Summer 2015 No. 40 The $2 €2 Internationalist It Will Take Workers Revolution To End It Killer Cops, Vigilantes: Racist Terror Stalks Black America Now Black Churches Are Burning... p. 3 Charlotte, NC Fire Department Bear Creek Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC was set ablaze and burned down, June 24. Internationalist Group Holds Conference. .15 International Perspectives of the LFI. 36 Australia $2, Brazil R$3, Britain £1.50, Charleston Massacre and Cop Terror: Canada $2, Europe €2, India Rs. 50, Japan ¥200, Mexico $10, Philippines 50 p, It’s Racist American Capitalism. 88 S. Africa R10, S. Korea 2,000 won 2 The Internationalist Summer 2015 In this issue... Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Order Now! Racist Terror Stalks Black America ....3 A series of articles that ap- peared in Workers Vanguard Bernie Sanders and the Pressure when it stood for revolution- Politics of the Opportunist Left..........6 ary Trotskyism, in response to a Maoist anti-Trotsky Mexico: Down With Elections diatribe. Articles cover Under the Military Boot!......................8 permanent revolution, Letter to the Editor: “Is China Now “socialism in one coun- try,” the popular front, the Capitalist?” .........................................13 struggle for the Fourth In- Internationalist Group Holds ternational, Mao’s China, National Conference .........................15 Trotskyism vs. the SWP, and more. Document of the First National Conference of the Internationalist Group: The Trotskyist Struggle for US$1 International Socialist Revolution ......16 Order from/make checks payable to: Mundial Publications, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, New York 10008, U.S.A. Fernando López: Comrade, Internationalist, Revolutionary ........31 International Perspectives of the Visit the League for the Fourth International/ League for the Fourth International ...36 Internationalist Group on the Internet All Honor to Our Comrade Marília, http://www.internationalist.org Communist and Poet of Struggle ....57 Now available on our site: Founding Statement of the China : Battle Over Capitalist Internationalist Group Restoration Looms............................59 Declaration of the League for the Fourth International The Bugbear of “Russian Articles from The Internationalist Articles from Vanguarda Operária Imperialism” .................................... 66 Articles from El Internacionalista For a Scottish Workers Republic in a Articles and documents in German, French and Pilipino Socialist Federation of the The fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal British Isles .........................................78 Marxist readings Charleston Massacre and Cop Terror: Visita la página del Grupo Internacionalista en Internet It’s Racist American Capitalism .......88 Visite a página da Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil Matérias de Vanguarda Operária A luta para libertar Mumia Abu-Jamal Documentos marxistas sobre a luta pela libertação do negro e da mulher The Internationalist A Journal of Revolutionary Marxism for the Reforging of the Fourth International Publication of the Internationalist Group, section of the League for the Fourth International EDITORIAL BOARD: Jan Norden (editor), Mark Lazarus, Abram Negrete, Marjorie Salzburg The Internationalist (ISSN 1091-2843) is published bimonthly, skipping July-August, by Mundial Publications, P.O. Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A. Telephone: (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 E-mail: [email protected] Subscription blank graphic based on a Subscriptions: US$10 for five issues. poster by V.A. Rodchenko, Books (1925). No. 40 1162-M Summer 2015 Summer 2015 The Internationalist 3 It Will Take Workers Revolution To End It Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America Whitney Curtis for The New York Times Whitney Curtis for The New York St. Louis County Police prepare to confront protest march over killing of Michael Brown, 13 August 2014. For Labor/Black/Immigrant Mobilization Against Police Killings After months of rampaging killer cops came the June 17 chilled America’s capitalist rulers to the bone: they had been Charleston, South Carolina massacre – nine black church- preparing for years to impose martial law in case of urban unrest, goers in a Bible study class at the iconic Emanuel AME Church but when they brought out all their hardware, it didn’t work. murdered by a white supremacist (see page 88). In the follow- In late autumn it happened again, this time nationwide. ing week, six churches with black congregations have burned. When word came on November 24 that a grand jury had let This, too, is hardly new. Between 1995 and 1999, a government off Darren Wilson, the Ferguson cop who murdered Michael task force opened investigations into 827 church burnings and Brown, thousands flooded into the streets. Ferguson was bombings. Then they stopped counting… aflame, I-44 shut down in St. Louis, I-580 in Oakland. The next The summer of 2014 exploded in massive outrage