25C1:

No. 549 ~~23 17 April 1992 • nile • alerDillar rlKe

EAST PEORIA, Illinois, April 14- E~rly this evening the leadership of the United Auto Workers caved in to the dic­ tates of Caterpillar Inc. and ordered the more than 12,000 strikers back to work. The five-month-Iong strike was a showdown between labor and capital in this country. CAT declared all-out war on organized labor when it announced it would begin hiring scabs April 6. For the last week the eyes of American labor have been on Peoria. "Hell no, we won't go!" chanted thousands of angry UAW strikers who massed at plant gates in East Peoria, Decatur, Mapleton, Aurora and other industrial towns'in Illi­ nois. Few UAW members crossed the picket lines. But now the UAW leadership of Pres­ ident Owen Bieber and Secretary Treas­ urer Bill Casstevens, head of the union's

Agricultural Implements departmentl has declared unconditional surrender. In a "deal" brokered by a federal mediator, the company's "final offer" is being imposed. The UAW traitors who knifed the strike are deliberately keeping the mem­ bership in the dark. No meetings were called, committeemen are nowhere to be Picketers outside CAT plant in Aurora, Illinois. Rather than mobilize all labor in class struggle, pro-Democratic Party found. There is talk that the return to UAW tops stabbed the strikers in the back. . work is only for 90 days. Many strikers are furious at this shameless capitula­ vidually recalled. Workers rightly fear a Caterpillar strike that "with other corpo­ "should never have let them destroy tion. Demobilizing the strike and calling purge of union militants and the destruc­ rations and unions looking on, it has PATCO." The air traffic controllers union off the pickets spells defeat for this cru­ tion of seniority. This would threaten the become a critical battle that could shape was destroyed because, while the union cial, hard-fought battle. future of unionism at the largest con­ labor relations for years .to come." tops talked "solidarity" and staged a While the union is telling everyone to struction equipment manufacturer in the At the March 22 solidarity rally in phony consumer boycott, they never took report tomorrow, Caterpillar announced world. Peoria, one sign said simply, "PATCO strike action to shut down the airports. that scabs should show up for work, and This was no isolated dispute. The Wall 1981, CATCO 1992." For the last decade This was followed by union defeats strikers should wait until they are indi- Street Journal (7 April) wrote of the everyone has said the labor movement continued on page 8

u.s. CORS of the World Double-Cross Former Henchman The Noriega "Trial" In an act of supreme imperialist arrogance, an illegal invasion; his status as a prisoner of the United States government invaded a country, war; his status as head of a sovereign state; the killing thousands and destroying the homes of government's freezing of his financial assets; tens of thousands, kidnapped the head of state­ the electronic "bugging" of his confidential tele­ '{l former U.S. flunkey-and hauled him off to phone calls to his lawyer from his cell; and the Miami in handcuffs. After a farcical show trial prohibition of any testimony about his donkey in which the defense was not allowed to raise work for the CIA, DEA and Defense Depart­ any of the fundamental political and legal issues, ment. Rubino remarked bitterly, "The United the verdict is now in. Under heavy pressure States will now trample across the entire world, from the government's hand-picked judge, the imposing its will upon so-called independent, jury found Panamanian leader General Manuel sovereign nations. Unless leaders of foreign gov­ Noriega guilty on eight counts of conspiracy, ernments are willing to kneel once a day and drug trafficking, racketeering and money laun­ face Washington and give grace to George Bush, dering. George Bush was spared the embarrass­ they, too, may be in the same posture as General ment that an acquittal would have brought in Noriega." this election year. And Washington could pro­ Noriega faces up to 120 years in prison. After claim a victory in the "drug war," casting itself the July 10 sentencing in this case, he will go top cop and supreme judge of a "New World on trial in Tampa on charges of smuggling mar· Order." ijuana into the U.S. After the verdict in the The chief defense lawyer, Frank Rubipo, said Miami trial, federal attorneys were guzzling General Noriega with his lawyer Frank Rubino, who Noriega would appeal the conviction on numer­ champagne and joking about "flipping" Noriega, bitterly remarked that foreign leaders who don't kneel to ous grounds, including his illegal seizure during continued on page 11 Washington could end up in his client's shoes. . "Tax the -Rich" Fakers Back r "Flat Tax" Jerry Brown i en o If Bush or Pat Buchanan had proposed stein and Mr. "Tax the Rich" himself, 1199 a: ""en something like this, liberal and not-so­ hospital union leader Dennis Rivera! --,o liberal Democratic politicos would have Brown is running a phony populist lashed out at them with fake outrage for campaign, denouncing the powers that wanting to increase taxes on the poor. be. He's become popular among lib­ But it is none other than Jerry Brown-­ eral student activists, and when the current spokesman fot: the rad-lib wing AFL-CIO's protectionist darling Harkin of the Democratic Party-who is calling dropped out, Brown tried to pick up 1199 hospital for a flat-rate tax with everyone from a labor support, ostentatiously wearing workers leader black teenager working at McDonald's union jackets. He spoke to a cheering Dennis Rivera to Donald Trump paying 13 percent of Pennsylvania state labor meeting of (left) and their gross income to Uncle Sam. Plus "revolution" and the "alliance" of "my Jerry Brown. he wants an additional 13 percent across­ family and labor." Standing on the steps the-board value-added tax (VAT), in of the federal building, across from the effect a national sales tax, alongside the Wall Street stock exchange, Brown existing array of state and local taxes. railed that "Capital and money lenders A new (April 1992) study by the Con­ and the greedy elite have been able to gressional Budget Office estimates that subvert the democratic process." under such a scheme, federal taxes on Yet Jerry Brown's flat-rate tax scheme being slashed or eliminated outright. of their income in value-added taxes." the poorest one-fifth of American fami­ has been endorsed by that authoritative "Surely," they blithely argue, "the solu­ One of the sharpest radical critics of lies would more than triple, increasing mouthpiece for money lenders and the tion to. families facing overwhelming Brown's flat tax is Doug Henwood, edi­ from 8 to 28 percent. This would produce greedy elite, the Wall Street Journal, medical bills is not a tax deduction, but tor of the Left Business Observer. Its 10 afall in their real income of a whopping as well as by the right-wing business national health insurance, which Mr. February issue also exposed the sinister 22 percent! In contrast, the taxes of the journal Forbes, self-described "~apitalist Brown SUpportS." side of Governor Moonbeam, quoting richest fifth would fall while their tool." Interestingly, echoing the editors Surely the worldly Cockburn is aware extensively from Jerry Brown: The Man income would rise. oftheJournal on this issue is the paper's that arra~ed against national health in­ on the White Horse by J.D. Lorenz, who Last year, a slew of anti-Bush liberals token radical contributor, Alexander surance is a capitalist monopoly far more served for a time as state employment and "progressive" trade unionists were Cockburn, who devoted a 2 April column powerful and rapacious than anything director when Brown was California campaigning on a program to increase (co-authored by academic economist ever dreamed of by Michael Milken governor in the 1970s. Lorenz recalls his taxes on the wealthy. For instance, the Robert Pollin) to "Why the Left Should or Carl Icahn~the American Medical boss fantasizing: "People want a dictator New York City labor leadership called Support the Flat Tax." Association. It will take red revolution these days, a man on a white horse. an April 30 march of tens of thousands CockburnlPollin attempt to answer to get socialized medicine in this coun­ They're looking for a man on a white in which the most prominent slogan was liberal economist Robert Kuttner, who try. And surely he hasn't forgotten horse to ride in and tell them what to "tax the rich." But in the recent New pointed out that under Brown's scheme the massive protests a couple of years do. A politician can do anything he wants York Democratic presidential primary, working-class families would no longer ago against another "flat tax," Margaret so long as he manipulates the right Brown was endorsed by CWA phone be able to deduct thousands of dol­ Thatcher's hated "poll tax" in Britain. symbols." workers leader Jan Pierce, transit union lars spent for medical emergelilcies, at a There are so many loopholes in the Once the governor rhetorically asked chief Sonny Hall, Teamster Barry Fein- time when company medical· plans are federal tax code that rich people often his employment director: "Are poor kids pay a smaller proportion of their income really hungry, or is that another liberal than working-class families. Still, the myth? I don't know why we should sub­ federal income tax is mildly "progres­ sidize school lunches. Nobody ever gave For Revolutionary Class Struggle sive"-i.e., the wealthy owners of capi­ me a school lunch when I was a kid." In the decade before World War I, the tal are supposed to pay _a higher per­ Since his father Pat Brown was Cali­ Industrial Workers of the World (/WW) wrote centage of their income. That's what the fornia state attorney general and then a heroic chapter in the history of the Ameri­ "Reagan revolution" tried to roll back. governor, little Jerry's school lunches can working class, pioneering industrial Even more flagrantly than Reaganomics, and a lot more were provided from the unionism. Many of the founding figures of Brown's flat-rate scheme is a frontal public teat. American Communism, such as James P. attack on the very principle of progres­ Brown Sr. made even more money Cannon, served their apprenticeship in the sive taxation. as a lobbyist for the Indonesian state­ revolutionary syndicalist /WW but later rec­ And more regressive still is a value­ owned oil company, Pertamina. The ognized the need for a Leninist vanguard added tax. "Value added" is the differ­ Indonesian military dictatorship came to - ence between a firm's revenue and the power in 1965 in a U.S.-backed mas­ TROTSKY party to lead the masses of workers in over­ LENIN turning the bourgeois order. The preamble to cost of inputs purchased from other sacre of half a million Communists,. the /WW constitution, despite its syndicalist elements, sets forth fundamental principles firms-basically its own labor costs, workers and peasants. The Brown family which must govern the struggle of labor against capital. depreciation on capital assets and prof­ wealth, which is now helping finance its. A 13 percent VAT would be passed Junior's presidential campaign, is liter­ The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be to consumers through higher prices as is ally derived from the blood of Indone­ no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and now the case in Europe, where this tax sia's toiling masses. the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life .... is widely used. . While many radicals, such a~ Doug Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world Every student of high school eco­ Henwood, view increasing taxes on the organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the.machinery of production and nomics learns that sales taxes are re­ rich as the key to ending the economic abolish the wage system. gressive: the poore! you are, the larger immiseration of American working peo~ We find that the centering of management of industries into fewer and fewer hands proportion of your income is taken by pIe, we have pointed out that such a makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing this particular form of tax. The more program is illusory since it leaves control class.... . affluent people are, the more they invest over production, employment, wages These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only in stocks, bonds, money-market funds, and prices in the hands of the wealthy by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in 'any o~e industry, or etc., and the less (proportionately) they owners of capital (see "U.S. Economy in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any spend on goods and services which are Dead in the' Water," WV No. 541, 27 department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all. taxed. The Congressional Budget Office December 1991). Thus it is no accident Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we study noted that in any given year fam­ that various left-liberals like Alexander must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage ilies on the bottom 20 percent of the eco­ Cockburn and "progressive" labor fakers system." It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. nomic scale "spend much more than their like Dennis Rivera who seek to work -Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World (1905) annual income, financing such spending within the confines of this capitalist by borrowing or selling assets. These system end up in bed with the likes of families would pay a significant portion "Flat Tax" Jerry Brown.. - !~~l!!'!!Y!..~!!..f!!.~.'!.! ~ DIRECTOR OF PARTY PUBLICATIONS: Liz Gordon EDITOR: Jan Norden PRODUCTION MANAGER: Joan Parker CIRCULATION MANAGER: Karen Valdez Social EDITORIAL BOARD: George Foster, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan, Len Meyers, James Robertson, Democrats Joseph Seymour, Alison Spencer, Marjorie Stamberg of DSA and CWA The Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (Fourth phone workers Internationalist) . union march Workers Vanguard (USPS 098-770) published biweekly, except 2nd issue August and with 3-week interval December, in NYC labor by the Spartacist Publishing Co., 41 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861 (BUSiness). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. Domestic _demo last April subscriptions: $7.00/24 issues. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address changes calling to to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint. "Tax the Rich." No; 549 17 April 1992

