with right-wing militias and fascists fall back on it and the angel of death “The fact that everyone must have a abolition of the capitalist mode of provoke clashes during the voting or in the home is even more obvious and urgent rages in its ranks as ruthlessly as in production and the appropriation of next days; local cops crack down on pro- during a pandemic. A militant workers the ranks of the workers.” all the means of life and labor by the movement would work with tenants and In the present pandemic, it is striking working class itself.” 1 Washington Post, 24 July 2019; CNN, 17 homeless organizations to stop evic- April 2020. 20 The Internationalist testers; the administration declares a civil through, it would produce an explosion in disorder under 18 U.S. Code, Section 231 homelessness. But such a calamity could and deploys the U.S. military to lock down also produce a tidal wave of class struggle John Duricka / AP “Democrat-run cities,” as he threatened to – the key question is leadership, and spe- do in June. Or Plan B, or C, or D. cifically one prepared to wage a -revolu Yet the response of the Democratic tionary fight to bring down capitalism. Party is to look to the same repressive ap- In this period of putrefying capitalism, paratus which Friedrich Engels (and Lenin with social services pared to the bone, pub- after him) defined as the special bodies of lic schools under bipartisan attack, tens of armed men (police, military) and their aux- millions unemployed, major industries on iliaries (courts, prisons) who are the heart the edge of bankruptcy, the whole house of the capitalist state. Never forget that of cards could collapse. Under these condi- while police forces from New York to Min- tions, no lasting reforms to soften the devas- neapolis to Portland, Seattle and elsewhere tation are possible. Talk from Bernie Sand- may chafe at the bit, as we have stressed, in ers liberals and reformist pseudo-socialists cities from coast to coast, “Democrats are of a “Green New Deal,” “Medicare for the bosses of the racist killer cops.” Mean- all” and other measures of “welfare state” while, Biden has said that if Trump refuses capitalism are pipe dreams. Not only are the to leave, he expects the Pentagon chiefs “corporate Democrats” who run the party and the Secret Service to “escort him from dead-set against them, Wall Street won’t fi- the White House with dispatch.” So we are On June 1, Trump tried to impose martial law in Washington, D.C., trying to nance them. The Federal Reserve pumped hearing coup talk on both sides. But so far invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. trillions of dollars into the economy by it is just talk, we’ll see what comes next. ease, Western Europe has had 5.9 million tance, which included many workers nor- running the printing presses and buying up Trump is an outlier, seeking to in- cases and close to 200,000 deaths. And mally unable to get unemployment benefits corporate bonds. But soon the music of this stall an authoritarian regime, while Biden while the Democrats just pin the virus’ (but not millions of hard-hit immigrants). frenzied “dance of the trillions” will stop. with all his talk of “decency” and civility spread on Trump with his anti-scientific Since the beginning of March, over 66 Early on in the pandemic, after the is counting on the core of U.S. imperial- bombast and talk of COVID-19 miracu- million workers filed unemployment initial shock that sent share prices tum- ist power to ensure his victory. Proud Boy lously “disappearing,” half the deaths in claims, far more than at any time in U.S. bling, many decried the obscene spectacle thugs must be stopped with workers power, the U.S. (110,000) have been in states with history. Now many so-called “furloughs” of Wall Street indexes reaching record but the vastly larger strategic threat posed Democratic governors, although now the are becoming permanent job losses. Not heights while the economy was largely by the Democrats is exemplified by the arse- deadly toll is rising rapidly in Republican- only start-ups and restaurants but long- shut down, with profits falling and tens nal that has laid waste to Afghanistan, Iraq, governed states like Florida and Texas. established retail chains, hotels and other of thousands dying. But there was a (gro- Syria, before that Vietnam and Korea under Yet in China, where the disease first ap- capitalist giants have closed their doors. tesque) logic to it: who needs profits when their command (as well the Republicans’). peared, there have been only 95,000 cases The airlines are teetering, even with over Uncle Sam, or in this case Federal Reserve As we approach the deadline, many left- and less than 5,000 deaths. Why this strik- $50 billion in free cash from the federal chief Jerome Powell, is pouring billions ists and “progressive” trade-unionists have ing difference? Trump and the Democrats government, and mass layoffs are being into your coffers? Time to party on. The vowed to hit the streets to “defeat the Trump absurdly accuse China