From Resistance to Counteroffensive
to the Struggle for Workers Power
Focal Point Europe:
in Crisis,
le Erupts
Greece on the Razor’s Edge. ...
France: Worker-Student Upsurgi
.16
e.51-64
U.S. War on North Korea Never Ended... 39
Mobilize Against Attacks on Muslims .. 81
Australia $2, Brazil R$3, Britain £1.50,
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2
The internationalist
January-February 2011
in this issue...
Denounce FBI Raids on Leftist Antiwar
and Solidarity Activists.4
Focal Point Europe: Capitalism in
Crisis, Class Struggle Erupts.5
Fury of Student Revolt Shakes Up Britain... 8
Greece on the Razor’s Edge.16
Free Julian Assange! Drop All Charges!.... 28
U.S./South Korean Provocations
Could Ignite New Korean War.33
U.S. War on North Korea Never Ended .39
France: May in October?
The Spectre of a New ’68.51
To Drive Out Sarkozy & Co.
Fight for Power to the Workers.56
Guadeloupe on Strike!.60
And Now Comes the Stab in the Back.62
Brazilian Elections: The Bourgeoisie
Goes For More Lula.65
Quebec: What’s Needed to Defeat
Privatization and Defend
Public Services.69
Police State in Toronto.73
No Justice in the Capitalist Courts
Mobilize Labor/Black Power
to Free Mumia Now!.74
Healthcare “Reform” Law: Bonanza for
Wall Street, Attack on Working People... 76
CSEW on the Healthcare Crisis.77
We Can Stop the School Closings.79
Mobilize Against Racist Attacks
on Muslims and Immigrants!.81
Revolution: The Dream Act Swindle.84
Abolish the Board of Trustees! For
Student-Teacher-Worker Control
of CUNY!.85
Haiti: Occupation Elections
In Times of Cholera.88
Front page photo: Unions demonstrate
before French Senate, October 20.
Subscription blank graphic based on a
poster by V.A. Rodchenko, Books (1925).
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No. 32
>1162-M
January-February 2011
January-February 2011
The internationalist
3
U.S./South Korean
Provocations Could ignite
New Korean war. 33
U.S. war on North Korea
Never Ended. 39
Never Ended. 39
‘ v " ■■ "■‘•g
/ -
Sinister Attack on
WikiLeaks
Free Julian
Assange!
Drop All
Charges! 28
v_/
Denounce FBI Raids on Leftist
Antiwar and Solidarity Activists.4
V
Mobilize Against Racist Attacks
on Muslims and Immigrants!.81
J
No Justice in the Capitalist Courts
Mobilize Labor/Black
Power to Free Mumia
NOW! .74
Healthcare “Reform” Law: Bonanza for
Wall Street, Attack on Workers. 76
CSEW on the Healthcare Crisis. 77
We Can Stop the School Closings. 79
Mobilize Against Racist Attacks
on Muslims and Immigrants!.81
The Dream Act Swindle.84
Abolish the Board of Trustees! For Stu¬
dent-Teacher-Worker Control of CUNY!...85
V_/
Focal Point Europe:
Capitalism in Crisis,
Class Struggle Erupts
Fury of Student Revolt
Fury of Student Revolt
Shakes Up Britain. 8
Greece on the Razor’s Edge.16
v___/
^ \
DOSSIER FRANCE
May in October?
The Spectre of a
New ’68.51
To Drive Out
Sarkozy & Co.
Fight for Power to
the Workers.56
Guadeloupe on
Strike!.60
And Now Comes the Stab
in the Back.62
s_>
Haiti: Occupation Elections
in Times of Cholera.88
Quebec: What’s Needed to Defeat
Privatization and Defend
Public Services.69
Brazilian Elections: The Bourgeoisie
Goes For More Lula .65
4
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Feds Break Into Homes, Seize Documents, Subpoena Activists
Denounce FBI Raids on Leftist
Antiwar and Solidarity Activists
28 SEPTEMBER 2010 -At around 7 a.m. Friday, September 24,
agents of the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) barged into eight homes in Minneapolis, Min¬
nesota and Chicago, Illinois, breaking down doors in a coordinated
raid against leftist activists. Agents seized papers, computers, cell
phones and personal items of Hatem Abudayyeh, Joseph losbaker
and Stephanie Weiner in Chicago, and served Thomas Burke of
Chicago with a subpoena ordering him to appear before a grand
jury investigating “material support to terrorism.” In the Min¬
neapolis/St. Paul area, agents raided the homes of Meredith Aby,
Mick Kelly, Tracy Molm, Anh-Thu Pham, Jessica Sundin, and the
offices of the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee. FBI spokesmen
said that “interviews” were being conducted across the country.
No arrests have been made or charges reported, yet about a dozen
activists have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand
jury, whose proceedings are secret.
In Minneapolis on Friday evening, over 100 gathered at
an emergency meeting at a church to express their solidarity
with the targeted activists. Protests outside of federal offices
across the U.S. are planned for this week. These raids are a
blatant attempt to criminalize leftist politics, antiwar and soli¬
darity advocacy and political dissent generally. Those targeted
include University of Minnesota and University of Illinois staff
members and unionists who have been outspoken in opposition
to U.S. policies. They include activists associated with Students
for a Democratic Society, the Colombia Action Network and
the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO-Fightback)
group. The labor movement and all defenders of democratic
rights should respond with powerful mobilizations to denounce
this political persecution, the latest in the “home front” of the
imperialist “war on terror.” An injury to one is an injury to all!
One of the warrants authorizes search and seizure of papers,
property and electronic records related to alleged violation of the
1996Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA).
The warrant bandies about charges, citing no evidence whatso¬
ever, of having “supported, attempted to support or conspired to
support” the Revolutionary ArmedForces ofColombia (FARC),
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and
Hezbollah, the Islamist political party in Lebanon. But the
main object of the FBI’s fishing expedition appears to be to
the finances, members, recruiting and structure of the Freedom
Road Socialist Organization. The Internationalist Group defends
the activists targeted by these raids and demands a halt to the
grand jury and the government “investigations,” spying on and
attempts at intimidation of leftists and anti-war activists!
prescribes up to ten years in prison for anyone who “know¬
ingly provides material support or resources to a foreign ter¬
rorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so.” These
deliberately vague terms are used to suppress political dissent
and erase democratic rights that are supposedly guaranteed by
the Constitution. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which
issued an 88-page report on The Policing of Political Speech:
Constraints on Mass Dissent in the U.S. the same day as the
raids, notes that the AEDPA’s “material support” clause has
been construed to include “humanitarian aid, expert advice,
and political advocacy, to any foreign entity that the Executive
branch decides to designate as a ‘terrorist’ group.”
Thus courageous civil liberties defense attorney Lynne
Stewart is in federal prison today for supposed “material sup¬
port” to her client - holding a press conference! The AEDPA
is also infamous for restricting the right of prisoners on death
row from suing for their freedom even when new evidence
of innocence and judicial misconduct comes to light. These
provisions have been used against the renowned black radical
journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocent victim of a racist
political frame-up on Pennsylvania’s death row for the last
quarter century, among many others.
This is a classic red squad frame-up job, from the fed¬
eral police organization that began in the first “red scare,”
Woodrow Wilson’s police raids and deportations of thousands
of union organizers, radicals and socialists during the first
imperialist world war. The Twin Cities Anti-War Committee
played a central role in organizing the demonstrations against
the Republican Party convention in St. Paul in 2008. Before
and during that event over 300 activists were arrested, some
charged with felony “conspiracy to commit riot” charges, while
Minneapolis/St. Paul was transformed into an armed camp. The
only rioters to be found were the riot police, who assaulted
peaceful protest marchers with tear gas, concussion grenades,
and pepper spray. While most of the trumped-up charges have
been dropped, some defendants go to trial on October 25.
The U.S. “war on terror,” which has brought nine years
of mass murder and chaos to the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq
and now Pakistan, has been from the beginning an assault on
elementary democratic rights “at home.” In the weeks fol¬
lowing 11 September 2001, the FBI rounded up thousands of
Arab, South Asian and Muslim immigrants, subjecting them
to indefinite detention without charges. This was soon ac¬
companied by the U.S. A. PATRIOT Act, a wholesale assault
on civil liberaties which was rammed through Congress with
The AEDPA, signed by Democratic president Bill Clinton, continued on page 38
Imperialist War Abroad Means Police-State Repression “At Home”
January-February 2011
The internationalist
5
From Resistance to Counteroffensive
to the Struggle for Workers Power
Focal Point Europe:
Capitalism in Crisis,
ts
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CD
73
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French high school students, rail and postal workers mobilize in the port of Marseille,
October 21, against government attack on pension rights.
Over the past year, a wave of class struggle has swept
across Europe. In country after country, working people are
facing devastating attacks on their livelihoods, their past gains,
and their futures. And they are fighting back. On December 15,
Greece had yet another one-day nationwide strike - its eighth
this year. On November 25, more than 3 million workers walked
out in the biggest strike in Portugal’s history. All fall, France
was in turmoil as millions of workers and students repeatedly
mobilized against the government’s pension “reform,” with
numbers and militancy not seen in years. In Ireland, Italy and
Spain as well there have been huge marches of hundreds of
thousands trade unionists, students and youth. Now in Britain,
angry student protests against drastic fee hikes could spark
working-class resistance to the government’s program of vicious
cuts. But demonstrations in the streets, no matter how massive,
have not stopped European governments - whether of the right
or “left” - from proceeding with their onslaught. Nor will they
in the future, for this is not a matter of pressuring over budget
priorities, it is a concerted capitalist assault on the working class.
To defeat it, we must go from resistance to a struggle for power.
The burning question is how to get there.
The particular issues involved vary from country to coun¬
try. In Greece, the battle was set off in December 2009 when
so-called “bond vigilantes” drove up interest rates on loans
6
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
On November 24 more than 3 million Portuguese workers struck against the
Socialist Party government in the largest one-day general strike in the coun¬
try’s history and the first in 28 years (since 1982).
after a ratings agency downgraded
the country’s credit rating over the
size of the budget deficit. As part
of a €110 billion (US$ 140 billion)
bailout by the International Mon¬
etary Fund and the European Cen¬
tral Bank, the “socialist” Greek
government ordered a draconian
austerity program, slashing public
sector wages by 30 percent and
threatening tens of thousands of
public workers’ jobs. In France,
the fuse that lit the explosive
worker-student revolt was a plan
by the right-wing government to
raise the retirement age. This was
understood as the opening wedge
for a drive against social security
and other hard-won labor gains.
In Britain, the detonator was the
Conservative-Liberal coalition’s
plan for tripling university tuition
and eliminating student mainte¬
nance grants, the first of a series of
planned cuts supposedly aimed at reducing the deficit (mostly
the result of bailing out the banks and war in Afghanistan). And
in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, workers are up in arms over
austerity programs aimed at pleasing bond holders.
The attacks are rooted in the global capitalist economic
crisis that came to a head in 2008 with the financial panic set
off by the fall of the Wall Street banking house of Lehman
Brothers. As major banks faced bankruptcy, housing prices
collapsed, industrial production plummeted, unemployment
shot up. Now often referred to as the Great Recession, it is in
fact a depression which like those of the 1930s or after 1876
will take years to overcome. At present, numerous governments
are insolvent and the capitalist financial system could come
crashing down. Yet after an initial period in which high-flying
bankers sought trillions in government aid to survive, they are
now back to business as usual, paying themselves billions in
bonuses. Of course, someone has to foot the bill to pay off the
mountain of debt. For the capitalist masters and their politi¬
cians, it is the working class that must pay. Using the crisis as
an excuse, they are attacking workers’ rights and jacking up
the rate of exploitation to fatten profits. So even though the
“free market” policies of “neo-liberalism” set off the crisis,
the neo-liberals are back on the offensive.
While bourgeois economists spoke of an “upturn” earlier
this year, it didn’t feel like one to hard-hit workers. Long-term
unemployment continued to rise in the “jobless recovery,”
which soon fizzled out. Anger spread over the obscene bonuses
financiers paid themselves with billions from the public trea¬
sury. In the politically backward United States, where there
is no mass political representation of workers and the labor
movement is beholden to the Democrats, who currently hold
the reins of power, the rage has been siphoned off by right¬
wing “Tea Party” populists bankrolled by leading billionaires.
In Europe, with its left-wing, socialist and Labourite political
traditions, protests against the ravages of the economic crisis
and government attacks have been led in many cases by the
unions. As millions poured into the streets to protest, capital¬
ist governments, bourgeois media and reformist labor leaders
have all been caught by surprise at the size, militancy and
determination of the mobilizations.
Using time-honored ruses, right-wing regimes in Italy
and France tried to divert the disgust by launching chauvinist
attacks on immigrants, Muslims and Roma (gypsies). But the
“security” offensive fell flat. In France the unions came out
in defense of the Roma. So bourgeois opinion-makers tried
another tack, railing against “violence” by “hooded anarchists.”
They sought to capitalize on the deaths of three workers trapped
in a bank in Athens that had been firebombed during the May
5 Greek national (“general”) strike. To no avail: the strikes
kept on coming. Likewise with the sacking of Conservative
Party headquarters in London on November 10 accompanied
by thousands of protesting students. Despite howls of horror
from the government and mainstream media - as well as “of¬
ficial” student leaders - campus occupations and mass student
marches intensified. A month later, the British heir apparent
and his consort drove into a crowd of demonstrators, some of
whom decorated their vintage Rolls-Royce while the shaken
royals were treated to a chorus of “off with their heads.” But
all the government/media fear-mongering over “feral mobs”
of anarcho-“yobs” had zero effect.
The scare tactics aren’t working because the assault on the
livelihoods of working people is so severe. Millions of workers,
students, youth and even many in the middle classes see that
their lives are being ripped up in order to pay off the banks and
Vilarigues
Aris Messinis/AFP
January-February 2011
The internationalist
7
Police flee charging demonstrators in Athens, May 5.
giant corporations - in short, the capitalists - who set off the
economic crisis. Yet after months of demonstrations and one-day
nationwide strikes, it’s clear that the usual means of pressure from
“the street” have no effect, it’s common to hear protesters remark
that the mobilizations must be “radicalized,” that the struggle
must be taken to a higher level. But how, and led by whom? The
labor tops have no intention of waging a serious struggle against
capital, and instead hold one march after another, hoping to run
them into the ground. While the unions are workers organizations,
the bureaucracy that sits atop them is a privileged petty bourgeois
layer that serves as a transmission belt for the bosses, to make sure
the ranks don’t get out of hand. The bureaucrats are, in Daniel De
Leon’s phrase, the “labor lieutenants of capital” and the name of
their game is class collaboration.
To wage a serious fight, the labor fakers must be ousted
by a leadership committed to class struggle with a program
and the determination to see it through to victory. To defeat
the attacks on the working class will require the revolutionary
overthrow of capitalism, as the severity of the economic crisis
should underline. Yet the vast majority of the European left
presents a reformist platform that differs at most quantitatively,
if at all, from that of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy. With
ever-so-slightly different formulas, they call for competing
coalitions to “fight the cuts” or “fight the right,” when the task
at hand is to defeat the capitalist attack. Seeking to gain cred¬
ibility, these “popular front” type coalitions tie the workers to
sections of the ruling class. If they talk of “fighting politically”
or “winning the battle ofpublic opinion,” they mean channeling
the struggle into the straitjacket of bourgeois parliamentarism.
But playing by the bosses’ rules is a ticket for defeat.
The reformist social-democratic and Communist parties of
West Europe have long been cogs in the machinery of capital¬
ist rule, integrated into the state through local administration,
national parliaments and the mechanisms of the “welfare
state.” With the latter under full-scale attack by “free market”
forces, this traditional left has
been caught between the pressures
of their capitalist masters and the
demands of their working-class
base. So they do nothing (as in
Britain, so far) or call ritual pro¬
tests to blow off steam (Greece,
France, Ireland, Spain, Portugal).
The erstwhile “far left,” while
maintaining a distinct political
profile, are no longer the radicals
of 1968, having become com¬
fortably ensconced in the labor
bureaucracy, electoral politics and
the bourgeois media. But whether
seeking to build “anti-capitalist”
parties and coalitions (the NPA in
France, ANTARSYA in Greece)
or calling for “new mass (or
socialist) workers parties,” these
are reformist political formations
operating in the confines of bourgeois
electoralism. They talk of resistance, but they cannot lead a
revolutionary class struggle to bring down the ride of capital.
The present crisis highlights as seldom before the urgent
need for a program of transitional demands such as that put
forward in the founding document of the Fourth International,
“to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find
the bridge between present demands and the socialist program
of the revolution” (Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program
[1938]). Over the decades, Trotsky’s program has been dis¬
torted by opportunists in myriad ways: classic demands such
as a sliding scale of wages and hours are watered down to turn
them into contract demands (an escalator clause and limits on
layoffs) or appeals to capitalist governments; workers control
is translated into “self-management” under capitalism; calls for
workers militias are disappeared. Above all, they leave off “the
final conclusion: the conquest ofpowerby the proletariat.” In the
hands of pseudo-Trotskyists, it becomes a “bridge” to nowhere.
Yet what is required today is precisely to mobilize the power of
the working class on a program to turn defensive struggles into a
proletarian counteroffensive on the road to socialist revolution.
So far the rulers have been able to muddle through, while
keeping a vigilant eye on the “spreads” (between interest rates
for German or U.S. bonds and those of country x) as they
once watched opinion polls. In the imperialist “democracies”
the vote of “the market” can topple governments, wielding
far more power than the electorate ever had. The stakes are
high. Greece, Ireland and Portugal can be “bailed out,” a run
on Spain or Italy could spell the end of the euro. Trotskyists
have always opposed the European Union as an imperialist
alliance. But while national tensions between the rulers could
blow apart the EU, this is the time to counterpose the Europe
of the workers to the Europe of the bosses. Until now “inter¬
nationalism” for the Euroleft consisted of inviting a couple
of speakers from other countries to address marches. Today,
continued on page 38
8
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
50,000 March in London Against Conservative/Liberal Cuts
Student Revolt
Up Britain
Students outside Parliament in Westminster, London, November 10 protesting tripling of tuition fees.
19 NOVEMBER 2010 - Finally! When an estimated 52,000
students marched through London on Wednesday, November
10, their mobilization ended up shattering not only the windows
of Conservative (Tory) Party headquarters at Millbank Tower
but also the eerie calm that had enveloped the country following
elections last April. The incoming cabinet of Conservative prime
minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat deputy PM Nick
Clegg vowed to impose “painful” cuts to what’s left of Britain’s
once extensive social programs. Already badly tattered after 18
years of Tory rule beginning under Margaret Thatcher, followed
by 13 years of “Thatcher II” under the “New Labour” Party of
Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, the “welfare state” was
about to receive the death blow. So where was the resistance?
Labour was passive, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) put off
national protest until March 2011 (!). Except for several solid
one-day London Tube (subway) and firefighters’ strikes, silence
on the social front had settled in. Would the Con-Dem coalition
get away with their program of budget axe murder?
Not if the students could help it. Organised by the National
Union of Students (NUS) and University and College Lecturers
Union (UCU), tens of thousands came by coach from all over
the country. They even travelled from the farthest reaches of
Scotland, which will be spared this round of cuts - but students
could read the handwriting on the wall. As they marched down
the Strand past the government ministries in Whitehall and
Parliament in Westminster, they chanted “Tory, Tory, Tory
- scum, scum, scum.” When they reached the Conservative
headquarters at Millbank, the pent up anger exploded. About
500 broke away from the “official” demonstration and began to
lay siege to and take over the building. With few police to stop
them, windows were kicked in, the lobby received a thorough
ransacking, some office furniture was burned in an impromptu
bonfire. This brought out the riot cops but they were dwarfed
by the crowd that had grown to several thousand cheering on
the action. Some protesters managed to reach the rooftop, from
where they sent a defiant text message:
“We stand against the cuts, in solidarity with all the poor,
elderly, disabled and working people affected. We are against
Workers: The Time for Strike Action Is Now!
Break with Labourism - Build a Leninist-Trotskyist Party!
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
January-February 2011
The internationalist
9
Protester delivers swift kick to window of Conservative Party central office
in Miilbank Tower, London, November 10. Government, media and official
student leaders piously intoned against “destruction,” but demonstrators
furious over cuts that could destroy their lives, cheered.
all cuts and the marketisation of
education. We are occupying the
roof of Tory HQ to show we are
against the Tory system of attacking
the poor and helping the rich. This
is only the beginning.”
“This is only the beginning .” We
hope so, a lot of the bourgeois political
establishment fear so. The Guardian
(11 November) splashed the phrase
across its front page. It was repeated
by MPs (Members of Parliament) and
cabinet ministers as they shuddered
with recollections of the 1968 demo
against the U.S. embassy in Gros-
venor Square over the Vietnam War,
and the much larger 1990 “riots” over
the Tories’ “poll tax.” For students
facing a drastic increase of university
tuition fees, their lives are at stake:
tens of thousands will be driven out,
and many of the rest will be saddled
with a lifetime of debt. After venting
against the Tories on Wednesday, much
of the anger is now directed at Nick
Clegg and his fellow Lib-Dems who
pledged during the election campaign
to “vote against any increase in fees”
even as secret documents show they were planning to raise
them. But to really defeat the cuts and fee hikes, it is neces¬
sary to mobilize working-class power to take on not only the
government parties but the capitalist system itself, among
whose most ardent defenders over the century have been the
Labour Party, “New” and old.
The Occupation of Tory Headquarters: An
“Unrepresentative Minority” of Thousands
The government and media have sought to divert attention
from the issue of cuts and fees by expressions of feigned out¬
rage over the trashing of the Conservative party HQ, blaming
it all on an “unrepresentative minority” of “anarchists” and
assorted riffraff and ne’er-do-wells. The press all ran the same
photo of a protestor kicking in a window at Miilbank. “Hijack¬
ing of a Very Middle Class Protest,” screamed the Daily Mail
(11 November). The same theme came from official protest
leaders: UCU general secretary Sally Hunt denounced the
“actions of a mindless and totally unrepresentative minority.”
N US president Aaron Porter tweeted his “disgust” at the actions
of “a minority of idiots.” Before TV cameras he “absolutely
condemn[ed] the actions of a small minority who have used
violent means to hijack the protest,” calling them “despicable.”
What’s truly despicable is this support for the rulers. But what
else coidd one expect from a right-wing Labourite like Porter
anxious to use his NUS position to launch his political career,
as generations of Labour MPs before him have done. The fact
is, and everybody knows it, that nobody in power would have
paid the least attention to the students’ march, no matter how
large, if it weren’t for the Miilbank occupation.
Time and again, all over the world it is claimed that the
most militant actions are the result of a “handful of outsiders.”
Nonsense. John Harris in the Guardian (12 November) quoted
a colleague who described the scene at Miilbank as “ordinary
students who were viscerally angry,” adding that this was “an
early sign of people growing anxious and restless, and what a
government pledged to such drastic plans should increasingly
expect.” Damage to property? Please spare us the cynical hand-
wringing. Cameron and his fellow members of the Bullingdon
Club at Oxford used to regularly smash up pubs and the like
in their drunken sprees. Likewise for threatened charges of
“attempted murder” against demonstrators. In fact, very few
people were hurt, far fewer than in the G20 protests last year
where riot police of the Territorial Support Group sought to
terrorise protesters and killed newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson
(for which no cop has been prosecuted, or even disciplined).
Some 58 protesters have been arrested for the occupation of
Conservative Party headquarters. There should be an outcry
demanding that they all be released and all charges dropped.
The criminals are the government and the ruling class it serves.
Not all NUS and UCU representatives had the same
belly-crawling response as their top leaders. Student union
presidents at the University of London, Sussex University
and others issued a statement saying: “We reject any attempt
to characterise the Miilbank protest as small, ‘extremist’ or
unrepresentative of our movement. We celebrate the fact that
Dominic Lipinski/Press Association
10
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Thousands of protesters cheered the occupation of the hated Tories’ HQ.
thousands of students were willing
to send a message to the Tories that
we will fight to win. Occupations
are a long established tradition in
the student movement that should
be defended.” Several thousand
activists have added their names
to this statement. Certainly the
police will use this incident to
ramp up repression in the next
round. A “senior police figure”
was quoted as saying “In the past
we’ve been criticised for being too
provocative. During the next demo
no one can say a word.” But more
fundamentally, lashing out at such
symbols of an upper class elite,
while thoroughly understandable
and justified, cannot break its power to cause misery for the
masses. Much more is needed to hit the capitalist rulers in their
pocketbooks where it counts. To really fight to win, it will be
necessary to mobilize the power of the working class in ac¬
tion. And despite the treachery of the trade-union misleaders,
millions of British workers are ready to fight.
Although the government and police commissioners were
reportedly “caught by surprise” by the size and militancy of
the students, which far exceeded their expectations, such angry
protest has long been in the cards. A “senior Tory aide” was
quoted back in May saying that “if we win, this is going to
be a deeply unpopular government. They have six months at
maximum” to get their program of cuts in place. Now, writes
Michael White in the Guardian (11 November):
“Right on cue, exactly six months into David Cameron’s
premiership, the ancient British roar of ‘Tory scum’ echoed
across central London again. In honour of the coalition’s deal
on higher tuition fees, student protesters spliced their message
with cheerful abuse of Nick Clegg. After almost 100 years of
apathy Lib Dems can hold their heads high - hated at last.”
And the hatred they are harvesting is not limited to “professional
protesters,” as Tory spokesmen claim. All accounts agree that
for many if not most of the students who marched on Novem¬
ber 10, including the thousands who cheered the occupation of
Millbank, this was their first demonstration. It won’t be their last.
Fee Hikes: A Class Purge
of Higher Education
The Con-Dem cabinet’s plans will drastically change
British universities and schools. University tuition fees are
set to be tripled to £9,000 (US$14,500) a year! At the same
time, government expenditure on university instruction is to
be cut by 40 percent. Not only is this paying “more for worse”
education, the only way it could be accomplished is if there is
a big fall in enrolment, which is exactly what they are aiming
at. The intent, and not only the predictable consequence, is to
deprive tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of young people
of a college education. And by cutting as well the £30-a-week
Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) for 16-19 year
olds and slashing budgets for FE (Further Education) colleges
(similar to community colleges in the U.S.) by 25 percent,
universities are set to be places just for the wealthy, leaving the
working class either unemployed or stuck in dead-end McJobs.
The responsibility for this class purge of Britain’s universi¬
ties is not confined to the Tories and Liberal Democrats who
are carrying out the horrendous program. This was, after all, the
outcome of a review by Lord Browne - what better “expert” on
education than a former CEO of British Petroleum! - that was
commissioned by the previous Labour government of Gordon
Brown. The expansion of higher education courses and the
student population by New Labour under Tony Blair after 1997
was deliberately under-financed. The costs of paying for it were
shoved onto students and their families by cutting student grants
and introducing tuition fees in 1998. While they were at first
means-tested and many working-class students still studied for
free, this changed drastically in 2004 when Blair/Brown intro¬
duced top-up fees, tripling the maximum of £1,250 to £3,290.
Like previous Conservative measures, they were mainly aimed at
expanding the pool of skilled labor: according to the 2003 New
Labour white paper, “The Future of Higher Education,” students
are to attend universities merely for the “acquisition of skills.”
Seeking to one-up Labour’s extreme business-friendly
policies, the Con-Dem coalition has come out for all-sided
privatization. Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt announced budget
cuts with the idiotic claim, “The changes 1 have proposed today
would help us deliver fantastic culture, media and sport, while
ensuring value for money for the public” ( Guardian, 26 July
2010). But “value for money” is hardly an invention of this
coalition. Commenting on government spending cuts in 1922,
the historian R.H. Tawney observed: “consider the philosophy
behind its proposals. It does not actually state, in so many words,
that the children of the workers, like anthropoid apes, have fewer
convolutions in their brains than the children of the rich. It does
not state it because it assumes it.... While most decent men have
viewed with satisfaction the recent considerable development
of secondary education, they deplore it as a public catastro-
Carl de Court/AFP
January-February 2011
The internationalist
11
phe, and are indignant that
education ... is sold ‘below
actual cost’” ( Guardian , 21
February 1922).
The rhetoric of the au¬
thors of the 1922 cuts has
now resurfaced unchanged,
with talk of the undeserv¬
ing poor who commit a
“sin” by not working for
starvation pay. Such Social
Darwinism inevitably has
a racist character. This was
recently expressed in its
crudest form by the Social
Democrat banker Thilo
Sarrazin in Berlin, who
has made waves by openly
bemoaning the destruction
of German Kultur by Turk¬
ish immigrants. Sarrazin
argues, as the New York
Times (13 November 2010)
summed up his views, that
“since Muslims are less
intelligent (his conclusion)
than ethnic Germans, the population will be dumbed down (his
conclusion).” That this is not just some crackpot talking was
underscored by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s pronouncement
last month that “multiculturalism is dead.” And as Sarkozy in
France goes in for mass expulsion of Roms and threats to cancel
immigrants’ citizenship, the Con-Dem government in London
shares the same worldview, vituperating against an “out of
control” immigration system.
This cabinet of 18 millionaires (by the Guardian’ s count)
really has it in for Britain’s working people. The day after the
student protest, the government announced plans to replace
hardship payments (to the unemployed whose benefits have
been held up) with loans (to be repaid), and to ban anyone who
refuses a job or “community service” from receiving benefits for
up to three years. According to the spending review by Chancel¬
lor of the Exchequer George Osborne, some £18 billion is to
be slashed from the welfare system. Public sector workers are
to be hit with a pay freeze and a 3 percent increase in pension
contributions - in other words, a pay cut. Local council grants
are to be slashed by 27 percent. Planned cuts of 500,000 public
sector jobs could lead to an equal number of private sector job
losses, adding one million more people to the dole queues (un¬
employment lines). While the health service is supposed to be
exempt from cuts, nurses say 10,000 jobs are threatened. It’s all
supposed to reduce a budget deficit of £ 149 billion. Yet as a result
of the world capitalist economic crisis, the Labour government
funnelled ten times that amount - £1.5 trillion - into the coffers
of Britain’s banks to stave off collapse.