2 WORKERS VANGUARD ,'ltDl NYC Transit Wo·rkers: Rip Up the Taylor Law!

Last month, transit workers threw back by a two-to­ that led the industry in wages~and working conditions. one margin the sellout contract that Transport Workers • Union control of union funds. Abolish the dues Union Local 100 president and Democratic Party loy- . check-off. Having the TA as our union banker ensures alist Sonny Hall tried to foist on the membership. This we won't have our funds when we need them most-as massive repudiation of the TWU tops was unprece­ a war chest for the battle against the TA bosses. Dues dented. Kngry transit workers are now asking, what collection by elected stewards would make the leader­ next? ship accountable to the membership and prepare this We reprint below excerpts from a leaflet by the Com­ union for combat. mittee for a Fighting TWU presenting a· class-struggle • Elected safety representatives to shut down program to win. The Committee is circulating a petition unsafe work on the spot. The TA is substituting our to convene a mass membership meeting "to take what­ blood for the massive funding needed to rebuild the ever action is necessary to defend our jobs, benefits subways. We've lost lives and liberties because of the and working conditions." The "New Directions" group­ TA's deadly neglect. Defend Robert Ray-the bosses' ing, which represents a wing of the Local 100 bureauc­ scapegoat for the Union Square deathtrap. No to drug racy, orients instead to pressuring the Democrats. and alcohol testing. Rehire the provisionals and mass On April 7, primary day, New Directions called a hiring to repair and maintain the entire system. rally outside Governor Cuomo's World Trade Center • Equal pay and benefits for equal work., Scrap office. In spite of the fact that 35,000 transit workers the tier system-full parity at the highest level for TA, have been without a contract for a year; their banner MABSTOA and private lines workers. Reduce the work and main chant was "no contract, no peace." This is week to 30 hours at no loss in pay. Maternity and meant to hide the fact that these junior labor fakers paternity leaves and free 24-hour day care. oppose calling for a strike. Yet only by mobiliz·ing the • Rip out the turnstiles. We can rally riders to our union's power can transit workers win against the cut­ side by demanding free mass transit. back Democrats who are squeezing New York City on • Real labor solidarity-in strike action! Half the behalf of Wall' Street and the White House. unions in this town are working without a contract. Transit workers demonstrate outside Governor CUNY students face tuition hikes and cutbacks that Cuomo's World Trade Center omce, April 7. No Contract-No Work! mean a racist purge of black, Latin and working-class youth from their only shot at an education. Local 100 Rip Up the Taylor Law! less a strike leader. Since PATCO, labor has been taking can lead a powerful working-class fight on behalf of a beating because housebroken pro-pemocratic Party all labor and the oppressed in New York! We must misleaders knifed militant and popi.llar labor strikes We Voted It Down, appeal to NYC workers and link up with PATH, LIRR, like Eastern and Greyhound, turning them into losing NJ Transit, and Metro~North to strike with us. We consumer boycotts. Now Caterpillar has thrown down Now Let's Shut It Down! should all be in one powerful NY INJ transit union. the gauntlet to the UAW, threatening to run scabs in The health trust arbitrator is threatening to drop our and run union men and women out. '. Labor defense guards to stop racist attacks. supplemental health benefits. That means working in Our union is the most powerful public employees Remember Willie Turks, Yusuf Hawkins, Federico a deathtrap every day without full medical coverage .. union in any city in this country. New York City is the Pereira! For union-run minority recruitment and job­ The TA, which just got $292 million from the federal financial capital of the world. The stakes are big-Wall' training programs. Down with racist immigration laws, government, says there's not a penny more for us and Street wants to stick it to us. But we have the power-if Full citizenship rights for foreign-born workers. is threatening to send the entire contract to arbitration. we use it-to tear up the givebacks/cutbacks with a Disgusted with Sonny Hall & Co., a lot of workers This is a direct result of the decision by Hall and New solid strike to shut down New York. are looking to New Directions for answers. Even Directions to extend the contract and refuse to use our now, New Directions opposes organizing for a strike. power and strike. Management's playing hardball and The Committee for a Fighting TWU stands for: That's why they talk about gimmicks like slowdowns it's about time we do the same. We need an effective • A union-wide elected strike committee repre­ three months from now at the Democratic Party con­ strike led by a leadership that fights to win. Smash the senting every shop, gang, depot, and terminal-and vention. We need collective union action now, not Taylor Law ... no fines and no victimizations or we don't subject to instant recall if it's not doing the job. No impotent atomized slowdowns which risk individual go back. confidence in the bosses' courts and arbitrators. No victimization. No more closed door meetings and back room deals secret negotiations-for regular mass meetings. The capitalists are bleeding workers and the poor in to sell'us down the river! We've had it with a leadership • Rip up the Taylor Law. The anti-labor laws can New York to feed the bankers. And they will do it that called the cops on us to keep us out of our own be smashed through successful class struggle. No as long as our power is throttled by the union tops union hall. We need an immediate mass meeting of the judge's injunctions can get Wall Street to work if we who are beholden to the bosses' parties. We need a entire Local 100 membership at the Garden to discuss don't move the trains or buses. In 1966, [TWU leader multiracial workers party that doesn't "respect" the the issues, decide how to fight and win. Mike] Quill went to jail for refusing to call off our bosses' rules, a party that will lead a fight for a workers There is a lot of hesitancy about a strike-nobody strike. This union played hardball and won total government to rip the wealth out of the bosses' hands trusts Sonny Hall to be a school crossing guard, much amnesty from the no-strike law penalties and a contract and create a society where those who labor rule.

Three hundred scabs have been brought in to "per­ Safeway, Blue Diamond-Teamsters manently replace" the workers in the processing plant. Unionization for cannery workers in California's Cen­ Must Fig.ht, Union··Busting Drive! tral Valley is threatened by this union-busting assault. But the strikers are determined to win. Early in the OAKLAND, April 13-Safeway, one of the country's takes in $21 billion a year. Management is already canning season, strikers went to the Oakland docks to largest supermarket chains, is out to break the Team­ hiring sc.abs. Teamsters must honor the lines and choke picket a container of Blue Diamond walnuts. Long­ sters union in their Northern California warehouse dis­ off Kroger's deliveries! shoremen honored their line, but the container was tribution network. On May 1, Safeway plans to close Safeway's plans have been known for years, and loaded elsewhere. its Richmond and Fremont warehouses and open a new now the new facility is built and stocking goods. The Instead of calling on dock workers and Teamsters $125-million non-union facility in Tracy, 50 miles east Teamster bureaucrats' failure to counter Safeway's up and down the coast to hot cargo Blue Diamond of Oakland. Safeway has hired Specialized Distribution stalling and foot-dragging has cost the union valuable products, the Teamster tops launched a consumer boy­ Management Inc. (SDMI) to manage the new facility. time. Now they're substituting impotent consumer boy­ cott centered on appeals to corporate giants like General Southern Pacific Railroad used this same scam on long­ cotts and useless Congressional hearings for picket Foods. Rather than calling for mass picketing to keep shore union members in their container transfer yard lines. United strike action by Teamsters, Retail Clerks, scabs out and shut down the Stockton plant, the outside Los Angeles (see WV No. 544, 7 February). butchers and other unions at Safeway could spike this bureaucracy has treacherously insisted the ranks obey SDMI is threatening to operate with scabs rather than union-busting attempt in a hUrry. Mass pickets should an injunction limiting pickets to four to a gate. This transfer the 800 workers, if the union does not accept shut down the Tracy operation tight until all present is the kind of sabotage that repeatedly undercut the its latest offer. warehousemen and drivers are hired with seniority courageous 18-month strike by women cannery work­ Teamster warehousemen and drivers voted Sunday rights, wages and benefits preserved. ers in Watsonville in 1986-87. Now Pillsbury/Green by 425 to 10 to reject what SDMI president George The consumer boycott diversion is being used to Giant has moved its Watsonville operation to central Crum called' the company's "LAST AND FINAL cover the bureaucrats' abandonment of 500 members Mexico. Union jobs in the area have been decimated OFFER." At the last minute SDMI agreed to "offer of Teamster Locar 601 striking the Blue Diamond with an impact worse than the earthquake. employment" to the existing workforce, but Safeway Walnut processing plant in Stockton. The workers, who Various fake-lefts trumpet the Justice Department­ workers, many with 15 to 20 years seniority, would process 50 percent of the world's walnuts, are two­ run election of Teamster president Ron Carey as a "rev- essentially be starting over as new hires. The proposed thirds minority women. For them, a union cannery job . olution" and prattle about the "new" Teamsters. But five-year pact has a draconian no-strike clause, saying is the way out of the backbreaking, brutal life of a When it comes to putting labor's muscle on the line workers must "not refuse to cross a picket line" and migrant worker. against the bosses and their government, the "new" forbids "handbilling, boycotts" and even "adverse pub­ In 1985 the company slashed base wages 45 percent, Teamsters are indistinguishable from the "old." The licity"! Sick benefits and holidays would be slashed, with seasonal employees making as little as $4.25 per election Carey won was a government operation aided a seven-tier wage scale imposed and drivers' pay tied hour and full-timers making up to $7.65 per hour, by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union. The survival to mileage. according to Local 601 business agent Barbara George. of the labor movement depends on breaking the pro~ Meanwhile, some 7,000 Michigan clerks, cashiers Now Blue Diamond is insisting on co-payments for capitalist bureaucrats' grip. This requires building a and meatcutters are in a make-or-break battle against health benefits and fighting union demands to .return workers party committed to the fight for socialist rev- Kroger's, the nation's largest supermarket chain, which to pre-1985 wage levels. olution internationally. • .