of some underhand- announced. In mid-town Manhattan, 90% winners – IT monopolists Apple, Google, coup.” For the most part these will likely be ed plot or mishandling the coronavirus. In of office space is empty, a disaster for the Microsoft, Amazon – raked in the dough. pro-Biden demonstrations. Revolutionary fact, China did far, far better than the West commercial real estate speculators, which Apple soared to $2 trillion market evalu- Marxists, in contrast, will fight not for the in containing it and treating the victims. will then shake Wall Street banks. ation in August, five months after passing victory of one of the bourgeois contenders The reason is simple: China, a bureaucrati- On top of mass unemployment that the $1 trillion mark. Megafirms drove up but to defend democratic rights with sharp cally deformed workers state with a planned will take years to overcome, a “Tidal their market value with stock buybacks; class struggle pointing toward establishing economy, quickly directed resources to Wave of Evictions” is looming, as the Wall others have been cashing out of this “ca- organizing centers of workers power. where they were needed to save human Street Journal (28 October) headlined on sino capitalism.” Now with rising infection lives. Every symptomatic case was housed its front page, as various federal and state rates in Europe and the uncertain U.S. elec- The Face of Barbarism in isolation centers while two new hospitals moratoriums expire. In the aftermath of tion, the selloff may have begun. Over a century ago, the Polish-Ger- were built from scratch in ten days in Wu- the 2008 financial crash, triggered by usu- It all spells trouble for those exploited man communist Rosa Luxemburg wrote han. In the capitalist world, the pandemic rious “sub-prime mortgages,” 10 million and oppressed by capitalism, whose toil that the choice is “socialism or barbarism.” threatened to overwhelm a public health home “owners” lost their homes as banks produces the profits the bosses are gambling Today we are staring barbarism in the face. system gutted by decades of cutbacks, and foreclosed. Now the number of residen- with. Those workers who were hoodwinked The coronavirus pandemic has already all but the most serious cases were sent by Trump into believing his lies about re- 2 tial renters unable to keep up with rent is led to the deaths of more than 225,000 peo- home, to infect family members and others. estimated at between 30 and 50 million viving U.S. industry have nothing to show ple in the U.S., and over 1 million across Now the economic consequences of households. Should those evictions go for it. But the Democrats are no better. The the globe. Nearly 9 million people in the this capitalist disaster are hitting home. United States have fallen ill with COV- The initial impact was mitigated by the ID-19, with new cases averaging 75,000 one-time $1,200 “stimulus” checks and the a day and climbing. Globally there have $600/week pandemic unemployment assis- The been 45 million reported cases. While the 2 See our article “A Tale of Two Cities: Wu- Internationalist U.S. is rightly regarded as the having the han – New York,” The Internationalist No. worst record in handling the deadly dis- 59, March-April 2020. A Journal of Revolutionary Marxism for the Reforging of the Fourth International Publication of the Internationalist Group, section of the League for the Fourth International
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Write the Internationalist Group at the above address, or contact: Tel (212) 460-0983 Fax (212) 614-8711 China’s planned economy made it possible to mobilize resources to contain E-mail: [email protected] the coronavirus. On September 1, all schools were reopened, safely. September-October 2020 21 “free trade” policies of the Clinton-Obama- ing the danger of authoritarian rule and say- Biden administrations hollowed out domes- ing that “If Donald Trump refuses to leave tic production, leaving many blue-collar office at the expiration of his constitutional workers jobless. As for the super-rich, the Brendan Smialowski / AFP term, the United States military must re- U.S. ruling class is not enamored of the er- move him by force, and you must give that ratic Donald Trump, but they do enjoy the order” (DefenseOne, 8 August). billions from his tax “reform,” which the Revolutionary Leadership Is Key Democrats voted for. Biden reassured New York billionaires at a ritzy fundraiser in the Then we have the left in the United swanky Carlyle Hotel in June 2019, that States, such as it is. And that is overwhelm- “nothing would fundamentally change” if ingly reformist and in the Democrats’ camp. he is elected, that he would not “demonize In our earlier article on the elections (“Demo- anybody who has made money.” crats’ Pro-Cop Ticket Vies with Trump Over Nothing would change for those on ‘Law and Order’,” bottom of page 1 of this top, but for those at the bottom of capital- issue), we noted that several groups are this ist society, the “good old days” pre-Trump time around