But Britain’s students aren’t taking it. The London protest
was the latest in many in Europe over the austerity measures
being pushed by the capi-
0 talists to make the working
i. class pay for the economic
S' meltdown. Repeated one¬
s’ day “general strikes” in
5. Greece during the winter
and spring, mass protests
in Portugal, a strike by
Spanish unions against the
Socialist government in
Madrid, and now two and
a half months of weekly
“days of action” by French
unions and students 1 : the
working people of Eu¬
rope have demonstrated
their readiness to do battle.
Barely three weeks ago the
New York Times (23 Octo¬
ber 2010) was contrasting
Britain - “stiff upper lip,”
“inherent stoicism,” “bull¬
dog resolve in the face of
hardship,” and all that - to
the strike-prone French for
whom taking to the streets
is a “rite of passage” for the young. Confronting “five bleak
years of austerity, the British barely seemed to blink,” the
writer sagely opined. But now British students are accused
of “acting French,” and the deputy editor of the Wall Street
Journal Europe suggests that perhaps French president Nicolas
Sarkozy would lend Cameron his CRS riot police.
The fury of British students over the fee hikes and cuts
was all the more fierce as they had been pushed through by
the recently elected Lib Dem/Conservatives. After the broken
promises of Tony Blair/Gordon Brown’s “New” Labour which
oversaw the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and repeated at¬
tacks on immigrants and the working class, many young people
(especially students) voted for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats
hoping that they would be a ‘progressive’ alternative. They
have been disappointed - big time. Yet Labour is no opposi¬
tion. Even today, while needling Clegg in Parliament, Labour
spokesmen have not flatly opposed the cuts. They mainly differ
over the pace, and Labour local councils will be administering
the cuts. As for the student fee hikes, Labour is now toying
with a “graduate tax,” which only means that students will
have to pay off the £9,000 a year fees later. They may quibble
about specifics, but all the parliamentary parties support the
attacks on working people in Britain. And that is because all
of them - including Labour, which Russian Bolshevik leader
V.I. Lenin long ago characterized as a “bourgeois workers
party” - uphold the capitalist order.
1 See our articles “French Students and Workers Strike: May in Oc¬
tober? The Spectre of a New ’68” (page 51), “To Drive Out Sarkozy
& Co., Fight for Power to the Workers” (page 56) and a series of
reports from Paris on the www.intemationalist.org web site.
The coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron
(Conservative), left, and Deputy PM Nick Clegg (Liberal-
Democrat), posh twins in a millionaires’ cabinet. Shown
here in front of No. 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s
office, after taking office on May 12. Luckily they are wear¬
ing different ties so you can tell them apart. Politically they
are united on a program to make the working class pay for
the capitalist economic crisis.
12
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Liberal-Democrat leader Nick Clegg in April 2010, holding up
his signed pledge to vote against any increase in university
fees. The entire Lib-Dem parliamentary slate signed the pledge.
Now they will vote to triple fees as part of coalition government.
“Broad Coalitions” vs.
Worker-Student Struggle
So what is to be done now? British students
are energized, even exhilarated. NUS leaders want
to pull back and limit themselves to embarrassing
Liberal Democrats who signed the “no fee rise”
pledge. However, the Labourite student bureaucrats
of the NUS and UCU are hardly in control of the
protests. On November 10, there was a “free edu¬
cation bloc” of assorted left social democrats and
a “radical students and workers bloc” of a more
anarchist and syndicalist bent. Now, over opposi¬
tion from the NUS, the National Campaign Against
Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) has called for university
walkouts and occupations on November 24 and a
central national demonstration at Trafalgar Square
to be accompanied by “direct action.” Already an
occupation has begun at Sussex, after a one-day
occupation at Manchester U.
There are a host of leftist student groups in Britain, usually
led by one or another socialist group, ranging from Communist
Students of the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain)
and Socialist Students of the SPEW (Socialist Party of Eng¬
land and Wales, led by Peter Taaffe) to the Education Activist
Network (EAN) led by the SWP (Socialist Workers Party,
followers of the late Tony Cliff). The EAN is a follow-on to
the SWP’s earlier Student Respect and Another Education Is
Possible ventures, and of course the Stop the War coalition.
Where Che Guevara called for “two, three, many Vietnams,”
the SWP’s variant is two, three, many front groups, one (or
more) for every “movement” it is tailing at the time (Muslim,
anti-globalisation, antiwar). It has been noted that while the
parent organizations may have some differences, the programs
of their student affiliates are virtually interchangeable. This
reflects the fact that at bottom they are all part of the social-
democratic reformist milieu.
As always, the SWP places itself squarely on the right
flank. Positioning itself one baby step to the left of the NUS
leadership, which calls for the graduate tax, the SWP, while
itself formally in favour of “free education” (that is, the
abolition of all fees), insists that the EAN should not raise
this fundamental demand, as that might hinder its opportunist
manoeuvring in the NUS. Following November 10, the SWP
decided to pose as the biggest defenders of the Millbank oc¬
cupation, crowing that “First through the doors of Millbank
Tower were members of the Socialist Workers Party...”
(Socialist Worker, 20 November). The SWP’s perspective
was set out in a pamphlet calling for “a huge campaign
that turns every college into a centre of resistance.” This is
2 Though often referred to in the British press as a Trotskyist, Cliff
broke with Trotskyism at the start of the Cold War, declaring the
Stalinist-ruled Soviet Union to be “state capitalist” rather than a bu¬
reaucratically degenerated workers state, and in 1950 refusing to
defend North Korea and the USSR against imperialist attack, an act
of class treason for which his supporters were rightly expelled from
the Revolutionary Communist Party.
bread and butter for the SWP, which looks to everyone from
CIA-run unions in Poland to mullahs in Iran, but never the
working class (though while calling for everyone to “build
the fightback,” it does say that they could “invite local trade
unionists to come along”).
Other groups have their own profile. The SPEW calls
for “building a mass, sustained and determined movement
that can stop the Con-Dem onslaught” - carefully avoiding
any attack on Labour - that would be “joined by the power¬
ful organisations of the working class.” Meaning they want
the TU bureaucrats to sign on. Alan Woods’ Socialist Appeal
(SA), which bills itself as a tendency in the Labour Party, calls
for “a movement that can bring this government down” - and
thus pave the way for a return to Labour. They all have their
criticisms of the “New Labour” of Blair and Brown, and they
may say that the recently elected Labour leader is not the “Red
Ed” (Miliband) portrayed in the media. But, the SWP writes,
“the movement will be looking to Miliband to speak up for
all those who will be hammered by coalition cuts” (Socialist
Review, November 2010). And there they and their various
coalitions all were, lobbying the Labour conference in Brighton
September 27, “to tell the Labour Government that they must
change direction,” as the UCU put it.
Whether in the SWP’s “student power” version or the
more Labourite SPE W/SA variant, these social democrats act
as pressure groups on the Labour stewards of capitalist Britain.
Lobbying Labour, especially now that it is out of office, cannot
stop the cuts. Only powerful worker-student class struggle,
independent of all political ties to the bourgeois state, can take
the struggle forward.
Dreams of a New Poll Tax Revolt and
Social-Democratic Support for the Police
In the wake of the November 10 occupation of Millbank
Tower, the bourgeois press harked back to the 1990 “poll tax
riots” as a harbinger of what could be in store. At the same
time, several socialist groups saw that as a model of how
National Union of Students
journalismfrombelow
January-February 2011
The internationalist
13
Poll tax “riot,” 31 March 1990. Bloody police attack on demonstrators sealed
Margaret Thatcher’s fate.
mass struggle could bring down this Tory government, as the
revolt over the poll tax led to the downfall of “Iron Lady”
Thatcher. SWP: “This is a sign we can resist. The poll tax
riots show it is possible.” SPEW: study “the lessons of the
poll tax struggle and how we took on the Tories and won last
time round.” Socialist Appeal: “The anti-poll tax movement
... shows that the government can be defeated if a serious and
effective struggle is mounted.” This is at best a partial truth.
While hatred of this tax on the poor and working people and
revulsion over police brutality eventually led to Thatcher’s
resignation and abandonment of the tax, she was succeeded
by the Tory John Major ... and eventually by Tony Blair,
whose “New Labour” government continued the anti-worker
polices of Thatcher.
The “poll tax” replaced graduated local taxes (based on
the rental value of houses) by a single head tax for every
adult, whether earl or pauper, a capitalist or an unemployed
worker. Those who didn’t pay would go to jail, bringing
back the debtors’ prisons of centuries past. The Militant ten¬
dency in the Labour Party, from which both Socialist Appeal
and the Socialist Party devolved, initiated a national Anti-
Poll Tax Federation. Eventually 14 million people refused
to pay the tax, making it effectively uncollectible. On 31
March 1990, some 200,000-plus people jammed into central
London to protest the tax. They were met with a wanton
cop attack. Police vans drove into crowds at high speed,
police horses trampled on demonstrators, police batons
rained down on old ladies. Millions were shocked as they
watched the spectacle on TV. The Tory barons concluded
Thatcher had to go if they were to avoid defeat in the next
elections. A few months later she was out. And the Tories
got seven more years in office.
Bringing down a hated government in a palace coup
by fellow Tories, though it may
have given a measure of belated
satisfaction to those who were
defeated in the epic coal min¬
ers’ strike and other hard-fought
labour battles, hardly counts as
a victory for the working class.
Moreover, when the poll tax
battle is held up as an model for
how to struggle today, it is an
argument that it is possible to go
around the obstacle of the Trades
Union Council. In particular
circumstances, mass civil diso¬
bedience may be a possible tactic
- such as when 14 million people
are willing to risk jail rather than
pay the heinous tax. But to actu¬
ally defeat Thatcherism, it was
necessary for the trade unions to
undertake political strike action
against the poll tax, as Trotskyists
called for at the time. Today it
will take workers action on a national basis to defeat Cameron
and Clegg’s cuts and fee hikes. And that means a fight within
the labour movement.
Akey issue is the nature of the police. Various left groups,
but particularly the heirs of Militant (SPEW and SA) charac¬
terize the cops as “workers in uniform.” But there is a vital
difference between workers conscripted into the army and
the police, who are strikebreakers and professional agents of
repression. “We have to distinguish ordinary police officers
from Chiefs of Police,” write Socialist Appeal supporters
Adam Booth and Ben Peck about the recent student march (In
Defense of Marxism web site, 12 November). But did chiefs
of police kill Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in 2009; or
execute Jean Charles de Menezes with shots to the back as he
entered the London Underground in 2005; or beat anti-fascist
demonstrator Blair Peach to death in 1979? No, these were
the acts of “ordinary police officers,” who are the armed fist
of the capitalist state.
Not surprisingly, the authors of the article sought to
distance SA from the “attack” on Millbank Tower, saying
it was “initiated by a minority of ultra-lefts” and was “not a
method that the labour movement would adopt.” An article
by the SPEW criticized the NUS leadership for denouncing
the protesters at Millbank, but remarked elliptically that
“stewarding of the protest was inadequate - particularly at
the end.” Meaning that had SPEW “stewards” been there,
they would have tried to prevent the occupation of Tory
headquarters? Naturally, the SA does not call to defend
the arrested protesters, and the SPEW has only a mealy-
mouthed reference to “no victimisation of students involved
in the demonstration.” What constitutes victimisation, and
what about non-students? The SPEW scandalously includes
a leader of the Prison Officers Association among its mem-
Coalition of Resistance
14
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Coalition of Resistance march protesting cuts, October 20. What welfare
state? Defending remaining social gains will require hard class struggle, not
“popular-front” coalitions with minor bourgeois parties and politicians.
bers, in total contradiction to Leon Trotsky’s insistence
that “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service
of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker.” In
contrast to the SA/SPEW, the League for the Fourth Inter¬
national calls for cops out of the unions (see our article,
“Her Majesty’s Social Democrats in Bed with the Police,”
The Internationalist No. 29, Summer 2009).
Class Struggle vs. Class Collaboration
Clearly there needs to be a massive mobilization against
the war on the working class spearheaded by the Conserva¬
tive/Liberal Democrat coalition government. Mobilize on
what basis? Campus occupations and mass marches are
necessary, but with the strategic aim of mobilizing workers’
industrial power on a program of class independence. Talk
of “student power” is illusory - by themselves, students do
not have the social weight to bring down the government,
although they can play a key role in sparking struggle. And
marching alone will do little. A million people demonstrated
against the Iraq war, but it didn’t sway Labour PM Tony Blair,
who kept right on wagging his tail for poodle master George
Bush. What is called for is joint strike action pointing toward
a general strike , based on elected strike committees , to break
the stranglehold of Labour and a trade-union bureaucracy
beholden to capitalism.
There must be a struggle to mobilize labour’s strength, in
the factories and on the streets, now, not some time next year,
in a sharp class battle against the capitalist rulers. This will
face opposition from the Trades Union Congress tops, who
have been dragging their heels - and not just from open right¬
wingers like Unison, which clearly wants to avoid a showdown
with the government. Tony Woodley, general secretary of
Unite, Britain’s largest union, and one of the “awkward squad”
who sought to “reclaim” Labour for “socialism,” saluted the
“anger and passion” of the students, but would only commit to
"linking up with the broadest range of other groups, including
students, to make the government
change its mind.” Like how? Even
Bob Crow, general secretary of
the Rail, Maritime and Transport
Workers, which earlier appealed
to the TUC for “coordinated strike
action,” now says only that the
RMT seeks “the strongest possible
co-ordinated and peaceful resist¬
ance in the coming months.”
What they are aiming at is to
build yet another “broad” coali¬
tion of a popular-front character
that would tie workers, students,
immigrants and others to minor
bourgeois forces and a program
of cosmetic reforms, in order
to ensure that any protest does
not challenge capitalist rule. An
example was the no 2 eu coali¬
tion, initiated by Crow and the
RMT, an alliance with the thoroughly bourgeois splinter
Liberal Party for the June 2009 elections to the European
parliament. One of the coalition’s top candidates was John
McEwan, a Socialist Party supporter and leader of the chau¬
vinist 2009 strike by Lindsey oil refinery workers whose
main demand was “British Jobs for British Workers.” (The
strike committee tried to prettify this disgusting demand
as hiring of “locally skilled union members” instead of the
Italian and Portuguese workers employed there.) This year a
popular-frontist Coalition of Resistance has been launched
by former Labour left MPTony Benn last August to fight the
cuts and “defend the welfare state.” This is also what most
groups on the British left are angling for. But such “coali¬
tions” are vehicles for class collaboration and roadblocks
to militant class struggle.
After World War II, the Labour Party under Clement
Atlee and Aneurin Bevan enacted a series of measures to
salvage bankrupt British capitalism. As Britannia no longer
ruled the waves, having lost its Empire, the bourgeoisie
hoped to stave off the “communist menace” by nationalizing
unprofitable but vital branches of the economy (coal, rail,
steel, docks, electrical energy), and providing some social
services to the workers, notably the National Health Service
and council housing. Following the counterrevolution in
the Soviet Union and East Europe during 1989-92, capital¬
ists the world over no longer felt the need to make conces¬
sions to the workers they exploited. In Britain the process
of dismantling the “welfare state” had already begun under
Margaret Thatcher. It continued apace under “New Labour”
and now the bourgeoisie is determined to finish it off under
the Con-Dem cabinet.
No “broad coalition” is going to stop this wrecking ball,
only mobilizing workers’ power and the students’ militancy
in sharp class struggle can do the job. To stop the purge
of higher education, the mass redundancies (layoffs), the
Solveigh Goett
January-February 2011
The internationalist
15
London tube strike, 7 September 2010. RMT must not
stand alone! Urgently needed: all-out strike action
to defeat the cuts.
destruction of local services will take a battle far surpassing
the 1984-85 coal strike in scope and intensity. What then?
In the 1978-79 “winter of discontent,” British workers un¬
dertook widespread strike action, but since they had nothing
to replace the Labour government of James Callaghan, the
forces of reaction won, in the figure of Margaret Thatcher.
A general strike would starkly pose the question of which
class rules. If the workers movement is not prepared to fight
for power, as the TUC was not in the 1926 general strike,
the result will be a colossal defeat. Today, the only way to
defend the remaining gains of the “welfare state” of distant
memory is by fighting to overthrow capitalist rule.
To Defeat the Cuts, Fight for
International Socialist Revolution
The struggle against the class war on the workers cur¬
rently being waged by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat
coalition is no isolated national battle. Across Europe,
workers and students are confronting a drive by govern¬
ments and business to make the working class and large
sections of the middle classes pay the costs of the capital¬
ist economic crisis. The bankers who triggered the new
Depression are demanding that the bailouts be paid for by
massive elimination of social programs such as they have
sought for years. They have no compunctions. Last week,
Barclays Bank announced it was anticipating paying out
£2.24 billion in bonuses in 2010, an amount equal to the
entire planned cuts in government expenditures on uni¬
versity teaching budgets. Meanwhile, market speculators
hold entire countries hostage. Earlier this year Greece was
targeted, today it is Ireland, tomorrow Portugal, and the day
after tomorrow.. .Britain?
If the Con-Dem cabinet does not succeed in ramming
through the cuts, the impersonal forces of “the market” will
take their revenge and push the country into sovereign bank¬
ruptcy, which would make the collapse of the Wall Street
banking house Lehman Brothers in September 2008 seem
small potatoes. When social-democratic leftists speak of a
“socialist transformation” of Britain through an enabling
act, as Militant did in the 1970s and ’80s, and their offspring
do today with programs for “socialist nationalisation” and
“public ownership” of 150 top companies under “demo¬
cratic workers’ control and management” (SPEW, “Where
We Stand”) they are peddling democratic illusions. Such a
“transformation” would be no more socialist than the post-
WWII nationalisations by Labour, and in any case a peaceful
transition to “socialism” through parliamentary channels is
impossible. It will take nothing less than socialist revolution
on an international scale to expropriate British capital, and
only by fighting for that goal can British workers hope to
defend what’s left of their past gains.
The starting principle of Marxist politics is the class
independence of the workers from the bourgeois exploiters.
Thus the League for the Fourth International opposes vot¬
ing for any bourgeois candidate, party or coalition - even
for workers parties in “popular fronts” - no matter how
leftist their rhetoric may be. In Britain, after a dozen years
in office, Labour was thoroughly discredited and no class¬
conscious worker or genuine Marxist could have voted in
the 2010 elections for these warmongers and loyal servants
of British (and U.S.) capital. But class independence is only
the beginning. To obtain decent housing, quality health care,
free and accessible education for all, capitalism must go.
And it is necessary to build a workers party to lead that
struggle, by putting forward a transitional program leading
to socialist revolution.
Workers should mobilize to force British troops out of
Afghanistan - and Northern Ireland - with proletarian ac¬
tion, including strikes, such as heralded by the West Coast
U.S. port strike against the war on May Day 2008 (which
was endorsed by the RMT). Fight mass unemployment by
demanding a shorter workweek, with no loss in pay, to divide
the available work among all hands. Government attacks
on Travellers must be vigorously opposed, and the anti-
“foreigner” backlash combated by demanding/)/// citizenship
for all immigrants. The growing threat of the British National
Party, the English Defence League and anti-Muslim attacks
should be met by workers defence guards to disperse the
fascist scum. In the face of all the hoopla over the upcoming
wedding of Prince William of the House of Windsor (will
his swastika-loving brother Prince Harry attend in full Nazi
regalia?), we call to abolish the monarchy and the House of
Lords, and for a voluntary federation of workers republics
of the British Isles and a Socialist United States of Europe.
It is necessary to struggle within the unions as well as
among students, the black and immigrant populations and all the
oppressed to break from Labourism, the heritage of an all-em¬
bracing social-democratic reformist party, and forge a proletarian
revolutionary vanguard. The LFI seeks to build the nucleus of a
workers party such as Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, to educate
and lead (in word and deeds) the fight for a workers government,
as part of the struggle to reforge the Fourth International as the
world party of socialist revolution. ■
16
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Workers Revolt: Government Wage Slashing, Jobs Massacre
“Could Lead to Civil War”
Greece on the Razor's Edge
Some 300,000 marched in Athens on May 5 to protest anti-worker austerity program of “So¬
cialist” government of George Papandreou.
Economist Trade Unionism, Left Electoral Coalitions No Answer
Build a Leninist-Trotskyist Party to Fight for Socialist Revolution
On December 15, more than 100,000 angry demonstra¬
tors rallied outside the Greek parliament in Athens shouting
“thieves, thieves” and “no sacrifice for the rich.” Workers
were protesting drastic anti-labor legislation by the “Socialist”
government which would effectively eliminate the minimum
wage, throw out collective bargaining agreements, privatize the
state railways and fire thousands of workers. Bus drivers went
on a three-day strike, tying up traffic throughout the capital;
piles of trash, uncollected due to a sanitation workers strike,
burned; TV, radio and newspapers were shut down; workers
occupied the Acropolis where 300 are due to be sacked. Police
fired tear gas and flash grenades at demonstrators. Hundreds
of youths used sledgehammers to break paving stones, hurling
them at the cops. Police, “rioters,” journalists and cameramen
all wore gas masks. It was by one count the tenth one-day
“general strike” in a year, and certainly the largest and most
militant since May ... when workers tried to storm parliament.
Greece is where the current wave of European workers’
struggles against a massive capitalist assault on their livelihoods
first broke out this past January. It is also where they have gone
the farthest, bordering on a full-scale revolt. With a population
of 11 million - the same as the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil - Greece
has a cultured, leftist and militant working class. Despite facile
talk of Greece as “the birthplace of democracy” (in the slave
society of Athens!), it also has a long history of oppression. From
the fascistic Metaxas dictatorship in the 1930s, Nazi occupation
and an anti-Communist bloodbath in the st-WWII civil war in the
’40s to a U.K./U.S.-imposed monarchy in the ’50s and a military
junta in the ’60s and ’70s, a weak but bloodthirsty ruling class
backed by the leading imperialist powers held Greece in thrall
for decades. This means that Greek workers have a long history
of struggle against repression, and that the threat of bonapartist
dictatorship is never far off - including today.
Greek capitalists have been living in fear of an uprising
threatening their rule since the December 2008 youth revolt
over the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandras Grigoropou-
los. The center of Athens was aflame as hundreds of youths
clashed with the militarized riot police; police stations were
attacked around the country. In succeeding days, thousands
demonstrated in protest, with the support of some trade unions
January-February 2011
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17
Athens in flames, December 2008, as thousands protested police murder
of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
and many trade-union militants. After
the global economic crisis hit in 2008,
the ruling class decided they needed
some protection from the left to stave
off worker unrest. In October 2009
elections the Panhellenic Socialist
Movement (PASOK) ousted the right-
wing New Democracy (ND), under
fire even in bourgeois circles for its
rampant corruption and budgetary
finagling. Despite its name, PASOK
is a liberal bourgeois-nationalist party
founded by former prime minister An¬
dreas Papandreou, the son of Giorgios
Papandreou who was installed as a
puppet prime minister by the British
in 1944 to crush the Communists, and
father of the present prime minister
George Papandreou.
Many voted for PASOK expecting that it would at least be
more worker-friendly than the ND spokesmen for big business.
But in office, Papandreou has defended the interests of Greek
and European capital to the hilt, imposing vicious austerity
programs of mass layoffs, drastic salary cuts and tax hikes on
working people far worse than the rightist New Democracy
even proposed. He has been able to do this so far because of
the support of PASOK trade unionists who lead the ADED Y
(public employees) and GSEE (the General Confederation of
Greek Labor, including private sector workers) federations.
When Papandreou announced in November 2009 that the
projected budget deficit was actually 12.7 percent of the gross
domestic product (GDP) instead of the 3.7 percent earlier
predicted by his ND predecessor, and total government debt
was over €300 billion (about US$430 billion), the markets
went bananas. Ratings agencies downgraded Greece’s credit-
worthiness, raising the rates it would have to pay to borrow
money to finance the deficit (and to roll over existing debt).
Bowing before finance capital, in December 2009 Papan¬
dreou announced a pay freeze for government employees and
sharp cut in twice-annual bonuses, which make up a large part
of their pay. In response, public sector unions called a strike
on February 10, declaring “We won’t pay for their crisis.” A
February 24 one-day general strike included private sector
workers as well. But the austerity plan was not sufficient to
satisfy the bond speculators. So the government announced
further cuts, including an additional 10% public sector wage
reductions and raising the value added (sales) tax, just to pay
the €32.5 billion in interest due this year. This sparked an
even larger one-day general strike on March 11. Still it was
not enough for “the markets.” So the Greek government asked
the European Union and International Monetary Fund to bail it
out, and on May 2 ordered massive cuts to public sector pay,
eliminating bonuses for many government workers, raising
the VAT to 23% for most goods, slashing pensions and raising
the retirement age from 61 to 65. The EU and IMF agreed to
provide €110 billion in loan guarantees.
This devastating attack on workers’ living standards pro¬
voked rage in the population. While German chancellor Angela
Merkel and the financial press scold “the Greeks” for "living
beyond their means,” Greek workers have a longer workweek
(over 42 hours on average, compared to 38 in France) and are
among the lowest paid in the Eurozone (earning just over €800
a month, as opposed to €1,250 in France), while the cost of
living is higher even than in Belgium. Pensions average €700
(less than US$ 1,000) a month. And now with the cuts imposed
by the “socialist” government, teachers, for example, have
seen their already low pay slashed by a staggering 30%. In
addition, the unions calculate that unemployment has shot up
to 1 million, out of a workforce of under 5 million. Attacks of
this magnitude threaten the vital minimum necessary for the
very survival of the proletariat, and have seldom been achieved
except under the iron heel of military rule. It’s not surprising,
then, that a new general strike broke out whose size and fury
haven’t been seen in Greece since the fall of the hated “colonels
regime” in 1974.
The protests kicked off at daybreak on May 4 as support¬
ers of the Communist Party (KKE) took the Acropolis and
unfurled giant banners in Greek and English proclaiming,
“Peoples of Europe Rise Up.” Public sector workers went out,
shutting schools and government offices and bringing air, rail,
maritime and public transport to a halt. The next day, May
5, up to 300,000 demonstrated in the streets of Athens, with
huge marches in Thessaloniki, Patras and elsewhere around
the country. In the capital, the PASOK-controlled unions kept
their march away from the center, yet GSEE leader Giannis
Panagopoulos was loudly booed by his own ranks (on March
6 he was physically attacked by irate workers). The KKE-led
PAME (Militant Front of All Workers) labor front rallied in
front of Parliament. As their rally was breaking up, thousands
of angry demonstrators showed up. According to the London
Guardian (6 May), “hundreds tried to storm the building,
screaming ‘let the bordello burn’.” Riot police then savagely
attacked the crowd. Soon battles were raging between cops
Aris Messinis/AFP
Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
18
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
and protesters all over central Athens.
The KKE denounced those who tried to enter parliament.
But the angry demonstrators who surged across Syntagma
Square were not the “black block” or “far left.” The Guard¬
ian reported that many were “once-stalwart supporters of the
governing socialist PASOK party.” Others observed that most
came directly from the PAME rally. In the course of the fight¬
ing, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Marfin Bank, where
workers were trapped inside: three employees tragically died
in the blaze. Was the firebomb thrown by provocateurs (as
some anarchists claim), or by proponents of “direct action”
who had no concern for the potentially lethal consequences
of their acts? The fact is, as a bank worker reported, that the
employees had been required to work that day or lose their
jobs, there were no adequate fire extinguishing devices, and
the boss had locked the doors. While lamenting the tragedy,
bank workers did not let themselves be deterred and struck
the next day, rightly blaming the police and management for
the deaths, while distancing themselves from the anarchists.
It may be a tad overheated to describe the May 5 general
strike as “semi-insurrectional,” as some have done. But it
certainly showed that the anger of Greek workers had reached
the boiling point and large numbers were prepared for radical
action going far beyond the ritual marches that have achieved
nothing. The government and the capitalist rulers breathed
a sigh of relief when subsequent one-day general strikes on
May 20, June 29 and July 8 were less tumultuous, though
still huge. After the August holidays (which many
families saw as perhaps their last summer vacations
for years to come), thousands of workers protested
a speech by Papandreou at the Thessaloniki trade
fair in September, where he announced a lowering
of corporate taxes on profits to the lowest rate in the
EU, while the VAT (mostly paid by workers) is now
one of the highest. Some “socialist”! Most of the fall
was taken up with campaigning for local elections
on November 7, in which the PASOK lost 1 million
votes. While the KKE and an “anti-capitalist left”
coalition advanced to over 12% of the vote, the big¬
gest increase was for abstention.
But after a brief electoral interlude, the battle
continues. Papandreou and the PASOK have carried
out every step that the “troika” of the IMF, European
Commission (EC) and European Central Bank (ECB)
have required - to no avail. In December 2009, after
the first downgrade of Greece’s credit standing,
speculators pushed the spread between interest rates
on a German and a Greek ten-year government bond
to 2.5% (250 basis points). Today, the spread stands
at 10%! And the day after Parliament voted, Moody’s
rating agency, while congratulating the government
for “significant progress in implementing a very
large fiscal consolidation effort,” announced it was
considering lowering Greek notes to junk-bond status
if it concluded that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio
(currently 125%) was not stabilizing.
In fact, every reputable economist knows - and
many have said publicly - that Greece cannot possibly pay the
amounts demanded by the international creditors. As the auster¬
ity measures sink the country deeper into economic depression,
lowering the gross domestic product by 4 percent this year,
probably more in 2011, the debt will soon rise to 150% of GDP.
Even with EU/IMF loan guarantees, no commercial bank will
lend to it. Only a dramatic return to prosperity would enable
Greece to grow its way out of this morass, and there’s no sign
of that on the horizon. As the prominent German economist
Hans-Werner Sinn of the IFO Institute in Munich remarked
to an elite gathering at Lake Como, Italy in early September,
“The policy of forced ‘internal devaluation,’ deflation, and
depression could risk driving Greece to the edge of a civil war.
It is impossible to cut wages and prices by 30 per cent without
major riots.” In any case, the present course will inevitably
(and possibly soon) lead to a blowup.