17 APRIL 1992 3 an organization devoted to committing provocations against the left. And they go after the SL not least because they see in us all-purpose surrogates for their anti-Soviet venom. . This is not the first time they have expressed a macabre interest in our dead. Following the suicide of one of our cadres two years ago, the Northites raised this ifI an article on the New York Daily News strike, as they tried to weasel out of our exposure that the. Bulletin is published by non-union labor. Several months later, they seized on the untimely The murder of our comrade Martha vocateur reasons. We've had altercations a "commission of inquiry" raised in a death of another comrade from cancer Phillips in Moscow has drawn the sinis­ with Pamyat. The Kuzbass region inde­ very powerful letter of solidarity by a to twist their gruesome knife again. pendent mine workers union is run sympathizer of our organization (see WV ter attention of David North's Workers straight out of Washington by a Russian Take this ghoulish mind set, add the League and other denizens of his self­ fascist and the CIA; we intervened and No. 546, 6 March). They even cite Trot­ mercenary appetites of a poison pen for styled "International Committee of the got in their way. There are many other sky as a precedent. Yet the Dewey hire, and that gives you a rough approx­ Fourth International." possibilities. Moscow is hardly New Commission was convened not to deter­ imation of the North gang. In exchange York-that is, you don't get knifed in mine that it was Stalin who murdered for petrodollars, the IC under North's For more than 20 years this outfit has the street in Moscow, although increas­ variously described the Spartacists as ingly with impoverishment you can get Left· Oppositionists in the 1930s, but British mentor Gerry Healy served as "racist" and "fascist," the "main spokes­ robbed. But this was not that kind of to clear Trotsky's name from the lies press agents for anti-Communist repres­ man for the national interests of the murder at all. And the plain truth is, we heaped on him by Stalin's infamous sion by Near East dictators. They are American bourgeoisie," "provocateurs in do not know." Moscow Trials. notorious for assisting the bourgeois the service of Stalinism," "the finger­ North & Co. talk as though they do As we wrote in reply to our supporter, state in persecuting working-class mili­ man for the world capitalists," "Finger know more, or pretend to, claiming to "unlike in Stalin's time, today it is not tants, from the Healyites' smear of Brit­ Man for the FBI" and generally as find in our straightforward statement an easy task to identify the culprit(s)." ish miners leader Arthur Scargill to the most decadent and unregenerate, the "smell of political coverup."· They The Workers League claims this state­ North's campaign to imprison American "politically diseased" elements, moti­ demand a "public accounting of the ment is "so specious and flimsy that it SWP trade-union activist Mark Curtis. vated by '''hatred of the working class." 'milieu'" in which we. intervene in the invites ~uspicion." What "invites suspi­ In November 1990, they seized on the Why would they care what happens to Soviet Union, reports of which appear cion" is that the Bulletin editors willfully attempted assassination of German SPD our comrades? Yet twice in the space leader Oskar Lafontaine to go after of four weeks the Workers League's our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Bulletin has carried articles dealing with m"'!'I... l~l:jJ- .'. ~.. Party of Germany (SpAD), the only the death of our comrade. organization to unambiguously oppose Their 28 February issue cites the the imperialist annexation of the DDR "disturbing report" in Workers Vanguard C1::~~:!J AGAINST THE (East Germany). In a vicious smear, (No. 545, 21 February) of Martha's mur­ HEALYITE SCHOOL whose only purpose could be to set us der. They shed a few crocodile tears, l M~u..\4P.{t~ OF SLANDER. up as would-be "terrorists" in the eyes although everyone who knqws the Work­ of the Fourth Reich's agencies of repres­ ers League knows full well that they May 1979 Spartaclst sion, the German Northite BSA vitu­ would gleefully break open a bottle of demonstration in perated that "The hysterical language champagne over news of an SL leader's New York protested of the SpAD is directed at people Healy/North death. There soon follows a long list of smear campaign who are in a mental state similar to that dark and insinuating "questions" and implicating SWP of the schizophrenic would-be 'assassin innuendos about "sketchy" accounts of leadership in of Lafontaine." the murder, "hastily" organized memo­ Trotsky's For years, the Workers League has rial meetings, a "highly unusual" lack of assassination. been out to get us. Now they seek to any reports on the murder in the Moscow Today North use the tragic murder of our comrade or U.S. press. The article asks darkly, continues smears, who died at her post, fighting to "Could the killers have been known slanders and defeat counterrevolution in the Soviet to Phillips?" Even more explicitly, a provocations Union, for another of their insidious against left. second installment on "The Murder of , "campaigns." Whose interests does the Martha Phillips" (Bulletin, 21 March) Workers League serve? talks of "the unavoidable inference that Spartacist has something to hide." Poisoned Pens for Hire For Martha's comrades, the agony of The "International Committee" has a her brutal and untimely death has been regularly in Workers Vanguard. These ignore the many SInIster and deadly well-known history as a mercenary compounded by the fact that we still do virulent Stalinophobes point an accusing forces we pointed to as potential sus­ outfit. This is a matter of public record. not know who murdered her. Describing finger at the "political swamp of disin­ pects. We observed that "within the By their own later admission, Healy's' in the obituary the circumstances of the tegrating Soviet Stalinism," with which decomposing bureaucracy, several of its IC received at least well over £1 million discovery of Martha's body on the morn­ they attempt to put us in league. They wings" could be implicated, but "equally (over $2 million at the time) from a vari­ ing of February 9, we said: find it expedient, to say the least, to there are those with considerable invest­ ety of Near East sheiks and bonapartist "At the present time, the possibility can­ ignore other suspects, such as the numer­ ment in Yeltsin or ties to Yeltsin," ,as butchers over a period of years begin-' not be ruled out that this hideous crime ous' "assets" of the CIA in the Soviet well as smaller forces who "may have ning in the mid-1970s (see "Northite may have been politically motivated. The Union, or even the possibility of a simple seen our activities as a direct road­ Blood Money," WV No. 523, 29 March Moscow militia is carrying out an inves­ tigation in which our friends and sup­ criminal act. block to their aspirations.'.' The Workers 1991). And this really was for services porters in Moscow are cooperating." The Bulletin remarks that the WV obit­ League certainly fits in this last category. rendered. Two weeks later, after we had managed . uary has "no suggestion in the headline Far from demanding a commission of Beginning with a 1976 deal with the with great difficulty to get some fur­ that Phillips was -the victim of murder." inquiry, they should be worried about Libyan government for £50,000 with ther details from the militia investiga­ Perhaps they will next denounce Trotsky what an inquiry might reveal! which to buy a four-color web offset tion, this was reported to a memorial for titling his obituary of his slain son, What do they really want, these people printing press, according to an IC Con­ meeting by SLIU.S. National Chairman "Leon Sedov-Son, Friend, Fighter." who have for years treated the Sparta­ trol Commission report, the IC received James Robertson. Laying out the range And maybe they will go after Trotsky's cists as deserving nothing more than to more than a half million pounds from of potential suspects, comrade Robert­ article as well for the fact that "the first be shot down like mad dogs? They want the Qaddafi regime over the years. son concluded: mention of murder as the cause of death to seize on a tragedy which has struck Among the services this money bought "I do not have any basis now to spec­ comes more than three-quarters of the our organization, and use that tragedy to was turning Healyite publications into ulate. It could have Deen somebody way into the article." hurt the Spartacist League. hagiographic press agents for the Libyan within our milieu for personal or pro- They cynically pick up on a call for The SL has earned a reputation for strongman, as well as supplying names telling the truth, no matter how bitter, of and intelligence on prominent "Zion­ just as the rules of Trotsky'S Fourth ists" in "finance, politics, business, the International instruct us, from warning communications media and elsewhere." A Matter of Public Record against Solidarnosc counterrevolution Another £20,000-and this figure can back in 1981, when the bulk of the left only be the tip of the iceberg, given that £ (and the Workers League) was cheer­ the "investigation" was carried out by Libya 542,267. ing it on, to correcting errors in our the guilty parties themselves--<:ame Kuwait 156,500 press. We stand on our record, making Qatar 50,000 from Saddam Hussein. In exchange, the Abu Dhabi 25,000 available the indexed bound volumes of IC hailed the execution of 21 Iraqi PLO 19,997 , Workers Vanguard and Spartacist dating Communist Party members in 1978. Iraq 19,697 back to our first issue. They not only whitewashed the Ba'athist unidentified or We tell our readers the truth, as it is regime's anti-Communist terror, they other sources 261,702 known to us, when it is known to us. actively assisted it. Healyite provoca­ Total 1,075,163 And when we don't know, we say that teu~s spied on anti-Saddam demonstra­ too. tions in Britain, taking pictures of Iraqi Reprinted from Workers News. April 1988 The Northites, on the other hand, leftists and turning them over to the WV has documented specialize in the arts of fabrication, Ba'athist regime.