openly calling to vote for Biden, were not good at all. The average weekly including the former Moscow Stalinist Com- real wages of production workers are less munist Party USA (CPUSA), “which has than they were 50 years ago ($318 in 2019, regularly backed Democrats since Franklin $328 in 1969, in 1982-84 dollars). Today D. Roosevelt in 1936,” and the Maoists of the millions of working people are fighting for Trump and his cabinet attend June 1 photo-op in Washington D.C. after feds Freedom Road Socialist Organization and survival, looking into the abyss. In New brutalize protesters. Democrats are relying on General Milley (on right). the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), York City you only have to recall the flash- Court’s ruling in the 2000 election which been making plans for mass pro-Biden with its various front groups (Refuse Fas- ing red lights of the ambulances carrying off handed the presidency to Republican “election protection” demonstrations from cism, World Can’t Wait), with its guru Bob COVID patients at all hours, the refriger- George W. Bush even though Democrat November 3 onward. Various reformist left Avakian calling for “actually voting for the ated trailers with cadavers to be transported Al Gore won the popular vote. And now groups have joined in calling for mass mo- Democratic Party candidate, Biden, in order to mass graves on Ward Island where they conservatives have a solid lock on the high bilization to “defend the vote,” meaning to to effectively voteagainst Trump.” were buried in boxes stacked three high and court with the rushed confirmation of right- put Democrat Biden in the White House. Now they have been joined by the main two across. In much of the rest of the coun- ist Amy Coney Barrett after liberal justice Top-level Democrats and anti-Trump leaders of the Democratic Socialists of Amer- try this terrifying scene is playing out today Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last month. Republicans have also been meeting to ica (DSA), which since its birth in the 1980s as hospitals are filled to capacity. And on top But it’s not just legal maneuvering. prepare plans to counter a Trump pow- has been tied to the Democratic Party by an 3 of that, mass joblessness and homelessness, This month, Attorney General Barr and er grab. The Transition Integrity Proj- umbilical cord. The DSA has expanded ten- evictions and endless racist cop violence acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad ect (TIP) held war games this June with fold since pre-Trump days, becoming the (1,574 civilians killed by police in the U.S. Wolf have been going around the country “a bipartisan group of over 100 current voice of millennial social democracy. In par- in 2020, up to October 10). talking with local police chiefs (but not and former senior government and cam- ticular, it was the backbone of Senator Bernie mayors) in “Democrat-run cities,” includ- paign leaders and other experts” to look Sanders’ bid for the Democratic presidential Trump’s Schemes, and ing New York City and Portland, Oregon, at various scenarios in a contested elec- election up until that campaign collapsed the Democrats’ about plans for the next few months. Barr’s tion. The TIP’s August 3 report, “Prevent- as the party leadership rolled out its heavy- Donald Trump has not been reticent Department of Justice offered $3 million to ing a Disrupted Presidential Election and weights to ensure Biden’s nomination in the 4 about voicing his intentions. He has tweeted Minneapolis police to provide “training” Transition,” concludes that “The admin- Super Tuesday primaries last April. DSA that mail ballots, which in recent years have following the racist cop murder of George istrative transition process itself may be superstar Democratic Congresswoman Alex- been heavily Democratic, will lead to “the Floyd last May. The Wall Street Journal (5 highly disrupted” and “The potential for andria Ocasio-Cortez quickly announced that Greatest Rigged Election in history,” that October) reported that the New York Police violent conflict is high, particularly since she would be voting for Biden. But last year people “grab them from mailboxes” and Department is putting all 35,000 uniformed Trump encourages his supporters to take the DSA passed a “Bernie or Bust” resolution “print thousands of forgeries” (May 24). He cops through two-day retraining on dealing up arms.” It also noted that “Trump might and after bust came in April, it tweeted “We has insisted that “the only way we’re go- with large-scale protests, and police com- himself initiate a foreign crisis” to divert are not endorsing Joe Biden.” ing to lose this election is if the election is missioner Dermot Shea canceled all leaves media attention. An attack on Chinese But with the moment of truth fast ap- rigged” (August 17). He has several times and vacations through the end of the year forces would put the Democrats in a bind, proaching – big surprise! –the Socialist refused to commit to a “peaceful transition” citing the possibility