I. KKE: “Communists”
vs. Revolution
This excruciating situation cries out for revolutionary
leadership. Instead, most of the Greek left and labor movement
are responding in their usual manner, ranging from economist
trade unionism to bourgeois electoralism, opportunist maneu¬
vering and coalition-building. The Stalinist-reformist Com¬
munist Party, by far the largest group on the left, has attracted
support in recent months mainly for its name, symbolizing
January-February 2011
The internationalist
19
Demonstrators of the PAME (All Workers Militant Front), the trade-union ten¬
dency led by the Greek Communist Party (KKE) during May 5 general strike.
rej ection of capitalism, rather than
its actual policies, which prop up
bourgeois rule. In the November
local elections, the KKE raised its
share of the vote from 7.5% in the
October 2009 parliamentary elec¬
tions to 10.7% today, picking up
60,000 votes, many from former
PASOK voters. The KKE-led
PAME trade-union front has also
gained strength at the expense of
the PASOK-controlled ADEDY
and GSEE, of which it is formally
a part. But what does the KKE/
PAME do with this increased sup¬
port? Basically they call for more
one-day general strikes 1 , just as
the French reformist union and
left leaders keep holding “days of
action” that go nowhere.
In the “general strikes” that
have taken place on a nearly
monthly schedule in Greece over the past year, with August
off for summer vacation and another break for the fall local
elections, PAME has insisted on organizing separately from
PASOK-controlled unions. But while criticizing the auster¬
ity measures of the Papandreou government, the Stalinists
have blocked any protest going beyond usual marches. The
ritualistic character of these parades can be seen in the march
routes: typically PAME will start at one point (e.g., at Syn¬
tagma Square in front of Parliament) then march to another
spot a couple of kilometers away (e.g., Omonoia Square, where
GSEE headquarters are located). Meanwhile, ADEDY/GSEE
will go the opposite route, avoiding contact by marching along
separate avenues. For the next march, they reverse itineraries.
The clear purpose, both for PASOK and the KKE, is to avoid
at all costs united working-class action in the streets, which
could lead to the fall of the Papandreou government. That, for
all their “opposition” to its policies, they don’t want.
Sometimes, however, unable to control the workers’
anger, the bureaucrats miscalculate and get caught up short
in their attempts to stage-manage militancy. What that hap¬
pens, as on May 5 when hundreds of thousands of protesters
poured into the streets, the KKE doesn’t hesitate to denounce
the ranks of its own trade-union front as “provocateurs” and
even “fascists.” For what? For trying to enter parliament hop¬
ing to prevent the despised bourgeois politicians from voting
for austerity measures that will ruin the lives of millions of
Greek workers. This craven denunciation is nothing new for
the KKE, which dismissed the “petty-bourgeois” youth revolt
in December 2008 as “Talibans,” “gangsters,” “drug dealers,”
“pimps” and “police agents”! The same KKE condemned the
1 What passes for a “general strike” these days in most of Europe
is a one- or at most two-day walkout by the most militant sectors
plus a big parade - one more pressure tactic rather than a showdown
between the capitalist government and labor.
student sit-ins at the Athens Polytechnic in November 1973,
even though its leaders now lay wreaths on the monuments
commemorating the uprising against the colonel’s regime (as
do representatives of the ND!).
It is the same Stalinist party that betrayed the Decem¬
ber 1944 uprising against the British occupiers, begging
Churchill at the Flotel Grand Bretagne for a “government
of national unity.” Meanwhile, its OPLA hit squads hunted
down and killed hundreds of Trotskyists in order to head off
the possibility of the struggle turning into a revolution. 2 It is
the same KKE that joined a coalition government under the
rightist New Democracy in 1989. The same KKE which in
its December 2008 “Theses on Socialism” hails “the leader¬
ship of Stalin,” defending his nationalist dogma of building
“socialism in one country” against Trotsky’s Marxist critique.
It even justifies the bloody Moscow Purges of 1936-37. 3 To¬
day, the KKE calls for a “social popular front” to “repel and
undermine the barbaric measures” of the government and the
2 Vassilis Bartzotas, a KKE central committee member, boasted in
a message to Stalin’s GPU secret police that the OPLA killed 800
Trotskyists. See the article by Loukas Karliaftis (who barely es¬
caped assassination himself), “Stalinism and Trotskyism in Greece
(1924- 1949),” in Revolutionary History, Spring 1991.
3 The draft theses made an elliptical reference to “some excesses in
the measures taken” in the purge trials, while quoting the approval
of U.S. ambassador Joseph Davies as “proof’ of the correctness of
the verdict. In fact, the purge trials were a blood sacrifice to im¬
perialism, hoping to achieve “peaceful coexistence” by killing off
the entire remaining political bureau of the Bolshevik Party which
made the revolution, except for Stalin who played only a marginal
role in October 1917 (after earlier opposing a workers revolution).
The theses also cited as an authority the Belgian “ice-axe Stalin¬
ist” Ludo Martens who justified Stalin’s assassination of Trotsky. In
the final “Resolution on Socialism,” the reference to “excesses” was
dropped, so the KKE is on record as giving uncritical support to the
bureaucracy’s murderous anti-communist purge.
Reuters
Athens News Antonis/Citizenside
20
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Hundreds of workers from the PAME demonstration
parliament, for which they were denounced by KKE
vocateurs” and “fascists.”
tried to occupy
leaders as “pro-
ArANA
AAI>
Commu¬
nist Party
general
secretary
Aleka
Papariga
“plutocracy.” 4 While talking of “people’s power” and “social¬
ization of the banking system,” there is no mention of socialism
or revolution. What the KKE is angling for is a new edition
of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile.
We have seen that film before, and know its bloody ending.
For these arch-Stalinists, popular-front class collabora¬
tion and patriotic appeals go hand in hand. The KKE calls on
a nationalist basis for Greek withdrawal from the European
Union and the Eurozone, rather than opposing this imperialist
alliance with workers action (see below). It fails to mention
that the attraction of leaving the euro is that it would allow
Greece to devalue its currency, which while making its exports
cheaper would make imports more expensive and inevitably
lead to a sharp drop in workers ’living standards through infla¬
tion. And while today KKE spokesmen rail against capitalism,
should Greece exit the EU, you can bet your last drachma that
the Stalinists will hold out their hand to a mythical “patriotic
bourgeoisie,” offering their services for another “government
of national unity.” Media propaganda to the contrary, the last
4 Aleka Papariga, "KKE’s Proposal - Solution for the Crisis” (12
May)
thing the KKE wants is to organize for revo¬
lution. Savas Michael-Matsas of the EEK
(Revolutionary Workers Party) 5 reports
(Prensa Obrera, 11 November):
“In a recent parliamentary debate, Prime Min¬
ister Papandreou (president of the Socialist
International) challenged the secretary gen¬
eral of the KKE, Aleka Papariga, saying that
‘her party wished Greece to default in order to
promote world revolution,’ Papariga rejected
the accusation, noting that her party saw no
possibility of defeating capitalism and didn’t
support the idea of world revolution like
‘Trotsky, Pablo 6 , Castoriadis 7 or Marcuse 8 ’!”
Last May, Gen-Sec Papariga laid out the
KKE’s aims: “since the political balance
of forces does not permit us effective in¬
tervention in favour of the people, we put
priority on the movement,” i.e., “for work¬
ing people to disassociate themselves from
PASOK.” Translation: since we can’t stop
the attacks, we’ll use the opportunity to win
over PASOK’s working-class supporters.
But what about the KKE leader’s claim that nothing can be
done about the attacks on workers’ rights and living standards,
except to try to limit the damage? The germ of truth in this lie
is that little can be effected within the framework ofcapitalism
and bourgeois parliamentary “democracy, ” whose limits the
KKE scrupulously respects. Nothing to be done? Papariga’s
May 15 statement came only ten days after the biggest, most
militant working-class mobilization in Greece since the fall
of the junta in 1974, after a demonstration in which hundreds
of militants of the KKE’s labor front tried to storm parlia¬
ment (for which the KKE denounced them). There is plenty
that a genuinely communist, revolutionary party could do. It
could prepare for a general strike until the anti-worker laws
are withdrawn by calling for the election of strike committees
5 The EEK is affiliated with the Coordinating Committee for the Re¬
foundation of the Fourth International led by the Argentine Partido
Obrero of Jorge Altamira.
6 Michel Pablo (Mikhailis Raptis) became the main leader of the
Fourth International after many of its leading cadres were killed by
the Nazis or the Stalinists during World War II. In the 1950s his ca¬
pitulatory policies toward the Stalinsts and other non-revolutionary
leaderships, abandoning the struggle for an independent Trotskyist
vanguard, led to a deep split of the FI and its destruction as the world
party of socialist revolution.
7 Kornilius Kastoriadis broke with Trotskyism in 1948, declaring
the Soviet Union under Stalinism to be “bureaucratic capitalism”
rather than a bureaucratically degenerated workers state which must
be defended against imperialism while fighting for a proletarian po¬
litical revolution to oust the parasitic bureaucracy, as Trotsky held.
Kastoriadis founded the Socialisme ou Barbarie group in Paris and
definitively broke with Marxism in the 1960s.
8 Herbert Marcuse was a philosophy professor and writer originally
associated with the Frankfurt School of “academic Marxism.” His
Hegelian idealist views (as opposed to Marxist materialism) were
influential in the 1960s, and he gained fame as the father of the New
Left in the United States.
January-February 2011
The internationalist
21
everywhere; it could organize the permanent occupation of
central Athens by thousands of workers; it could call on bank
workers to open the books, to find out what happened to the
€100 billion in bailout money given to the banks to prevent
their default. Etc.
All of this, of course, would bring into question the foun¬
dations of capitalist rule. And that the “Communist” Party
will not do.
II. Left Electoral Coalitions:
Antechamber to a Popular Front
In addition to the KKE, there are quite a number of
would-be socialist and communist organizations in Greece,
grouped together in two main coalitions, SYRIZA (Coalition
of the Radical Left) and ANTARSYA (Anti-Capitalist Left
Cooperation for the Overthrow). Both the “radical” and the
“anti-capitalist” left coalition are electoral fronts running on
platforms of reforming capitalism that, with a little finessing,
could be accepted by a bourgeois “partner” - a split-off from
PASOK, or some minor party, perhaps an eco-capitalist Green
varietal. Each of the left coalitions is made up of a dozen or so
smaller groups, many of which have been in prior coalitions
with each other. Such electoral combinations are made possible
by the fact that the actual political programs of the various
components are not all that different from each other. And in
the struggle against the assault on the working class by the
PASOK government on behalf of the EU/IMF/ECB “troika,”
neither SYR1ZA nor ANTARSYA call for a counterattack
against capitalism. Their laundry lists of demands are entirely
on the bourgeois parliamentary terrain.
SYR1ZA is the older of the two alliances, dating from the
2004 elections and an earlier “Space for Dialogue” going back
to 2001. Its leading party, Synaspismos (which itself began
as the Progressive Left Coalition), traces its lineage to the
“Eurocommunist” split from the KKE, originally called the
KKE-interior (later called the Greek Left). 9 Far from represent¬
ing a “radical left” alternative to the Stalinist reformism of the
KKE and the bourgeois Hellenic Socialist Party government,
SYRIZA’s politics are traditional reformist social democracy.
As such, it has had a hard time deciding whether it wanted
to be an opposition to or a pressure group on PASOK. This
contradiction reached a breaking point this summer, when the
right wing of Synaspismos split to form the Democratic Left,
which in the November 2010 elections ran candidates on the
9 A 1968 split in the Greek CP produced the KKE-interior which
rejected Kremlin tutelage, prefiguring and later aligning with the
Eurocommunists. The latter was a current that arose in the West
European Communist parties, led by the Spanish PCE under San¬
tiago Carrillo and the Italian PCI under Enrico Berlinguer, which
broke with Moscow in order to integrate themselves more fully into
capitalism through popular fronts with bourgeois forces. Eurocom¬
munism was a stage in the social-democratization (and in the case
of the PCI, liquidation) of these parties. In the guise of rejecting
Stalinism, they discarded the last vestiges of Leninism, including
democratic centralism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. When
the second anti-Soviet Cold War broke out in 1980, the Eurocom¬
munists refused to defend the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Alexis
Tsipras,
leader of
SYRIZA
PASOK ticket. SYRIZA, on the other hand, ran a slate in the
Attica regional elections, including Athens, headed by Alexis
Mitropoulos, a founding member of PASOK who recently
resigned from the government party’s national council over
differences with its “neo-liberal policies.”
While SYRIZA mostly consists of ex-Stalinists (and
Mao-Stalinists of the KOE) who have become social demo¬
crats, a couple of ostensibly Trotskyist outfits are also part
of this coalition. This includes Xekinima, the Greek section
of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) led by
Peter Taaffe, while Marxistiki Foni, part of the International
Marxist Tendency (IMT) of Alan Woods, is a current inside
Synaspismos. Both the CWI and IMT come out of the Militant
tendency of Ted Grant in Britain, notable for its decades-
long submersion in the Labour Party. The whole Militant
tradition is one of “entrism,” burying themselves in the big
social-democratic or Stalinist reformist parties and seeking
to pressure them to the left. Another component of SYRIZA
is the DEA (International Workers Left), which is linked to
the International Socialist Organization in the United States.
Several of these groups joined SYRIZA in 2007-08, after a
slight “left turn” in Synaspismos and when the coalition was
up to 18% in the opinion polls due to a crisis in PASOK. Now
that SYRIZA has split, its candidates got barely 4.5% in the
2010 local elections, and the opportunists are lamenting that
they may have picked the wrong horse.
Just as they were forever calling on the Labour Party
in Britain to adopt a “socialist program,” the CWI and IMT
groups in Greece call for Synaspismos/SYRIZA to commit
to a “clearly left-wing program” for a “left government” (Xe¬
kinima), or alternatively for a “truly socialist government”
(Marxistiki Foni), in fighting the right wing of this coalition
which yearned to join a “center-left” government with PASOK.
Yet when the pseudo-Trotskyists talk of a “left” or “socialist”
government, this would be a government of the capitalist state.
Even if it commits to a program for “full employment” and
“nationalise the big monopolies, all the commanding heights
of production,” etc. - as the British Labour Party under Clem¬
ent Atlee and Aneurin Bevan did in the late 1940s - such a
government would remain subject to the capitalist market.
Genuine Trotskyists explain to the masses that no bourgeois
government, no matter how left it talks, can provide full em¬
ployment or expropriate the capitalists (as distinguished from
Athens News
Athens IMC
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
22
ANTARSYA banners (foreground) in 100,000-strong
strike demonstration in Athens, December 15.
nationalizing the losses of certain bankrupt sectors). That can
only be done by a revolutionary government based on workers
councils that bring down the state of the capitalist exploiters.
The second alliance, the “anti-capitalist left coalition”
ANTARSYA, was formed in early 2009, also as a combination
of previous coalitions. Its components include the NAR (New
Left Current) 10 ; the OKDE-Spartakos; * 11 and the SEK (Social¬
ist Workers Party). 12 If SYRIZA’s openly social-democratic
policies can sometimes place it to the right of the Stalinist
KKE, ANTARSYA assumes a more radical posture - while at
bottom it is no less reformist. And if SYRIZA’s vote has been
declining, ANTARSYA has picked up steam electorally, qua¬
drupling its 2009 score to 98,000 in the November 2010 vote,
giving it about 1.8% of the vote and eight local councillors.
This led SEK leader Petros Constantinou (who was elected to
10 Originating in a split of KKE youth members in 1989 in opposi¬
tion to the KKE joining (along with PASOK) an all-party govern¬
ment led by the right-wing New Democracy.
11 Greek section of the United Secretariat (USec), the heirs of Ernest
Mandel who claim to be the Fourth International although their poli¬
tics are counterposed to authentic Trotskyism.
12 Linked to the British SWP and the current founded by Tony Cliff
which labeled Stalin’s Soviet Union “state capitalist” and refused to
defend the USSR in the imperialists’ anti-Soviet Cold War.
the Athens city council) to wax lyrically about how “the anti¬
capitalists have a big opportunity to help lead the whole of
the left and the movement to a victory of historic dimensions”
{Socialist Review, December 2010). To draw such grandiose
conclusions from this modest result shows ANTARSYA’s
parliamentarist nature.
ANTARSYA is seen by various of its components as a
precursor to some kind of “anti-capitalist” left party, along the
lines of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) in France, where
Mandelites and Cliffites amiably cohabit in the leadership.
Where the pseudo-Trotskyists in SYR1ZA orient toward the
periphery of the Stalinist KKE and its offshoots, their coun¬
terparts in ANTARSYA look to the “anti-globalization” move¬
ment which, as in France, also includes bourgeois elements. 13
But politically, their programs are pretty much interchange¬
able, so much so that if someone hacked into the websites of
SYR1ZA and ANTARSYA and switched their programs in the
dead of night, it is doubtful that anyone would notice. The lat¬
ter’s program includes: nationalization of banks under workers
control; stop payment of the foreign debt; a ban on layoffs;
“secure and decent jobs for all”; wage increases; tax capital;
“cuts to military expenditures”; health care, social security and
public education for all; legalizing immigrants; refusal to obey
EU and IMF directives; exit from the Eurozone and European
Monetary Union, and “an anti-capitalist exit from the EU.”
In a statement of the “European radical left” on the
economic crisis and in solidarity with the struggle in Greece,
these demands are watered down to: stop pension “reform”;
“health and education are not for sale”; for a “public bank¬
ing service and financial system under public control”(!); a
guaranteed right to work, etc. (see Socialist Worker [Britain],
8 May). In either version, nothing in this platform goes be¬
yond the limits of capitalism, and deliberately so. The call to
“tax the rich/capital” was raised by none other than the head
of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (“Greece Urged to Tax
the Rich,” Financial Times [London], 8 December). And any
number of bourgeois governments have pledged themselves
to achieve full employment, though few have and then only
temporarily. These are essentially democratic demands to be
implemented by a more left-wing bourgeois regime. It is a
program geared toward a popular front including elements in
and around PASOK disappointed by the conversion of these
“Hellenic socialists” to free market “neo-liberalism.” As such,
this “radical left” platform is in reality a program to salvage
bankntpt Greek capitalism when it is on the point of collapse.
III. A Revolutionary Program to
Defeat the Capitalist Offensive
Thus in the face of the existential threat to the Greek
proletariat, while hundreds of thousands repeatedly take to
the streets to show their anger and will to struggle, what the
Greek left offers instead of a revolutionary mobilization of
workers’ power, is the usual reformist pablum and hunting
for votes in the framework of bourgeois “democratic” parlia-
13 In France, the ecologists symbolized by Jose Bove and the Attac
movement of Le Monde Diplomatique director Ignacio Ramonet.
January-February 2011
The internationalist
23
mentary politics.
In Greece as in France, the reformists’ demands and their
whole mode of struggle reflect the basic fact that they seek not
to overturn capitalist rule, but rather to find a niche within it
as a pressure group. Unfortunately for them, the bourgeoisie
has launched a frontal attack on the working class in order to
stave off its own collapse. So when old-line social democrats,
pseudo-communists and even younger “anti-capitalists” try to
divert resistance to the capitalist assault into electoral politics
or siphon off anger with endless marches, they have no crumbs
from the capitalist table to hand out, hoping to buy off sections
of the workers. In this situation, with the manifest willingness
of the working class to fight back against capitalist attack and
the equally clear incapacity of the reformist left, resolving the
crisis of leadership is key, as Trotsky insisted in the Transitional
Program. Revolutionary Marxists put forward a program oftran¬
sitional demands to turn defensive struggles into a proletarian
counteroffensive leading to international socialist revolution.
We seek to build a vanguard workers party to lead the exploited
and oppressed from resistance to a struggle for power.
The clash between reformist and revolutionary programs
is constant. Take the demand for nationalization of the banks,
which is put forward by the KKE, the “radical left” and “anti¬
capitalist left” coalitions and all their components. At the pres¬
ent time, the Greek banldng system - at least in its operations
within Greece - is essentially bankrupt. Its debts to European
and North American banks and the imperialist agencies (IMF,
ECB, etc.) vastly exceed its assets and any income it expects
to receive from outstanding loans. Certainly the savings and
accounts of working- and middle-class depositors should be
guaranteed. But for the government to take over the banks today
would be to rescue the leading Greek capitalists and financiers
from collapse: it is a pro-capitalist not an anti-capitalist demand.
Look at what happened with the nationalization of the banks by
Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo in 1982 at the time the
famous “debt bomb” exploded. This was a measure that saved
the Mexican bourgeoisie from utter ruin. A dozen years later,
after recapitalizing the bankrupt financial institutions, they were
reprivatized. Trotskyists do not call for “trash can socialism” or
socializing the capitalists’ losses, but for expropriation of the
banks - and the entire bourgeoisie -by a workers government.
As a step in that direction, Greek workers today should
occupy the banks, instituting workers control, and “open
the books’’ so everyone can see the financial swindles that
have been going on. This is a very different demand than the
reformists’ talk of “public ownership” under “public control,”
or even “socialization” of the banks. What they are presenting
is a program for a “left” bourgeois government. Thus an article
by the editor of Marxistiki Foni (IMT), “The EU, Greece and
the Demands of the Left” (29 June), after listing a series of
demands, concludes: “To implement this program as a whole,
requires the election of a leftist socialist government .” If he
adds “based on self-organization of workers in every workplace
and every neighborhood,” etc., this is just to cover the fact that
he is calling for a government installed by a bourgeois election.
Likewise, when the reformists refer to “workers control,” they
mean the revisionist distortion of this transitional demand into
“ self-managemenf ’ under capitalism. 14 But having a union
commission occasionally glance at some fraudulent statement
cooked up by the capitalist bankers is very different from the
workers effectively taking control of the banks, on the road
to workers revolution.
Similarly with the international demands of the various
left groups. ANTARSYA calls for “immediate stoppage of
foreign debt payments,” some left groups call for a “morato¬
rium,” SYRIZA leader Tsipras wants to “restructure the terms”
of Greece’s public debt (and “perhaps write off some of the
debt”), KKE leader Papariga says only that “The public debt
will be re-examined under people’s power.” These wishy-
washy demands, each more feeble than the last, all present a
program for a “left government” trying to work out a deal with
the creditors. Temporary debt moratoriums and “restructuring”
debts have been common in Latin America, although this still
leaves the debtor country chained to the imperialist banks. The
SEK raises the correct demand to “abolish Greece’s debt” to
the imperialist bankers (but then waters this down to stopping
payment for the purposes of its electoral coalition). Yet even
in this “left” version, the reformists don’t make clear that the
dominant imperialist powers would oust any government and
subject to a devastating embargo any country that dared to
cancel their debt. Abolition of the imperialist debt requires
workers revolution, as the Bolsheviks did in 1917, and inter¬
national extension of the revolution.
What about Greece’s relation to the euro and the European
Union? ANTARSYA and the KKE call for Greece to leave the
EU, various components of SYRIZA do not. For Trotskyists,
our opposition to the imperialist European Union is not nation¬
alist but internationalist, opposing the Europe of the capital¬
ists by fighting for workers rule - a socialist united states of
Europe. To call for Geece to exit the EU and drop the euro
in favor of the drachma is quite different - this is a bourgeois
nationalist demand, with negative consequences for Greek
workers. What concretely would be accomplished by Greek
withdrawal from the Eurozone? It would be able to devalue its
currency, making Greek exports and Greek vacations relatively
cheaper. It would increase tourist income; whether it would
enable Greece to export more is debatable, since much of its
industrial capacity has been destroyed. But it would also make
servicing Greece’s euro-denominated debt more expensive, and
imports more costly - producing serious inflation. In fact, a
principal effect and main purpose of currency devaluations is
to slash wages through inflation, which is a lot easier for the
bosses than imposing a direct pay cut.
Thus in calling for Greece to leave the European Union, and
drop the euro and even to abolish the debt, leftists are angling for
a political bloc with a section of the bourgeoisie, and the PASOK
14 Ernest Mandel carried out this revisionist operation in 1968, just
when a fight for workers control as Trotsky defined it - dual power
in the factory - was eminently possible as a means to combat the
Stalinists’ sellout of the French general strike. Mandel’s embrac¬
ing of self-management (“ autogestion ”) served as a basis for his
French followers’ alliance with the Unified Socialist Party (PSU)
of the long-time bourgeois Radical and ex-prime minister Pierre
Mendes-France.
24
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
~ ' ' T? 1 ■
Greek troops participate in the U.S./NATO war/occupation of
Afghanistan. Trotskyists say: Drive out all imperialist forces!
government in particular. In an article on “How can
Greek workers beat the IMF?” ( Socialist Worker, 15
May), the British SWP argued that:
“The ruling class is vulnerable. It could decide that
the best way out of the crisis—and to protect its
power—is to abolish Greece’s debt.
“The Greek government could pull out of the euro,
take charge of its own currency and defy the IMF’s
demands for cuts.”
This is not just the opinion of the British Cliffites.
Supporters of the SEK in Athens argued the same
pro-capitalist line.
Calls for Greece to leave the EU are not limited
to left-wing Greek nationalists. Mainstream bourgeois
economists like Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini
and Hans-Werner Sinn have stated that as part of a
“controlled default,” Greece will have to abandon the
euro. 15 No matter how severe the austerity, they argue,
Greece will never be able to pay the full amounts owed
to the international bankers as long as it is tied to the
euro. Moreover, if bankers don’t have confidence in
Greece’s ability to pay, it won’t be able to get loans to
finance its annual budget deficit of 13% of GDP - or
even its unattainable target of 3%. If Greece does abandon the
euro, Krugman writes, “it will play something like Argentina in
2001, which had a supposedly permanent, unbreakable peg to the
dollar.... [I]t will send shock waves through Europe, possibly
triggering crises in other countries” {New York Times, 7 May). In
Argentina, the abandonment of the U.S. dollar peg led to the fall
of five governments in the space of a week, factory occupations
and movements of laid-off workers (the piqueteros). Capitalism
is still intact on the Rio de la Plata, but Argentine workers paid
the price with a devastating fall of their living standards.
Many on the left, particularly in and around the KKE, speak
of Greece as being subject to “imperialist oppression,” thereby
portraying withdrawal from the EU as an “anti-imperialist”
step. Yet Greece is not some semi-colonial country struggling
for independence. It is a sub-imperialist power whose capitalists
own the largest shipping fleet in the world (though mostly not
sailing under the Greek flag); whose banks have historically
had a privileged position in the eastern Mediterranean and are
now buying up banks and companies throughout the Balkans;
and which economically dominates Macedonia and Albania.
Moreover, there are small Albanian and substantial Macedonian
minorities in northern Greece. The KKE calls to “defend the
territorial integrity and the sovereign rights of our country” and
joins the Greek government in referring to its northern neighbor
as FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) while
calling to “safeguard Greece” from the “irredentist views of the
leadership of FYROM.” 16 In contrast. Trotskyists support the
15 Sinn: “All the alternatives are terrible but the least terrible is for
the country to get out of the eurozone, even if this kills the Greek
banks.” Krugman: “What remains seems unthinkable: Greece leav¬
ing the euro. But when you’ve ruled out everything else, that’s what’s
left.” “Roubini Says Greece May Lead Euro Exodus,” Bloomberg
BusinessWeek, 12 May.
16 “About the situation in the Balkans and the issue of the FYROM
Macedonian right to self-determination and fight for a socialist
federation of the Balkans.
Significantly, some who call for Greece to exit the EU do
not call for Greek withdrawal from NATO. Why not? Because
that could weaken Greece militarily in its eternal jousting with
Turkey, both over Cyprus and the Aegean Sea, where Ankara
claims that several islands held by Greece belong to it. The
Stalinist-nationalist KKE, while opposing NATO, vociferously
upholds “The struggle for sovereign rights in the Aegean, for the
territorial integrity of our country.” 17 This is no abstract issue for
the KKE: as recently as last July Greek F-16 fighter jets inter¬
cepted Turkish F-16s near the island of Ikaria, the only locality
where the Greek Communist Party has close to a majority. 18
But as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist
Manifesto, that “the workers have no country (fatherland)” so
long as the bourgeoisie rules. Genuine Marxists support neither
side in Greek-Turkish disputes over the Aegean and Cyprus,
and call instead for unity with Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot
workers in struggle against capitalism.
While ANTARS YA calls in its program for “cuts to military
expenditure” and several of its components call for withdrawal
from Afghanistan, the League for the Fourth International says
“not one euro for the imperialist military” and calls to drive all
U.S./NATO occupation forces (including the 125-man Greek
contingent) out of Afghanistan. Domestically, the economic
crisis has been accompanied by the growth of ultra-rightist
name,” KKE statement, 8 November 2007.
17 “Report of the Central Committee of the KKE to the 17th Con¬
gress,” February 2005.
18 Ikaria, located near the Turkish coast, was used as a prison island
under the Metaxas dictatorship, and again for Communist prisoners
during the post-WWII Greek Civil War. A number of Communists
stayed on the relatively underdeveloped island and in the November
2010 municipal elections the KKE received 48 percent of the vote.
However, all the other parties joined together to prevent it from con¬
trolling the local government.
Katadromi
January-February 2011
The internationalist
25
EU chief Barroso threatens dictatorship in Spain, Greece, Portugal if auster¬
ity is rejected. From left: Gen. Francisco Franco, caudillo who ruled Spain
from 1939 to 1975; Col. Giorgios Papadopoulos, who led military junta that
ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974; and Antonio Salazar, who established
right-wing authoritarian regime that ruled Portugal from 1932 until 1975.
forces such as the Popular Orthodox
Rally (LAOS) and openly Nazi-fascist
groups such as “Golden Dawn,” which
ominously got 5% of the vote in Athens
and which has mounted virulent anti¬
immigrant campaigns. In the face of
right-wing attempts to whip up chauvin¬
ist hysteria, ANTARSYA calls vaguely
to “legalize immigrants,” Trotskyists
fight for full citizenship rights for all
immigrants and for workers defense
against anti-immigrant attacks.