~ ;: Healyites' well-known innuendo and anti-communist smear North points to the IC "control com­ c' " history as paid mercenaries designed to bring forces far more pow­ mission" to claim innocenc~, protesting of Arab bourgeois regimes. WIJIIIIEIII ".,"'111 erful than their own down on those the WL never got any of the loot. But ~ 29 March 1991 '5- whom they target. In short, they are the entire IC carried out the political 4 WORKERS VANGUARD services required for this money over a whole period, and the fact that the Healyites were on the take was obvious to anyone· who looked. In 1977 we ran an article, "Healyites, Messengers How the SWP Tried to Dupe the Labor Movement of Qaddafi," concluding that "even a cursory look" at the IC's "year-lo~ Workers League's pandering to the oil-rich Qaddafi forces The Mark Curtis Hoax Bulletin helped bourgeois state to the observation that there is indeed -"""'.-=C;;-=::J Part One: The SWP Invents a "Frame-Up" something very rotten in the state of SIII,"eMarchl988.lheSocLahstWorkerSPartyhasbo.>el railroad SWP leadingrunnHlian memilen.' ,n(",.maILORa! Mark campaIgn Curtis. whotOdd .....Wi:$ -.atTl'Sted. of," ~.. unC,t~ ..... t~offoc,a1 Marcl!'. In Ul!: arrestorJ)omllllcan •• panuhe bed. and pullf'd"","" hI" t.v.U... notDrlIlU!iPlnll.r1"".,,..,,,J ...... McParJiIIId.wbo canvL~.nd!fentencedtoZSyearsmprisol'lrortherape E'."'·...... ~publ",.andaMa"'htpl',,"1 ··I~._wtuolyoo·n""'. had bem respon",b~ for the trade unionist Denmark." 01 Oemetrl.l Mon'IS. a lS-year~d black hIgh school ...,..~ofIMSWP.'O'" lhe~Sllld·Whal"'V.*"&ot .~hetIIoon.ndn~uon'" studmlinDesMoines.lowa'J"htSWPliasraisedY~ "".. ::::::t~n!e-:'~~ ~.nW:lelldded.nobloque ~::~:a"',ra"""'3D Mark Curtis, seen Three years later, Sean Matgamna, !~_o~n:~~=;=~·==rk'7:~~ '", ...... ·t ~M~~~~ ~M:.to~~~:: =tI!~I';~I~~~I: dtfenRClllmpalgl'lfromlhousandsofttadtlllllOlland ':!!!,_. leader_Ib.I'ormet'ct\a1l'mM'l anoId1llli1b.IIIed .. tMllMy ~Daytlo:JmbA'ltl'n here after vicious editor of the British Socialist Organiser, ~=:~~~~::ed~~~~~~ ·M:;.;: ~u.;~~~~u~ =~·~rr~:l~~ :,,~~.. . .11 ::...w:.:: beating by police. was dragged~y Healy into Her Majesty's ~.:;.;;.= =-=5£ ;";i~r ::g::~...: ~.:'i:;:l=..,~ :.~~:"~=;: cen\vlct""", ... anu·laboroul",,,,IIIME'n,,,,toher_ , "'''howto~'1 _tokIlhftn,·""lguyvlcteilonlb.lnI""""ycl. fIo~.lIIIIbeen_11e "'tMstary "",M..-dIa ...... "'",. jUII.-.ptdme'- ...... JohrIMcOonald courts on .libel charges. ·But the one pNon ... 1M \luis '" _I.,. Ht-vl!ftllriell.lherear... num- MililanI. pubI"""" .. "MardI who_""lIy...,..,dllllfd"'t- ~ra::.~:.~ ...... ~=~~:=~I:i =~~~=I\~ !~:::,:::::'=CU~:"I" 'VC b."'ldl~~"", charge that Matgamna raised which =hoorelS IJI. WorUn PaI1y bar mawmtlll an Healy didn't contest was the central one, that the Healyites must have been has been an FBI-controlled organization the Healy/Northites have been found on Soviet miners struck massively across subsidized by "one or more Arab gov­ for decades. Within their own demented any side fighting against the Soviet the country in the summer of 1989. The ernments." In 1985, when Healy was framework, what would that make the Union. later Vorkuta strike, however, was the deposed by his lieutenants, the accusa­ Workers League? Thus in Britain, When anti-Communist first to openly raise anti-Communist tions of taking blood money from Arab True to form, the main vehicle North "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher was demands. The WL's Bulletin (8 Decem­ bourgeois regimes became a big scandal & Co. have used in pursuing their ven­ gearing up for a bloody showdown with ber 1989) publicized an appeal by the in the IC. Why? Because by then the detta against the SWP is the capitalist the powerful National Union of Mine­ "Vorkuta Workers' (Strike) Committee," flow of money had $ed. up. When courts-appealing to the U.S. govern­ workers, the Healyites put their support which included a demand for the it was coming in, nobody complained ment to determine that the SWP is an for Solidarnosc into service for the "complete cutoff of the financial and (see "Healyism Implodes," Spartacist organization of "government agents"! In union-busting cabal. On the eve of the economic help to the fraternal totalitar­ No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86). 1979, when the SWP was engaged in a heroic 1984-85 miners strike, Healy's ian regimes"-i.e., Cuba, Vietnam, etc. More than 20 years ago, we char­ lawsuit against the FBI's COINTELPRO press made a big play of scandalizing In introducing this appeal, the Bulletin acterized the Healyites as unsavory infiltration, the Northites-using WL NUM leader Arthur Scargill for oppos­ explained that it had been "transmitted "political bandits" whose positions were tool Alan Gelfand-took the SWP to ing Solidarnosc as "anti-socialist." The by telephone from Vorkuta to Leningrad tailored to their own opportunistic ad­ court in order to force it to hand over scurrilous anti-Communist campaign and published there by the Democratic vantage. As they continued to degener­ Political Committee minutes. was instantly' picked up by the Labour Union Party." The Democratic Union is ate, their ostensible politics, like their . Four years ago, the "Workers" League Party!Trades Union Congress right wing a pro-Western, anti-Communist outfit cheering for a mythical bourgeois "Arab launched a big international campaign and the Fleet Street tabloids with the aim which has been financed by the Ameri­ Revolution," became a front-basically with the aim of sending SWPer Mark of isolating the miners union and trying can government through the notorious to crush it. conduit of the "National Endowment for A few years later, the American AFL­ Democracy"! CIO's International Department (widely One of the leaders of the Vorkuta min­ known as the "AFL-CIA") sought to put ers is Nikolai Terokhin, who railed that together a new Solidarnosc by creating "The Cubans receive this money out of a layer of pro-imperialist "free trade our pockets and practically flip out under unionists" in the Soviet Union. To this their beautiful sun" (taz, 18 November end, they tried to get the so-called 1989). This same Terokhin, along with Independent Union of Miners (NPG) to another Vorkuta miner, Sergei Maso­ endorse slanders that Scargill had pock­ lovich, were brought to Britain in June eted contributions by Soviet miners to 1990 by the fascistic NTS, which has the British miners strike. Our comrades' been financed for decades by Western intervention into the founding confer­ intelligence agencies. There they ad­ ence of the NPG in the Donbass in 1990 dressed the scab "Union' of Democratic put a spike in this disinformation cam­ Miners" which was set up to destroy paign. We gored the ox of these CIA­ Arthur Scargill's NUM. These two are connected elements, and they have good also sponsored proteges of AFL-CIO cause to hate us. leader Lane Kirkland, who have been Visiting delegation of Soviet "free trade unionists," including Vorkuta miners Currently, the Northites are engaged highlighted in the pages of that other leader, hosted by "AFL-CIA" chief Lane Kirkland in Washington, January 1991. in a fund drive for "aid to the Vorkuta Bulletin, published by the AFL-CIO miners," who however are not presently "Department of International Affairs." Is dependent on who they were working Curtis to prison (see "The Workers engaged in any particular struggle. This this the "milieu" that North & Co. have for at any given time. The petrodollar League and Mark Curtis," WV No. 480, was launched at a November Berlin been working? What's in it for them, we connection was only one of their con­ 23 June 1989). Curtis was an Iowa trade meeting of North's "IC," supposedly on wonder, and does it have anything to tracts. In Australia they took money unionist who was getting in the way of the basis of an appeal from the miners. do with their interest in the murder of to print a Vietnamese rightist emigre the Swift Packing Co. He is currently Yet the appeal has not been published. our comrade? newspaper, the Bell of Saigon, which serving a 25-year prison term after being Could this be related to the fact that a called on its fascist supporters to "exter­ railroaded on charges of burglary and few months earlier the AFL-(:IO set up Hate the Soviet Union, Hate minate" communists. Even when it isn't sexual abuse. Whole paragraphs of the a "relief fund" for Soviet mIners? This the Spartacist League . exactly clear in whose employ they are prosecutor's summation at the trial that was reported in an article on Boris Yel­ If there has been one political constant at a given moment, like out-of-work gun­ put Curtis behind bars were taken almost tsin's visit to AFL-CIO headquarters, to North's organization for the past cou­ slingers in the Old West they have con­ word for word from what the Bulletin where he was hailed for his "commit­ ple of decades, it has been unadulterated tinued to do their dirty work with the had written a month earlier! As the ment to free unions." Interestingly, the anti-Sovietism. This is "theoretically" aim of serving somebody. _ headline of a subsequent WV article said, article talks of the "plight of the Soviet justified with the description of the Sta­ In the early 1970s, the Healyites began "Why Should Anyone Believe David miners, who first struck in November linist bureaucracy as "counterrevolution­ a decades-long vendetta against the North?" 1989 in Vorkuta" (AFL-CIO News, 24 ary through and through"-which flatly reformist SWP entitled "Security and the June 1991). denies Trotsky's understanding of the Fourth International." Resuscitating the What "Milieu" Does.North Now this is curious indeed,. for the continued on page 8 vile Stalinist slander that Trotsky had Work In? been killed by "one of his own," the And that brings us back to the North­ Healyites tried to smear the entire SWP ites' grotesque insinuations concerning leadership--especially Trotsky's secre­ the murder of Martha Phillips in Mos­ tary Joseph Hansen-as "FBI and KGB cow. We have sought to marshal what­ agents" and "accomplices" in the murder ever resources we can to press Moscow of Leon Trotsky. This slander, of course, authorities to pursue all possible avenues also implicated SWP leader James P. of investigation with vigor and rigorous­ WIIINEIiI "."'111) Cannon and Trotsky himself. David ness. And we are taking other measures. Volume No. 22: Issues 517-541,4 January to 27 December 1991 North cut his teeth on that campaign. Particularly given the chaos of the dis­ $25 Completely Indexed integrating Soviet Union since Yeltsin's The Workers League's modus oper­ ------Also available ------­ andi in order to get left~wing opponents pro-imperialist countercoup last August, is to place themselves at the service of pursuing this investigation is fraught Workers Vanguard Volumes 1-21: 1970 through 1990 larger forces hostile to revolutionaries. with difficulty. This is compounded by Volumes include one year of WV except: Volume 1 includes 1970-73; In 1971, at a time when the bourgeoisie the fact that Martha was a Trotskyis,t, a Volumes 4-9 include six months each, 1976-78 worried over growing radicalization, the Jew and an outspoken public opponent Spartacist Volume 1: Issues 1 to 20, Feb. 1964-July 1971 SWP decided it was time to draw a blood of Yeltsin counterrevolution. As we've Volume 2: Issues 21 to 30, Autumn 1972-Autumn 1980 line in the "antiwar movement." At a said, at this point we have no way of Volume 3: Issues 31/32 to 40, Summer 1981-Summer 1987 meeting of the SWP's "National Peace knowing who killed our comrade and are Action Coalition," a popular front includ­ in no position to exclude any possibility. ing prominent Democratic Party politi­ But as noted above, the Workers cians, the WL rushed to join in a vicious League has been quick to exclude certain thug attack led by SWP goons against possibilities, notably those connected to Progressive Labor and the Spartacist the CIA an9 the Yeltsinites. Why miglit All volumes also available on microfilm. All prices include postage. League when we protested the presence that be? From opposing Soviet interven­ of Senator Vance Hartke on the podium. tion against CIA-financed Islamic fun­ Order from/make checks· payable to: And here they were acting as guard dogs damentalists in Afghanistan to hailing Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA for the same SWP which they now claim CIA-sponsored Solidarnosc in Poland, 17 APRIL 1992 5 Southern Schools Ban Malcolm X Black students in the Old South have society we'd have if the South had won read Malcolm X, they might not fall into been besieged by "in your face" racists the Civil War. The Confederate flag has the trap of asking their enemy to defend insisting on their "right" to wave the nothing to do with "freedom of expres­ black rights. Although Malcolm did Confederate flag of slavery in public sion"-it is the battle flag for fascist vio­ not have a program of integrated class schools. In Georgia, South Carolina and lence, and it is increasingly brandished struggle, at the time of his murder in Tennessee, white racist students bave as black rights are rolled back and as 1965 his views were evolving from joined forces with hooded Klansmen 'and the fascist vermin grow in the decay of black nationalism. He was deeply hos­ swastika-tattooed skinheads in school this bankrupt capitalist economy. tile to U.S. imperialism's oppression of boycotts, walkouts and racist rallies Last April, Ku Klux Klansmen from dark-skinned peoples throughout the demanding the right to carry or wear this across Georgia targeted a suburban world, and saw with x-ray vision the flag in public schools. Underscoring the Atlanta school, Newton County High, sham of racist American "democracy." precarious position of blacks in the so­ for recruitment to their fascist ranks. Malcolm said, "when you vote Demo­ called "New South," public school Alleging "bias" in favor of blacks, some crat, you vote Dixiecrat," and spoke the boards and principals have responded to 30 white students in KKK T-shirts bitter truth about Uncle Tom black this resurgent racism by politely labeling walked out to join a Klan rally outside leaders who fostered illusions that the it "racial tension" and slapping black the school. Protected by agents of the system could be made to work for black youth back down in their place to notoriously racist Georgia Bureau of people. appease the race-haters. Investigation and sheriff's deputies, the Especially in the South, there should In public schools across the South, Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the be no illusions in the supposed "neutral­ black students have been. banned from Ku Klux Klan whipped up the white­ ity" of the government or any of its insti­ wearing the popular "X" hats or any supremacists to a racist frenzy over the tutions from the courts to the cops to the T-shirt bearing an image or quotation selection of a black student as school school boards. It was in open defiance from Malcolm X, the militant spokesman valedictorian. Emboldened by the right­ of the Brown v. Top.eka Board of Educa­ for black self-defense against racist wing climate in this country, the KKK Southern schools have banned pop­ tion decision outlawing segregation in attacks. At suburban Atlanta's Peachtree presented formal demands that a Klans­ ular Malcolm X buttons, caps and public schools that the Georgia state Jr. High (which banned Malcolm X man be included on the school panel other clothing in order to appease legislature dug up the old Confederate clothing on the eve of February, Black where an NAACP member sits, and fur­ white racists. battle flag and slapped the state seal on History Month) a student who thought ther that the Confederate flag and it in 1956. (Alabama and South Carolina it was OK to wear a shirt bearing the "Dixie" be put back in the classrooms. Committee" to decide whether to con­ immediately followed suit and Missis­ likeness of the accommodationist Martin Meanwhile, Main Street in Duncan, tinue with a Confederate soldier as the sippi has just about always flown the Luther King Jr. was harassed and humil­ South Carolina was transformed into a school's official emblem. Confederate flag.) It is to this barely iated by school authorities and forced to sea of Confederate flags to honor the What began initially as an effort by modified battle flag of slavery that wear his clothing inside out all day. And more than 100 white punks who were black students and organizations like the school principals ask students to rise and it doesn't stop there ... the principal is suspended for a few days for wearing NAACP to pressure the school. boards pledge allegiance each morning. It's a even on the prowl for "Black Bart"! the racist banner in school. At one rally to remove the Confederate flag from daily reminder that there is a lot of unfin­ Dimwitted school principals argue for these junior would-be Klansmen, a public facilities has come back with a ished business to attend to in this that banning fascist regalia and Mal­ white school board member was arrested vengeance against the black students country. colm X T-shirts is just an evenhanded carrying a .38 calibre pistol. These racist themselves, who. are now stripped of To wipe out the scourge of racism and dress code against "message clothing." rallies spread like a virus to nearby coun­ their rights and facing vile racist reac­ Klan terror, and bury forever the Con­ But to equate the youthful expression of ties, and demonstrations around the area tion. This example drives home the federate flag of slavery, requires a black pride, by an oppressed minority in were boosted by squads of Nazi skinhead point that pleading with bourgeois thoroughgoing socialist revolution in a white racist society, with the bloody thugs from North Carolina and beyond. politicians and state a~thorities to "out­ this country to finish the Civil War and banner of white supremacy is an outrage. With black students literally under the law" fascist activity and symbols simply make good on the unfulfilled promise of The Confederate flag is a call to arms gun, the school principal in Duncan gives the state more ammunition to black freedom. The Spartacus Youth for murderous thugs North and South. It responded by canceling Black History restrict and regulate the rights of union­ Clubs are dedicated to winning students represents a program of racist terror for Month. The school superintendent ists, socialists, opponents of racist terror. to build a multiracial revolutionary party those who want to live in the kind of appointed a "Rebel Mascot Advisory If more people who wear Malcolm X to fight for this future. _

• Anti-Duke pickets discuss politics Looking for Recruits °ln Fascist Nest with workers attending rightist rally BY Rill. LAMBERT ReproduClive Frttdom," and "I>rfmd Imnli· A woman, r;«ing Ihe y~".~ 'ii!!n "N.. 10 AND RANIJY WAKRF.N grant Righl~." !",ide the mil)" Dule hi' on Oukt"i~m. Ddt'"d Affimlaliv(' Actinn," 'MIll!. LEAGUE CITY. 'Ihall - Young Social- "illegal" immlgmlKJft. "If 1'1111 !