of “violence.” Com- as they have put themselves forward as Majority Caucus and a host of other promi- of office, saying in one interview: “There ing from the NYPD chief, that’s a threat. the bigger anti-Communist war hawks. nent DSAers announced that they were won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be What that retraining could consist of But what happens when the Trump re- “Organizing Against Trump” and appealed a continuation” (September 23). He has might be a repeat of the kind of massive gime, with control of the White House, the to others to join in “phonebanking, text- tweeted “Must know Election results on the repression that Republican mayor Michael Senate, the Supreme Court and the massive banking, doorknocking, and other organiz- night of the Election” (July 30), before most Bloomberg carried out during the 2004 federal government apparatus, digs in? All ing to defeat Trump,” i.e., to get out the mail ballots would have been counted. Republican convention in New York when the TIP scenarios except for a clear Biden vote for you-know-who. There’s not much A lengthy article on “The Election That the police arrested entire demonstrations of win ended up with two competing claimants to be said to or about these foot soldiers for Could Break America” by Barton Gellman 1,500 protesters and locked up almost 2,000 to the White House, in which case, “It was the Democrats, many of whom may aspire in the November 2020 issue of The Atlantic, of them without food and water in Pier 57. unclear what the military would do.” The to move up the ranks to run for office, or to released late last month, detailed the many Meanwhile, in preparation for the October TIP’s imagined positive outcome hinges on become staffers in a Biden administration possible ways in which Trump could use his 3 Portland rally by the fascist Proud Boys, the Pentagon brass leaking that “the Joint or in unions led by “progressive” Demo- power to prevent a decisive, legally unam- the DOJ federalized the riot police squads of Chiefs’ commitment was to the Constitu- crats. In various places, DSA candidates biguous outcome against him. Notably there the Portland Police Bureau, the Multnomah tion rather than to the President,” while the will be elected, particularly in big cities are numerous ambiguities in the 1887 Elec- County Sheriff’s Department and the- Or Secret Service demonstrated its “culture like New York and Chicago or in college toral Count Act, which resulted from the egon State Police. This means that anyone of professionalism” by “indicating that it towns, meaning that they will act as ward contested 1876 Hayes vs. Tilden presiden- who so much as sneezes near one of these would be ‘loyal to the office, not to the per- heelers and sheep dogs for the Democratic tial election that led to the “Compromise” robocops could face federal charges of years son’ and therefore it would escort Trump machine to keep the millennials in line. that removed federal troops from the South, in jail rather than disorderly conduct misde- out of the White House on January 20.” In Then there are those self-proclaimed ending Reconstruction and laying the basis meanors. It also means that the feds could other words, it would take a military assist socialist groups, several of which make for Jim Crow segregation. There are also de facto seize operational control of local for Democrat Biden to take office. some claim of affinity with Lenin and deadlines which require that electors in the police in a hot situation. Likewise, the Gellman Atlantic article Trotsky, which are formally not calling to highly undemocratic Electoral College cast So there is a full-scale operation un- admonishes, “If you have a place in the vote for Biden, but are in practice lining their ballots by this December 14. derway to ramp up heavy-duty repression military chain of command, remember your up with the Democrats in the post-elec- Gellman reported plans by Republi- on Election Day and after, combined with duty to turn aside unlawful orders.” And tion turmoil to come. Socialist Alterna- cans in key “battleground states,” several a huge legal offensive seeking to ensure it’s not just war gamers and pundits. There tive (SAlt) is now calling for votes to the of which have Democratic governors and a Trump “victory.” What, then, are the was Biden’s comment on Trevor Noah’s Green Party candidate, Howie Hawkins. Republican-controlled legislatures due Democrats planning? They have their own Daily Show (June 11) that he was “so damn 3 See “The Real Heritage of Harrington’s DSA” to gerrymandering. The chairman of the phalanx of lawyers, of course. Democratic proud” of military leaders who had recently and “‘Democratic Socialism” in the Service Pennsylvania Republican Party confirmed governors could counter electors appointed criticized Trump, and “I’m absolutely con- of U.S. Imperialism,” in the Internationalist that he had discussed with Trump’s nation- by Republican legislatures by naming their vinced, they will escort him from the White Group pamphlet, DSA: Fronting for the Demo- al campaign the possibility of the legisla- own slates, so that two different sets could House with dispatch.” And in August, two crats (2018). ture appointing a slate of pro-Trump elec- show up at the Electoral College. Liberal well-known retired military officers wrote 4 See “Like We Said, Bernie Sanders’ ‘Political tors even if the vote count goes to Biden. activist groups such as Hold the Line (which an open letter to General Mark Milley, the Revolution’ Was a Scam,” Revolution No. 17, This would be “legal” under the Supreme has put out a 55-page “how-to” guide) have chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rais- August 2020. 