The same clash between reformist
and revolutionary politics is manifest
in the question of methods of struggle
to be employed. With one-fifth (or
more) of the labor force out of work,
with less than one youth in four hav¬
ing a job (and most of those being
part-time, temporary or for short-term
contracts), and now with looming mass
layoffs, the issue of unemployment is
a key battleground for Greek workers.
The call for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay (a sliding
scale of hours), to provide jobs for all through distributing
the available work among all takers, is a classic demand of
Trotsky’s Transitional Program. Likewise with the call for
indexing pay to inflation (a sliding scale of wages), which will
be vital should Greece abandon the euro. But in the programs
of the reformists, these demands - which prefigure a socialist
planned economy - are to be implemented when a future “left/
socialist government” gets elected. In contrast, revolutionary
Trotskyists call on the workers movement to mobilize its power
today to impose these demands against the resistance of the
bourgeois rulers.
Thus under the batch of anti-labor laws just voted by
the PASOK majority in Parliament, the government plans to
privatize the state railway OSE, and in preparation for that, to
fire 2,500 rail workers (40 percent of the total). The POS rail
union has staged repeated strikes over the last six months to
protest the privatization/layoff plan, but only for one or a few
days at a time. Faced with this death threat from the capital¬
ists, rail workers should strike and occupy the OSE until the
government’s plan is withdrawn, including cancelling all
layoffs and wage cuts. Kick out management, stop all freight
traffic, perhaps maintain passenger service. Ask government
workers to help them inspect the state railroad’s books. If that
is not enough, occupations could be extended to include, say,
the Acropolis, where workers have not been paid for months
(and riot police recently attacked union pickets). Their example
would soon be followed in other sectors facing the massive
jobs slaughter by the PASOK budget axe murderers.
The growing brutality of police attacks on demonstra¬
tors points to the danger that the ruling class could resort to
bonapartist measures in enforcing its anti-worker offensive.
Indeed, the head of the EU, former Portuguese prime minister
Jose Manuel Barroso, told trade unionists several months ago
that if austerity measures were not approved, Greece, Spain
and Portugal “could virtually disappear in the way that we
know them as democracies.” The London Daily Mail (15 June)
portrayed Barroso’s warning as “an ‘apocalyptic’ vision in
which crisis-hit countries in southern Europe could fall victim
to military coups or popular uprisings as interest rates soar and
public services collapse because their governments run out of
money.” Clearly this is blackmail, yet the bonapartist threat
is real. The workers movement must build up its defensive
capacities. Unions should initiate worker defense guards to
defend strike pickets and protests, including flying squads
to come to the aid of workers under attack - and immigrants
threatened by fascist gangs. However, the rare mentions of
workers defense guards in the reformist left press have called
for their formation to protect workers demonstrations from
... the anarchists! 19
What will it take to defeat the bosses’ attacks? Accounts of
the “general strike” mobilizations in Greece as far back as last
February quote demonstrators complaining that such marches
19 Following the deaths of the three bank workers in the May 5 gen¬
eral strike, Xekinima (the CWI affiliate) issued a press statement the
next day declaring, “the first task to which the organised workers’
movement and particularly the mass parties of the Left should re¬
spond to, is the defence of the rallies and mass actions of the work¬
ing class, by all means, from these ‘anti-state’ groups.” They were
echoing the KKE and SYRIZA tops and along with them were ca¬
pitulating to the hysteria whipped up by Papandreou and the bour¬
geois media. Trotskyists are against the capitalist state, including
when it is administered by sniveling social democrats like Militant
- in Liverpool, England between 1983 and 1987 - who consider
cops to be “workers in uniform” and support police “strikes.” While
taking necessary precautionary measures to protect the integrity of
demonstrations, th e first task for revolutionary communists would is
to defend them against the murderous bourgeois state.
AP and EPA
26
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Workers march in Moscow during during general strike, October 1905.
are not about to force the govern¬
ment to back down, and more mili¬
tant tactics are needed. Yet what
does the “radical/anti-capitalist”
left offer? Essentially more of
the same. Thus an article by Fred
Weston of the IMT and Stamatis
Karagiannopoulos of Marxistiki
Foni states: “The fact is that the
bourgeoisie can live with a few
general strikes and protests as long
as these don’t seriously challenge
their power.” 20 Quite true. Their
conclusion? “What is required is
a 48-hour general strike of all sec¬
tors, both public and private, with
mass rallies all over Greece.” Yet
the May 4-6 mobilization already
amounted to a 72-hour strike by
key sectors! “After that the move¬
ment needs to be taken to a higher
level,” namely an “all-out struggle
... to stop the PASOK government
in its tracks.” Flow is not specified.
But the situation cries out for a real
general strike to defeat the capitalist attack and open the way
to workers revolution.
Many would-be socialists and anarcho-syndicalists make
the general strike into the be-all and end-all of class struggle.
(The anarchist equivalent is a fetish for occupations: “Occupy
Athens, London, Rome,” read a slogan on a wall during the
December 15 strike.) Some point to Rosa Luxemburg’s en¬
thusiasm for the mass strikes that swept Russia in 1905. But
by itself, the strike (withholding labor) is essentially a passive
form of defensive struggle. Trotskyists stress that while the
general strike poses the question of power, it alone cannot
resolve it. The general strikes in Russia ultimately led to the
Moscow uprising of December 1905. In his article summing
up this experience, Lenin wrote: “A peaceful strike and dem¬
onstrations immediately ceased to satisfy the workers. They
asked: What is to be done next? And they demanded more
resolute action.” Recalling Marx’s observation that the prog¬
ress of revolution also produces strong counterrevolutionary
tendencies, Lenin spelled out:
“The strike was growing into an uprising, primarily as a result
of the pressure of the objective conditions.... Over the heads
of the organizations, the mass proletarian struggle developed
from a strike to an uprising. This is the greatest historic gain
the Russian revolution achieved in December 1905.”
-“Lessons of the Moscow Uprising” (March 1906)
The organs of struggle thrown up in such a battle could
become workers councils, like the soviets in tsarist Russia, and
eventually become the framework of a proletarian state. That
depends centrally on the leadership of a vanguard workers party
like the Bolsheviks, taking the struggle in the direction of social-
ist revolution not in the distant future but in the here and now.
20 “Greece: What Now?” In Defense of Marxism (18 June)
The IMT article does say that “the question of who is to
govern the country, and in the interests of which class, would
be posed.” But what is their answer? As “a political alternative
to the present government,” they call for “a united front of the
KKE and Synaspismos/SYRIZA aimed at the wider labour
movement.” They add: “Unless these two parties adopt a fully
worked out socialist programme, come together and direct their
propaganda at the ranks of the labour movement who support the
PASOK, then the present stalemate will continue.” This is not
calling for a united front for workers action , but an appeal to
the sellout party/union bureaucracies to form a propaganda hloc
with “socialist” rhetoric. The OKDE-Spartakos, for its part, calls
for “united mobilization to defeat the government’s measures,”
noting that the KKE/PAME “go to great lengths never to call
actions jointly or in the same place as the majority unions.” 21
Others cite as a precedent Trotsky’s appeal for a workers united
front in France in 1934, following a violent fascist demonstration
against the bourgeois Radical government. Yet while saying that
Marx and Lenin were prepared “to make practical agreements
with any mass organization for the defense of the daily interests
of the proletariat,” the Bolshevik leader emphasized:
“[I]t is not true that the proletariat is in need of unity in and of
itself. It needs revolutionary unity in the class struggle _Op¬
portunistic ‘unity’ has proven itself to be the road to ruin....
Such unity is a rope around the neck of the working class.
“We need genuine, revolutionary, fighting unity: for the resis¬
tance against fascism, for the defense of our right to live, for
an irreconcilable struggle against bourgeois rule, for the full
conquest of power, for the dictatorship of the proletariat....”
21 Tassos Anastassiadis and Andreas Sartzekis, “Workers against
the so-called stability programme,” International Viepoint No. 423,
April 2010.
Hulton Archive
January-February 2011
The internationalist
27
- “France Is Now the Key to the Situation” (March 1934),
Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34)
The reformist misleaders of the unions can sometimes
be forced by pressure from the ranks and the severity of the
attacks to undertake defensive actions: this is what happened
this past spring in Greece and in the autumn in France. But
even then, they place themselves at the head of mobilizations
only to sell them out. That is why Trotskyists direct their
appeals for an all-out general strike to the workers organiza¬
tions themselves, including but not focusing on the leaders;
and also why we call for the formation of elected strike com¬
mittees to take control of the struggle out of the hands of the
pro-capitalist bureaucrats. In fact, the general strike with the
greatest revolutionary potential in recent times, in France in
May 1968, came about largely because of the initiative of
the masses overcoming bureaucratic resistance. And in any
case, the KKE, SYR1ZA or ANTARSYA, whether separately
or united, cannot be an alternative to PASOK, for they also
ultimately support bourgeois rule, having been thoroughly
integrated into the capitalist electoral apparatus. Calling on
committed reformists to be transmogrified into revolutionaries
can only breed illusions. 22
As for the anarchists, their repertoire consists essentially
of endless skirmishes with the police that, in the absence of a
revolutionary mobilization of the working class to defeat the
guardians of bourgeois “law and order,” can only be a form
of street theater. It makes for dramatic photos, and sometimes
tragedy, while offering ample opportunity for police provo¬
cation. While pseudo-socialist reformists see their number
one task as “protecting” demonstrations from the likes of the
“black bloc,” Trotskyists defend anarchist and autonomist
militants against capitalist state repression. At the same time
we underline that “direct action” by small groups, a program
born of desperation and despair, undercuts the struggle to
raise revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat and
promote the self-organization of the workers and oppressed
in overthrowing capitalism.
There can and should be “popular uprisings” in Europe
against the breakdown of services and against the bourgeoisie’s
austerity plans, but it is crucial that such upheavals be led by the
working class, and that they aim at bringing down capitalism
and instituting workers rule. This prospect is still distant, but
when hundreds of thousands of Greek working people repeat¬
edly strike and occupy Athens, when thousands of trade union¬
ists boo their leaders off the stage, when hundreds of workers
attempt to storm the Greek parliament, the union bureaucrats
as well as spokesmen for the bourgeoisie can see quite clearly
where this is heading. Their response is to try to head it off,
for like their social-democratic predecessors in Germany in
1918-19. they fear revolution like the plague. The formation
22 Note also that the “radical/anti-capitalist” left’s opposition to PA¬
SOK is only conditional (“so long as the right-wing PASOK leader¬
ship continues to collaborate in these crimes being carried out by
the international capitalists against the working people of Greece,”
as the IMT put it [In Defense of Marxism, 24 February]). Let Papan-
dreou nationalize a couple of banks and these pseudo-Trotskyists
would eagerly offer their support, “critically” of course.
of politically undefined “new mass workers parties” - even if
you add the adjective “socialist” - cannot defeat the capitalist
attack. To turn the present defensive struggles of the Greek
working class into a proletarian counteroffensive and to lead it
forward to the overthrow of bourgeois rule, the central need is
for a genuinely communist, Leninist-Trotskyist workers party.
In a resolution on Europe from its recent international
congress, the CWI writes: “But what has saved capitalism,
so far, has been the political weakness of the working class, a
result of the past decades’ falling back in class consciousness,
that has meant there has been no general counter-posing of
socialism as the alternative to capitalism” (posted CWI web
site, 23 December). Actually, no: what has saved capitalism
has been the betrayals of the leadership. This same argument
has been proffered by opportunists the world over, in order
to excuse their own failure to fight for revolution. 23 (It must
be admitted that in the case of the CWI, IMT, USec and the
rest, the argument has a certain twisted logic: since their own
policies consist of chasing whatever is popular, if there is no
“mass movement” for socialism, how can they tail after it?) As
Lenin emphasized - and Marxists from the then-revolutionary
Karl Kautsky to Leon Trotsky also held - consciousness of
the need to fight for socialist revolution to overthrow capitalist
rule does not arise spontaneously, it results from a dialectical
interaction between the masses’ experience of class struggle
and the intervention of the revolutionaries.
Instead of the “class patriotism” of the KKE, a Leninist-
Trotskyist party would be animated by proletarian interna¬
tionalism. Waging the struggle on a Europe-wide rather than
a national basis is indispensable, as the capitalist offensive
against the working class is continental in scope. Even a lim¬
ited victory in Greece, or anywhere else, would have to spread
internationally or soon be overturned. Such a revolutionary-
internationalist leadership of the working class does not now
exist in Greece. Should one therefore throw up one’s hands
and say that, alas, until such a leadership arises nothing can
be done? Or seek to pressure the existing anti-revolutionary
leadership to change its spots? Both would be a betrayal of the
workers’ cause. Instead we must build a Bolshevik vanguard
party through intervening in the struggles of the working class
on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, fighting for a socialist
united states of Europe and to reforge the Fourth International
as the world party of socialist revolution. ■
23 Notably the International Communist League, or Spartacist tenden¬
cy, in expelling long-time cadres in 1996-97 who went on to found
the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International,
rejected the IG’s assertion: “The central thesis of the 1938 Transi¬
tional Program of the FI fully retains its validity today: ‘The historical
crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary lead¬
ership.... the crisis of the proletarian leadership, having become the
crisis in mankind’s culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth Inter¬
national.’ ” Trotsky’s thesis, the ICL wrote in revising its program a
year later, was outdated by “the present deep regression of proletarian
consciousness” so that today the backwardness of the working class is
key. Fora discussion of how this claim has been raised by a host of ex-
Marxists, see our article, “In Defense of the Transitional Program,”
The Internationalist No. 5, April-May 1998)
28
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Sinister Attack on WikiLeaks to Cover Up Imperialist Crimes
Free Julian Assange!
Drop All Charges!
Julian Assange, presenting WikiLeaks’ release of files on Afghanistan war in
London, July 26.
9 DECEMBER 2010 - The De¬
cember 7 arrest in London of Julian
Assange, the founder and editor-
in-chief of the Internet investiga¬
tive site WikiLeaks, is a threat to
freedom of the press and an attempt
to silence critics who expose the
bloody deeds of imperialism. We
are convinced, along with many
others, that Assange is innocent of
the trumped up accusations of the
crimes of rape and sexual molesta¬
tion that are being manipulated by
Swedish authorities to request his
detention and extradition. It is clear
that sinister forces are pushing the
persecution of this courageous man,
and his life could be in danger.
We have no hesitation in
naming the criminal forces who
are behind this frame-up: first and
foremost, the United States government of Barack Obama and
its military and spy agencies. They have enlisted U.S. corpora¬
tions such as Amazon, MasterCard, PayPal and others, Swiss
banks and the complaisant Swedish, British and Australian
governments in their war on WikiLeaks. They seek to silence
whistleblowers who have not only caused them diplomatic
embarrassment but also lifted a corner of the veil on Wash¬
ington’s Murder, Inc. If the would-be masters of the world
cannot stop the leakage of information through judicial/police
methods, they will surely resort to other means.
Despite the arrest of its leader, the shutdown of some of
its websites by service providers due to U.S. threats and cutoff
of donations by payments companies, WikiLeaks has vowed to
keep publishing. It is urgent that all defenders of civil liberties
and opponents of imperialist war stand up in defense of Julian
Assange, demanding that he be immediately freed and that all
charges against him be dropped , including those that are in the
works. It is also necessary to defend his comrades who are at
risk for their dedication to shining a light into the dark corners
where the capitalist rulers hide their dirty secrets. And we must
oppose all efforts by the U.S. and its allies to enact gag laws to
enforce police-state controls. We demand: Hands off WikiLeaks!
For the last nine months, U.S. imperialism has been smarting
over a series of revelations of a small proportion of its crimes by
WikiLeaks. The website won global fame and attention when it
released the video “Collateral Murder” last April, showing the
crews of U.S. helicopter gunships nonchalantly mowing down with
machine-gun and rocket fire two reporters, several first aid respond¬
ers and even children in Baghdad in 2007. Millions of viewers
watched in horror as they saw the massacre unfold before their eyes.
The Pentagon, stung by the worldwide outrage, responded
by arresting Private First Class Bradley Manning, a military intel¬
ligence analyst stationed in the Iraqi capital, charging him with leak¬
ing the incriminating footage. In our article, “Defend PFC Bradley
Manning!” (The InternationalistNo. 31, Summer 2010), we wrote:
“If Bradley Manning did indeed help to uncover evidence of U.S.
imperialism’s war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and if he did try
to bring to light the secret dealings of U.S. diplomats and spies,
these were justified acts evidencing rare moral courage. Class¬
conscious workers and all defenders of democratic rights should
hail Manning as a hero. Exposing U.S. imperialism’s crimes and
tearing the curtain of secrecy from its plots can save the lives of
innocent people by helping to put an end to the Pentagon’s reign
of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world.”
We also warned that Julian Assange, the founder and editor-in-
chief of WikiLeaks, was at risk of arrest or even assassination:
“Make no mistake, J ulian Assange is in real danger from the
same imperialist war criminals that have Bradley Manning
in a military jail. Hands off Julian Assange and WikiLeaks /”
In July, WikiLeaks followed up by releasing over 90,000
documents from the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan spanning
the six-year period from 2004 through 2009. The Afghanistan
War Logs were provided in advance to several leading news
media, including the New York Times, the London Guardian
Getty Images
January-February 2011
The internationalist
29
and the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which published
excerpts. Naturally, the Times downplayed some of the most
egregious war crimes - for example, suppressing a story by its
correspondent on the hit squads of Task Force 3 73, professional
assassins responsible for numerous massacres in Afghanistan
- alleging lack of space and other implausible excuses. Der
Spiegel (26 July), at least, put the story on its cover.
In October, Wikileaks released 350,000 documents about
the Iraq war, showing, as Assange summarized them, that it
was “a bloodbath on every corner.” It also documented 15,000
civilian deaths that the U.S. never publicly admitted. Then at
the end of November, WikiLeaks began releasing documents
from a trove of251,000 secret State Department and CIA cables.
As rad-lib journalist Alexander Cockbum noted in an article
titled “Julian Assange: Wanted by the Empire, Dead or Alive”
(i Counterpunch , 3-5 December), the “communications released
by WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking disclosures that under¬
mine the security of the American empire.” The latest stash of
documents published so far mainly illustrate the prejudices and
stupidities of the diplomatic corps. Most of the yelps are coming
from the governments being reported on, not from the U.S. If
anything, as a columnist for an Israeli liberal Zionist paper noted:
“They depict the fall of the American empire, the decline of
a superpower that ruled the world by dint of its military and
economic supremacy.... The days when American ambassa¬
dors were received in world capitals as ‘high commissioners’
are long since gone. The diplomats who wrote the WikiLeaks
documents are tired bureaucrats: Nobody rises in their honor
and clicks their heels when they enter a room. They spend
their days listening wearily to their hosts’ talking points,
never reminding them who is the superpower and who the
client state that needs military or financial aid from America.”
-Aluf Benn, “WikiLeaks Cables Tell the Story of An Empire
in Decline,” Haaretz, 1 December
That certainly describes Israel’s dismissal of any pressure from
the Obama administration.
No doubt, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton felt put-upon
to excuse U.S. envoys’ denigrating comments about their
“allies,” and to explain why the Foreign Service and even
ambassadors had been tasked with ferreting out the cellphone,
credit card and frequent flier numbers of their counterparts.
Or to explain about the list of facilities in other countries that
the U.S. considers its own (“critical foreign dependencies”).
Moscow was irate about a secret NATO treaty to defend Es¬
tonia, Latvia and Lithuania. “Against whom else could such
a defense be intended? Against Sweden, Finland, Greenland,
Iceland? Against polar bears, or against the Russian bear?”
asked the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin. Rus¬
sian president Dmitri Medvedev suggested perhaps Assange
should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
U.S. spokesmen keep repeating that the leaks will get
their secret informants killed, for which there is not a shred
of evidence. After getting heat for releasing the names of
Afghan informers collaborating with the NATO occupiers
(what about the identities of Nazi collaborators in occupied
Europe?), WikiLeaks is so intent on appearing responsible that
it has taken to excising the names of such covert operatives
themselves. At least former CIA agent Philip Agee named
names when he broke with “The Company” in the 1960s. Still,
official Washington is fit to be tied. Democrats and Republicans
alike fear that the U.S.’ ability to dictate to the world will be
gravely compromised unless it clamps down on “unauthorized
disclosures.” “The empire can’t exist without secrecy,” said
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers history of the
Vietnam War, in defending Assange and WikiLeaks.
Democrat Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intel¬
ligence Committee, notorious for covering up CIA torture,
called for Assange to be prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage
Act. Democratic turncoat Joe Lieberman, head of the Senate’s
Homeland Security Committee, wants to investigate the New
York Times as well. And Attorney General Eric Holder vows
to “close the gaps in current U.S. legislation” by enacting new
laws infringing on freedom of speech. But that may take some
time. They yearn for an Official Secrets Act like in Britain,
so they could stop publication of anything by slapping a “D
Notice” on it. They wish they were back in the post-9/11 days
when they rammed through the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act with a
near-unanimous vote before anyone bothered to read it.
For now, they want to defame the WikiLeaks founder, to
take away Assange’s moral authority by smearing him so that
he looks dirtier than they are - a pretty tall order. So we get this
persecution on sex charges. Not prosecution yet, for curiously no
charges have been filed. In fact, the allegations against him were
not even described to Assange and his lawyers before he was
arrested on an Interpol alert and held for deportation to Sweden.
No evidence has ever been presented. Everything about this legal
vendetta stinks to high heaven of state provocation. Briefly:
• Assange is supposedly being held only for questioning. Yet
he stayed in Sweden for 40 days after the allegations were first
made, seeking to speak to the prosecutor, who would not see
him and finally let him leave the country legally. He offered to
be questioned at the Swedish embassy in London, to no avail.
• The allegations were first made on August 20 by a pros¬
ecutor in Stockholm. But, as Assange’s attorney in London,
Mark Stephens, said in an interview with Channel 4 News (7
December), “the most senior prosecutor in all of Sweden looked
at them, and she said there is not a shred of evidence here that
warrants an investigation” of rape or sexual harassment. So in
less than a day, the main accusations against him were dropped.
• Weeks went by, and then “a politician got involved with
these women and took them off to another prosecutor, in Go-
thenberg, and we’re now seeing these warrants coming out
suspiciously close in time to the date of the release of the cables.”
This kind of “witch-hunt,” Stephens said, suggests that this af¬
fair is “politically motivated, there are darker forces at work.”
Indeed there are. And what are those “darker forces?” the
interviewer asks. Assange’s lawyer responds that “Sweden is one
of those lickspittle states that allowed for ‘extraordinary rendition’
and torture flights to go through their country.” Good point. Not
only did Sweden dispatch asylum seekers to Egypt where they
were imprisoned, beaten and tortured, as well as allowing CIA
“rendition” flights, under Prime Minister Goran Persson of the
Social-Democratic Labor Party (SAP), despite its professed neutral-
30
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
ity, Sweden sent troops to join in the occupation of Afghanistan.
This points to the crucial social-democratic connection in
this affair. Sweden’s social democracy has long been a hand¬
maiden of U.S. intelligence agencies. During the 1980s, much
of the CIA’s clandestine aid to the anti-Soviet Polish Solidarnosc
was channeled through Sweden with the blessing of SAP prime
minister Olaf Palme. This was hardly novel. The CIA financed
social-democratic parties throughout Western Europe after
World War II in order to break their wartime alliances with the
pro-Moscow Communist parties. It is particularly significant in
the case of Assange, because the politician/lawyer who contacted
the prosecutor in Goteborg was Claes Borgstrom, who is the
SAP’s chief spokesman on gender equality issues.
This brings us to Anna Ardin, one of the two women
who made the accusations against Assange. Ardin is a well-
known feminist activist who was a gender equality officer for
Uppsala University, the Harvard of Sweden. She is also the
press secretary of the Christian Social Democratic Association,
commonly referred to as the Brotherhood Movement. Former
prime minister Persson is likewise a member of this associa¬
tion. Anna Ardin worked at the Swedish embassy in Buenos
Aires for a time when the Social Democrats were in power, and
also reportedly at the Swedish embassy in the U.S. But most
particularly, Ardin has been active on the issue of Cuba, as a
social-democratic operative keeping in touch with anti-Castro
“dissidents” (see box on “Anna Ardin’s Gusano Connection”).
Anna Ardin was the person who invited Julian Assange
to speak at the Stockholm meeting on August 14, hosted by
the Christian Social Democrat Brotherhood organization. An
article by Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett (“Assange Besieged,”
Counterpunch, 14 September) noted that while Assange went
to Stockholm hoping to shield WikiLeaks from legal perse¬
cution, “the moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish
media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue in¬
telligence sharing with [SAPO], the Swedish Secret Service.” 1
It turns out that Ardin has a brother who works in Swedish
intelligence, and who was a liaison in Washington to U.S. spy
agencies. Nothing but a strange coincidence?
Ardin offered to let Assange stay at her flat, and the night
before the meeting they had sex. This sure smells like a classic
intelligence agency “honey trap,” but with a Swedish twist.
1 Since this article was first published on the Internet, it has come to
our attention that Israel Shamir is a Holocaust denier, which could call
into question his credibility. However, on the charge of pressure from
U.S. spy agencies on their Swedish counterparts, Assange himself re¬
ports that WikiLeaks had “two reliable intelligence sources that state
that Swedish intelligence was approached last month by the United
States and told that Sweden must not be a safe-haven for WikiLeaks”
(AFP dispatch, 8 September). When the Swedish news agency Tid-
ningamas Telegrambyra asked a top official of Sweden’s Migration
Board whether in denying Assange a residency permit it had been
advised by the Swedish intelligence agency SAPO, the official re¬
sponded: “I cannot go into the details” — a “non-denial denial” in clas¬
sic Watergate fashion. As for the report of Anna Ardin’s activities with
the U.S.-funded group Damas de Blanco and other anti-Conununist
“dissidents” in Cuba leading to her effective expulsion from the coun¬
try (see page 33), this is amply documented, including by Ardin her¬
self in her master’s thesis, which is available on her website.
The usual pattern is to lure the target into bed with an attrac¬
tive woman, photograph the tryst and then use the pictures to
blackmail the mark into cooperating. In this case, after the sex
come accusations of rape and howls about male chauvinism. At
this point it’s sounding like the plot of a Stieg Larsson novel,
perhaps “Wikileaks: The Man Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,”
as the London Guardian (8 December) titled its editorial.
Although no formal charges have been brought, or evidence
presented, the content of the prosecution dossier against Assange
were handed over to a major Swedish tabloid, Aftonbladet , which
published a special supplement detailing the accusations. The
affidavit read in court in London provided some detail of the
allegations, but although it claimed to buttress accusations of
a sexual assault, they could also be interpreted as “a frivolous
case of miscommunication during consenting sex acts,” as the
Toronoto Globe & Mail (7 December) put it. There are numer¬
ous aspects that cast doubt on the claims by the two women.
Ardin now asserts that Assange has a “warped view of
womanhood and can’t take no for an answer.” Yet by all
accounts their sexual encounter was consensual, although
apparently the condom split. Still, the two appeared to be on
friendly terms at the meeting the next day. That same day
Ardin twice posted “tweets” on her accounts gushing about
“Julian” and a party she threw for him, telling the world at 2
a.m. that she was “with the world’s coolest smartest people,
it’s amazing.” Later, when she went to the police she deleted
the tweets from one account, but forgot another. In any case,
cybersleuths retrieved them from the Google cache. 2
The second woman admits that she actively pursued As¬
sange, landing an invitation to the meeting, sitting in the front
row, hanging around afterward like a groupie to get invited to
dinner, calling him repeatedly for two days, then taking him
home where they had sex in the evening, and again in the morn¬
ing, first with a condom then without. They parted amicably.
She asked Assange if he would call again, he said he would. But
two days later when he didn’t, she called Ardin to say she was
worried about getting pregnant or a sexually transmitted disease.
Earlier both women sent out text messages that police describe
as “exculpatory” toward Assange. Now the two text each other
about going to the scandal sheet Expressen to get back at him.
Then they go to the police. The second woman tells police
that Assange “had sex with her against her wishes” while she
was asleep. Ardin now tells the police that Assange “deliber¬
ately” ripped the condom during their sexual encounter. The
police officer and prosecutor on duty classify the former as
rape, the latter as sexual molestation, and open an investigation
(only to have it dropped in 24 hours, and then suspiciously
reopened weeks later). Details of the case are immediately
leaked. Editors are tipped off, top reporters are called in the
middle of the night to hop on the story. By the next morning it
is splashed across the pages of Sweden’s tabloid press. Within
a day the news is shot around the world via the Internet.
That there was calculation here seems clear. Ardin’s dele¬
tion of the “tweets” from her blogs looks like an effort to make
her story more pla usible. Call it cover-up. The fact that the
2 “Assange Case: Evidence Destroyed Over and Over Again,” Rad-
soft, 1 October.
January-February 2011
The internationalist
31
women don’t make a formal complaint and let the police do
it shows that the Uppsala gender equity officer knows how the
law works. Is there more to it? On her blog, Ardin has posted
a “Seven-Step Program for Getting Revenge,” for women
whose boyfriends have been unfaithful. Step 7: “Ensure that
your victim will suffer the same way he made you suffer.” That
much they have achieved, whether it’s what they were after or
not: Assange is certainly suffering now.
Assange is accused of (but not yet charged with) rape,
sexual molestation, and molestation. Rape is an extremely seri¬
ous crime, overwhelmingly against women, involving violence
and coercion. For centuries, women have been intimidated from
bringing charges of rape, fearing that they will be subjected to
humiliation, or far worse persecution (as in U.S.-occupied Af¬
ghanistan, where a woman who has been raped can be stoned to
death for her “sin”). However, under Swedish law, a complaint of
sex without a condom can be the basis for a charge of rape - of
the lowest of three categories, which is what is alleged against
Assange (but which still carries a sentence of up to four years
in jail). This trivializes the horrible nature of this crime. And
as a spokeswoman for the British group Women Against Rape
wrote to the Guardian (9 December):
“Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at
the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued
for rape allegations.... Though Sweden has the highest per
capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have
quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have de¬
creased. ... In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though
almost 4,000 people were reported....