against night, tens of thousands, coast-to-coast, blocked highways, the racist murder of black men by the police. First, Eric Garner, tunnels, city centers. Ten days later when the Eric Garner grand choked to death by a swarm of cops in Staten Island, New York in jury verdict came down, again with no indictment, there was July. Millions saw the assault on a bystander’s cellphone video. a repeat. Vast numbers marched in angry defiance of a system Then, three weeks later, Michael Brown, shot down by a killer where police kill unarmed African Americans with utter aban- cop in Ferguson, Missouri, his body left in the street for hours don and total impunity. By December 13 there were 30,000 in as grisly warning by the lily-white police to the mainly black the streets of Washington, D.C. and 50,000 in New York. While residents of the St. Louis suburb. But the population refused to many chanted “No justice, no peace,” when the International- be intimidated and instead rose up. Even when an army of cops ist Group and CUNY Internationalist Clubs in NYC chanted from throughout the region was brought in, along with armored “Only revolution can bring justice,” it was widely taken up. cars and heavy weaponry, and then the state police followed by Night after night the mass protests continued in NYC, the National Guard, angry demonstrators refused to leave. This with die-ins at Grand Central Station, clashes with cops on the 4 The Internationalist Summer 2015 Brooklyn Bridge. The names of Akai Gurley in Brooklyn and killed by police was 37, that 27% had mental health issues 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland were added to the list of and 95% were men. One-third of the women were killed by victims of racist police murder. Protests became mainstream as police in their own home, as was Tanisha Anderson, killed by Congressional staffers chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot” outside Cleveland cops only days before they shot Tamir Rice. the U.S. Capitol. New York City Council members chanted Eric So despite the mass protests and pious talk of police “ac- Garner’s dying words, “I can’t breathe.” And then suddenly it countability,” nothing has changed. Whether it is unarmed all stopped. Two NYPD officers were shot by an enraged man, black men murdered by police, like Walter Scott in North driven beyond reason by the orgy of killing by cops, who decided Charleston, South Carolina and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, to take a couple with him and then committed suicide. It was Maryland, or the nine church-goers shot by a white-suprema- certainly convenient for the ruling class, as was the fact that the cist vigilante at a Bible-study session in Charleston last week, two dead cops were not white but Latino and Chinese. When it is clear that murderous white racism is endemic in the United New York City mayor Bill de Blasio demanded that the “anti- States. Soon another particularly egregious case will grab the police” demos stop, many liberal protest organizers complied. headlines, and again there will be angry mass protests. Will On December 23, a couple thousand people (including the they peter out or come to an abrupt end as they did last year with Internationalists) defied the NYC mayor and marched against nothing to show for it? At most there may be a few cosmetic, police murder. Demonstrators still chanted “NYPD, KKK, how symbolic changes like removing the Confederate battle flag, many kids did you kill today?” But the huge crowds were gone. the banner of the Ku Klux Klan terrorists, that flies at state The protests had been brought up short, face to face with the capi- capitols and is part of state flags. But the racist killing will go talist state. “Moderate” demo organizers who were only protesting on and on … unless we put a stop to it. But how? racist police (which they saw as some “bad apples” rather than Tens of thousands of young people, black, white, Latino and the racist system that means systemic police terror) denounced others, and many older people as well, participated in the mass “violence” and stood down or tried to block more militant protests. mobilizations last summer and fall. Over and over they chanted Meanwhile, the cops were chomping at the bit, going into open “black lives matter,” “hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe” rebellion against liberal Democrat de Blasio and itching to carry – slogans that reflect a sense of anguish and impotence. Many out mass arrests of hundreds and thousands of demonstrators as were radicalized by the experience, as they could see that Obama’s they did under Republicans Bloomberg and Giuliani. The naked America is anything but “post-racial,” and the pretense of democ- assertion of police power independent of civilian control was an racy is a cruel hoax. For that experience of activism not to turn ominous threat to the democratic rights of everyone.1 into an exercise in frustration, like the endless antiwar marches As 2014 drew to a close, according to the most detailed that occur every time U.S.