Join the Socialist Workers 1992 cam­ their Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) "socialist." We can just imagine how it dition in a fascist swamp. They give paign ... and you may find yourself trav­ selling papers and chatting up the fascist went..."We see you're into 'National new meaning to the term "social-fascist," eling to David' Duke rallies, meeting fringe at a Duke rally in League City, Socialism,' why not give our brand of outrageously and deliberately pandering Nazi skinheads and "talking socialism" Texas! This is downright disgusting ... socialism a try." AfttCr printing without to the bloody perpetrators of lynchings with race-haters! and deadly dangerous. . rebuttal Duke's white-supremacist filth and cross-burnings, and goose-stepping We kid you-NOT!! Back in Novem­ The Militant article infornl.s us that about immigrants and welfare "cheats," defenders of the Holocaust. They paint ber we told you that the Socialist Work­ YSAers joined a picket line on Febru­ they gush over a sale to another racist those who follow Duke's racist appeals ers Party (SWP) had issued a lying "fact ary 27 set up by members of the gay creep who opined, "I agree with Duke as just poor "workers" who need a sheet" on David Duke that never once liberation group Queer Nation. When on welfare, but I'd like to read your "socialist alternative" to fascism. Bull­ mentioned the word "Klan," "Nazi" or anti-fascist picketers jeered "Nazi!" at newspaper, too." What's next? "I agree shit. It was no accident that Duke "fascist." We warned that the SWP skinheads lining up to enter Duke's with Hitler on genocide but I'm open"? picked Galveston County for his rally­ "seeks to woo Duke's voting base by fascist rally, the article says, "Militant Duncecaps would fit these YSAers­ somewhere south of hell and in the soft-pedaling this deadly dangerous fas­ supporters sought to engage rally-goers and might help them mingle in the white­ heart of Klan country. Here's a pic­ cist" (Workers Vanguard No. 538, 8 in discussion." They brag that four skin­ hooded Klan nest they've opted to work ture of the fascist swamp the SWP November 1991). Now the SWP's Mili­ head thugs pooled their money to buy in-but idiocy is far too benign an plunged into. tant (April 3) boasts about members of the Militant when they heard it was explanation for the SWP's fishing expe- • Galveston County, immortalized in 6 WORKERS VANGUARD CUNY -Tuition Hike Iso Rocist Purge The New York budget ax team of working as adjuncts to the killer cops! Governor Mario Cuomo and New York Most CUNY students are so alienated City mayor David Dinkins is continu­ by the Democratic Party losers that ing its assault on working-class New No Illusions in the Democrats! only a few hundred turned out for the York. Cuomo's latest $500 tuition hike, farce at Lehman, where they beseeched on top of last year's increase and on the ghetto streets or be used as can­ murderers, occupying buildings on the Democrats under a massive cop pre­ new financial aid cuts, will mean a non fodder for imperialist wars. over a dozen campuses and shutting sence, including police helicopters cir­ doubling of tuition at CUNY (City Uni­ The CUNY Coalition of Concerned down City College for three weeks. cling overhead. versity of New York) in one year. This Faculty and Staff has brought a class­ Despite pledges of support from city As against these junior ward heelers is a deliberate racist purge-literally action lawsuit against Cuomo and labor leaders, the students were hung for the Democrats, the Spartacus Youth thousands of poor inner-city youth, New York State, challenging the class out to dry while the union tops tried to Club has been actively intervening in mostly black and Hispanic, will be inequality and racism in the funding cut a deal with the bloodsucking bank­ rallies and protests to win students to driven out. Cuomo's budget also dic­ of public higher education. The coali­ ers who dictate DinkIns' and Cuomo's a class-struggle perspective. Spartacus tates some $40 million in additional tion's research shows that CUNY's budgets of doom. Protest is stirring Youth Club member Semeon Gershko­ Ctlts for CUNY. Entire academic de­ senior colleges have received $500 mil­ again .this spring, but thus far has been vich addressed a rally of 500 students partment.s are on the chopping block. lion less than if they had been funded held firmly in the straitjacket of Dem­ at a walkout at Brooklyn College on Students who have worked and studied on a basis equivalent to the State Uni­ .general strike U.S. ruling class doesn't need or want in "Education U.S.A.-Separate and side a Democratic Party debate be­ called in the city. But that would re­ educated' youth anymore, especially Unequal": tween Dixiecrat Clinton and "Flat Tax" quire a fight against the trade-union not minorities, who have constituted Brown before the New York primary. bureaucrats, who support Democrats "There are two 'publics'-those like Dinkins and Jerry Brown and even a majority at CUNY since 1976--the who've got property and those who The implicit deal was, "if you speak Dixiecrat Bill Clinton. Dennis Rivera same year tuition was introduced. The don't. And families from the red brick for us, then we'll deliver the vote for [head of Local 1199 hospital workers] greedy bosses have bankrupted the U.S. housing projects cannot provide a tax you." They even went so far as to beg sold us out for the sake of Dinkins and base for education comparable to that Cuomo." economy-and they couldn't give a of families from the green lawns and a Democratic Party honcho to addres!! damn about skilled labor or educating white picket fences." the student demonstration. Perhaps We are fighting to build a workers youth because there are no jobs for - Workers Vanguard No. 544, they wanted to hear Clinton discuss his party which will fight for all the op­ them anyway. Bush and die Democrats' 7 February· plans for military boot camps for pressed. No illusions in the Democratic "education policy" is to let a whole Last year CUNY students waged a "delinquent" youth, or how students Party of war, racism and capitalist mis­ generation of working-class youth die hard struggle against the budget ax should pay back their student loans by ery! Join the Spartacus Youth Club!

Left: Student bureaucrats appeal to Democrats at Lehman College, March 31. Right: At March 24 Brooklyn College walkout, SYC .fought for an alliance with labor in struggle against Democrats' killer cuts.

Louis Malle's chilling film Alamo Bay, in Texas, one has to wonder whether it's army in Angola but was shot for falling And while the SWP looks for recruits is where the KKK unleashed a murder­ an attack from the left or the right! afoul of Fidel Castro). According to in fascist nests after earlier providing a ous terror campaign against Vietnamese Today the SWP's Uder maximo Jack these semper Jidelistas, shooting Ochoa platform for fascist KKK killers to incite fishermen on the Gulf Coast. Barnes says that Buchanan is "fascis­ was a "resolute response" for which racist murder under the guise of a • Next door in Brazoria, and just two tic"-but yesterday the SWP allied with "working people everywhere owe a debt "debate" with SWP candidates, the Spar­ months before Duke's rally, a black cou­ this former Goebbels of the Reagan of gratitude to the Cuban government" tacist League, like the then-Trotskyist ple's home was destroyed twice by white administration and would-be Fuhrer of (Militant, 11 August 1989). Consistent? SWP of the 1930s and '40s, has mobi­ supremacists who spray-painted the the White House in defense of the fascist For the SWP, only with "civil liberties" lized mass laborlblack actions to stop house with racist epithets and left a butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, and for fascists. the fascists in urban centers across the noose hanging at the door. Some months Estonian death camp commandant Karl Genuine Marxists, Trotskyists such as country. earlier, a black Marine was gunned down Liimas! Along with Pat Buchanan and ourselves, are consistent in our class In the past we've described the by four whites who told police they did Ed Meese, the SWP opposed the extra­ loyalty and struggle for the working peo­ SWP as a particularly quirky band of it to "fuck with some niggers." dition of these Nazi butchers, whining ple to achieve power. We opposed the social-democratic reformists who want • In the weeks immediately before that "Linnas, Barbie, and other war crim­ execution of Ochoa (see Workers Van­ to act as salesmen for Castro (or Duke's fascist rally, Ku Klux Klansmen inals like them are scapegoats" (Militant, guard No. 500, 20 April 1990). As for variously stranger Third World national­ "warmed up" by sending death threats 12 June 1987). the fascist mass murderer, we starkly ist revolutions) to imperialist liberals. to public black activists in Houston. The SWPcried crocodile tears for headlined, "Kill Klaus Barbie!" As our Their strange fixation with American Next the SWP popped up at the April the fate awaiting these mass murderers French comrades wrote: farmers, who the SWPludicrously 5 abortion rights march in. Washington who were extradited to stand trial for "As communists, we are opposed to the equate with oppressed Latin American with a front-page headline, "Buchanan­ the deaths of thousands of Jews, Com­ death penalty. But we know there are campesinos, has kept SWPers in a fairly ism: What It Is and How to Fight It" munists, Resistance fighters, Gypsies, many justified executions following a right-wing miiieu for many years. Their bloody war. A court made up of their (Militant, 10 April). If that same headline and children, ostensibly because they surviving victims should decide the fate new plunge into the fascist Duke's fringe appeared in the press of any of the more wanted to be "consistent about opposi­ of war criminals like Barbie. He should indicates that something more sinister garden-variety American reformists, like tion to all use of the death penalty." But be judged by the Jews of Buchenwald than .a loose screw may be animating the Communist Party's People's Weekly the SWP hailed the Stalinist show trial and Auschwitz, those tortured in Lyon, Barnestown. To youth who may run those who escaped the French and Rus­ World, you'd assume it was the usual and execution of Cuban general Ochoa sian villages he devastated, the Bolivians across the SWP's "campaign for a social­ popular-frontist drone for the Demo­ (who led the Cuban troops as they that his thugs tortured." ist alternative": caveat emptor-buyer cratic Party. But after the SWP's antics valiantly defeated South Africa's racist -Le Bolchevik, May 1987 beware! _ 17 APRIL 1992 7 with such frequency and ease that where it fits in relation to the workers move­ Workers ment is elastic, to say the least. The WL and its activities and associations do League •• ~ indeed warrant close scrutiny. (continued from page 5) Martha Phillips was a proletarian internationalist, and as our most promi­ dual nature of this parasitic caste sitting Virulent atop proletarian property forms. Hostile Stalinophobe nent spokesman in the Soviet Union to defense of the gains of the October David North she riled the counterrevolutionary na­ Revolution, now the Northites have joins Yeltsin in tionalists who spearhead the drive to joined Yeltsin in proclaiming the death proclaiming death restore capitalist exploitation there. The of the Soviet Union. Under a headline of Soviet Union. v~y forces she fought against are trumpeting "The End of the USSR," the ones that are championed by the David North writes: "It is impossible to 10 January. 1992 Workers League, from the reactionary define the Confederation of Independent Lithuanian Sajudis government to the States as a whole, or any of the republics "AFL-CIA"-backed "independent" min­ of which it is comprised, as workers pronouncement that the unions in the they will work for just about anyone, ers, whose masters pull the strings from states" (Bulletin, 10 Janu~ry). U.S. can no longer be considered and maybe they do. Washington. We know that there are In his famous trade-union analogy, working-class organizations reflects his The Workers League claims to be call­ powerful and sinister elements intent on Trotsky compared the Soviet Union !fder maximo complex. In Berlin last ing for an "inquiry" not "as a question stopping us from building the Leninist­ under Stalinist rule to a giant labor November, North pompously declared: for factional dispute," but because "If Trotskyist party needed to lead the organization which must be defended "The delegates today speak to the inter­ Phillips was the victim of a political kill­ Soviet workers in a proletarian political against the capitalist enemy despite its national working class as the authori­ ing, her death is of concern not merely revolution to defeat the counterrevolu­ bureaucratic misleaders. North inverts tative representatives of the Fourth Inter­ to the Spartacist League, but to the entire tionary onslaught. Trotsky'S analogy to write off the organ­ national" (Bulletin, 22 November 1991). working class movement." If Martha's As the capitalist-restorationists seek ized labor movement along with the From the "modest" start of crowning murder was politically motivated­ to consolidate a hold on power and Soviet Union. After years of groveling himself as Healy's heir apparent at the which at this point we do not know-it uproot the foundations of the Soviet to the racist, pro-imperialist labor fakers top of the IC garbage heap, North is is indeed a matter of vital importance workers state, we honor our martyred to build a "labor party," the Workers now assiduously trying to eliminate any and concern for the workers movement comrade Martha by continuing the strug­ League now says, "to define the AFL­ perceived rivals to his new claim to be internationally. But such interests are of gle to reimplant Bolshevism in the land CIa as a working-class organization is leader of the world proletariat. no concern to North's organization, of its birth, to return the Soviet Union to blind the working class to the realities In his Berlin speech, North declared which' has crossed over the class line to the road of Lenin and Tr.otsky .• which they confront." that Ernest Mandel, leader of the United Only a few years ago, the WL Secretariat, has "become, in the full ' qenounced us for saying that the hard­ sense of the word, a bourgeois politi­ fought Hormel meatpackers strike had cian." He took Mandel to task for pre­ been knifed by the "labor traitors that paring "the ground for the restoration of currently make up the top leadership of capitalism in Eastern Europe," in partic­ the American labor movement." North's ular by supporting Polish Solidarnosc . Bulletin (1 April 1986) claimed that and its ideologue Jacek Kuron. He this revealed our "virulent hatred of the charged that "through the medium of working class and deep pessimism." Jacek Kuron, Lech Walesa himself is a Now the Worker~ League writes off the political Frankenstein created by Man­ unions along with the Soviet Union. This del." What chutzpah! When it comes to comes from an outfit which is notorious cheering Solidarnosc, the Northites took for hailing police "strikes," a supposedly second place to no one, including the "working-class" group whose newspaper Mandelites. David North is a "political is produced with no union label, an Frankenstein" created by Gerry Healy (and who knows who or what else). CltOtlll liS nyn, ostensibly socialist organization which flelti1Hil 11 TPOUKDf('J: in· this deeply racist society fulminates Having now defined themselves as the ~~~~~"*n.,.:yt·;t··~·i "~""f.(:i(i!.;:': n ',;:; against SL-initiated anti-Klan actions as sole representatives ofthe working class, ii'! %~'~~:>ii.~"}!{~J~;<,~~~) ~.:, an "obsession with race." where the megalomaniacal Northites go Other than providing a convenient from here is anybody's guess. We do New York, January 31: Spartaclsts picket on Wall Street as Yeltsln met with excuse for scabbing on strikes, North's know that they are capable of anything; his paymasters.