22 The Internationalist in fighting to defend democratic rights and will be emboldened. If Biden wins, the cops to oppose repression by the capitalist state, will want to test his professions of support for represented by both Democrats and Repub- them. If the situation is confused, the forces licans. In the concrete, leftists mobilizing in of state repression will seek to squelch mass the streets against an attempt by the Trump unrest by cracking down hard, going after CQ Roll Call regime to annul the popular vote will face “antifa,” arresting demonstration leaders as repression by police forces under the com- they have done in Denver, New York and mand of Democratic mayors and governors, now Philadelphia, and/or carrying out mass and which are effusively supported by both arrests, as they have been doing for months. Biden and Trump. Revolutionary Marxists Only now the gloves will be off. After the must make it crystal clear that we would op- mass protests last summer, the cops are itch- pose the attempt to install an authoritarian ing for revenge. government by extra-legal means but do not Already the I.C.E. police are gearing call for Biden to take office, from which he up for a crackdown on undocumented im- will repress the working people, telling his migrants following the elections. Black pals the cops to shoot us in the leg while Har- neighborhoods could be terrorized by police ris moves to lock us up. working in tandem with fascists and right- Any kind of actual mass strike action in wing militias. The Internationalist Group has this context must be directly connected to a repeatedly called for bringing out the power fight to form a workers party on a program of of mass workers action against deportations, Then-vice-president Joe Biden meeting with police chiefs. Democrat Biden militant class struggle to fight for a workers raids and racist attacks and will continue to has always mantained close ties with the police, but now they back Trump. government. Of course the Democrat-loyal insist that mobilizing union power in mass The Greens are a minor capitalist party vowing to defend democratic rights “while labor lieutenants of capital did not call for a action, and organized defense of the rights whose role is to act as a pressure group on still maintaining our own independent po- strike (let alone a general one) in Rochester of us all, rather than individual actions or the Democrats. SAlt now says it “warned litical identities,” this is a classic popular- against the racist murder of Daniel Prude by unfocused outbursts, is key to defeating the at every stage in both Bernie’s 2016 and front call to “fight the right” with contin- the police – which the law-and-order duo of reactionaries allied with the state. The repres- 2020 campaigns that the Democratic Party gents in the demonstrations and marches to Biden-Harris want to beef up even further. sive forces of the exploiters and oppressors leadership simply would not accept him as come, which will overwhelmingly be dem- In contrast, revolutionary Marxists fight can only defeated by a greater power, that of their nominee,” while leaving out how it onstrations of political support to Biden. In for mass workers action, including strikes, the workers with a leadership that seeks to re- stumped for Democratic candidate Sand- the election itself, the FSP is calling to vote against racist cop terror, as part of the ur- ally shut it down, meaning not only a street, a ers, including with its #Movement4Bernie. for Jeff Mackler, the write-in presidential gent struggle against repression. What pro- bridge, a tunnel or highway but bringing the Now it is putting forward the same Green candidate of Socialist Action (S.A.). Democratic Party union leaders mean when capitalist system to a grinding halt. they (almost never) dare to utter the words The key to all of this is the arduous New Deal/Medicare/tax the rich program S.A.’s Mackler is running on a platform “general strike” is basically a big demon- struggle to forge the nucleus of a revolu- of the Sanders/AOC Democrats. not that different from that of other social- stration combined with a work stoppage, tionary workers party on the program of With the election heating up, SAlt has democratic groups like the FSP and SAlt. not the prelude to a struggle for state power, the Bolsheviks who led the workers revo- even come out with