“There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault
for political agendas that have nothing to do with women’s
safety. In the south of the US, the lynching of black men was
often justified on grounds that they had raped [the Scottsboro
Boys] or even looked [Emmett Till] at a white woman. Women
don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while
rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.”
Criminal cases involving sex are notoriously difficult and
messy (often no witnesses, complex relations between the in¬
dividuals). However, in this case it is evident that there was no
violence or coercion. None has been alleged, and whatever they
may have felt afterwards, indications are the sex was consensual
at the time. Add to this the judicial mishandling of the case: im¬
mediately leaking it to the press, switching prosecutors in order
to reinstate the investigation, refusing to meet with Assange, then
demanding his extradition. Throw in a connection with intel¬
ligence agencies, and Cold War anti-Communist connections via
Swedish social democracy. Plus the overriding determination
of the U.S. empire to strike back at, and shut down, WikiLeaks.
The conclusion can only be that Julian Assange is the
victim of a political frame-up. The purpose of that frame-up:
to staunch the flow of information about imperialism’s crimes
and machinations.
Was it a “honey trap”? Was it two women who felt they
had been wronged getting “revenge”? We don’t know. At the
very least, the two are being used by sinister forces who will
use any excuse to nail the founder of WikiLeaks: start by
defaming him, and go from there.
Julian Assange is not guilty of rape, but there is plenty of
serious criminality here. There have been highly publicized
death threats against the WikiLeaks founder. A former aide to
Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan, said
on CBC Television that “Assange should be assassinated.”
Former Nixon staffer and convicted Watergate criminal G.
Gordon Liddy says that Assange should be put on a “kill
list.” Conservative pundit William Kristol calls to “neutralize
Assange and his collaborators.” Another, Jonah Goldberg,
asks “Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?” A Washington Times
columnist calls to “treat Mr Assange the same way as other
high-value terrorist targets: Kill him.”
People who make such death threats should be behind
bars. They would be if they made them against top capitalist
politicians. But they won’t be when they are made against the
man who is No. 1 on the Obama administration’s “enemies
list.” Moreover, while liberal luminaries headed up by Noam
Chomsky are circulating an open letter to Australian prime
minister Julian Gillard citing these threats by vicariously
murderous conservatives, the real danger to Assange comes
from the liberal Democrats now wielding state power in the
U.S. - and from their “lick-spittle” social-democratic allies,
and partners in war crimes in Afghanistan, from Australian
Labor Party to Swedish social democracy.
Assange is in potentially mortal danger. As the material
published by WikiLeaks shows, and as he is well aware, the
U.S. government is in the assassination business big time. It
has multiple apparatuses to “terminate” opponents “with ex¬
treme prejudice,” as the Nixonians used to put it. Alexander
Cockburn recently published excerpts from the CIA’s 1950s
“how to” guide to pushing people out of windows. Then there
was the Reagan administration’s illustrated Everyman’s Guide
to “Selective Violence,” issued in Spanish for the Nicaraguan
contras and subsequently translated into Arabic for use by
A1 Qaeda. Or the Bush administration’s secret Waterboard¬
ing for Dummies memos. One way or another, the masters
of American imperialism would dearly like to “take out” the
troublesome website’s founder and editor-in-chief.
The work that WikiLeaks has been doing has been useful
in exposing a tiny proportion of the bloody crimes of U.S. rul¬
ers. But there should be no illusion that “leakers” from within
the government will ever be able to show in all its horror what
the imperialists are up to. For that, it will be necessary to carry
out a revolution, as in October 1917 when the Russian workers
seized power, and opened the archives and the dungeons of the
tsarist autocracy. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky was named
Commissar for Foreign Affairs and proceeded to publish the
secret treaties of the tsar and the other Great Powers. Only
when U.S. imperialism is brought down by international so¬
cialist revolution will we be able to really delve into the vast
secrets of Washington and Langley.
For now, it is urgent to demand that Assange be immedi¬
ately freed and all charges against him be dropped, and that
Bradley Manning be freed. They will be awarded their justly
earned medals for uncommon valor, and the war criminals
brought to justice, when the workers rule. ■
32
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Anna Ardin’s Gusano Connection
It has been known for some time that Anna Ardin, one
of the accusers against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange,
has been involved with counterrevolutionary anti-Castro
dissidents in Cuba (see the article by Israel Shamir and Paul
Bennett, “Assange Besieged,” Counterpunch, 14 Septem¬
ber). Shamir and Bennett called attention to articles by Ardin
denouncing the “dictator Fidel Castro,” which appeared on
the website of the Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas ,' a well-
funded anti-Communist exile outfit based in Sweden which
puts out a glossy magazine, Miscelaneas de Cuba.
Ardin’s anti-Communist articles speculating about
prospects for Cuba when the “dictator Fidel Castro” dies
highlight the Corriente Socialista Democratica Cubana, 1 2 3 one
of the numerous Cuban “dissident” groups bankrolled by
the U.S. government. A main spokesman for the Corriente
is Miami-based exile Orlando Patterson, who specializes is
bashing the Cuban regime for racism. 3 The Corriente was
founded in 1992 as an expression inside Cuba of the exile
Cuban Democratic Platform (PDC) of Carlos Alberto Mon-
taner 4 , a notorious CIA agent. In 2008, after several years of
infighting in the tiny fragmented Cuban social-democratic
milieu, the Coordinadora founded the Arco Progresista. 5
Shamir and Bennet also report that:
“In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group
Las damas de bianco (the Ladies in White). This group
receives US government funds and the convicted anti-com¬
munist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter.
Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argen-
1 For a Spanish translation of Ardin’s January 2005 articles, see http://
www.miscelaneasdecuba.net/web/article.asp7artIDM277 and http://
www.miscelaneasdecuba.net/web/article.asp7artIEU1271.
2 For information about the Corriente’s subversive activities in
Cuba and ties to the U.S. embassy in Havana, see the book by Rosa
Miriam Elizalde and Luis Baez, The Dissidents (Havana, 2003).
3 For a denunciation of U.S. government sponsorship of counter¬
revolutionary Cuban blacks, including Patterson and Carlos Moore,
see the article by Esteban Morales Dominguez, “El tema racial y la
subversion anticubana” in La Jiribilla, 8 September 2007.
4 Carlos Alberto Montaner, son of a major in the army of dicta¬
tor Fulgencio Batista, was convicted in Cuba of terrorist action
in 1962, and after escaping was selected by the CIA for training
in Fort Benning, Georgia. He operates out of Madrid, posing as
a “moderate” opposition to the Castro regime, more palatable to
European social-democratic and liberal sensibilities. But his Cuban
Democratic Platform (PDC) is bankrolled by the U.S. (via the Na¬
tional Endowment for Democracy) and he participates in various
enterprises with the Cuban American National Foundation (FNCA)
of hard-line batistiano exiles in Miami, including the RECE (Cu¬
ban Exile Representation). The notorious CIA terrorist Luis Posada
Carriles is also part of the PDC.
5 In addition to the Corriente, the other main component of the
Arco is the Coordinadora Social-Democrata Cubana, an exile
group even more closely associated with the CIA and one of the
founding components of Montaner’s Democratic Platform.
V___
tine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that ‘the so-called
Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States’ .” 6
Now important new information has come to light.
According to Juan Tamayo writing in the Miami Herald
(8 December), “Ardin visited Cuba about four times be¬
tween 2002 and 2006 as a representative of Swedish social
democrats, said Manuel Cuesta Morua, head of Cuba’s Arco
Progresista, a social-democratic dissident group.” Her mas¬
ters thesis, Tamayo reports, was on the subject, “The Cuban
Multi-Party System. Is the democratic alternative really
democratic and an alternative after the Castro regime?” What
he doesn’t mention is that Ardin was expelled from Cuba
for her activities with the pro-imperialist gusanos (worms).
While giving no political support to the Castro regime,
which is introducing measures which greatly strengthen
pro-capitalist tendencies, Trotskyists resolutely defend the
bureaucratically deformed Cuban workers state against
imperialism and internal counterrevolution, whether from
such U.S.-funded “dissidents” or from within the bureau¬
cracy. Cuban social democracy is a wholly owned subsidiary
of the CIA, and those who aid it are doing the work of the
Yankee imperialists.
Ardin is no babe in the woods. Four visits in four years,
“as a representative of Sweish social democrats”: Ardin is up
to her neck in the swamp of anti-Communist subversion in
Cuba, and not just as a wide-eyed tourist. So much so that,
according to the Herald article, an annoyed Cuesta Morua
complained that she “wrongly alleged that some European
funds for Cuban dissidents had been mishandled.” Question:
How would she even know to make such an accusation,
accurate or not? Answer: She was tasked to do so, she was
acting as their control.
The main accuser of Julian Assange is an anti-Commu¬
nist social-democratic operative. ■
6 Luis Posada Carriles is a Cuban-born terrorist and CIA agent who
in 1963-64 was trained in sabotage and the use of explosives at the
U.S. Army’s base at Fort Benning (the same period when Montaner
was there). Operating out of Venezuela, he was responsible for -
and convicted of- bombing a Cubana de Aviacion airliner in Octo¬
ber 1976, killing 73 people, including an entire sports team. After
escaping from prison, in the 1980s, he was involved in the U.S.’
clandestine supply of anns to the Nicaraguan contras. In 1997 he
organized a dozen bombings in Havana aimed at discouraging the
tourist trade. In 2000, he was arrested in Panama with 200 pounds
of explosives and convicted of attempting to assassinate Fidel
Castro. Pardoned by Panama in 2004, he now lives comfortably,
protected from deportation in the U.S., where he marches together
with Cuban American pop singer Gloria Estefan in Miami dem¬
onstrations for the damas de bianco. The damas receive $1,500
a month from Rescate Juridica [Legal Rescue], the foundation of
Santiago Alvarez Femandez-Magrina, who is also Posadas Car¬
dies’s financier ( Machetera , 26 March 2010). Estefan’s father was
a bodyguard for the dictator Batista.
January-February 2011
The internationalist
33
Defend North Korea and China Against
Imperialism and Counterrevolution
U.S./South Korean Provocations
South Korean navy hovercraft coming from military garrison island of Yonphyong, November 24.
For Revolutionary Reunification of North and South!
5 DECEMBER 2010 - American imperialism and its South
Korean militarist ally have embarked on a dangerous course of
escalating actions against North Korea and China. Washington
and Seoul invent North Korean “provocations” and hide their
own role in provoking reactions by Pyongyang. Three times
in the last nine months, aggressive U.S./South Korean military
exercises have been held in the Yellow Sea. Now a “crisis sum¬
mit” ofU.S., South Korean and Japanese foreign ministers is to
be held to plot a joint strategy against the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Bogged down in a losing war in Afghanistan, despite
tripling U.S. forces there, and having lost the midterm elec¬
tions to right-wing Republicans who deride him as weak, U.S.
president Barack Obama may delude himself into thinking he
could score points by striking a hawkish pose on North Ko¬
rea. For his part. South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, a
virulent Cold War anti-Communist, won office railing against
“appeasement” of the North and has since staged one incident
after another.
Judging from diplomatic correspondence recently pub¬
lished by Wildleaks, decision makers in Seoul and Washington
seem to have convinced themselves that North Korea is about
to collapse (as they have often miscalculated in the past). They
want to push it over the brink. In the process, they may bring
the region - and the world - to the brink of war. In this perilous
situation, we reiterate our call to Defend North Korea against
imperialist war provocations and sanctions, and demand: All
U.S. troops out of Korea!
The latest casus belli (cause of war) was an exchange of
artillery fire on Yonphyong Island just off the western coast
of North Korea. According to the account broadcast around
the world, at 2:30 p.m. local time on November 23, North
Korean artillery shells suddenly began raining down on the
island, held by South Korea. Two South Korean soldiers were
reported killed, and two bodies of island residents were later
found. After 100-plus rounds were fired from the North, the
South Koreans responded by lobbing scores of shells at a North
Korean military base.
The Western press screamed bloody murder about North
Korea targeting civilians. South Korean legislators demanded
heavy-duty retaliation. A White House statement quoted
President Obama saying he was “outraged,” and that the North
Korean government is “an ongoing threat that needs to be
dealt with.” Liberals and conservatives in the U.S. joined in
denouncing the North’s “belligerence.” “Diplomats” (usually
a codeword for spies) speculated about effects of leadership
transition in the North. Korea “experts” psychoanalyzed DPRK
leader Kim Jong 11.
Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
Reuters
34
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and war minister Robert Gates
at the DMZ for some nuclear sabre-rattling, July 21.
The whole rigamarole is one big smokescreen, to create
a fog of war.
Repeating a common refrain, British foreign secretary
William Hague condemned the North Korean government for
its “unprovoked attack.” Yet provoked is exactly what it was.
The North Korean salvos came just one hour after the South
Koreans unleashed a massive artillery barrage from Yonphyong
Island, as part of the “Hoguk” military exercises. (The island is
home not only to 1,350 fisher folk but also to a South Korean
military base with 1,000 soldiers.)
The DPRK had warned repeatedly, including in an urgent
telephone message to South Korean military leaders at 8 a.m.
that morning, that “if even a single shell of the enemy is fired
inside the territorial waters of the DPRK, it will take a prompt
retaliatory strike.” Moreover, days later, the South Korean
National Intelligence Service admitted it knew from electronic
surveillance that the North was preparing to respond to the
South Korean artillery by shelling the island. But the South
Koreans went ahead anyway, daring the North to respond.
The New York Times did have a story reporting a North
Korean statement that “the South ‘recklessly fired into our sea
area’,” and that “The North blamed the South for starting the
exchange; the South acknowledged firing test shots in the area
but denied that any had fallen in the North’s territory.” The
story went on to say that “The attack on Yeonpyeong came as
70,000 South Korean troops were beginning an annual nation¬
wide military drill called Safeguarding the Nation. The exercise
has been sharply criticized by Pyongyang as ‘simulating an
invasion of the North’ and ‘a means to provoke a war’.” But
after a few hours this dispatch disappeared from the Times’’
web page, so one could only find it by searching. It was never
published in the paper.
“Senior American officials” said the North Korean attack
was “premeditated,” since the South Korean maneuvers were
announced in advance. Premeditated is right - about the U.S.
and South Korean provocation. They knew
what the consequences would be of holding
war “games,” including artillery barrages,
just off the North Korean coast in its territo¬
rial waters, and they went ahead anyway.
South Korean spokesmen ridiculed the
North’s assertion that the Hoguk exercises
were simulating an invasion. Yet photos
of the drill show soldiers practicing land¬
ing exercises. Where do you suppose they
might be preparing to land? Is the South
Korean military perhaps planning to invade
... South Korea?
The media accounts have also passed
over a basic fact: Yonphyong Island is
located just seven miles off North Korea’s
coast. The South Korean artillery shells
fell even closer. That’s roughly the distance
from Wall Street to the tip of Staten Island.
What do you expect would happen if an
enemy power staged a live-fire military
exercise in the New York harbor?
And Yonphyong sits at the mouth of the North Korean
deep water harbor of Haeju. What would be the response if
the North unleashed artillery barrages from an island facing
the South Korean port of Incheon? The fact that South Korea
occupies this and other coastal islands is a standing military
provocation.
U.S. spokesmen accused the DPRK of violating the 1953
armistice agreement that ended combat in the Korean War. Yet
North Korea never agreed that the islets hugging its western
coast belonged to South Korea. The “Northern Limit Line”
claimed by the South is just a few miles offshore, well to the
north of the Military Demarcation Line. It was unilaterally
imposed by the United States at the end of the Korean War.
The DPRK was unable to prevent South Korean occupa¬
tion of the islets, now turned into a string of military outposts
targeting the North, because in 1953 it didn’t have a navy or
air force. But it has always insisted that these islands belong
to North Korea, being well within its territorial waters, as they
certainly are.
Washington and Seoul linked this incident to the sinking
of the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan last March, claim¬
ing both are North Korean “provocations.” Not only does the
DPRK vehemently deny having anything to do with the sink¬
ing of the Cheonan, the available evidence upholds its denial.
This was discussed in a previous article (“Defend North Korea
Against U.S. War Threats and Sanctions,” The International¬
ist ~Ho. 31, Summer 2010). Since then, an independent South
Korean newspaper, The Hankyoreh, has done an independent
investigation that makes mincemeat of the government’s
claims (see article, “What, Sank the Cheonan ?” on page 37).
Opinion polls in South Korea report that less than one-third
of the public believes the official story.
Adding up the Cheonan and Yonphong Island incidents,
the imperialists and their South Korean auxiliaries have been
January-February 2011
The internationalist
35
Baengnyeong island
South Korean ship sunk
near the island In March
Northern limit line
(established 1953)
Disputed border
Yeonpyeong island lies near the disputed
maritime border between the North and
South, which has been a source of
contention between the countries.
pressuring the Chinese govern¬
ment to pin the blame on North
Korea, which it has refused to do.
Both China and North Korea are
bureaucratically deformed work¬
ers states, and China is the main
trading partner for the North,
enabling the DPRK to circumvent
the imperialist sanctions orches¬
trated by the United Nations. For
Beijing to abandon Pyongyang
would be an act of class treason of
the highest order - and suicidal as
well, for the imperialists’ ultimate
target is the People’s Republic of
China, which they avidly seek to
reconquer for capitalism.
Beijing issued a statement ob¬
jecting to the U.S./South Korean
military exercises because they
were being held within China’s
“economic zone.” Indeed, in the area where the South Ko¬
rean and U.S. navies held joint maneuvers last March before
the Cheonan sunk, North Korea is barely 200 miles from
China’s Shandong peninsula. Last week’s U.S./South Korean
maneuvers involving the U.S. nuclear supercarrier George
Washington were held in the East China Sea. Next week’s U.S./
Japanese operations will be in the Yellow Sea, between Japan
and China. All these “war games” are aimed at containing the
rising influence of China, and with one false (or deliberate)
move, the “games” coidd easily turn into the real thing.
The background to the current crisis is U.S. imperialism’s
longstanding vendetta against North Korea over nuclear weap¬
ons. The DPRK has sought to develop the capacity to generate
nuclear power because since the demise of the Soviet Union it
is chronically short of fuel, lacking hard currency to buy oil on
the capitalist world market, while it does have uranium. It has
sought to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent to the impe¬
rialists, who devastated the North during the Korean War (see
“U.S. War Against North Korea Never Ended,” on page 38),
who subject North Korea to punishing sanctions, who refuse to
sign a peace treaty and are constantly plotting counterrevolution.
While giving no political support to the Stalinist rulers
of the DPRK, we defend North Korea s right to have nuclear
weapons to defend itself. Why should the United States, the
only power ever to use atomic bombs in war, slaughtering
hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, have a monopoly on “weapons of mass destruction”?
The purpose is to subjugate the world to the diktat of U.S.
imperialism. And Washington wants to deprive North Korea
of its nuclear deterrent so that the U.S. can finish the Korean
war by destroying the DPRK with impunity.
Skirmishing over North Korea’s nuclear program has
been going on for almost two decades. Prior to the 1990s, the
main deterrent to imperialist conquest of North Korea was
the certainty that this would mean war with the Soviet Union.
NORTH KOREA
Haeju
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U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises
Nov. 29, 30
f.,
V
With the USSR destroyed by counterrevolution, the regime
headed by Kim II Sung and his son Kim Jong 11 rightly figured
it had better get the bomb to ward off attack. It did, to great
consternation in the White House and the Pentagon.
In the latest installment of the ongoing saga, Pyongyang
invited an American scientist, Siegfried Hecker, the former
head of the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos,
to visit the DPRK’s most sensitive nuclear site, the reactor at
Yongbyon. Hecker had been there before, and certainly could
recognize a weapons lab if he saw one. He reported that the
North was building a 25-30 megawatt electric light-water reac¬
tor, and that it had a small, quite modern industrial facility with
2,000 centrifuges producing low-enriched uranium for the new
reactor. The North Koreans wanted to show this to a qualified
nuclear expert before U.S. intelligence agencies announced
that they had “discovered” another “secret bomb factory.”
Instead, the imperialists screamed that this was another
“provocation,” it was Kim Jong 11 bragging that he had a
“second route to making nuclear weapons.” Yet Hecker in his
report on his November 12 visit made clear that North Korea
had shut down its plutonium producing reactor and “has ap¬
parently decided not to make more plutonium or plutonium
bombs for now.” And while a light water reactor could produce
some nuclear fuel, it is “much less suitable” for bombs than
what they had before. In fact, when the U.S. tried to stop the
DPRK from getting nuclear weapons in the 1990s, it offered to
build a light-water reactor to supply the North’s power needs!
So officials in Washington and Seoul add up the sinking of
the Cheonan, centrifuges at Yongbyon and the North Korean
shelling of Yonphyong Island to make a case for ... what?
Following the last incident, South Korea president Lee sacked
his minister of defense and announced “robust” new rules of
engagement would be forthcoming. Yonhap news agency said
the South was “planning further artillery drills, ‘including
waters close to the Yellow Sea border’” with the DPRK. The
Map: AP
36
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
clear intent is to provoke a new “attack” by the North.
Some imperialist geostrategists worry about where this is
all headed. The New York Times (24 November) noted early on:
“[F]or Mr. Obama, much stronger responses, including a
naval quarantine of the North, carry huge risks. A face-off
on the Korean Peninsula would require tens of thousands of
troops, air power and the possibility of a resumption of the
Korean War, a battle that American officials believe would
not last long, but might end in the destruction of Seoul if the
North unleashed artillery batteries near the border.”
Yet the U.S. government still seems to be caught in the “brief
bubble of sole superpower fantasy,” as one analyst (Robert
Rothkopf) put it. Whatever Washington’s intentions are,
full-scale fighting could easily break out. The threat by the
new South Korean war minister on December 3 to “retaliate
immediately” against the DPRK, including air strikes in the
North, “until they completely surrender,” would do it. The U.S.
boarding a Korean freighter on the high seas could also set it
off. This is a war waiting to happen, and a new Korean war
would not stay limited to the peninsula for long.
In response to the stepped-up imperialist onslaught against
North Korea, China called for resumption of the six-party talks
including South Korea, Japan, the U.S. and Russia. This was
contemptuously dismissed by the White House, whose spokes¬
man declared that the U.S. is “not interested in stabilizing the
region through a series of P.R. activities.” The Chinese English-
language newspaper Global Times (2 December), wrote: “The
Cold War ended 20 years ago.... But the US, South Korea
and Japan are still dealing with Pyongyang with an old Cold
War mentality.” The Beijing bureaucrats are still pursuing the
Stalinist pipedream of “peaceful coexistence” with imperial¬
ism, an illusion that contributed greatly to the demise of the
USSR. They fail to see, or pretend not to see, that Washington
views Beijing through the same lens.
On the left in the United States, some reformist groups that
follow the political line of Pyongyang call on the U.S. to “sign
a peace treaty with the DPRK” (Workers World Party state¬
ment, 1 December). The Party for Socialism and Liberation
says that “normalization of relations” between Pyongyang and
Washington “seemed like a realizable goal in the last months of
the Bill Clinton administration in 1999 and 2000” (ANSWER
Coalition statement, 26 November). Wrong. It wasn’t about to
happen under Democrat B. Clinton, and it sure won’t under
Democrat Obama and H. Clinton. Faced with a challenge to
their class domination, the imperialists will go for “peace” only
when they have been defeated, as in Vietnam.
The fact that Washington refuses to sign a peace treaty is
certainly indicative of its “Cold War mentality,” but for left¬
ist opponents of U.S. imperialism to call for that reveals the
same dangerous illusions that Washington and Seoul can be
pressured into peacefully coexisting with North Korea. The
war threat comes from the South Korean militarists and U.S.
imperialists, who are bent on the destruction of the DPRK.
Revolutionaries and class-conscious workers should defend
North Korea s right to nuclear weapons, call for an end to
the imperialist sanctions against North Korea and demand
immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Korea, Japan,
Okinawa, Philippines, Indochina and all of East Asia.
Above all, a real defense of the deformed workers states of
North Korea, China and Vietnam cannot be successful on the
narrow nationalist program of the Stalinists. What is ultimately
required is the international extension of the revolution to the
imperialist centers of Japan, North America and Europe. In
the immediate crisis, it is urgent for South Korean workers to
mobilize against the looming war threat. Spokesmen for the
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) joined with
other labor and civic groups in a press conference December
1 calling for “no war” and calling “dialogue the only way to
recover stability and peace on the Korean Peninsula” ( The
Hankyoreh [Seoul], 1 December). The vast majority of South
Korea’s population opposes war moves against the North.
But what’s needed is to bring the power of the militant labor
movement into the streets to stop the drive to war.
South Korean workers have demonstrated repeatedly that
they have the strength to bring the capitalist economy to a grind¬
ing halt. In December 1996 over a million workers walked out
and stayed out to protest anti-labor laws and increased powers
to spy and police agencies. Another general strike in June 2001
protested austerity measures ordered by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, as well as calling for abolition of
the infamous National Security Law. Again in 2006, the KCTU
(and particularly the militant transport workers) struck against
a law increasing the use of temporary workers. Most recently
Korean workers held militant protests against the G20 summit in
Seoul, and have repeatedly demonstrated against the just-signed
Korean-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. What’s needed to mobilize
this tremendous force against the South Korean militarists and
chaebol capitalists is a class-struggle leadership.
The League for the Fourth International calls for revolu¬
tionary reunification of Korea under workers rule, through a
proletarian political revolution against bureaucratic misrule in
the North and a social revolution overturning capitalism in the
South. Such a struggle would send shock waves to Japan, where
antiwar sentiment among the population remains strong due to
the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; to Okinawa, where
a labor-led struggle could drive out U.S. military bases; and to
China, where it could inspire tens and hundreds of millions of
workers to rise up against capitalist exploitation in the special
economic zones and the threat of capitalist counterrevolution
engulfing the entire country.
And in the United States, the Internationalist Group warns,
as we did even during the 2008 election campaign when the
left caved in to the popularity of Barack Obama, that Demo¬
crats, Republicans and all capitalist parties and politicians are
responsible for the endless imperialist wars. The war machine
can only be stopped through proletarian action (of which the
May Day 2008 West Coast port strike against the Iraq and
Afghanistan war was a small token) to defeat U.S. imperial¬
ism and bring down the whole imperialist system through
international socialist revolution.
To lead such a struggle we must build revolutionary work¬
ers parties on the internationalist communist program of Lenin
and Trotsky, fighting to reforge the Fourth International. ■
January-February 2011
The internationalist
37
What Sank the Cheonan?
Earlier this year, the sinking of a South Korean navy
corvette Cheonan off the North Korean coast and the deaths
of 46 sailors on board led to a chorus of accusations from
Washington and Seoul that it was sunk by military forces of
the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). North
Korea categorically denied having anything to do with the
March 26 sinking of the South Korean warship. Numerous
technical experts also questioned the charge of North Korean
responsibility. After a so-called “international commission”
claimed the Cheonan was sunk by a North Korean torpedo,
the U.S. announced new sanctions against the DPRK and
provocative naval maneuvers led by the nuclear aircraft car¬
rier USS George Washington. We wrote about the incident
and analyzed the contradictory claims against the North in
the article, “Defend North Korea Against U.S. War Threats
and Sanctions” (The InternationalistNo. 31, Summer2010).
Since our article was published the imperialists have
continued to use the Cheonan incident in their escalating
war propaganda, routinely alleging that North Korea was
responsible, as if this were an established fact. However,
a Los Angeles Times (24 July) article, “Doubts Surface on
North Korea’s Role in Ship Sinking,” reported that the of¬
ficial version of events was being challenged in South Korea
itself. One of the doubters is Shin Sang-chul, a former ship¬
building executive who was appointed to the investigating
commission by the opposition Democratic Party. Shin was
peremptorily removed from the commission when after in¬
specting the vessel he said that in his opinion, the Cheonan
ran aground in the shallow water, and then damaged the hull
trying to get off a reef (which is what the South Korean navy
originally reported). The defense ministry accused him of
“lack of objectivity and scientific logic” and “intentionally
creating public mistrust.”
Numerous elements of the official story have been chal¬
lenged. One is the piece of a torpedo propeller fortuitously
discovered weeks after the sinking. A physics professor,
Seunghun Lee, questioned why there was so much cor¬
rosion after less than two months in the water, while the
supposed North Korean marking was very clear and on
top of the rust. “You could put that mark on an iPhone and
claim it was manufactured in North Korea,” Lee scoffed.
Also, the marking used an abbreviation common in the
South, not in the North. Many asked why the government
was refusing to let the press or outside investigators speak
with surviving crew members. The Hankyoreh (21 May), a
liberal Seoul paper, questioned how it could be that no North
Korean submarine or torpedo launch was detected, either by
the Cheonan, which is an anti-submarine warfare (ASW)
vessel, or by the South Korean ASW base on the nearby
Baengnyeong Island, or by U.S. ships that were present in
the area following ASW maneuvers (codenamedCoo/ Eagle)
with the South Korean navy.
V___
As the controversy continued, more questions have been
raised. The South Korean government invited Russia to send
a team to investigate, which it did in early June. However,
the Russian team concluded that damage to the propellers on
the salvaged Cheonan indicated it had scraped the shallow
ocean floor; that the torpedo propeller was dubious (mark¬
ings and rust); that there were significant time discrepancies
between sailors’ reports of an explosion and the time code
recorded on closed circuit TV images inside the ship; and
that the corvette could have touched the antenna of an ocean
mine (Hankyoreh, 27 July). This would jibe with a report
from Beijing suggesting that the South Korean warship
could have been sunk by a bottom mine laid by the U.S.
The report noted the presence in the U.S.-South Korean
maneuvers of a diving support ship, USNS Salvor, of a type
frequently associated with the Office of Naval Intelligence
(“Did an American Mine Sink the South Korean Ship?” New
American Media, 27 May).