are on the inside of the plants, sitting on CIa decision to back Bill Clinton, the UAW jobs were eliminated. The bosses top of their inventory and machinery! "right-to-work" governor of Arkansas. used the weakened· seniority provisions Caterpillar ... Mass pickets must seal off the plants. When he came to Peoria last week, Clin­ to weed out workers, especially women (continued from page 1) It's not so easy to sell those big CATs if you can't move them-call on Team­ ton lectured the strikers on their "need and blacks: today in East Peoria, there at Phelps Dodge copper mines, Grey­ sters, longshoremen and rail workers to to change": "Unions should be willing is less than one black among every 100 refuse to handle them. There's only one hound, Hormel meatpackers. Now they to abandon outmoded work rules that sti­ CAT workers, while the area's popula­ way to skin the CAT-mobilize union tion is ten percent black. have pulled a PATCO on the CAT strike, power!" fle prodllctivity"! The Democrats are in the industrial heartland of America. -"UAW Workers: Skin the enemies of labor! This strike began on November 4- This opens the road to a full-scale assault CAT!" WV No. 539, The disast~r at Caterpillar shows the more than a month after the previous on the entire Auto Workers union. 22 November 1991 urgent need to sweep away the entire contract expired-as a partial shutdown This strike could have been won. At Instead, the UAW misleaders kept the pro-business bureaucracy that has hog­ affecting only 2,400 of the 17,000 UAW the very outset, Workers Vanguard laid strike isolated and partial. tied the labor movement. Their loyalty members employed by Caterpillar. Three out a program for victory, underlining - This strike was sacrificed on the altar to their capitalist masters has led to a days later Fites responded by locking out that the biggest obstacle was the pro­ of support to the Democratic Party in decade and more of union defeats. It is 5,600 other UAW members. The union capitalist union leadership itself: this election year. AFL-CIO chief Kirk­ urgently, desperately necessary to forge formally called these workers out on a class-struggle leadership of the work­ strike only in February, after CAT ended "UAW workers: don't let the' 'Sacrifice land called for begging the Democrats House' gang hang you out to dry, as in for his bill to outlaw "striker replace­ ers movement, and a workers party that the lockout in preparation for its back­ the 206-day Caterpillar strike of 1982. ments." But no strike, no gain of labor, will fight to eradicate this exploitative to-work ultimatum. Caterpillar spent It's high time the ag imp bosses in the was ever won in the bosses' courts or capitalist system of wage slavery and $20 million on security, bringing in the Midwest tasted some union hardball. racist oppression. strikebreaking storm troopers of Vance Shut down Caterpillar-occupy the fac­ the halls of Congress. The sellout of the Caterpillar strike International. tories! See how fast the CAT bosses Class-Struggle Leadership come running to talk when the strikers comes less than 24 hours after the AFL- A hell of a lot of unionists in the Mid­ the Key . west didn't want to see the CAT strike Last fall Caterpillar boss Fites took a go down to defeat. Miners, rail work­ hard line against the pattern contract ers, Machinists, rubber workers and negotiated by the union with John Deere & Co. Pleading poverty, Fites demanded massive benefit' cuts and work rule changes. He claims CAT "lost" $404 mil­ Spartacist League lion last year. Bull. This paper loss includes $373 million in "charges" for Public Offices closing plants in Sao Paulo, Brazil and -MARXIST LlTERATURE­ York, Pennsylvania, plus "increased depreciation" and insurance charges. Bay Area CAT made over $1.5 billion in the last Thurs.: 5:30·8:00 p.m., Sat.: 1 :00-5:00 p.m. 1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street) ten years while real pay raises have been Oakland, CalilQrnia. Phone: (510) 839-0851 held to a miserable 3.7 percent. Of course, Fites found a cool half-million . Chicago to give himself a 19 percent raise last Tues.: 5:00-9:00 p.m., Sat.: 11 :ooa.m.-2:00p.m. 161 W. Harrison St., 10th Floor year. Chicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 663·0715 CAT bosses prepared for this battle for well over a decade. The bitter 206- New York City day 1982 walkout led to a contract that Tues,: 6:30-9:00 p.m., Sat.: 1 :00·5:00 p.m. 41 Warren St. (one block below ceded seniority and work rule changes, Chambers St. near Church St.) PATCO strike was betrayed by labor tops who refused to shut down the' allowing the company to gut the work­ New York, NY' Phone: (212) 267-1025 airports. force in the following years. Over 23,000 8 WORKERS VANGUARD workers will play in a future Japanese socialist 'revolution. For Revolutionary Rail Strike Ties Up Tokyo Internationalism! The recent railway and nurses' strikes TOKYO-A bold and powerful strike by were betrayed. and aborted by social­ private rail line workers on the morning democratic, Stalinist and New Leftist of March 27 tied up Tokyo and Osaka union leaders who for years have echoed in knots during rush hour. On the lines the intense hostility of Japanese imperi­ that struck, it was 100 percent effective. alism to the Soviet Union, a bureaucrat­ Not a train or subway car moved, ically degenerated workers state._Thus it as 60,000 workers disrupted rail service should come as no surprise that they for nearly. 0.5 million people. Streets refuse to defenci the working class at adjacent to the stations were turned home when the bosses are gearing up into human gridlocks as commuters for austerity attacks on labor. were hours late in getting to work. The Japanese left is, in the main, nar­ According to the Transport· Ministry, this row, nationalist and chauvinist, and this six-hour strike stopped over 6,800 train is reflected in the social composition of runs and 20,000 bus runs. The strike the labor movement. None of the three even reduced ·the crowds at the opening labor federations have foughtto organize of this spring's high-school baseball either the non-Japanese permanent resi­ tournament at Osaka's Koshien Stadium. A strike by rail dents, like the Koreans and Chinese, or Unlike the typical coffee-break strike and subway the more recent superexploited immi­ or after-work rally which characterizes workers in Tokyo grants from Asia and Africa, into com­ the ritual annual spring labor shunto and Osaka tied mon unions with Japanese workers. Now ("offensive"), this was the real thing. It rush hour in even Nikkeijin, some 150,000 ethnic showed that rail workers have the power knots March 27 Japanese whose families emigrated to and demonstrated to bring Japan, Inc. to a screeching halt. Latin America (mainly Brazil and Peru) But the union bureaucrats, deathly afraid the enormous social power who have now come back to Japan to of the social power they unleashed that , of labor. work in factories and workshops, are fac­ morning, capitulated within hours ·to ing discrimination and intense exploita­ management a~d accepted the same tion in this chauvinist society. wage package the rank-and-file members The fight for a shorter workweek with had struck against. The striking rail no loss in pay is directly linked to break­ workers, having nQ leaders with the ing the racist "Japanese only" employ­ stomach for 'a real fight, reluctantly ment system in major industry. The fake­ started up their trains while seething these so-called leftists-':'-who've traded letariat has the power to win, but it must leftist union leaders haven't lifted a with anger. their hard hats, bandannas and· sun­ sweep away the barrier of the pro­ finger to fight the vicious part-time labor Key to winning was common action glasses for three-piece suits-refused to capitalist labor leadership that stands in system that effectively bars women between workers on the private lines and, engage in a real· class-struggle fight the way. ' workers and burakumin (descendants of the Japan Railway (JR), which continued against the employers. There were no Another indication of the suppressed feudal-era outcasts) from full employ­ to operate during the mqrning of the picket lines to stop scabs, no appeals to militancy of the Japanese working class ment status ,and union protection. strike. As a result, JR lines were inhu­ the other JR unions for a common offen­ is the job action of 80,000 nurses early Nor have the labor misleaders organ­ manly jam-packed, platforms danger­ sive. Instead of stopping rail traffic, this month. Underpaid and horribly over­ ized a union-based defense of Koreans ously overcrowded, and a few passen­ these New Leftovers employed the tra­ worked, nurses staged a number of spir­ in the face of recent racist terror carried gers were injured. Had the private lines ditional shimeisto (selective strike) tactic ited and militant demonstrations before out by xenophobic Japanese rightists. We stayed, out much longer, the JR lines' to ensure that on the JR lines where they the official shunto ceremonies were Trotskyists say: the Koreans should vote, could not have handled the overload. If had members only minor disruptions slated to begin. Their working clNissan strike. The shunto. union leaders, including the Stalinists of 'talist exploitation, which is sustained by suffered cutbacks and victimization, this instituted by the anti-communist social­ the reformist and chauvinist· Japanese racist and chauvinist ideology and prac­ was a golden opportunity to clog up the democratic-led Sohyo union ·federation Communist Party, limited the nurses' tices. The proletariat of Japan needs a main artery of Japanese capitalism. in 1955, seeks to move the workers away "strike" in some cases to a mere 20 min­ revolutionary internationalist party mod­ Yet instead of striking when the pri­ from action at the point of production, utes! That these overworked heroines, eled on the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and vate lines went out, sections of JR motor­ where their strength lies, into impotent who usually spend all their spare time Trotsky. To forge such a party is the per­ men engaged in a 48-hour strike two demonstrations and ritual "struggles" catching up on sleep, could summon the spective of the Spartacist Group Japan days later. The unions involved have an that invariably lose. The truncated rail energy to engage in militan.t protests is as part of the InternationaL Communist ostensibly New Left leadership. But strike dramatically showed that the pro- a.testament to the powerful role women League .•