a CYA article on “Why It repeats the calls pushed by the DSA and as Lenin and Trotsky insisted. When unions lution of 1917 The Internationalist Group, the Left Shouldn’t Support Joe Biden.” the entire reformist milieu to cut funding to in Wisconsin were on the verge of a general U.S. section of the League for the Fourth At the same time, two SAlt-aligned union the police, throwing in disarm and disband, strike in February-March 2011, a measure International, has taken on that task. As presidents issued an appeal that “Unions without saying that this is impossible short which the Internationalist Group called for the repression elections of 2020 highlight, Need to Get Organized Now to Defend the of a socialist revolution. Plus tax the rich, from the beginning of the struggle against to fight capitalist barbarism and the mul- Vote” (Socialist Alternative, 20 October), shut down the war machine, community Republican governor Scott Walker’s union- tiple dangers it poses to the workers and saying that “if Trump, the Republicans, control, nationalize big oil. When it comes busting law, with tens of thousands protest- oppressed, we must wage – and win – the and their lawyers try to steal the election to how this is to be done, Socialist Action ing at the state capitol every day, the fright- fight for socialist revolution.n through voter disenfranchisement,” then talks only of “a fundamental reorganization ened labor bureaucrats “we should organize mass demonstra- of society – for socialism.” Similar calls called it off on behalf of League for the Fourth International tions demanding every vote counts.” It could be found from left elements in social- the Democratic Party. cites a widely circulated resolution of the democratic parties in Sweden or Britain, LFI, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY A “general strike,” Rochester, New York Labor Council call- who seek to introduce “socialism” within 10008, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] or mass mobilization of ing on the national AFL-CIO to “prepare the framework of the capitalist state. any sort, which has as its Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil for and enact a general strike of all work- But as Election Day draws near, S.A. aim to put Biden/Harris ing people, if necessary, to ensure a Con- has taken up the call to hit the streets to Brazil: write to Caixa Postal 084027, CEP 27251-740, in office, could also be stitutionally mandated peaceful transition “counter a potential Trump coup.” It adds: Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil called off by them. Pop- of power.” This is a call to mobilize labor “Yes, we will say – assuming this is clear ular-front mobilizations Rio de Janeiro: write to Caixa Postal 3982, CEP to put Democrat Biden, the quintessential – that Biden won the election and should together with sections of 20001-974, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil capitalist establishment pol and master of be president,” while then piously adding E-mail: [email protected] mass incarceration, in office. that it would expose “the totally corrupt the bourgeoisie – which A second group, Freedom Socialist nature of billionaire capitalist-orchestrated is what social democrats Internationalistische Gruppe/Deutschland like S.A., SAlt and the Party (FSP), issued a call for a “United elections and Democrat Biden.” No matter Germany: write to Postfach 80 97 21, 21007 Hamburg, Front Against Reaction” which has since how much S.A. says it would act “without FSP mean when they Germany morphed into a “United Front Against Re- in any manner indicating political support talk of a “united front,” E-mail: [email protected] pression” to protest Trump’s “Constitution- to Biden and the Democrats,” this is saying like in the antiwar move- Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia shredding bid to steal the election.” While it would mobilize to ensure that he takes ments they built in the office, which is po- past – are a lifesaver for Italy: write to Anna Chiaraluce, Casella Postale N. 6, litical support. Gen- the ruling class when it 06070 Ellera Umbra (PG), Italy uine revolutionar- is in trouble, as the U.S. E-mail: [email protected] Order Now! bourgeoisie is right now. ies would mobilize Grupo Internacionalista/México A 70-page against violation of The danger is not only pamphlet ana- democratic rights the authoritarian Trump, México: write to Apartado Postal 12-201, Admón. lyzing the orga- and police repres- but Biden-Harris who Postal Obrero Mundial, CP 03001, México D.F, México nizational and sion, but on a pro- boast of their support E-mail: [email protected] political history of gram of opposing from a raft of intelli- Tel. Mexico City: 55-3154-7361; Guadalajara: 33-1752- the Democratic the Democrats and gence and retired mili- 6643; Oaxaca: 951-185-6815 (Party) Socialists all capitalist parties tary (“deep state”) brass. Internationalist Group/U.S. of America. and fighting for so- Struggles in the next cialist revolution. period will likely be of Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street US$5 Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A. including shipping Today, authentic a defensive nature, fac- Trotskyists must be ing ramped-up repression E-mail: [email protected] Order from/make checks New York Tel. (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 payable to: prepared to mobi- against immigrant, Af- Mundial Publications, lize on a class basis, rican American, Latino, Los Angeles Tel. (323) 984-8590 Box 3321, Church Street politically indepen- poor and working-class New England Tel. (617) 213-5010 Station, New York, New York 10008, U.S.A. dent and against all communities generally. Pacific Northwest Tel. (503) 303-8278 bourgeois parties, If Trump wins, the police September-October 2020 23 El Internacionalista septiembre-octubre de 2020 Millones de inmigrantes indocumentados y sus familias ante el abismo Nueva York: ¡Exigimos trato igual y apoyo de emergencia para los trabajadores excluidos! Declaración de Trabajadores lojo residencial en medio de la pandemia. Internacionales Clasistas Varias ONGs (organizaciones no guber- namentales) y defensores de los inmigrantes 11 de AGOSTO – Ya estamos en el sexto Ben Fractenberg / The City están apoyando un proyecto de ley (NY S. mes de la crisis sanitaria desatada por la 8277), auspiciado por la senadora estatal Jes- pandemia de COVID-19. Un preocupante sica Ramos y la asambleísta Carmen de la auge de contagios sacude gran parte del Rosa, que liga un “fondo de rescate de los tra- país. La crisis económica se agudiza: el bajadores” a un impuesto sobre el patrimonio número de desempleados alcanzó los 55 de los multimillonarios (“billionaire’s tax”). millones a principios de julio, y sigue cre- No incumbe a los trabajadores dar consejos ciendo. Entretanto, las marchas del mov- al gobierno capitalista sobre dónde y cómo imiento Black Lives Matter (“las vidas ne- deben encontrar el dinero para pagar lo que gras importan”) contra la racista brutalidad los patrones y su estado ya han sacado de la policiaca continúan. Fuerzas federales ase- fuerza laboral de los duramente explotados in- dian a Portland, Oregon, con el propósito migrantes indocumentados, y eso en una crisis de suprimir las protestas, y otras ciudades por la que los trabajadores “esenciales” están están en la mira. Ante este trasfondo, nue- vas tormentas de crisis se avecinan para arriesgando sus vidas. Es absurdo fingir que la clase obrera en general y para los inmi- no tienen dinero cuando la ciudad de Nueva grantes en particular. Muy pronto comen- Cientos de residentes de Corona, Queens, hacen fila para recibir York es la capital mundial de las altas finan- zarán las ordenes de desalojo de familias comida gratis de una iglesia el 27 de abril. Más de 200,000 trabajadores zas en Wall Street. Exigimos lo nuestro, lo que que no logren pagar la renta. Entre los indocumentados en la ciudad de Nueva York han perdido sus trabajos o no precisamos para una vida digna, y punto. primeros afectados estarán los inmigrantes pueden encontrar trabajo en medio de la pandemia. Estas medidas urgentes están muy lejos indocumentados. via, regresaban a casa con las manos vacías. inmigrantes. Esto es intolerable. de resolver todos los males que están padeci- A nivel nacional el impacto de la crisis Por un lado, con las políticas de con- Según la Oficina de Asuntos de los In- endo los inmigrantes en esta crisis. Hay los del coronavirus se vio parcialmente mengua- finamiento, muchos de los inmigrantes- in migrantes municipal de Nueva York, el 37% cientos de miles de trabajadores agrícolas do por las medidas de emergencia de la Ley documentados se han quedado sin empleo. de los residentes de la ciudad son inmigran- (800,000 tan solo en los campos de Califor- CARES, que otorgó un cheque de $1,200 por Al no percibir ningún salario ni ayuda, tes y representan el 44% de la fuerza laboral, nia, 60% de ellos indocumentados) cuyo tra- adulto (con ingresos anuales de menos de muchos trabajadores inmigrantes, con los esto es 3.2 millones de inmigrantes. De éstos, bajo es imprescindible para alimentar al país, $75,000) y $500 para cada niño, además de pocos ahorros que les quedan, tienen que 1.2 millones son indocumentados. La gran pero que laboran con casi inexistentes medi- un pago adicional de desempleo de $600 a la elegir entre pagar la renta de sus vivien- mayoría de trabajadores indocumentados das de seguridad por salarios de miseria. Hay semana y la inclusión de millones de traba- das o comprar víveres. Se calcula que en pagan impuestos por sus salarios, además de ataques racistas, particularmente en contra de jadores que antes fueron excluidos del siste- la ciudad de Nueva York unos 200,000 tra- que todos pagan impuestos por las compras los asiáticos, quienes han sido blanco de dis- ma de seguro de desempleo. Todo con una bajadores indocumentados han perdido sus que realizan. Aun así, no van a percibir ni un criminación por lo que el presidente Trump condición: los beneficiarios requieren contar empleos o no encuentran