The National Union of Media Workers and Korean
Federation of Journalists set up their own committee to
investigate the Cheonan incident. On November 11, Ha-
niTV, a video production unit of The Hankyoreh, put up a
documentary on the Internet with material from that inquiry
providing a detailed critique of the government’s story. In
addition to the questions about the Cheonan 7 s propellers, the
alleged North Korean torpedo propeller fragment and the
various times given for the explosion (suggesting tampering
with the tape), it questioned the location where the sinking
reportedly occurred based on coast guard reports, and noted
that based on NASA experiments, a torpedo blast sufficiently
strong to slice the ship in two would have mangled sailors’
bodies. Yet none of the survivors or the recovered bodies
show signs of this; the sailors who died were drowned, not
blown apart. (The video can be seen on the Internet at http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDITkTEDVNA).
At this point there is still insufficient public evidence
to determine who or what sank the Cheonan, which was a
warship engaged in hostile military maneuvers against the
DPRK. But it can be said with certainty that the account
presented by the South Korean government and backed by
U.S. authorities is a concocted story. Its purpose is to whip
up a war hysteria against North Korea. As noted in our earlier
article, “There is a long history of imperialist governments
staging provocations or seizing on unrelated events to jus¬
tify launching a war. Recall how ‘Remember the Maine!’
became the battle cry for the U.S. occupation of Cuba in
1898, after an explosion sank the American battleship in the
Havana harbor.... [I]f the provocative U.S.-South Korean
military maneuvers escalate into war against North Korea,
the war cry will no doubt be ‘Remember the Cheonan! ’” In
opposing the war moves against North Korea, it is important
to expose the fabrications being used to justify them. ■
___ /
38
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Denounce FBI Raids...
continued from page 4
the bipartisan support of both capitalist parties. The Demo¬
cratic Obama administration picked up where the Republican
George W. Bush left off, blocking investigations of torture,
vastly expanding warrantless wiretapping, and now demanding
unfettered access to everyone’s e-mail. The behemoth of the
Department of Homeland Security, which includes the FBI and
the ICE immigration police, deports nearly 400,000 immigrants
annually, a number which has increased sharply under Obama.
This war is a war to ensure world domination by U.S.
imperialism. It goes hand in hand with the war on working
people, immigrants and democratic rights here. The goal of
Democrats, Republicans and their FBI goons is to make all
resistance to the capitalist order illegal. They target anyone who
is seen to be on the side of the working class, the oppressed
Black minority and immigrants. In justifying a violent police
attack on San Francisco Bay Area longshoremen and antiwar
protesters on 7 April 2003, a spokesman for the state’s Anti-
Terrorism Information Center argued “if you have a protest
group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought
against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at
that.” Yet the longshoremen and protesters refused to be intimi¬
dated, and on May Day 2008, dock workers shut down every
port on the West Coast to stop the war on Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Sept. 27, the San Francisco Labor Council unani¬
mously passed a motion condemning the recent raids, noting:
“The FBI raids are reminiscent of the Palmer Raids, McCarthy
hearings, J. Edgar Hoover, and COINTELPRO, and mark a
new and dangerous chapter in the protracted assault on the
First Amendment rights of every union fighter, international
solidarity activist or anti-war campaigner....”
The real terrorists are the Pentagon generals and Wall Street
CEOs, and their politicians of both capitalist parties. To these
warmongers, “terrorism” is the watchword under which they
shred democratic rights and condemn millions around the world
to the horrors of war. They use the indiscriminate terror attacks
of “9/11” as a ploy to justify an expanding war to intimidate
the world into submission. Their evidenceless insinuations that
the FRSO provides “material support” to those the U.S. brands
as terrorists are a cynical device to hide the real intent of these
raids: to disrupt an organization that protests and opposes the
ongoing terrorism against civilian populations committed by the
U.S. and its allied regimes, the states of Israel and Colombia.
The Internationalist Group defends the FRSO and all those
targeted for political persecution under the U.S.’ terrorist “war
on terror.” We seek to mobilize the power of the international,
multiracial working class to defeat “our own” imperialist rulers
- and to put an end to the capitalist system that produces endless
war - through international socialist revolution. Our defense is
based on the principle of non-sectarian defense of all victims of
capitalist state repression, irrespective of political differences.
In fact, while the IG opposed both Obama and McCain
in the 2008 actions, most reformist left groups tried to sidle
up to the Democratic nominee. The FRSO went further than
most and openly supported Obama. It claimed in an editorial
(“2008 Presidential Elections: Defeat McCain,” 5 June 2008)
that: “The facts are plain; Obama parts ways, to a degree, with
Clinton on the Iraq War, free trade agreements and racism. He
has a message of hope with wide appeal.... his election will
create a better political climate for the anti-war, immigrant
rights, labor and national movements.” Not so.
In reality, as genuine Marxists warned, a vote for Obama
was a vote for more war, more domestic repression, and more
attacks on the labor movement. That is what happened, and
now this is thrown into stark relief as the Obama administration
takes aim at some of its leftist supporters, with more to come.
We call to unchain its power to defeat this latest attack on
our rights. Working people should break with the Democratic
Party of racist police repression and imperialist war, and forge
a revolutionary workers party that champions the struggle of
all the oppressed. ■
Focal Point Europe...
continued from page 7
the attack on workers’ gains throughout the continent should
be met with Europe-wide strike action. The action last fall by
unionists at Belgian refineries stopping exports in solidarity
with striking French refinery workers points the way forward
to a socialist united states of Europe.
Collapse of the euro would produce international financial
chaos. Soon the “bond vigilantes” may train their sights on the
British pound and the American dollar, for the finances of the
United Kingdom and United States are just as shaky as those
of the second- and third-tier capitalist countries currently under
siege. Plus the U.S. imperialist superpower (along with its Eu¬
ropean NATO allies) is bogged down militarily in a losing war
in Afghanistan and endless occupation of Iraq. If the holders of
U.S. T-notes and T-bonds ever decided to cash in their paper
holdings, it would be all over. But with this “debt bomb,” the
only thing stopping them is the doctrine of nuclear deterrence,
mutual assured destruction (MAD): in the ensuing global eco¬
nomic meltdown, bondholders would lose big as well.
A decaying capitalist order in the throes of the deepest eco¬
nomic crisis in three-quarters of a century is seeking to ensure
its survival by impoverishing the proletariat and destroying its
ability to resist. From Athens to London, the ruling classes have
launched an across-the-board offensive against the working
class, taking aim at every social gain and even, in some cases,
threatening its very existence. But no matter how severe the
crisis, capitalism will notfall by itself. To defeat this onslaught,
the usual fare of bourgeois pressure politics (“coalition build¬
ing,” “peaceful protest,” electoral politics and limited defensive
struggles) is wholly inadequate. It is necessary not only to resist
the particular attack but to turn the tables and direct the fight
not merely against the policies of “neo-liberalism,” but the
capitalist system itself. To lead that struggle, we must begin
to build a party of the proletarian vanguard like the Bolsheviks
of Lenin and Trotsky, reforging the F ourth International as the
world party of socialist revolution. ■
January-February 2011
The Internationalist
39
Beginning in 1945, at the End of World War II
U.S. bombing of port of Wonsan in 1951. U.S. saturation bombing flattened 18 of North Ko¬
rea’s 22 cities, an unequaled level of destruction in modern wars.
The American media have demonized North Korea ever
since the start of the anti-Soviet Cold War following the end of
World War II. It is typically portrayed like something out of a
comic book - an irrational, paranoid regime constantly engaged
in provocations, behaving like a petulant child, lashing out in
order to get attention, immersed in a never-ending succession
crisis, a hermit kingdom bent on incinerating the South and
nuking Japan, if not Hawaii, while deliberately starving its own
population. This caricature is nothing but crude war propaganda.
In fact, it is North Korea that was incinerated by U.S. imperial¬
ism in the Korean War, and which ever since has been the object
of endless provocations and nuclear threats from Washington.
Even before the official start of the war in June 1950, the U.S.
government vowed to “roll back Communism” in the Korean
peninsula and elsewhere. During the war, it officially adopted
the goal of “destruction” of North Korea. And despite the 1953
armistice, the Korean War has never stopped.
During the fighting, General Douglas MacArthur prepared
to hit North Korea with dozens of atomic bombs; in 1951,
President Harry Truman signed off on the plan to nuke the
North if Communist forces pushed further South. In 1969,
Richard Nixon put nuclear-armed warplanes on 15-minute
alert and had Henry Kissinger order the Pentagon to come up
with scenarios for using the hundreds of U.S. warheads pre¬
positioned in South Korea. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton weighed
a nuclear strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities and set
up task forces to plan for “end game” in North Korea, which
Hillary Clinton is still pursuing as Secretary of State. In 2002,
George W. Bush listed North Korea as one part of his so-called
“axis of evil,” a hit list of “rogue regimes” slated for annihila¬
tion once Washington had bumped off Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Currently, the Obama administration is escalating its pressure
on North Korea, tightening an economic blockade and stag¬
ing provocative U.S.-South Korean war “games” just off its
Western coast. No matter whether Democrats or Republicans
are in office, U.S. rulers have been scheming about how to
destroy North Korea for more than six decades.
Contrary to its political supporters, the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea is not socialist but a bureaucratically de¬
formed workers state modeled on the Stalinized Soviet Union.
It is similar in its fundamentals to China, Vietnam and Cuba,
albeit with its own peculiar features - notably an extreme “cult
of the personality” that has morphed into a dynastic succession.
Its official ideology of juche - self-reliance - is but an extreme
version of the national autarky inherent in the Stalinist dogma of
“building socialism in one country.” But the relatively privileged
position of the Northern bureaucracy and the vagaries of the Kim
family hardly bother U.S. rulers, who have for decades propped
up a regime of mass murdering colonial puppets in the South.
North Korea’s original sin, in the U.S.’ eyes, was overthrowing
U.S. National Archives
40
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
4
Leftist mass meeting in Seoul, South Korea on May Day 1947.
capitalist rule - for which “crime” Washington has constantly
sought to topple the regime, or failing that, to obliterate the
entire country. Trotskyists, in contrast, unconditionally defend
North Korea against imperialism and internal counterrevolu¬
tion, while seeking to oust its conservative, nationalist Stalinist
ruling stratum through a proletarian political revolution in the
North and revolutionary reunification of Korea.
1945-49: Imperialist Occupation
and Massacres in the South
As World War II ended abruptly
after the horrific U.S. atom-bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan,
the Soviet Army rapidly pushed the
Japanese army out of Manchuria and
northern Korea. It stopped at the 38th
Parallel north of Seoul, in accordance
with the August 1945 Potsdam agree¬
ment that carved up Soviet and Western
spheres of interest worldwide. At the
same time, Korean Communists led
by Kim 11 Sung, who had fought the
Japanese colonial occupiers in guer¬
rilla struggles since the 1930s, rapidly
expanded their influence throughout
the peninsula, even setting up a short¬
lived People’s Republic of Korea
(PRK). The U.S. military government
brought in Syngman Rhee from the
U.S. to head a right-wing “democratic
council” in the South, whose appa¬
ratus consisted of the puppets who
ran Korea as a Japanese colony from
1910 to 1945. The U.S. proceeded to
repress the left, banning strikes
and outlawing PRK authorities in
December 1945.
But this didn’t stop the spread
of unrest in the South. Unlike other
countries occupied by the U.S.
after WWII (Germany, Japan,
Austria), Korea was not a defeated
imperialist power but a colonized
nation yearning to throw off for¬
eign rule. In 1946, an Autumn
Uprising broke out with a peasant
revolt against hated landowners, a
railroad strike and mass assaults on
police stations. The U.S. military
government declared martial law.
Although in 1945 it was agreed
that after a five-year “trusteeship,”
Korea would be reunited and inde¬
pendent, with the start of the Cold
War, Washington reneged on this
pledge. In March 1948, the U.S.
announced elections for an anti-Communist government in the
South. When the Workers Party of Korea (WPK) held rallies
to oppose this, the U.S. arrested 2,500 Communist cadres. In
April, South Korean police on the island of Cheju (or Jeju)
fired on a demonstration commemorating the struggle against
Japanese rule, touching off a mass rebellion that was put down
with bloody terror:
“Over the next year, the soldiers burned hundreds of ‘red vil¬
lages’ and raped and tortured countless islanders, eventually
killing as many as 60,000 people - one fifth of Cheju’s popu¬
lation. They committed these atrocities in
plain view of the highest authority then
in southern Korea - the U.S. military,
which had occupied the peninsula south
of the 38th parallel following the World
War II defeat of Japan. The Americans
documented the brutality, but never
intervened.”
-“Ghosts of Cheju,” Newsweek, 19 June
2000
For the next 50 years, it was a
crime to even mention the Cheju
Massacre in South Korea, but it was
only one of several. A new Republic
of Korea quickly passed a National
Traitors Act outlawing the WPK,
forcing Communist militants to head
to the hills to begin guerrilla struggle.
In October 1948, a rebellion in the
southwestern cities of Yeosu and Sun-
cheon was crushed by U.S.-led forces
which killed up to 2,000 civilians. In
December 1949, South Korean troops
in Mungyeong executed scores of
prisoners (mostly children and elderly
Carl Mydans/Life Magazine
Captured rebels in Suncheon, 1948.
January-February 2011
The internationalist
41
Suspected “communist collaborators” arrested in Yongdong.
people) accused of collaborating with Communist bands.
Meanwhile, the U.S. authorities were revamping their world¬
wide strategy for the Cold War, shifting from “containment”
of Communism, the watchword of the early years, to “rolling
back” the Soviet bloc, a policy embodied in National Security
Council Report 68 (NSC-68), issued in April 1950. The first
place this doctrine was tried was in the Korean War, which
broke out that June.
Newsweek quoted University of Chicago historian Bruce
Cumings on the origin of the Korean War:
“Americans remember it as a lightning bolt in the morning,
like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.... In fact, the war
began as a civil conflict in 1945 - and still hasn’t ended.”
In response to the proclamation of the Republic of Korea
(ROK) in the South, a Democratic People’s Republic (DPRK)
was established in the North. Later in 1948, Soviet troops left
North Korea, and in mid-1949 U.S. troops pulled out of the
South. However, South Korean strong man Rhee (who op¬
posed the U.S. withdrawal) was acutely aware that his survival
depended on an American military presence, especially fol¬
lowing the victory of the Chinese Communists against Chiang
Kai-shek that October. So throughout 1949 and early 1950, the
ROK army staged provocative raids across the 38th Parallel
which everyone (including North Korea and U.S. officials)
understood were intended to provoke a DPRK counterattack
that would force the return of U.S. troops.
At the same time, Kim 11 Sung and Korean nationalists,
angered at the Americans’ ripping up of the 1945 agreement for
a reunified Korea in five years’ time, saw the departure of U.S.
troops as an opportunity to reunify the country by sweeping
away the hated landlord/militarist regime in the South. When
its forces were sufficiently built up, and assured of Soviet and
Chinese backing, on 25 June 1950 the Korean People’s Army
(KPA) launched the attack. The “ROK” army, which had been
a garrison police force under the Japanese, was no match for
the KPA, which included 60,000 battle-hardened soldiers who
had fought with the Chinese Communists in the just concluded
civil war. As the KPA rolled south, they were welcomed by
uprisings in several provinces.
Rhee responded as always, or¬
dering the execution of 30,000
prisoners accused of Communist
ties, as well as tens of thousands
more who had been forced into an
official “re-education” campaign,
called the Bodo League. Adding it
up, just this past summer the New
York Times (10 July) reported that
a South Korean commission:
“...confirmed that during the first
chaotic weeks of the war, when
North Korean troops barreled down
the peninsula, the South’s military
and police rounded up thousands of
suspected leftists - historians say
as many as 200,000 - and executed
them to prevent them from aiding
the invading forces.”
Korean War: More U.S. Massacres
in South Korea
The prewar (1946-49) massacres by the U.S.’ South
Korean flunkeys (sometimes overseen by American officers)
were only the warm-up to the wholesale slaughter of Koreans
carried out directly by the U.S. military during the Korean War,
as American warplanes and troops returned, this time suppos¬
edly as “United Nations” forces. In the name of “freedom” and
“democracy,” the United States engaged in mass murder in
Korea on an industrial scale from 1950 to 1953. This included
leveling virtually every city in North Korea with carpet bomb¬
ing; targeting civilian population centers with firebombs and
dropping huge quantities of napalm (jellied gasoline), burn¬
ing inhabitants to a crisp; executing vast numbers of peasants
and “suspected Communists” in cold blood; and deliberately
murdering thousands of refugees. This was a policy of mass
extermination. The United States wiped out one fifth of the
entire North Korean population at the time. In addition,
Washington prepared to drop scores of atomic bombs on the
North and turn the country into a vast radioactive cemetery.
For years, there was a curtain of silence about the mas¬
sacres in the South. But in 1999, a team of reporters for the
Associated Press - Sand-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley and
Martha Mendoza - published a series of groundbreaking ar¬
ticles laying out in horrific detail a massacre on 26 July 1950 of
up to 400 Korean refugees at a bridge outside No Gun Ri , near
the city of Yongdong. 1 The reports were based on testimony
from Korean survivors and from a dozen U.S. soldiers who
had participated in or witnessed the slaughter. The reports had
a profoundly shocldng effect. The Pentagon had been denying
this and similar reports for years. At first it claimed that no
troops were even in the area of No Gun Ri. But faced with the
testimony of a dozen American veterans, it had to backtrack.
1 The reports were later published as a book by Choe, Hanley and
Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare From the
Korean War (Henry Holt, 2001).
42
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Long lines of refugees fleeing from Yongdong on 26 July 1950. The day be¬
fore, hundreds of refugees were massacred by U.S. soldiers and warplanes
at bridge at No Gun Ri, eight miles away.
The AP stories won a Pulitzer
Prize for investigative reporting.
Fifteen months later, the Pentagon
issued a report acknowledging
that large numbers of civilians
were killed by soldiers of the 7th
Cavalry Regiment at No Gun Ri,
though claiming it was less than
100. Nevertheless, it concluded
that the carnage was “not a delib¬
erate killing” but “an unfortunate
tragedy inherent to war.”
The right-wing U.S. News
& World Report tried to discredit
the AP story, as did a former 7th
Cavalry officer, Robert Bateman,
who published a book seeking to
refute it. With information from
Pentagon records, they focused
on one of the vets, Edward Daily,
who it turned out had fabricated
his story in order to claim benefits
for post-traumatic stress disorder.
But the detractors admit that numerous refugees were killed,
and cannot explain the testimony of 30 Korean survivors or the
eleven other U.S. soldiers who had indelible memories of the
massacre. “We just annihilated them,” said ex-machine gunner
Norman Tinkler. “It was just wholesale slaughter,” ex-rifleman
Herman Patterson told the reporters. Vets reported that a Cap¬
tain Melbourne Chandler, “after speaking with superior officers
by radio, had ordered machine-gunners
from his heavy-weapons company to
set up near the tunnel mouths and open
fire.” “Chandler said, ‘The hell with
all those people. Let’s get rid of all of
them’” (“War’s hidden chapter: Ex-GIs
Tell of Killing Korean Refugees,” AP
dispatch, 23 September 1999).
A BBC report on the Korean War
quoted 7th Cavalry vet Joe Jackman
about No Gun Ri: “There was a lieu¬
tenant screaming like a madman, fire
on everything, ‘kill ’em all’.... I didn’t
know if they were soldiers or what.
Kids, there was kids out there, it didn’t
matter what it was, eight to 80, blind,
crippled or crazy, they shot ’em all.”
But this was not the action of some
panicked soldiers - they were acting
on orders. The original AP story quoted
retired Colonel Robert Carroll, then
a lieutenant, who witnessed aircraft
strafing the refugees and then riflemen
opening fire on the refugees: “This is
right after we get orders that nobody
comes through, civilian, military, no¬
body.” That very morning, July 26, the U.S. 8th Army radioed
orders throughout the Korean front that began, “No repeat no
refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time.”
A day earlier, the headquarters of the Fifth Air Force issued
a memo (labeled “Secret”) on “Policy on Strafing Civilian
Refugees.” In cold bureaucratese, it read:
“3. The army has requested that we strafe all civilian refugee
parties that are noted approaching our
positions.
“4. To date, we have complied with the
army request in this respect.”
And on July 24, the 1st Cavalry Divi¬
sion HQ sent out an explicit order: “No
refugees to cross the front line. Fire
everyone trying to cross lines. Use dis¬
cretion in case of women and children.”
The slaughter at No Gun Ri was
only one of scores of such mass mur¬
ders. The slaughter at No Gun Ri
was only one of scores of such mass
murders. A far larger massacre took
place outside the city of Daejeon in the
first week of July 1950, when South
Korean police executed over the space
of three days at least 1,800 jailed left¬
ists and other prisoners. Altogether
some 4,000 civilians were murdered in
Daejeon by the retreating ROK forces.
This was known at the time by the top
U.S. authorities. Nevertheless, when
reports of this atrocity were published
by Communist journalists, the United
States government denounced them as
USAF aerial photo, from U.S. Department of the
Army, No Gun Ri Review [January 2001]
Scene of the crime: railroad bridge
where hundreds of South Korean refu¬
gees were massacred by U.S. troops
on 25 July 1950.
Aiujvsn
January-February 2011
The internationalist
43
Some 1,800 South Korean leftists and other prisoners were massacred near
Daejeon by the ROK police over the space of three days in July 1950.
“fabrications.” The Pentagon also hid photos of this massacre for
half a century by classifying them secret. Even larger numbers
of South Korean leftists were executed, an estimated 10,000, in
the city of Busan (Pusan) during this same period (July-August
1950). Documents show that a U.S. advisor to the ROK military
authorized the machine-gunning of 3,500 prisoners in Busan.
An extensive presentation of evidence about the Daejeon mas¬
sacre, using material uncovered by the South Korean Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, “Mass Killings in Korea: Com¬
mission Probes Hidden History of 1950,” was prepared by the
Associated Press and is available on the Internet.
Meanwhile, in the South Korean countryside as well there
was a reign of terror. On 26-29 July 1950, U.S. soldiers and
planes slaughtered more than 100 people in a massacre at Chu-
gok village in Yongdong county. On August 3, the commander
of the 1st Cavalry Division, Maj. Gen. Hobart Gay ordered a
bridge crossing the Naktong River in South Korea blown up
in order to stop refugees crossing it. Gay later wrote to a mili¬
tary historian, “up in the air with the bridge went hundreds of
refugees.” The same day, 25 miles downstream at the village of
Tuksong-Dong, army engineers blew up a second bridge over
the Naktong. The detonation "lifted up and turned it sideways
and it was full of refugees end to end,” said Leon Denis, one
of the engineers (“Other Incidents of Refugees Killed by GIs
During Korea Retreat,” AP dispatch, 13 October 1999). More
incidents kept coming to light. On 20 January 1951, in Youngc-
hun American bombers dropped incendiary bombs at the mouth
of a cave, killing 300 local villagers huddled inside. “Earlier that
week, 60 miles to the west, another 300 South Korean refugees
were killed by a U.S. air attack as they jammed a storage house
at the village of Doon-po" the AP journalists reported in a third
dispatch (28 December 1999). A colleague reported seeing “the
frozen bodies of at least 200 Koreans in civilian clothes” on 26
January 1951 on a road near the
village of Yong-in.
Infantry massacres, aerial
bombing, even the Navy got in
on the indiscriminate slaughter.
Years later, researchers found
records in the National Archives
of a massacre on a beach near the
southern Korean port of Pohang.
On 1 September 1950, the de¬
stroyer USS DeHaven “received
orders from the SFCP [shore fire
control party] to open fire on a
large group of refugee personnel
located on the beach,” according
to the ship’s log. The ship’s of¬
ficers questioned the order, but
then complied. The AP (13 April
2007) reported: ‘“The sea was a
pool of blood,’ said Choi 11-chool,
75. ‘Dead bodies lay all over the
place.’ Witnesses say 100 to 200
civilians were killed in the Navy
shelling.” On 20 August 1950, a U.S. air attack on 2,000 refu¬
gees assembled at Haman, near Masan, killed almost 200 (AP
dispatch, 3 August 2008). On 10 September 1950, the air force
dropped 93 tanks of napalm on Wolmi Island, killing 100 or
more residents, according to survivors (International Herald
Tribune, 21 July 2008).
No Gun Ri, Daejeon, Busan, Chugok, Tuksong-Dong,
Youngchun, Doon-po, Yong-in, Pohang, Haman, Wilmi
Island, the bridge over the Naktong River: these names
should be seared into the collective memory as horrendous
massacres committed by U.S. forces in the Korean War. And
these are only some of the ones in which 100 or more dead are
reported. There are countless others in which dozens and scores
were machine-gunned, strafed, napalmed and fire-bombed.
Like the infamous 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam,
these were not the actions of some lone lieutenant - they were
the result of official policy. In 2006, a former Harvard historian
now at the National Archives, Sahr Conway-Lanz, discovered a
letter from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, to his
superior, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, sent the night
before the No Gun Ri massacre. It reported on a high-level
meeting with military commanders and outlined the policy:
“If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive
warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will
be shot” (see “U.S. Policy Was to Shoot Korean Refugees,”
AP dispatch, 29 May 2006). So there is not the slightest
doubt that the top U.S. military authorities in Korea directly
ordered the deliberate killing of non-combatant refugees, an
unambiguous war crime, and that this was known by civilian
authorities in Washington. Yet no one has ever been tried, or
even charged, for this mass murder.
For decades, right-wing dictatorships in South Korea and
the United States government kept a lid on all reports of mass
44
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
CL
<
U.S. president Truman decorates Gen. MacArthur, October 1950. In
the background, U.S. ambassador to South Korea John Muccio.
MacArthur planned to wipe out North Korea with atom bombs. Muccio
sent letter (below) saying it was official policy to fire on refugees.
1. Leaflet drops will be cade north of US llne#®n/fj
the poop le not to proceed south, that they risk being Sired
upon If they to so. If refugees do appear from north of US
lines they sill receive warning shots, and If they then
persist In advancing they will be shot. ,
The Honorable
Dean Rusk,
Assistant secretary of State,
Department of State,
Vashington.
killings by their armed forces. But in December 2005, under a
liberal government in Seoul under President Roh Moo-hyun, a
Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to investigate
mass killings going back to the period of Japanese colonial
rule. It had more than 200 wartime cases on its docket. Last
summer, it was reported that the Commission had found that
“American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on
138 separate occasions during the Korean War.” But now a
right-wing government headed by Lee Myung-bak is in office
determined to wrap up the commission without antagonizing
the U.S. So with new commissioners in charge, the slaughter
was written off as due to “military necessity.” No compensa¬
tion will be sought or criminal charges filed in 97 percent of
the cases brought before the body, and the survivors will get
nothing. So much for “truth” and “reconciliation.
Napalm and Nuke Threats in the North
In the South, the U.S. forces engaged in retail level mass
murder, mowing down hundreds of civilians at a time. As the
U.S. Army (along with ROK troops and contingents from Britain
and Turkey) crossed the 38th Parallel invading the North, they
turned to wholesale slaughter of thousands and tens of thou¬
sands of North Koreans, treating the entire population as “the
enemy.” This was billed as a “limited war” but it was under the
command of Gen. MacArthur, who advocated total war against
Communism - and had waged it against Japan. Even after he
was relieved of his command for insubordination in April 1951,
MacArthur’s policies were continued. The preeminent historian
of the Korean War, Bruce Cumings, has written:
“The air force dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea
on 12 August [1950], a tonnage that would have required a
fleet of 250 B-17s in the second world war. By late August
B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North.
Much of it was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950,
B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.”
-“Korea: Forgotten Nuclear Threats,” Le Monde Diploma¬
tique (English edition), December 2004
From the outset, the aim was to wipe out every urban center
in the North. In his recent book, The Korean War: A History
(Modem Library, 2010), Cumings notes:
“The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea
(not counting 32,557 tons of napalm), compared to 503,000
tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II.... [ A]t least
50 percent of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major
cities were obliterated.”
Responding to apologists for this devastation, Cumings points
to the implicit racism behind it: “note the logic: they are sav¬
ages, so that gives us the right to shower napalm on innocents.”
To comprehend the scope of the destruction of North
Korea by U.S. air power, consider some comparisons. In Ger¬
many, estimates of the number of civilians killed in the Allied
air war range from 305,000 (U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey)
to 600,000, out of a total German population of 78 million.
The bombing aimed at destroying the Reich’s industrial ca¬
pacity and breaking morale (which it notoriously failed to do)
through sheer terror. (This, from the “democratic” imperialists
who today claim to be waging a “war on terror”!). Where the
civilian population was targeted with firebombing - notably
Hamburg and Dresden - this was widely denounced as war
crimes. In Japan, due to racist prejudice the U.S. rulers had
fewer compunctions about indiscriminately slaughtering Asian,
rather than European (“white”) civilians (see John Dower, War
Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War [Pantheon
Books, 1986]). Some 100,000 people were killed in a single
firebombing raid on Tokyo in March 1945, and more than
200,000 were murdered in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
andNagasaki that August. In Japan, estimates of civilian deaths
range up to 600,000, out of a total population of 72 million -
the same scope as in Germany, but over a much shorter time
period of nine months.
In North Korea, in contrast, the U.S. bombing went on
for three years, and its purpose was not terrorizing the popula¬
tion, it was annihilation. Cumings quotes Curtis LeMay, the
architect of the aerial bombing that incinerated Japanese cites
(and who later advocated bombing Vietnam “back to the Stone
Age”). LeMay says he argued with his Pentagon superiors at
the outset to “let us go up there . . . and burn down five of the
biggest towns in North Korea.” While there were objections
about civilian casualties, he said, in the end “over a period of
three years or so ... we burned down every town in North
Korea and South Korea, too.” The number of civilian dead
January-February 2011
The internationalist
45
Napalm bombing of village near Hanchon, North Korea, 10 May 1951. Use of napalm on villages later became
infamous in Vietnam, but much more was dumped on North Korea.
in North Korea during the war was over 1 million, and total
casualties were 1.5 million-plus, out of a total population at
the time of 8-9 million: almost 20 percent of the population.
Plus another million killed in South Korea.