AFSCME members joined striking CAT to·buy a 75-ton excavator? Equipment Workers in Peoria and purge released film, American Dream, about workers on the lines in Decatur, East Tailing after Bieber & Co. were a the UAW of,reds. the Hormel meat.,ackers strike: "The Peoria and elsewhere. CAT tried- to gaggle of fake-socialists. The Socialist That was at the beginning of the first defeat at Hormel d"ramatically· showed intimidate the strikers,. blustering that Workers Party, whose supporters were Cold War. Today, as the rapacious rulers that the workers of P-9 were battling not there was an army of strikebreakers out waterboys for the Machinists tops who of this country seek to bring capi­ , just the company, but centrally their own there. But scabs are human dust. With a strangled the Eastern str.ike, asked polj­ talism to the Soviet Union, including union misleaders. That is the heart of determined effort to organize fighting ticians to "place themselves on the picket mass unemployment and homelessness, the crisis of American labor" ("Which solidarity and truly mass pickets, the far lines to show where they stand." The they're gunning for the unions here. Side Are You On?" WV No. 542, 10 Jan­ more powerful army of organized labor Communist Party called to "redouble our The Caterpillar strike has shown once uary). The misleaders and betrayers must would have swept them away. But the effort to dump President Bush in Novem­ again that the key to victory is class­ be replaced by class-conscious militants UAW misleaders discouraged coal min­ ber." The most craven advice came from struggle leadership. As we wrote in our fighting for a workers party and a work­ ers and other unions from joining the David Moberg of the social-democratic review of Barbara Kopple's recently ers government .• battle. In These Times (1 April), who criticized Bringing out Chicago labor was key. the UAW from the right: "Some union Yet a Chicago Federation of Labor strategists think that the UAW might spokesman said its affiliates were only have been better off with an 'in-plant' being asked to join the UAW's "Adopt slowdown"-Le., no strike at all. They a Striker" financial assistance program. got what they called for: Clinton came When an Amalgamated Transit Union to Peoria, and CAT workers got the shaft. Marxist Working-Class Biweekly· of the Spartacist League (ATU) Local 241 member reported to his UAW officials were more concerned union meeting on the progress of the about stopping "reds" than stopping strike after a trip to East Peoria, ATU scabs. But the industrial unions in1 this 0$7/24 issues of Workers Vanguard o $3/3 issues of (includes English-language Spartacist) Women and Revolution leaders squelched his motion to mobilize country were built by socialists. Farm o New 0 Renewal 0$2/10 introductory issues Chicago transit workers to UAW strike equipment workers' proud tradition of International rates: sites by tabling it into oblivion. $25/24 issues-Airmail $7/24 issues-Seamail of Workers Vanguard militant class struggle goes back over a (includes English-language The class collaborationist union top's century to the 1886 McCormick Harvest­ 0$2/4 issues of Spartacist (edici6n en espanal) Spartacist) pushed poisonous "Buy American" pro­ er strike, growing out of the movement Name ______: ______tectionism and Japan-bashing, thus for an eight-hour day. This was met by undercutting any appeal by CAT strikers the bloody Haymarket Massacre' that Address ______for solidarity action abroad, partic­ made May 1 the international work­ ______Apt.# Phone (_) ______ularly by Komatsu and Caterpillar­ ers holiday. To defeat the hard-fo'ught Mitsubishi workers in Japan. Solidarity 1948 strike at Caterpillar Tractor, City State Zip ____----.,,= House even proposed a consumer boy­ -pro-capitalist "labor statesman" Walter 549 cott of Caterpillar! What were you sup­ Reuther used the Taft-Hartley slave labor Make checks payable/mall to: Spartaclst Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO~ New York, NY 10116 posed to do, ask your neighbor not law to wipe out the Communist-led Farm 17 APRIL 1992 9 a capitalist "shock treatment" at home, and it looked with favor on one of the France ... goals this former bourgeois politician (continued from page 12) has obstinately pursued ever since 1968: been legitimized by the anti-immigrant to reduce the PCF, which ):las held the campaigns launched by Mitterrand's dominant position in the French workers governments. Racist terror, unemploy­ movement ever since the Second World ment and segregation in bleak concrete War, to nothing. ghettos-this is what French capitalism A few days after Mitterrand's elec- . has to offer immigrant workers and their tion, while Alain Krivine's LCR, Pierre children (many of whom were born in Lambert's OCI .(today PCI-PT) and France and are French citizens). Every Lutte Ouvriere (iO) hailed the "victory. month the list grows of youth who are of May 10," our comrades of the Ligue gunned down in cold blood by the police Trotskyste explained that "the Mitter­ or by private security guards-as does rand government will be a Cold- War, the list of racist killers who get off with austerity government" (Le Bolchevik No. a slap on the wrist. Yet immigrant work­ 26, June 1981). In contrast to the ers from France's African ex-colonies LCR/PCI/LO host of fake-Trotskyists, are heavily represented in the industrial the LTF never called for a vote for working class and are often the majority Mitterrand. on auto assembly lines. The LCR's "critical" support to the The outcome of the March 22 vote Combative strike of auto work~rs In Cle6n, France, meeting here In general popular front in the recent elections was dramatically underscores that to crush assembly, was left Isolated and sold out by Stalinist CGT tops. summed up in their call to "vote as far the fascists what's needed is a proletarian left as possible." Despite a minimum of struggle to overthrow the capitalist sys­ democratic and Stalinist organizers, to sweep this scum off the' streets. Only anti-government blustering, these latter­ tem, that breeding ground of racism, these actions were largely intended as the working class has the power to stop day "possibilists" naturally called for a and replace it with a planned economy. an electoral ploy, but they intersected a the fascists." vote to the PS in the second round (run­ Facing a discredited regime and a par­ widespread desire to sweep the fascist off) elections where a National Front liamentary system rife with corruption scum off the streets. In the week before NATO Popular Front of candidate was still In the running. and and scandals, the National Front fascists the elections in Limoges, in central Antl·Worker Austerity in other locations effectively encouraged feed on the economic deterioration under France, several hundred demonstrators Just days after the election debacle, a vote to the popular-front parties by Mitterrand's "socialist" administration prevented the plane of one FN leader Mitterrand sacrificed his prime minister, refusing to take any position on the vote. , of capitalism. The persistent mass unem­ from landing. Le Pen got the same treat­ Edith Cresson:. During her year in office, The PCF, bled white by the destruction ployment is now officially reaching 10 ment in Corsica. However, instead of this ineffectual social-democratic imi­ of its industrial bastions (symbolized percent. The perspective of European mobilizing the workers movement, the tation of Margaret Thatcher "distin- by the recent closing of the Renault- "unification'" in a single market next organizers of these actions sought to year, which will subject the weakened pressure Mitterrand to ban the FN meet~ French economy to increased competi­ ings-which the government did several tion from its powerful German neighbor, times, while unleashing its cops to pro­ has driven layers of the petty bourgeoisie tect the fascists from the most combative and small capitalists to despair, seeking of the anti-fascist demonstrators. salvation by embracing the fascist Opposing such dangerous reformist demagogues. ' illusions in the bourgeois state, our com­ The NF also made significant ad­ rades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France vances in many working-class districts, (LTF) have been present in the anti­ beating out both Communists and fascist rallies and demonstrations, like Socialists in the former "Red Belt" of the one in Rouen on March 6. The LTF the lIe de France region around Paris. In calls for all the intended victims of the the department of Seine-Saint Denis, a fascists to join together in powerful former PCF bastion, and surrounding united-front actions' based on the power areas, the NF vote was as high as 29 of the organized working class against to 31 percent. The PCF/PS reformists' the common enemy. For labor/immigrant groveling loyalty to the capitalist state mobilizations to smash the fascists! has meant that for the last decade they An urgent deadline is coming up on have imposed brutal anti-working-class May Day, when the National Front austerity, while themselves launching goons are preparing once again to parade racist anti-immigrant attacks; such as the through Paris. Our comrade, Gilles PCF's infamous 1981 bulldozer assault Cazin, an auto worker from the Renault­ Rouen, 'March 6: Contingent of Llgue trotskyste was revolutionary pole In demonstration again$t Le Pen's fascists. Signs call for "Worker/Immigrant on an African workers' hostel in Vitry. Cleon plant in Rouen, took the floor Mobilizations to Cru$h the Fascists." This has led backward sections of the at a February 15 meeting of his CGT working class into the arms of the fas­ union local in order to underline the guished" herself by her virulent anti­ Billancourt factory) and discredited by cists. But there are many more who urgency of a working-class counter­ Japanese and anti-homo~exual diatribes. its support to the bankrupt Mitterrand would combat the racist scum. What they attack against this provocation: "The The new prime minister, Pierre Bere­ regime, is today desperately trying to lack is a class-struggle leadership. First of May is a workers' conquest. For govoy, is the former minister, of the econ­ survive as a social-chauvinist "Commu­ At each stop during Le Pen's electoral several years now, Le Pen has carried omy and finances, a hardline'monetarist nist" sect-without a "socialist father­ campaign, thousands of demonstrators out a provocation against the working and champion of anti-worker austerity. land" to defend. After supporting Yeltsin mobilized to try to stop him from spew­ class by demonstrating on this day. A Beregovoy wins hands down the prize against the Moscow "putschists" in the ing forth his calls to race-hatred and few tens of thousands of workers organ­ of the most popular "socialist" ... in the name of "democracy," the Marchais anti-Semitism. For the liberal, social- ized by their unions would be sufficient leading circles of finance capital. leadership proclaimed from the roof­ The first commitment made by the tops that it no longer had anything to Beregovoy government was to keep up do with the "ex-USSR." A few months SPARTACISl LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY the campaign to destroy the CGT dock­ later, the PCF reaffirmed its loyalty National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 • (212) 732-7860 ers' union, one of the rare sectors in to the French bourgeoisie by breaking which there is a real system of union the month-long Renault-Cleon strike. At Atlanta Detroit Norfolk control of hiring. Broad and determined the saDie time it was carrying out a rac­ Box 4012 Box 441043 Box 1972, Main PO workers action to defeat the assault on ist campaign demanding more cops to Atlanta, GA 30302 Detroit, MI 48244 Norfolk, VA 23501 this union bastio'n could be the coup de combat "insecurity" (code word for anti­ Boston Los Angeles Oakland grace for this tottering regime. That is North African and anti-black racism). Box 390840, Central Sta. Box 29574, los Feliz Sta. Box 29497 precisely why the Stalinist reformist The PCF's revolting propaganda pan­ Cambridge, MA 02139 Los Angeles, CA 90029 Oakland, CA 94604 PCF leadership of the CGT, which is dering to the racist National Front elec­ (617) 492-3928 (213) 380-8239 (510) 839-0851 directly targeted by this attack but bound toral constituency found a "far-left" echo Chicago San Francisco to Mitterrand by their popular-front pol~ in the "National-Trotskyist" sect LO Madison Box 6441, Main PO Box 77494 iti~s, channeled the dockers into a losing (whose American offspring is Spark), Chicago, IL 60680 Box 1492 San FranCiSCO, CA 94107 "strategy" of weekly 24- and 48-hour which carefully avoids using the word (312) 663-0715 Madison, WI 53701 (415) 777-9367 strikes and made no attempt to link up "racism" (quite a feat in 1992 France!) with other port workers who' are also while saying that it is necessary to assure New York Cleveland Washington, D.C. under attack. "security. " Box 91037 Box 444, Canal st. Sta. Box 75073 Cleveland, OH 44101 New York, NY 10013 Washington, D.C. 20013: In 1981 the bourgeoisie agreed to hand In order to defeat the fascists, the pro­ (216) 781-7500 (212) 267-1025 (202) 872-8240 over the reins of state to Mitterrand, can­ letariat must rid itself of the treacher­ didate of a class-collaborationist alliance ous impediment of class-collaborationist extending from a section of the Gaullist alliances and adopt the perspective of a TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA movement to the PCF and the fake­ revolutionary stfUggle for power. A gen­ Trotskyist "far left." The previous right­ uinely communist, Leninist-Trotskyist Toronto Vancouver wing Giscard-Barre government had not leadership must be forged to lead this Box 7198, Station A Box 2717, Main P.O. been able to impose the anti-labor fight to victory. As the LTF spokesman Toronto, ON M5W 1X8 Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2 measures demanded by the bourgeoisie said at the March 6 Rouen anti-fascist (416) 593-4138 (604) 687-0353 against a combative working class, and demonstration: "It is necessary to forge Montreal Edmonton it balked at firmly aligning French impe­ a multi-ethnic revolutionary workers . C.P. Les Atriums, B.P. 32066 PSSE P.O. Box 9605 rialism with the new anti-Soviet Cold party! We need a workers government Montreal, QC H2L 4V5 Edmonton, AB T6E 5X3 War. The bourgeoisie saw in Mitterrand to expropriate the bourgeoisie and smash a NATO "socialist" who could carry out the fascists once and for all!" .. 10 WORKERS VANGUARD he was vice president, and the former Noriega CIA station chief in Panama, who emphasized the value to the U.S. of the information Noriega passed on about "Trial" ... Cuba. (continued from page 1) In a fitting final touch, on March 30 offering to reduce his jail time in return Panamanian police arrested the last for testifying against Washington's nem­ scheduled defense witness, Fernando esis, Fidel Castro. But in Panama there Jaen, a former civilian aide to Noriega was no cheering. Instead, riot police who was to refute the testimony of a fired on a crowd of hundreds demanding surprise witness that the prosecution had jobs in the city of Colon, where more presented during its' rebuttal. Jaen was than one in three is unemployed. The arrested at the Panama City airport, as "government" of U.S. puppet Guillermo he was leaving the country after being Endara is "overwhelmingly unpopUlar, given a safe conduct. Judge Hoeveler rife with corruption and up to its nose said he would not delay the triaL Jaen in cocaine money laundering. Even DEA was later released, but not in time to fly sources estimate that drug trafficking to Miami to testify. through Panama, far from falling, has The parade of witnesses, both for and "doubled" since the Christmas 1989 against Noriega, was a graphic display invasion. The smug ofthe scum that Yankee imperialism uses Make no mistake, Noriega was as arrogance to enforce its rapacious domination. The sleazy a tin pot dictator as any on the of Yankee "trial" itself was a brazen assertion of U.S. payroll, though less murderous than imperialist U.S. "supersovereignty," and a travesty some of Washington's "democratic" occupation of every judicial norm. The 50,000 Pana­ pals. He is an enemy of the working peo­ of Panama. manians made homeless by the American ple. But Noriega's crimes are chicken invasion are still living in airplane han­ feed compared to the monstrous war gars or homesteading in the jungle, while crimes of his imperialist masters who the relatives and friends of the hundreds turned on him. who were buried by the U.S. Army in This was the first head of state of a mass graves still mourn. And what about foreign country ever convicted in an the Pentagon chiefs and that interna­ American court. It took 25,000 American tional outlaw Bush, whose hands are soldiers and a fun-scale high-tech inva­ whether the U.S. had the right to seize ter to testify about their client's years­ dripping with the blood of thousands of sion to "arrest:' Noriega, causing up to Noriega and try him: "I have decided long collaboration with Jhe U.S. These innocent Panamanian and Iraqi dead? It 3,000 civilian casualties and $1 billion that issue," he declared highhandedly. included a former DEA agent in Panama, will take international proletarian revo­ in damages inflicted on the country's "You are not permitted to second guess the former head of the DEA in Panama, lution to bring these mass murderers to economy. The seven-month-Iong "trial" that decision, as it is a matter of law" the formeI: chief of staff to Bush when justice! _ it took to convict him reputedly cost (New York Times, 10 April). upwards of $20 million, including pay­ In an all-out effort to get their man, ments for bribed testimony from drug the prosecution relied on the testimony kingpins. (This was in addition to the of convicted drug traffickers and money enhances the brutalization of society in $164 million cost of the invasion.) The iaunderers. One of them, Ramon Milian, State all respects. And in this racist country, only peep from the Democrats was to reputedly the chief accountant of the the primary victims of this brutality meekly question whether the money Medellin Cartel, was put behind bars are black." spent on this imperialist extravaganza with Noriega's aid. One of the most noto­ Murder ... The PDC's strategy of class-struggle was "worth it." rious was Carlos Lehder, who used his (continued from page 12) defense is part of the fight for workers Legally, the "trial" was an abomina­ cocaine profits to build a Colombian to the state's argument for the death power. If during the Depression the legal tion from start to finish. Federal district Nazi sect. According to an 11 April penalty. machinery of death went into high gear, court judge William Hoeveler ruled as Newsday article: On April 14, the Partisan Defense at the same time a powerful workers irrelevant or a threat to "national secu­ "In return for his testimony against Committee, a class-struggle legal and movement fought to defend itself and its. rity" any mention of Noriega's decades­ Noriega, Lehder and his family were social defense organization associated allies. In the 1930s, worldwide protest long collaboration with U.S. military and allowed to enter the federal witness pro­ tection program. He was transferred out with the Spartacist League, issued a against the racist frame-up of the Scotts­ intelligence agencies, thus blocking of the nation's toughest lockup, the U.S. statement demanding "the abolition of boro Boys saved their lives and exposed efforts by the defense to examine mul­ Penitentiary in Marion, Ill., and prom­ the barbaric death penalty everywhere it the brutal persecution of blacks in the tiple dirty secrets of U.S. policy in ised eventual reconsideration of his sen­ exists. We fight to abolish the death Deep South. It is a fighting labor move­ Central America. The judge also warned tence of life without parole." penalty because we do not accord the ment-not impotent moral protest, or the jurors at the outset that they could The defense, on the other hand, brought state the right to decide who lives and beseeching "law and order" Demo­ not take into account any of the politi­ in as many present and former senior who dies. We oppose the death penalty crats-which has the power to stop the cal questions,' nor could they consider government officials as it could mus- because this 'legal' brutality necessarily assembly line of death. _