trabajo debido a centavo de los beneficios que han financiado llama cínica y abusivamente “el virus chino.” con un número válido del Seguro Social. la pandemia. Por otro lado, hay más de un con sus aportes al erario público. Se estima Además, está la actividad nefasta del I.C.E. De esta manera excluyeron a millones de millón de trabajadores considerados “esen- que los fondos pagados por los inmigrantes (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), la trabajadores inmigrantes indocumentados, ciales” para que siga funcionando el sistema indocumentados al gobierno federal que no odiada migra, que acecha a nuestras comuni- muchos de los cuales pagan impuestos con de transporte, el suministro de alimentos son reclamados ascienden cada año a aproxi- dades, que encarcela a decenas de miles de un número de identificación de contribuy- (supermercados, bodegas), servicios socia- madamente 12 mil millones de dólares al Se- detenidos en condiciones insalubres en sus ente (ITIN). Es más, si se paga impuestos en les y de salud. La mayoría son inmigrantes, guro Social y $3 mil millones a Medicare. Sin campos de concentración, y que con sus de- pareja con una persona indocumentada, o si casi las dos terceras partes son negros o la- este dinero, el sistema de pensiones públicas portaciones masivas ha exportado el virus a hay siquiera un indocumentado en la familia, tinos, y la gran mayoría reciben salarios de de EE.UU. padecería de un gran déficit. países de América Latina. todos tienen prohibido recibir ayuda. En total pobreza. A la vez, son ellas y ellos quienes Nosotros de Trabajadores Internacio- Insistimos: Ninguna familia de la clase han sido excluidos al menos 15 millones de corren mayor riesgo de contagiarse con el nales Clasistas exigimos, primero, que el obrera debería de decidir entre pagar la ren- personas, entre ellas 3.7 millones de niños. coronavirus. estado de Nueva York incluya a todos los ta o comprar comida. Nadie debe quedarse En marzo Nueva York se convirtió en el Ya a mediados de abril el gobernador An- trabajadores, particularmente a los indocu- en la calle a causa de desempleo y de rentas principal foco de contagio del coronavirus en drew Cuomo se negó rotundamente a brindar mentados y a los de la “economía gig” (fal- impagables. No somos ilegales, somos tra- todo EE.UU. La crisis sanitaria es resultado ayuda financiera a las familias inmigrantes samente clasificados como “trabajadores bajadores internacionales y exigimos ple- de la ineficacia e ineptitud de las autoridades indocumentadas, alegando que no había su- por cuenta propia”), entre los beneficiarios nos derechos de ciudadanía para todos los burguesas, de la incapacidad del sistema ficiente dinero a causa de los problemas fis- del seguro de desempleo. No estamos men- inmigrantes. En vez de rogar a los partidos médico capitalista de atender las necesidades cales en el gobierno estatal en Albany (New digando: ya hemos pagado los impuestos. y políticos capitalistas, demócratas y repub- de la población, y de su política criminal de York Post, 16 de abril). ¡Burda mentira! En la Se ha calculado que, en los últimos diez licanos, debemos movilizar la fuerza de la enviar a los enfermos “leves” a casa, donde misma época, el estado de California decidió años, los trabajadores indocumentados en clase obrera, de los millones de trabajadores infectan a otros miembros de la familia o a proveer $75 millones de ayuda monetaria el estado han pagado $1.4 mil millones en inmigrantes junto con todos los oprimidos, sus compañeros de vivienda. La situación directa de $500 c/u para un número limitado impuestos de seguro de desempleo (Fiscal contra la mortífera brutalidad policíaca y pronto se convirtió en una terrible crisis de de 150,000 inmigrantes indocumentados. La Policy Institute, 14 de mayo). Segundo, ex- los ataques racistas, para impedir los desa- supervivencia para los más vulnerables. ayuda que se dio a los beneficiados mediante igimos del gobierno del estado y de la ciu- lojos y para bloquear las redadas y depor- Miles de personas a diario se volcaban a las una especie de lotería (que se repartió a los dad que compensen la injusta exclusión de taciones. Luchamos por forjar un partido largas filas para conseguir ayuda alimenticia primeros en llamar) fue realmente mínima, los inmigrantes en los pagos federales de obrero revolucionario para encabezar esta en iglesias y centros comunitarios. Éstos no ya que en California hay dos millones de in- “estímulo” y del fondo de desempleo por la lucha para derribar este sistema capitalista han podido dar abasto a la gran demanda, documentados. Sin embargo, en el estado y la pandemia. Y tercero, exigimos que se can- que nos está matando, echándolo al ba- y con frecuencia muchos de los que hacían ciudad de Nueva York no se ha brindado nada cele la renta (incluyendo la atrasada) de los surero de la historia mediante la revolución cola desde la madrugada, a veces bajo la llu- de apoyo financiero oficial a los trabajadores desempleados y que se prohíba todo desa- socialista internacional. n