When the revelations came out about the massacre at
No Gun Ri and other cases of mass murder by U.S. forces in
South Korea, the ministry of foreign affairs of the DPRK put
out a memorandum (21 March 2000) detailing the slaughter
carried out by the imperialists in the North. A main target was
the capital, Pyongyang, which was 75 percent destroyed by
aerial bombing. The memo reported: “During the war, the
U.S. aggressors made more than 1,400 air raids on Pyongyang
dropping over 428,000 bombs, destroying all industrial estab¬
lishments, educational, health and public service facilities and
dwelling houses and killing many innocent civilians.” In just
one of those raids, on 11-12 July 1952, U.S. planes dropped
over 6,000 napalm bombs, killing some 8,000 people. They
also hit other Northern cities repeatedly, including Nampho,
Hamhung, Hungnam, Sinuiju and Chongjin, burning them
to the ground. Overall, the memo stated, “Napalm and other
bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes totaled nearly 600,000 tons,
which was 3.7 times the 161,425 tons ofbombs they dropped
over Japan proper during the Pacific War,” although North
Korea is only one-third the size of Japan.
While the North’s KPA rapidly defeated the South Korean
army early in the war (July-August 1950), as soon as the United
States reinvaded in force in September (in the guise of a United
Nations “police action”), the balance of forces shifted dramati¬
cally. In a few weeks, the U.S./“U.N.” army pushed the overex¬
tended KPAback to the north. But when Americans crossed the
partition line at the 38th Parallel on 1 October 1950, the military
balance shifted again. China sent a People’s Volunteer Army of
1 million troops to aid their North Korean comrades. Under the
illusion that they were still advancing, the U.S. Eighth Army
launched a “Home by Christmas Offensive” on November 25.
Instead, by December 25 the entire U.S./U.N. force had been
pushed out of North Korea. As it retreated, it adopted a scorched
earth policy, destroying everything and everyone in its path.
During its brief (October to mid-December 1950) occupa¬
tion of the North, the U.S. escalated the indiscriminate mas¬
sacres it had carried out in the South. A museum in Sin eh on t
where the slaughter was particularly intense, documents many
of these, including over 1,500 people blown up or burned to
death in air raid shelters in the city from October 17 to 20;
2,000 people shot, bayoneted and pushed off Sokdang Bridge
over a period of three weeks; and another 900 (including 500
women and children) massacred on December 7. Altogether,
over 35,000 civilians were killed in the Sinchon region, a quar¬
ter of the entire population. Elsewhere, on November 7, they
shot to death more than 500 civilians on Mt. Sudo in Haeju,
and another 600 in Haugogae valley in Kumsan. On Decem¬
ber 5 in Sariwon City they arrested and took 950 inhabitants
to Mt. Mara, then machine-gunned them to death. When the
U.S. military entered the North Korean capital of Pyongyang,
they jailed 4,000 civilians and shot 2,000 of them in the prison
yard. For a listing of these horrific murders, see the section on
the DPRK of the report of the Korea International War Crimes
Tribunal (held on 23 June 2001 in New York).
But that’s only (some of) what the U.S. did. What it was
preparing to do was far worse. After MacArthur had been pushed
out of the North, on 24 December 1950, the U.S./U.N. com¬
mander made a formal request for 38 atomic bombs accompa¬
nied by a list of 24 targets, to turn North Korea from a wasteland
(which U.S. bombing had already made it) into an uninhabitable
moonscape. In posthumously published interviews, MacArthur
claimed he had a plan to win the war in ten days: “I would have
dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of
Manchuria,” leaving “behind us - from the Sea of Japan to the
Yellow Sea - a belt of radioactive cobalt... it has an active life
of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could
Map: warchat.org
Photos: AFP
46
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Above: U.S. and South Korean forces cross the 38th Parallel, invading North
Korea, on 12 October 1950. Below: U.S. forces hightail it back across the
38th Parallel in retreat, on 25 December 1950.
have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.” 2 Or any
human life in Korea north of the 38th parallel.
This was a program for genocide on a scale surpassing
Hitler Was it just bluster from a general known as a braggart?
Not at all. On 30 November 1950, President Truman (who had
ordered the A-bombing of Japan) threatened in a news confer¬
ence to use any weapon in the U.S. arsenal. Many considered
this a slip of the tongue. It was not. The same day, an order was
issued to the Strategic Air Command to prepare to dispatch
bomb groups to the Far East with “atomic capabilities.” Earlier,
2 Quoted in Bruce Cumings, “Korea: forgotten nuclear threats,” Le
Monde Diplomatique (English edition), December 2004.
the Joint Chiefs of Staff had estimated that
atomic bombs could establish “a cordon
sanitaire ... in a strip in Manchuria immedi¬
ately north of the Korean border.” This was
exactly MacArthur’s doomsday scenario,
minus the cobalt bombs (which didn’t exist).
Cumings reports that “The US came
closest to using atomic weapons in April
1951, when Truman removed Mac Arthur
[as commander in chief in Korea].... Tru¬
man traded MacArthur for his atomic poli¬
cies.” In March, the atomic bomb loading
operation at the U.S. air base on Okinawa
became operational; the bombs were there,
and only had to be assembled. On April 5,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered immediate
atomic retaliation against Manchurian bases
if large numbers of new Chinese forces en¬
tered the fighting. That same day, the head
of the Atomic Energy Commission began
the process of transferring Mark IV nuclear
capsules to the Ninth Air Force for use in
Korea. Only Chinese restraint apparently
stopped this operational plan. In June 1951
the JCS again considered using A-bombs,
this time for tactical battlefield purposes.
And in October 1951, U.S. forces carried
out “Operation Hudson Harbor,” a simu¬
lated atomic bombing including weapons
assembly and sending lone B-29 aircraft
from Okinawa to North Korea to drop
dummy A-bombs or heavy TNT bombs as
a trial run for using nuclear weapons.
Plans for nuking North Korea didn’t
stop with the 1953 armistice, which ended
the fighting but left tens of thousands of
U.S. troops occupying South Korea (29,000
are still there). This past June, on the 60th
anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean
War, the National Security Archive (a group
dedicated to “piercing the self-serving veils
of government secrecy”) published a series
of documents on planning by the Nixon
administration following the North Korean
shootdown of a U.S. EC-121 spy plane in April 1969. Code-
named “Freedom Drop,” the plan called for “the selective use of
tactical nuclear weapons against North Korea,” with warheads
ranging from 10 to 70 kilotons each against a dozen airfields.
This was hardly abstract: in 1967, the U.S. had 950 nuclear
weapons stockpiled in South Korea, in flagrant violation of
the Korean Armistice Agreement which banned (in Paragraph
13d) the introduction of any new weaponry. During the 1969
crisis, “nuclear-armed U.S. warplanes stood by in South Korea
on 15-minute alert to strike the north” (AP dispatch, 9 October
2010). The plan was eventually shelved after concluding that it
would likely lead to all-out war, bringing in the Soviet Union.
January-February 2011
The internationalist
47
4-156
Intelligence Report
(b) (1)
(b) (3)
Ujpct dj Ksum racyic ana luiw American Analysis
21 January 1998
Exploring the Implications of Alternative North Korean Endgames:
Results From a Discussi on Pa nel on Continuing Coexistence Between
North and South Korea j -
An Introductory Note j
(Group recently convened a panel of Northeast Asian
specialists to rentier examine some issues that arose from the March 1997 Intelligence
Community crisis simulation on alternative Korean endgames. In that simulation,
regional dynamics were examined in response to a limited North Korean invasion of
U.S. Imperialists Going for
“Endgame” in North Korea?
Again in the 1990s, the Clinton administration
considered “surgical strikes” against North Korean
facilities after the DPRK threatened to withdraw
from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 3 . Ulti¬
mately the plan was dropped in favor of negotiation.
Why? First, the North Korean army is a formidable
force of 1 million soldiers, backed up by another 8
million reservists. It has double the manpower, more
armor and substantially more artillery than the South
Korean and U.S. forces in the theater. If full-scale
fighting broke out, the South Korean capital, located
only 35 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, could be
pounded to smithereens by well dug-in North Korean
artillery. The war would be fought not in the desert like the
1991 attack on Iraq, but in the suburbs or in the center of Seoul,
producing millions of refugees and a staggering death toll.
Second, even the right-wing South Korean government was
not eager for a war. It worried about the tremendous economic
cost to it of a collapse of the DPRK. Moreover, some in the
ROK military were not adverse to North Korea developing
nuclear weapons, figuring they would inherit them in the event
of reunification. And an all-out war would likely bring in China
on the other side, with untold consequences.
So once again, the U.S. attack plans were archived, but
the threat remained. The Clinton administration negotiated
an “Agreed Framework,” promising a regular supply of fuel
oil and delivery of two light-water reactors in exchange for
North Korea abandoning its plutonium enrichment efforts.
However, the funds for the reactors were never appropriated,
and the oil supply was soon cut off. In response, North Korea
began a uranium enrichment program and eventually left the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, a toothless pact aimed at keeping a
monopoly of mass destruction in the hands of the dominant
imperialist powers, mainly the U.S. The DPRK has developed
atomic weapons and carried out at least two successful tests, in
October 2006 and April 2009. It has a range of short, medium
and long-range rockets capable of delivering nuclear warheads.
In short, North Korea’s nuclear deterrent exists and is credible.
Yet despite this, the South Korean and U.S. rulers have in the
last two years sharply stepped up their pressure on the North.
Again, the question must be asked: why?
On the U.S. side of the equation, Barack Obama has repeat¬
edly pointed to North Korea as a “threat” that should be focused
on. In his 2006 book Audacity of Hope, Obama asked, “Why
invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma?” (He later “clari¬
fied” this to say he wasn’t advocating invasion ofNorth Korea.)
In an article in Foreign Affairs (July-August 2007), candidate
Obama called for a “strong international coalition to prevent Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons and eliminate North Korea’s
nuclear weapons program.... In confronting these threats, 1 will
not take the military option off the table.” Mired in a losing war
3 See our article, “Defend North Korea Against Nuclear Blackmail
and War Threats!” The Internationalist No. 15, January-February
2003 for a detailed analysis.
in Afghanistan, the Obama administration is in no position to
wage another war in northeastern Asia. Yet it is systematically
stepping up military and economic pressure on the DPRK in the
evident belief that “endgame” for North Korea is near.
In South Korea, the relatively liberal governments of Kim
Dae-jung (1998-2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008) pursued
a “sunshine policy” of “engagement” with the North. But after a
decade out of office, during which the liberals never dared touch
the military, the right returned under President Lee My ung-bak,
in the shape of the Grand National Party. This is the political
instrument of the military command, which ruled South Korea
uninterruptedly until the late 1990s, and the powerful chaebol
conglomerates (Samsung, Hyundai, LG, etc.) who dominate
industry and finance. Lee perfectly embodies this capitalist
fusion of militarists and industrialists, having been installed in
Hyundai by the dictator-president, Gen. Park Chung-hee. In the
2007 campaign Lee accused his predecessors of “appeasement”
of the North. Since coming to office he has shown unremitting
hostility to the DPRK, cutting off aid and rattling sabers at
every chance. In the summer of 2009, at a meeting of Korean,
Japanese and American left-wing trade-unionists, the South Ko¬
reans alerted us that following consultations in Washington and
Tokyo - about whose results nothing was said publicly -South
Korean president Lee had embarked on a course of provocations
that could lead to war with the North.
The right-wing regime in Seoul is acting aggressively to
push North Korea over the brink, on the supposition that with
enough pressure the DPRK will implode. That is what is behind
holding provocative South Korean live fire military exercises
barely seven miles off the North Korean coast. A “confiden¬
tial” diplomatic dispatch by the U.S. ambassador to South
Korea, Kathleen Stephens, dated 12 January 2009, published
by Wikileaks in December 2010, reports that Lee is “quite
comfortable with his North Korea policy and ... prepared to
leave the inter-Korean relations frozen until the end of his term
in office, if necessary. It is also our assessment that Lee’s more
conservative advisors and supporters see the current standoff as a
genuine opportunity to push and further weaken the North, even
if this might involve considerable brinkmanship.” One of those
advisors is the former vice foreign minister Chun Yung-woo,
who has now been promoted to Lee’s national security advisor.
48
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong II (right) and son Kim Jong Un,
his heir apparent, with North Korean generals reviewing troops, 10
October 2010.
A Wikileaks cable from Ambassador
Stephens (22 February 2010) quotes Chun
saying that “The DPRK ... had already
collapsed economically and would collapse
politically two to three years after the death
of Kim Jong-il.” Chun also “claimed [Chi¬
nese] Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai
and another senior PRC [People’s Republic
of China] official from the younger genera¬
tion both believed Korea should be unified
under ROK control,” and that they “were
ready to ‘face the new reality’” that “the
DPRK now had little value to China as a
buffer state.” Chun argued that while China
would “not welcome” U.S. forces north
of the DMZ, he “dismissed the prospect
of a possible PRC military intervention in
the event of a DPRK collapse, noting that
China’s strategic economic interests now
lie with the United States, Japan, and South
Korea - not North Korea.”
Saner observers have ridiculed these reports, saying “much
of the information in the outed memos amounts to little more than
dinner party chatter that reflects outdated opinion or wishful think¬
ing” (Barbara Demick, “Beijing support for Korea reunification
not so clear, despite leaked cables,” Los Angeles Times, 30 No¬
vember). For China to stand by as an army of 1 million is removed
that is the main obstacle standing between it and front-line U.S.
forces, would be militarily suicidal. Moreover, counterrevolution
on its doorstep would be a direct threat to the Chinese deformed
workers state - something that the imperialists (and quite a few
leftists) who think that China has already gone capitalist cannot
grasp. China’s refusal to condemn North Korea over the recent
incidents, driving Hillary Clinton into a frenzy, show that the
Stalinist leaders in Beijing have some grasp of this reality. But the
U.S. and its South Korean allies may believe that their chitchat
about Chinese acquiescence to a South Korean takeover of the
North is accurate, and are acting accordingly. If so, the chances
of renewed military aggression against the DPRK have sharply
escalated, and with it the danger of a third imperialist world war.
U.S. strategists have often predicted the imminent collapse
of North Korea in the past. In 1997, a CIA panel of experts
concluded that “the Kim regime cannot remain viable” - due
to its deteriorating economic condition - “beyond five years.”
(In 2006, the National Security Archive published this paper,
“Exploring the Implications of Alternative North Korean End¬
games,” and a series of other documents from the Clinton admin¬
istration under the skeptical title, “North Korea’s Collapse? The
End Is Near - Maybe.”) Likewise, an article by Robert Kaplan
reported that “Middle- and upper-middle-level U.S. officers
based in South Korea and Japan are planning for a meltdown of
North Korea” (“When North Korea Falls,” The Atlantic, October
2006). 4 The prevalent opinion among imperialist liberals has for
4 Kaplan is not just another liberal journalist. His book, Balkan
Ghosts (1993), reportedly influenced Bill Clinton’s two wars on
Yugoslavia (1995 and 1999). He is currently on the Pentagon’s De¬
fense Policy Board.
some time been that the North Korean economy is a shambles,
and now that that the ailing Kim Jong 11 has introduced his son
Kim Jong Un as heir apparent they see a succession crisis. This
view is repeated as well by social-democratic reformists such
as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which writes
of North Korea that “its economy is on the edge of collapse”
(Socialist Worker, 29 November). 5
The accuracy of this picture is open to question. A number
of recent reports from the North indicate that markets are func¬
tioning, the population is making do as they have done for years
under U.N. sanctions, most consumer goods are domestically
produced, and while there are still food shortages they had a
fairly good harvest this year. Over the years there have been
numerous premature announcements of the impeding collapse
of North Korea. In fact, the dispatches released by WikiLeaks
from 2009 and early 2010 bear an uncanny resemblance to the
U.S. diplomatic and intelligence analyses from the last time
power changed hands in Pyongyang, in 1994, when Kim Jong
11 succeeded his father, Kim 11 Sung. And the analysts all agree
that the North Korean bureaucracy shows “no signs of losing its
political will to stay the course” (CIA analysis, 1998). Unlike
the Soviet bloc Stalinists, DPRK leaders can have no illusions
that they could emerge as leaders of a capitalist North Korea.
They are faced with an economically and militarily powerful
capitalist South Korea, whose leaders are bent on revenge -
sort of Cuban gusanos with state power - and would rather see
DPRK leaders shot than make any kind of a deal.
Whether endgame is looming for North Korea is debatable.
What is true is that the Stalinist regime ultimately has no way
out. What’s posed is a struggle for revolutionary reunification.
5 The intellectual godfather of the ISO, Tony Cliff, broke with the
Trotskyist Fourth International in declaring the Soviet Union to be
“state capitalist” at the onset of the anti-Soviet Cold War, and then in
1950 refusing to defend North Korea against the U.S.-led imperial¬
ist forces in the Korean War.
Xinhua
January-February 2011
The internationalist
49
For Revolutionary Reunification of Korea:
Political Revolution in the North,
Social Revolution in the South
It is impossible to learn anything about North Korea
from the bourgeois press, which has demonized the country
and the Kim regime like no other. Even serious imperialist
publications like the London Economist (27 November) write
such utter nonsense as, “No government anywhere subjects
its own people to such a barbarous regime of fear, repression
and hunger.” Similarly for statements like “North Korea is the
poorest country in the world.” Like poorer than Somalia? (To
the extent that such absurd claims are intended seriously, they
are statistical flim-flam, comparing the DPRK, where housing,
transportation and food are distributed by social mechanisms,
with countries based on a capitalist market. Thus according to
the Economist, using black market exchange rates, the aver¬
age North Korean wage in 2008 was US$1 a month - a sheer
impossibility.) No one reading this drivel would have a clue
that the DPRK is a modern industrial country, where people
work in factories and offices, have TV sets and VCRs, live in
high-rise apartments, play in parks, ride in subways and on
locally manufactured trolleybuses, etc.
And who exactly is subjecting the North Korean popula¬
tion to hunger? In the first place, there are wild claims that 2
million or even 3 million people died (the latter figure from the
demonic North Korea-basher Jasper Becker) in famines in the
mid-late 1990s. There certainly was widespread hunger at the
time, some 60 percent of North Korean children under 5 years
of age were underweight. But while the U.S. government’s
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) spread blatant lies that that
food consumption had fallen to under 1,000 calories a day, the
Food and Agricultural Organization of the U.N. estimated the
caloric intake at between 2,100 and 2,200: seriously deficient,
but hardly mass starvation. As we have written,
“Contrary to imperialist propaganda about the North Korean
population being reduced to eating grass, due to food ration¬
ing there have been no credible reports of mass starvation,
as there certainly would have been in any capitalist country
facing similarly drastic food shortages.”
-“U.S. Tries to Starve North Korea Into Collapse,” The
Internationalist No. 15, January-February 2003
Yes, there was a famine and widespread malnutrition in the
1990s, but the reports of millions of North Koreans starving to
death are pure invention. The food shortages were the result of
a combination of bad weather (severe flooding made much of
the limited farmland unusable) and the cutoff of oil supplies and
export markets as a consequence of the counterrevolutionary
collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea’s main trading partner
and source of aid. Prior to that, the DPRK had a productive,
highly mechanized agriculture, using tractors and industrial
fertilizer. With energy supplies cut off, industrial production
shut down and tractors sat idle in the fields. And yes, there was
someone deliberately trying to starve the North Korean people: it
was U.S. imperialism under Bill Clinton, which cut off delivery
of heavy oil supplies the United States was obligated to deliver,
in the midst of the brutally cold Korean winter.
U.S. gearing up for its next invasion. U.S. and South
Korean military stage dramatic reenactment of’1950
Inchon landing, using 14,000 troops, September 15.
We Trotskyists of the League for the F ourth International are
no fans of the Stalinist North Korean regime. As we have written:
“The Kim dynasty is surely one of the most bizarre nationalist
varieties of Stalinism on the planet. The ‘cult of the personality’
in North Korea rivals that of Stalin or Mao. For sheer capricious¬
ness and intrusiveness the Kims rivaled the Ceausescu family in
Romania, although the latter’s bloody downfall was due in good
part to its efforts to pay offloans from Western bankers, plunging
the country into darkness for lack of energy.” But our opposition
to the bureaucratic regime of the Korean Workers Party is the
exact opposite of that of the imperialists and their South Korean
allies. The latter want to get rid of the Kims and the KWP in order
to restore capitalism; in contrast, we warn that the bureaucracy’s
attempts to appease the capitalists endanger revolutionary gains.
After years of an “Army First” policy, the DPRK has
declared its focus is on building a strong economy and expand¬
ing consumer goods production by 2012. But its attempt at an
economic reform in November 2008 was a fiasco, wiping out
functionaries’ savings with a currency reform which limited the
amount that could be exchanged while leaving intact private
traders’ hoards of dollars and euros. As a result, the architect
of the reform, Pak Nam Ki was reportedly executed by a firing
squad after being found guilty of “deliberately ruining the na¬
tional economy” (Los Angeles Times, 25 March). No doubt this
was intended by the bureaucracy to show that they took seriously
popular discontent over the botched reform, but it does tend to
dampen discussion of policy differences if the consequence of
having the wrong line means getting shot. One more reason why
Trotskyists oppose the death penalty not only under capitalism
- where it serves as a measure of racist repression - but also in
countries where capitalist ride has been overthrown.
By abolishing capitalist exploitation and establishing a col¬
lectivized economy, the DPRK was able to make tremendous
strides in recovering from the utter devastation of the Korean War.
Pyongyang and other cities were rebuilt from the ground up, with
modern housing and facilities. Up to the mid-late 1970s, North
Korean workers had a higher standard of living than those south
of the DMZ, as Korean capitalists accumulated capital through
ruthless superexploitation of South Korean workers under the
iron heel of the military regime. But ultimately, as Marx and
Engels insisted as long ago as 1847 and as Bolshevik leader
Leon Trotsky stressed from the early 1920s on, it is not possible
to build socialism in national isolation from the world (capitalist)
50
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
South Korean workers march against G20 meeting in Seoul, November 11.
market. A classless society can only
be built on the basis of abundance,
for otherwise “want is generalized”
and some kind of police regime will
arise to decide the distribution of
scarce goods. That is the origin of
the bureaucratically degenerated (in
the case of the Soviet Union) and
deformed workers states, ^“social¬
ism in one country” could not last in
the case of the USSR with its vast
resources, it certainly won’t work in
a tiny half-country like North Korea
starved of vital inputs.
That is why the very real gains
from the overthrow of capitalism in
North Korea - which lay the basis
for a rationally planned economy -
can only be defended by extending
the revolution to the South, and
to the industrial powerhouse of
imperialist Japan. This requires a
proletarian political revolution to
oust the bureaucracy, whose capricious mismanagement un¬
dercuts the social gains in order to protect its privileged status.
An authentic, Leninist-Trotskyist communist party is needed to
establish a regime of egalitarianism and revolutionary workers
democracy, based on councils (soviets) that can recall officials
at any time. In a divided land like Korea, such an upheaval in
the North can only succeed if it goes hand in hand with a social
revolution in the capitalist South, to break the power of the kill-
crazed militarists and expropriate the profit-crazed chaebols and
other capitalists. Apolitical revolution in Pyongyang would also
send a powerful stimulus to the Chinese workers to rise up and
smash the growing danger of counterrevolution as capitalist
exploitation takes root and spreads.
Meanwhile, with North Korea having been subjected to
countless massacres by the U.S. and its Southern puppets;
having already lived through a U.S. war of annihilation
that engulfed the northern half of the peninsula; and having
been repeatedly threatened with nuclear attack by the U.S.,
it’s hardly surprising that the DPRK should seek to develop
nuclear weapons in self-defense, as it has prudently done. As
internationalist communists, Trotskyists defend North Korea’s
acquisition of a nuclear deterrent and emphasize that the cur¬
rent war hysteria makes the defense of North Korea against
imperialism and counterrevolution all the more urgent. ■
Internationalist
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January-February 2011
The internationalist
51
Students and Workers Strike
France: May in October?
The Spectre of a New '68
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Striking workers block fuel depot in Donges, 15 October 2010.
The Big Obstacle: Pro-Capitalist Union Misleaders
and the Now-Reformist “Far Left”
18 OCTOBER 2010 - A national “day of action” on October 12
brought 3.5 million French workers and youth into the streets
to protest the conservative government’s bill to push back
eligibility for retirement and pension benefits. It was the fourth
day of nationwide strikes and marches against the pension law
since the beginning of September. Although even more came
into the streets this time. President Nicolas Sarkozy and his
cabinet figured the demonstrations had run out of steam and
they could go on to their next anti-working-class “reform.” Big
mistake. Instead, worker-student protests continue to mount,
along with some heavy-handed repression by the cops. By
Friday, after several days of roiling student protests, a police
“union” complained (with some exaggeration) of “scenes of
urban guerrilla warfare” in cities around the country.
Strikes have continued on the railroads and at the country’s
oil refineries. On Friday, riot police dispersed pickets at several
fuel depots, only to see the last two refineries walk out in re¬
sponse. Several hundred service stations have run out of gas,
while long lines of motorists are forming to fill up their tanks.
The pipeline servicing the Orly and Roissy airports outside Paris
closed down and then reopened, although where the aviation
fuel is to come from is unclear. Meanwhile, the government is
telling airlines to fill up their planes outside France. Ferries to
the Mediterranean island of Corsica are not running. And starting
Sunday night, the French truckers union called on its members
to stage “operations escargof (driving at a snail’s pace to tie
up traffic on the main highways), blocking intersections with
their rigs and other actions against the pension law everywhere.
A fifth mass mobilization was called for Saturday, October
16. The unions reported that 3 million people participated in
264 marches around France (325,000 in Paris), roughly the
same as in the October 2 mobilization. Police estimates claimed
that the numbers were slightly less than two weeks ago, but
in any case it’s clear the mass protests have not let up. A sixth
day of action has been called for Tuesday, October 19, the day
before the Senate is scheduled to vote on the pension “reform.”
Boris Horvat/AFP
52
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
High school students march in Paris against pension “reform” law, October 12.
This will likely be as large or larger than previous protests,
as new sectors join in. So far, despite the radicalization of the
protests, media propaganda about “violent” youth and tough
talk from government ministers about forcing the law through
no matter what, a large majority of the population “support”
the strike action (52 percent in a recent poll) or “sympathize”
with it (19 percent). But the key question is, what happens
next? Some unions are hinting that they will pull out once the
law is approved, in order to look “responsible.”
One “day of action” after another will not stop Sarkozy,
nor will a few walkouts here and there. By endlessly repeating
these tactics, union leaders are actually aiding the government
in wearing down protest. What’s urgently needed is to mobilize
the entire working class, private and public, in militant strike
action to shut the country down , beginning with key sectors
and leading quickly to a nationwide general strike until the
anti-worker pension “reform ” is dropped. But the attack on
pensions is only part of the ruling-class offensive against work¬
ing people. Students and youth are going into the streets as well
to protest the unpaid internships, low wages, precarious jobs
and massive unemployment they face. Hundreds of thousands
of undocumented immigrants are demanding legalization, and
the government’s racist attacks against the Romany people and
French “travelers,” shutting down their camps and carrying out
mass deportations, are a taste of the police-state repression it
has in store for everyone. The power of the workers movement
must be brought out to defend all the exploited and oppressed.
Students Unite with Workers in Struggle
The last week marked a significant change in the protests
as the struggle entered its decisive phase. Instead of one-day
walkouts continuing strikes were called, notably on the rail
system and at refineries. In addition, students and youth mo¬
bilized for the first time in significant numbers. On October
12, there were walkouts at over 400 high schools and 90 were
totally blockaded. More than 150,000 students participated
in the demos. A popular sign read: “Youth toiling in the slave
galleys, older people living in poverty, this isn’t the society
we want.” In the universities there were assemblies of several
hundred students to discuss what action to take. In succeed¬
ing days the number of schools “mobilized” rose to 1,000 as
student protests spread around France.
The largest were in provincial cities including Toulouse
(20,000 marchers), Rennes (7,000), Bordeaux (5,000), Orleans
(2,000), Le Havre, Montpellier, Nunes, Lens and elsewhere. In
Paris, several thousand rallied outside the headquarters of the
employers association (Medef). A lead banner said, “Neither
kids nor puppets,” responding to government claims that they
were too young to protest about a pension law and were being
manipulated. Students’ signs read (in reference to Sarkozy’s
model-wife Carla Bruni), “Carla, we’re like you, the head of
state is screwing us too.” A favorite chant: “Sarkozy, you’re
screwed, the youth are in the streets.” And: “Put youth to work,
send oldsters to the cafes” (“ Les jeunes au boulot, les vieux
aux bistrots ”). One protester’s sign put it personally: “Mom
and Dad, I’ll get your right to retire at 60 for you.”
Government spokesmen complain about the “irresponsi¬
bility” of “bringing 15-year-olds into the streets” for “some¬
thing that doesn’t concern them.” But students pointed out that
as a result of the law, a million potential jobs will be eliminated,
as older workers are forced to stay on, aggravating the astro¬
nomical (26 percent) youth unemployment. The government,
media and trade unions all agree that if the students and youth
go out, this fundamentally changes the battle, widening it
into a general social conflict rather than a strictly union issue.
They recall 2006, when after two months of student strikes,
January-February 2011
The internationalist
53
the right-wing government of Jacques Chirac was forced to
withdraw the law for a lower minimum wage for youth (the
CPE). Sarkozy remarked, “you have to watch them [the youth]
like heating milk on the stove” (i.e., they may boil over). A
Paris newspaper ( Liberation , 12 October) wrote: “Experience
shows, when you say the youth are in the streets, you’re saying
withdrawal of the law is in the cards.”