Spartac;st ~ Educat;onal Conferences

New York Berkeley Chicago

Speaker: Brian Manning, Spartacist League

Barnard College, 116th 8t. & Broadway University of California, Berkeley University of Chicago Barnard Hall, Room 304 Evans, Room 10 Kent Lecture Hall (Take #1 IRT to 116th Street and walk north) Main Quad-Enter from 58th Street and Ellis Ave. $3 donation $3 registration fee $3 registration fee For more information, or to obtain readings, call (212) 267-1025 For more information, or to obtain readings, call (510) 839-0851 For more information, or to obtain readings, call (312) 663-0715 Saturday, April 18 Saturday, May 2 Saturday, May 16

17 APRIL 1992 11 W,/lIlI/IS ',11,",/1,

State Murder Machine in High Gear The State of California has scheduled over the execution of a hopelessly brain­ opposition to the reintroduction of cap­ government into granting a few conces­ the execution of Robert Alton Harris for damaged black man, Rickey Ray Rector. ital punishment. sions to buy off massive unrest. By 1976 April 21. A quarter century has passed In Delaware,· Steven Brian Pennell was The last time the states' murder the Supreme Court had reinstituted it in since the last execution in California, killed by lethal injection on March 14, machines were revved up so dramati­ law, but the 168 executions carried out when a black man, Aaron Mitchell, was the first execution there in 46 years. In cally was during the 1930s Depression­ since then had until recently been con­ put to death. For many years recollec­ Arizona, Donald Eugene Harding died at its peak 199 prisoners were killed in fined largely to the reactionary Southern tion of the outcry over the killing of states of Texas, Florida and Louisiana. Caryl Chessman in 1960 stayed the exe­ In the Reagan!Bush years, both Dem­ cutioner's hand. The Harris execution ocrats and Republicans conspired to put is intended to seal the fate of hun­ an end to habeas corpus appeals to the dreds already sentenced to die in Cali­ federal courts by prisoners on state death fornia. It will likely be the signal to rows, supposedly in the name of fighting open the floodgates for legalized state "crime." Now many prisoners' appeals murder nationwide. The national killing have run out or have been blocked by machine is now set to go into high gear, Bush's packed Supreme Court of Death. ready to extinguish the lives of 2,500 In one notoriously bizarre case, the men, women and youth-overwhelm­ Court is scheduled to hear an appeal by ingly black, Hispanic and almost exclu­ Texas prisoner Leonel Herrera, who had sively very poor-packed in on Death uncovered new evidence proving his Rowand waiting to die. innocence. The Court agreed to hear the The death penalty in the U.S. has case in October, but accepting the state's . always been an extension of racist ter­ contention that innocence is irrelevant, Demonstrators ror-from the extralegal murderers of it refused to stay Herrera's execution (he in Chicago, the Ku Klux Klan to the trigger-happy April 1989, won a stay from a Texas court). cops shooting to kill on ghetto and barrio protest the These accelerating executions make streets. "Capital punishment" is merely death penalty, more urgent the cause of former Black the juridical statement that for this coun­ call to save Panther Party spokesman and prominent try's racist rulers life is cheap. The death life of Mumia journalist and MOVE supporter, Mumia ptfnalty is the ultimate expression of the Abu-Jamal, Abu-Jamal, now a political prisoner on government's war on the black popula­ black political death row in Pennsylvania. Jamal was tion, already squeezed into permanent ~prisoner on sentenced to die because as a fighter for unemployment in rotting and disease­ 'death row. black liberation he had been in the cross ridden inner cities with no education, hairs of the raCist Philadelphia cops for no hospitals, no future. Even apartheid almost 20 years. Last month the U.S. South Africa has now suspended the Supreme Court threw out a death penalty death penalty. The fight to abolish the conviction on the grounds that prisoner death penalty is part of the tradition of after ten and a half agonizing minutes one year~and it is telling that the latest David Dawson's political affiliation had struggle for black equality in America. in the gas chamber on April 6, the bloodletting comes in a period of deep­ been improperly raised by the prosecu­ So far this year 11 people have already first execution in that state in 29 years. ening economic crisis and mass unem­ tion to prejudice the jury. Dawson was been killed by various states, compared In California, Harris was evidently cho­ ployment. The brief suspension of the a member of the raCist white Aryan with 14 in all of 1991. Death-penalty sen to break the 25-year hiatus because death penalty over two decades ago Brotherhood. But the same Court refused Dixiecrat Bill Clinton, campaigning for he was convicted of the grisly murder proved to be only a temporary bow to to even hear Jamal's appeal that his Black president, made a special point of flying of two teenagers, a crime sure to whet the turbulent '60s, when the'mass civil Panther Party membership was central home to Arkansas in January to preside the public's bloodlust and undermine rights and antiwar movements shook the continued on page 11

PARIS, April II-After ten years in office, the Mitterrand regime is in its death throes. The March 22 elections for regional councils were an ignomInIOus rout for the Socialist Party (PS). Only a few months ago, these social democrats cherished the hope of becoming a "party of the entire left and all progressive forces." Now the PS has precipitously tumbled from 30 percent to less than 20 percent of the vote. In the three most populous regions-around Marseille, Lyon and Paris-the fascist. National Front (FN) of Jean-Marie Le Pen is now the second largest party, with the parlia­ mentary right-wing electoral cartel tak­ ing first place. Although the French Communist Party (PCF) got no more than 8 percent nationally, the FN reaped 14 percent of the votes, and more than Face :20 percent in most of the big urban areas. French fascists gear up for more racist attacks, feeding off discontent produced by austerity poliCies of Cold Le Pen's FN and his racist killers have popular front. Right: Mltterrand meets electoral Waterloo. continued on page 10 12 17 APRIL 1992