Police responded to the youth mobilization with heavy-duty
tactics in a number of cities. In Montreuil, in the working-class
suburban district of Seine-St. Denis outside Paris, cops shot a
16-year-old high school student in the face with a flash-ball gun -
a French anti-riot weapon that fires rubber bullets - breaking his
cheekbones and detaching his eye from the retina. Several times
in recent years, youths have lost an eye when cops shot them
point-blank with flash-ball guns. This police provocation only
angered the students more and spread the walkouts. A student
leader pointed out that the more the government tells youths
they don’t belong in the streets, the more they come out. The
government poured oil on the fire by sending letters to parents
telling them to keep their offspring from demonstrating. This,
too, backfired. The main parent-teacher association, FCPE, is¬
sued a statement denouncing police running amok and calling
for parents to join the student demonstrations to stand in the
way of clashes with the “forces of order.”
Key to a Fight for Victory:
A Revolutionary Program
At present, “public opinion” is running heavily against
Sarkozy. Three-quarters of the population is opposed to the
pension “reform” and 54 percent said they wanted “the unions
to organize a general strike as in 1995” to force the government
to back down. On October 13, Le Monde headlined an article
on its web site, “What’s needed is an insurrectional general
strike,” quoting a retired woman trade-unionist. One recently
publicized survey reported that a quarter of French youth
agree that “it’s necessary to radically change the social order
by revolutionary action” (up from 6 percent in 1990). So the
“radicalization” of the struggle is not simply in terms of tactics.
In the face of the most severe capitalist economic crisis since
the 1930s - a new Depression, in fact - and the evident impo¬
tence of the usual trade-union protests, we are seeing renewed
receptivity to calls for class struggle and even revolutionary
agitation. This is what the ruling class and its labor lieutenants
are deathly afraid of in the battle over pensions.
it will take more than massive strikes “like in 1995” to
bring Sarkozy to his knees. In December of that year, a series
of millions-strong mobilizations of public sector workers
along with continuing walkouts by rail, metro, postal, gas,
telephone and other public workers, brought France to the brink
of a general strike. But the union tops were afraid to call it.
Eventually, Prime Minister Alain Juppe dropped his “reform”
of public sector pensions (which would raise the number of
years service to 40) but not his attack on social security, which
has led to years of cuts in France’s public health system.
With its chants of “tous ensemble ” (all out together) the 1995
struggle infused new spirit in a trade-union movement shaken
“Carla, we’re like you, the head of state is screwing
us too.” Paris, October 16.
by counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe.
But it did not provide a revolutionary program to combat the
bourgeois offensive. In 2003, Chirac was able to push through
the rest of the Juppe Plan on public sector pensions, aided by
the defection of the leadership of the CFDT union federation.
If 1995 doesn’t provide a model, no one in France, least
of all government and trade-union leaders, can help recalling
1968 - particularly since the entry of large numbers of stu¬
dent youth onto the scene. Last week, as high-school protests
spread, Olivier Besancenot, the young postal worker who ran
for president on the ticket of the Ligue Communiste Revo-
lutionnaire and is now (since the LCR dissolved) the main
spokesman for the “New Anti-Capitalist Party” (NPA), issued
a statement calling “For a New May ’68.” The reference to the
1968 student-worker revolt that brought France to the brink of
revolution and sent shock waves around the world produced
a chorus of yelps from supporters of the conservative govern¬
ment. But while the so-called “far left” races to catch up with
the student-youth protesters, there are problems with this call.
First and foremost, the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy stands
in the way of any serious radicalization of the struggle. They’re
looking for the exit, for a way out without losing face.
Many union leaders are privately worrying to the press
about the participation of youth. Liberation (16 October) quoted
the head of one labor federation saying, “It’s a real pain to man¬
age the youth ... it will take some time to separate them.” A CGT
leader remarked, “We didn’t ask them to come out,” but said it’s
probably better they are there, while worrying about “security.”
Another union leader complained of “things getting out of hand
and the violence discrediting the movement, turning off public
opinion.” And the more right-wing union tops, notably of the
Liberation
Frederick Florin/AFP
54
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
“Youth toiling in the slave galleys, older people liv¬
ing in poverty, this isn’t the society we want.” Youth
demonstrate in Strasbourg, October 12.
CFDT and UNSA, have hinted that once the law is passed by
the Senate, “other forms of action” will be called for - “in other
words, the end of the movement,” as Le Monde (17 October)
put it. They may hesitate to break ranks; Jean-Claude Mailly of
Force Ouvriere may invite youth into FO contingents; Bernard
Thibault of the CGT and Francois Chereque of the CFDT may
do their unity dance; but ultimately the union bureaucracy will
bow to the pressure of the bourgeoisie, for they are all commit¬
ted to working in the framework of capitalism.
Meanwhile, the once-upon-a-time far left that came out of
May ’68 has long-since become thoroughly reformist. In the
recent protests, groups like Lutte Ouvriere (Workers Struggle)
and the NPA did not initially call for a general strike (LO still
doesn’t), but only for massive participation in the marches. As
students joined in this month, one of their main chants was for
a “general strike until the law is withdrawn.” So now the NPA
and unions it influences (notably Sud-Rail, Sud-Education and
the Solidaires union federation) are calling for “extendable
strikes until victory.” But what do they mean by “victory,”
withdrawal of the law, or just some changes? When they’re
feeling pressure from the students, they sometimes call for an
“extendable general strike” (greve generate reconductible).
In other words, one that isn’t limited to a single day, which
amounts to a big parade combined with work stoppages in
places where the unions are strong. But to call a general strike
without a clear objective, voting daily on whether to continue,
is to ask for defeat. Like the bureaucrats’ endless “days of ac¬
tion,” it’s a pressure tactic.
The kind of tame parades that have taken place repeatedly
in the last year in France, Spain and particularly Greece are
hardly general strikes, which as Leon Trotsky pointed out, pose
the question of who is the master of the house, which class shall
rule ? Naturally, the reformists and pro-capitalist union bureau¬
crats have no desire to raise the struggle to that level, because
they have no intention of fighting for power, for workers revolu¬
tion. Thus everyone from the union tops to the “anti-capitalist”
left are dead-set opposed to a real general strike, which they
dismiss as “unrealistic,” “dreaming” (a “reve generate ,” a gen¬
eral dream) and the like. But the reformist ex-“far left” is caught
in a bind: they are afraid to raise slogans too far out in front of
what the CGT-FO-CFDT-UNSA union tops find acceptable,
yet if they lag too far behind the students, they risk losing their
potential recruits. So they try to find somewhere in between.
That hardly amounts to revolutionary leadership that can
prepare people for the struggle that is posed. Instead, these
tailist politics will “lead” protesters into a dead end. Even the
bourgeois press knows perfectly well what should be, and isn’t
being, done. An editorial in Liberation (14 October) referred
to the “phony strike,” pointing out that the union leaders are
fighting against a bill but not calling for it to be withdrawn,
that while the marches are huge the actual strikes are limited
to a few sectors, not including some of the historically most
militant. “One could imagine a ‘proxy’ strike, led by a minority
but valiant vanguard” (meaning, militants could set up strike
pickets that other workers would not cross). “Rail workers are
ready, on paper, to open the way by blocking the rails. But they
are not candidates to be kamikazes for the social movement.”
(Rail workers are mainly organized in the CGT, influenced (but
no longer tightly controlled) by the Communist Party, and in
the “far left” SUD-Rail.)
For this struggle to win a real and lasting victory, it is
necessary to raise not just vague “anti-capitalist” demands but
to put forward a transitional program leading toward socialist
revolution. A serious struggle for a real general strike would
call for the formation of elected strike committees, as a way
to wrest control from the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats.
Because of the division of the union movement into several
competing labor federations, serious strikes often produce
joint coordinating committees on the local or regional level.
At the time of the last big truckers strike, Le Monde (5 No¬
vember 1997) noted that in 1992, “the unions lost control of
the movement to spontaneous coordinating committees and
‘jusque ’au-boutists ”’ (those who want to “go all the way”).
Strike committees elected by the ranks of all the federations
as well as non-members would be greatly strengthened, and
would be a real step toward industrial unionism.
January-February 2011
The internationalist
55
Students join with workers outside Renault auto factory at Billancourt,
17 May 1968.
To strengthen ties between labor and youth and mobilize
the heavily immigrant working-class banlieues (suburbs),
class-struggle trade-unionists should fight not only to stop
the pension “reform” law, but also for a drastically shortened
workweek, at no loss in pay, to pro vide jobs for all. They should
fight the explosion of temporary jobs and “disposable” work¬
ers by demanding job security and equal rights for all work¬
ers, from the moment they begin working. And they should
mobilize union power to demand an end to expulsions of the
Roms', to block the destruction of their camps, including with
workers defense guards', and to demand freedom of travel and
full citizenship rights for all immigrants. A number of leaders
of the CGT, CFDT and FO union federations as well as spokes¬
men for the NPA have signed a “citizens’ appeal” in defense
of the Roms (which, however, upholds “republican security”
and the “necessary respect for public order”). Yet on October
12, the same day that the National Assembly voted the racist
Bresson immigration and nationality law, this was hardly (if
at all) mentioned by the various union and far left groups in
their leaflets and signs in the protest over the pension law.
A Liberation article talked of elements of a “pre-revolu¬
tionary situation” today, and a quote from Lenin on the role of
the youth in revolution was highlighted. But when a reformist
like Besancenot of the NPA talks of a “new ’68,” in good part
he is engaging in the old French sport of “epater le bourgeois ”
(throwing a scare into the bourgeoisie), as Baudelaire put it. In
contrast, the former soixantehuitard (68er) Daniel Cohn-Bendit
dumped cold water on talk of a new ’68, or even a general
strike. Instead, “Danny the Green,” now a respectable deputy
in the European parliament, called on the unions to organize “a
Crenelle together with the left.” (In 1968, the Grenelle Agree¬
ment between the union tops and De Gaulle’s prime minister
George Pompidou was massively rejected by the striking work¬
ers!) May 1968, when students joined with up to ten million
workers in a general strike which went on for more than two
weeks, is definitely a point of reference.
The situation today is different in many
ways, particularly coming in the middle
of a deep capitalist economic crisis. But
this only heightens the revolutionary
potential. The real problem with this
call is that May ’68 was defeated. The
reformist Communist Party clambered
on board the general strike to put an
end to the agitation, and the “far left”
did not have the revolutionary program
to fight them.
In 1968, rather than agitating for
workers control and occupation of
factories throughout the country, as
Trotsky called for in the mid-1930s
and as had already begun in mid-May,
Ernest Mandel and his followers in
the JCR (Revolutionary Communist
Youth) joined with left social demo¬
crats in calling for “anti-capitalist
structural reforms” and “self-manage¬
ment.” Other pseudo-Trotskyists such as the followers ofPierre
Lambert abandoned the barricades at the height of struggle,
and Lutte Ouvriere limited itself to the same-old, same-old of
factory-based struggles, while lambasting students for “fight¬
ing in the streets”! (Today, LO’s main banner reads, “What a
Parliament Decides Can Be Reversed in the Streets.” Yes, but
how?) A genuinely communist leadership would be calling for
a defensive general strike against the Sarkozy government’s
attack while putting forward the perspective “a new May ’68
that goes all the way ” to a struggle for power, for workers
revolution. And key to that struggle is forging an authentically
Leninist-Trotskyist workers party. ■
C ■ \
For Unconditional Release of
Everyone Arrested in the Protests -
Drop the Charges!
Over the last several weeks, police have re¬
sponded to high school demonstrations against the
pension law with ferocious repression. Some thou¬
sands of youth have been detained and hundreds ar¬
rested on the accusation of being “casseurs” (smash¬
ers). Many of those detained are youth of immigrant
origin from the suburbs, who are always the target of
racist attacks by the cops, and who are referred to
in the bourgeois press as the “other youth.” The real
casseurs are the police, the armed fist of capital and
professional anti-worker repressors. We say: police
out of the unions! The workers movement must
demand immediate and unconditional release
of all the detained and dropping of all charges.
Down with the “Republican” racist repression!
\ ___ J
56
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
French Battle Over Attack on Pensions Continues
t Sarkozy & Co.
to the workers
Union demonstration outside the French Senate, Paris, October 20. What’s needed is to bring to bear the power
of the workers in a general strike to block the economy and defeat Sarkozy’s anti-working-class offensive.
PARIS, 26 October 2010 - In the last week, the battle lines
in the conflict over the conservative government’s pension
“reform” law have hardened. On Tuesday, October 19, once
again some 3.5 million people responded to the call of unions,
striking and demonstrating in cities around France in the sixth
“day of action” in the last seven weeks. In some places, such
as Toulouse, the marches were the largest yet. Meanwhile, the
two-week-old strike of French refineries and the blockade of
fuel depots are beginning to bite. Despite government imports
of 100,000 tons of fuel a day, a third ofFrance’s 12,000 service
stations have run out of fuel. And while the number of pas¬
senger trains has been cut in half by strikes on the SNCF, the
national railways, rail transport of freight has been slashed by
90 percent while go-slow actions by the truckers unions have
tied up major highways. As a result, a number of key industries
are running out of supplies. Yet public support for the strikes
and protests is still overwhelming.
The response of the President Nicolas Sarkozy has been
to crack the whip. On government orders, the Senate shut
off debate on the
pension “reform”
just as opposition
Communist and
Socialist parties were presenting amendments. Its passage
on Friday evening [October 22] was pre-ordained, given
Sarkozy’s presidential majority in both houses. The final law,
combining Senate and National Assembly versions, may be
voted as early as today,. While ramming the bill through parlia¬
ment, the government ordered the CRS riot police to dissolve
strikers’ blockades around the fuel depots. At the Grandpuits oil
refinery about 100 km. outside Paris, the departmental prefect
(an agent of the national government) requisitioned strikers
to get the fuel supplies moving. On Friday morning, riot cops
attacked the pickets, injuring three strikers. When a judge ruled
this military measure illegal, for violating the constitutional
right to strike, the prefect simply issued a second requisition
order. Yet while fuel stocks are drawn down, no additional
amounts are being produced by the struck refinery.
This has been the first time since the 1968 general strike
that all ofFrance’s refineries have stopped production. More¬
over, oil imports at the Mediterranean ports of Marseille and
Fos-sur-Mer have been halted since dock workers there went
on strike at the end
of September over
the government’s
privatization plans
Build a Revolutionary Workers Party
on the Program of Lenin and Trotsky
Claude Platiau/Reuters
Laurent Cipriani/AP
January-February 2011
The internationalist
57
Gendarmes arrest youth during protests against pension law in Lyon,
October 19.
which threaten their jobs. (Simultaneously, Marseille garbage
workers struck for the last two weeks.) Car owners consult
Internet sites desperately looking for stations that still have
fuel. Yet despite the inconvenience, public support is strong:
a survey on Saturday, October 23 showed fully 69 percent in
favor of the strikes and protests even after the Senate passed
the law. French working people understand that the pension
“reform” is a frontal attack on their living standard and indeed
way of life. A big majority have come to despise Sarkozy for
his high-handed measures, his cavalier treatment of parlia¬
mentary opposition, his brutal repression, his catering to the
rich and contempt for the common people. One of the most
expressive photos of last week was a sign in a demonstration of
high school students, “Stop with the Contempt.” Another read:
“Take a Good Look at Your Rolex, It’s the Hour of Revolt!”
Millions have had it with Sarkozy, and this raz-le-bol
(roughly, being fed up) is a major factor fueling the protests.
Last summer, there was a huge scandal because his labor min¬
ister, Eric Woerth, had proposed Liliane Bettencourt, heiress
of the L’Oreal fortune and the second richest person in France,
for the Legion of Honor just when she was revealed (on a tape
recorded by her butler!) talking with her financial advisors
about how to avoid $ 100 million in taxes by sending money to
Swiss banks, and making illegal payments to key politicians,
notably in Sarkozy’s party, the UMR One of Bettencourt’s
main financial advisors was none other than Woerth’s wife,
while the labor minister himself was treasurer of the UMP
and organizer of his quarterly meals with rich supporters at
the three-star Hotel Bristol. Yet this didn’t stop the president
from having Woerth present and defend the pension law to
parliament. Everyone could see that Sarkozy was catering to
the rich while stealing workers’ retirement.
According to Saturday’s poll, 70 percent of the French
public is dissatisfied with Sar¬
kozy’s performance, the highest
figure for rejection of any presi¬
dent since General Charles De
Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic
in 1958. The Journal du Dimanche
(24 October) published the survey
under the headline, “An Anti-Sar-
kozy Movement.” But this doesn’t
faze him. The French president
fancies himself like De Gaulle as
a “savior” of the bourgeois nation
against the forces of disorder and
dissolution, and presents the battle
over pensions as the opening of his
campaign for reelection in 2012.
He wants to be known as having
the “courage” to enact an un¬
popular law, that is, thwarting the
democratic will of the majority.
Sarkozy’s bonapartist appetites
are notorious, and in many ways
he imitates the style of Berlusconi
in Italy - although, so far, without the neo-fascist squads and
Lega Nord thugs. Those he intends to pick up by grabbing the
electoral base of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fascist National Front,
which is a major reason behind his “security” offensive and
racist repression against the Roms, and immigrants generally.
Many bourgeois commentators have asked incredulously
why high school students take to the streets and youth of im¬
migrant origin from the working-class suburbs invade the
elegant city centers to protest a law about pensions, and why
the mobilizations keep up even though they have almost no
chance of success in the usual terms of parliamentary politics.
Sarkozy has made it clear he will not back down no matter
what, and with his “presidential majority” he has the means
to ensure that. This arrogance is a good part of the reason
why Sarkozy has earned the kind of massive and deep hatred
among French working people and particularly the youth that
U.S. president George W. Bush had in the last years of his
presidency. But while this has swollen the ranks of demon¬
strators, and helps explain why weeks of mobilizations and
strikes have not diminished popular support for the protests,
it also has the potential to undercut the very real possibility of
winning a genuine victory. Why? Because rather than bring
strike battle to a head, the reformists (including the so-called
“far left”) are looking to electoral politics.
The Socialist Party (PS) in particular wants to channel
the protests into the 2012 elections. Its leaders march in, and
even at the head of the mobilizations, but don’t want them to
“go too far.” And they waffle on the substance of Sarkozy’s
attack on workers’ pension rights: they are for a “reform,” just
not his. PS first secretary Martine Aubry last January at first
accepted the proposal to raise the retirement age to 62, then
backed down ten days later, promising to restore the right to
retire at 60 if Sarkozy took it away. Now she has once again put
58
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
“Down with the Contempt.” Sign in a demonstration by high school students
in Paris, October 21.
this pledge in question. A leading
contender for the Socialist presi¬
dential nomination is International
Monetary Fund head Dominique
Strauss Kahn, whose IMF earlier
this month issued a report backing
the French government’s pension
“reform” - for which minister
Woerth effusively thanked him.
Strauss-Kahn is an actual bour¬
geois figure in this social-dem¬
ocratic bourgeois workers party
that has followed Tony Blair’s
“New Labour” in abandoning its
support for the “welfare state” and
increasingly distancing itself from
the labor movement. Bottom line:
if the PS returns to office in 2012,
French workers will have to work
longer to get the right to retire, just
as under Sarkozy.
There is a long history in
France of reformist misleaders
holding back struggles, and then some time later claiming
victory when they get a turn in office managing the affairs
of the bourgeoisie for a few years. The 1968 general strike
was sold out, but De Gaulle ended up resigning (handing the
presidency over to his prime minister Georges Pompidou).
When in 1981 Mitterrand finally became president, this was
hailed as a belated victory for the ’68ers. But the popular-front
coalition led by the refounded Socialist Party in conjunction
with minor bourgeois parties like the Left Radicals fully sup¬
ported NATO in its imperialist drive against the Soviet Union
and carried out dirigiste (capitalist state planning) economic
policies similar to those of its conservative predecessors. After
the 1995 mobilizations only partially stopped Prime Minister
Alain Juppe’s pension “reform” plan, the election of Socialist
Leonel Jospin as president two years later was again hailed by
the reformists. Yet Jospin’s policies were just as “neo-liberal”
as those of his conservative predecessors and successors, and
under the Socialist-led bourgeois coalition government France
fully supported NATO’s 1999 war on Yugoslavia.
Sabotaging struggles in the factories and on the streets
so that they are defeated and then channeling the discontent
into the swamp of parliamentary politics is a main purpose
of popular fronts, which organizationally chain the workers
movement, along with other movements of the oppressed, to
sections of the bourgeoisie. In 1968, the French Communist
Party wanted to call off the general strike in order to build
support for a popular front on a “common program,” with Mit¬
terrand as its potential leader. In Mexico today, the struggles of
the electrical workers and miners against union-busting attacks
by the government of Felipe Calderon have been limited to
petitioning Congress and begging the Supreme Court, and are
now subordinated to the 2012 election campaign of a popular
front around Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. In a different
“Take a Good Look at Your Rolex, It’s the Hour of
Revolt!” Sign at demonstration in Lyon, October 19.
context in the United States, leftist organizers tied protests
against the invasion of Iraq to the Democratic Party via a
popular-front antiwar “movement,” feeding into the election
of Barack Obama, who then continued the U.S. occupation of
Iraq and escalated the war on Afghanistan.
The current struggle in France presents tremendous pos¬
sibilities for a revolutionary break with bourgeois politics
and trade-union reformism, which is a dead-end in this epoch
of capitalist decay where genuine reforms in the interest of
the working people are no longer possible and past gains are
being systematically ripped up. What’s needed is a revolu¬
tionary leadership to defeat the politics of class collaboration
and lead the way forward on the road of class struggle. This
not only means breaking with the Socialists, but also with
the Communist Party (PCF) which has been pushing the Left
Front as the core of a new popular front. The most prominent
AFP Stephane Mahe/Reuters
Bob Edme/AP
January-February 2011
The internationalist
59
DOCKS
des PETROLES D’AMBES
(D . P . A.)
P
Despite police action to remove blockades, the refineries strike could have shut
down the capitalist economy. Above: fuel depot at Bassens, near Bordeaux.
presidential hopeful for this front is Jean-Luc Melenchon, the
head of the Left Party (PG), which split from the Socialists
after the last election. Melenchon’s politics borrow liberally
from the rhetoric of Latin American nationalist populists like
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa,
taking over the latter’s slogan for a “citizens’ revolution.” In
terms of French politics, he describes himself as “a child of
the Common Program” of Mitterrand’s NATO popular front
(see Liberation, 20 October). 1
Melechon’s Left Party has largely eclipsed the so-called
“far left” formations, the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) and
Lutte Ouvriere (L.O.), whose 2006 presidential vote scores
were a flash in the pan and have since dwindled to a little over
1 percent. While occasionally saying that a general strike would
be nice, the thrust of the NPA’s position in the present struggle
is to simply keep on mobilizing. Thus the 14 October issue of
the NPA’s paper Tout Est A Nous argued that “it is necessary to
prolong the mobilization with extendable strikes where possible
but also by all forms of capable of bringing together the largest
number [ofpeople].” (No general strike in that issue.) The 21 Oc¬
tober issue of TEAN headlines, “Victory Is Possible!” gushing:
“In a few days the climate has changed. It’s a turning point!
You can sense everywhere that it could tip over, that the
mobilization could carry it off, that there is a chance to be
seized upon: that it is possible to win....
“It is a social and political crisis, a deep-going movement
1 Mitterrand, the model for both the “leftist” Melenchon and the
rightist Socialist Strauss-Kahn, was the French Socialist president
in the 1980s and early ’90s, who in an earlier incarnation was a pe¬
rennial bourgeois minister during the Fourth Republic, notoriously
in charge of the interior ministry (i.e., police repression) at the out¬
break of the Algerian war for independence. This supposed socialist
started out his political career as an official in the Nazi-collabora-
tionist regime of Marshal Philippe Petain during World War II.
demanding the resignation of Sar¬
kozy, [Prime Minister Frangois]
Fillon and the other Woerths! They
should give in or get out!”
Meanwhile, according to today’s
DirectMatin, NPA spokesman Ol¬
ivier Besancenot, “who has had to
... put a damper on his call for ‘a
new May ’68,’ has proposed a sum¬
mit meeting of the left parties,” an
open door for a new popular front.
But this also has gone nowhere.
From a battle to stop an at¬
tack on workers’ rights, these
“anti-capitalists” are now posing
it as a “movement” calling for
resignation of the government.
To be replaced by what? Another
capitalist government. The NPA’s
sometime talk of an “extendable
general strike” and a “new May
’68” is just that - talk to keep any
radicals and would-be revolutionaries in its ranks content. When
the former LCR abandoned its last pretenses to “communism”
and “revolution” by dissolving and reinventing itself as the NPA;
when it ditched references to the dictatorship of the proletariat
in favor of (bourgeois) “democracy,” when NPA spokesman
Besancenot says he is anything but an admirer of Lenin and
Trotsky, at least they are being consistent with their actual
program of “reforming” capitalism. But seeking to reform the
unreformable - a system based on exploitation of workers, racist
repression and imperialist war - is a ticket for defeat.
It’s clear that Sarkozy, Fillon, Woerth & Co. are not about
to give in or get out. Nor can the present mobilizations do the
job: endless marches, even if they are extended (a seventh “day
of action” is scheduled for Thursday, October 28, and an eighth
for November 6), will eventually run out of steam. With his
command of the machinery and tremendous resources of the
capitalist state, the hardline rightist president will either try
to wait them out or to crush them. Yes, it is possible to bring
down a bourgeois regime, especially one as widely hated as
this one, but this can only done by driving it out through sharp
class struggle leading to a fight for a workers government.
Simply replacing one bourgeois government with another
anti-working-class regime, even if it is decked out in “left”
clothing, is no victory.
A real general strike requires solid preparation for a con¬
frontation with the capitalist state. To be successful, even at
the level of a defensive struggle, it must become a proletarian
counteroffensive, raising transitional demands - from a shorter
workweek with no loss in pay to workers control - that are not
vaguely “anti-capitalist” but incompatible with capitalism, pos¬
ing a struggle for socialist revolution. Breaking with reformism
and popular-frontism to begin the arduous task of forging the
nucleus of a Trotskyist vanguard party of the working class to
lead that struggle is the key task in France today. ■
60
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
For Independence and a Socialist Federation of the Antilles!
Guadeloupe on Strike!
Demonstrators in Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe during October 26 [2010] strike
and mobilization called by LKP demanding implentation of accords that ended
historic 44-day general strike in 2009.
PARIS, 27 October 2010 - Today’s
papers report on a strike and protest
in France’s Caribbean colonies
of Guadeloupe, Martinique and
Guyane. According to the accounts,
the demonstrations were largest
in Guadeloupe, where a historic
44-day general strike took place in
February-March 2009. This time,
some 20,000 demonstrators came
out in the capital of Guadeloupe,
Pointe-a-Pitre, according to the
unions (6,500 according to the
police), in response to the appeal
of the Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon
(LKP - Collective Against Super¬
exploitation), and it was mainly
public sector workers such as the
post office that struck. The main
demands of the mobilization were
for carrying out the settlement
reached at the end of the 2009 strike, named after Jacques Bino,
a trade-unionist shot to death on the eve of that strike.
The Bino Accords called for a wage increase of200 euros
a month for the lowest-paid category of workers, as well as
for controls on inflation for basic necessities, most of which
(including foodstuffs) are imported and cost much more than in
metropolitan France, even though income levels are at least 50
percent lower. According to Elie Domota, the spokesman of the
LKP and general secretary of the General Union of Guadeloupe
Workers (UGTG), the government has tried to shortchange
the agreed-upon wage increases. Moreover, the employers’
association, the Medef, representing the local ruling class
descended from the white settlers (known in Creole as bekes),
who own a number of sugar refineries and superstores such
as Carrefour, refused to sign the agreements in the first place.
In the union-led mobilization yesterday, demonstrators sang
the theme song of the 2009 general strike, “La Gwadloup se tan
nou, la Gwadloup a pa tayo ” (Guadeloupe belongs to us, it doesn’t
belong to them). While the militancy and consciousness of that
struggle remains, the March 2009 Bino accords have remained
pretty much a dead letter. A commission was set up to oversee the
implementation of the accords, but it hasn’t met since November
2009 and government officials refuse to even talk with representa¬
tives of the LKP. If there is no change by December 5, Domota
declared, an open-ended general strike will begin on December
14. 1 The LKP supports the struggle of French unions against the
pension “reform” law, Domota said, but he would rather have
1 On December 14-15, the LKP held a two-day work stoppage pro¬
testing the failure to implement the 2009 accords and announcing an
“Operation to Root Out Superexploition” in early 2011.
seen a ten-day strike against it than ten separate “days of action.”
In an interview published in today’s L ’Humanite, Domota
called the LKP “an anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist organi¬
zation.” The popular-front-type coalition is led by the UGTG,
which calls for independence for Guadeloupe, and includes
the CGTG union federation (historically linked to the Com¬
munist Party and headed since 2002 by Jean-Marie Nomertin,
a supporter of Lutte Ouvriere), CFDT, F.O., and a host of petty-
bourgeois nationalist political and cultural groups. The LKP’s
demands include the right to use Creole in official matters.
Recently, judges refused to hear union officials in their own
language after being arrested in protests. “It’s as if we were back
in the days of the Code Noir [the Black Code, which held sway
in French colonies prior to the abolition of slavery in 1848] when
you couldn’t speak, sing or express yourself in your own culture
without the permission of the master,” commented Domota. 2
In Guadeloupe, after upsurges of nationalist struggle follow¬
ing the massacre of dozens of workers in May 1967 and in the
mid-1980s, overtly anti-colonial protests died down. In 2003, a
referendum on increased autonomy for local governments was
defeated. However, Guadeloupe and Martinique remain colo¬
nies, and pro-independence unions have increased their strength
- mainly the UGTG, which has majority support, but also the
CTU (United Workers Federation). Even the Guadeloupe Com¬
munist Party (PCG) calls for “support for independence for the
2 Since this article was written, the LKP issued a statement on Novem¬
ber 6 calling for freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal. A public meeting
sponsored by the Guadeloupe Collective to Support Mumia was held
on November 3 and addressed by Jacky Hortaut of the French Uni¬
tary National Collective “Together We Will Save Mumia Abu-Jamal.”
UGTG
January-February 2011
The internationalist
61
people of Guadeloupe.” PCG general secretary Alain Flemin told
a gathering in Cuba last year, “France tries to make-believe that
Guadeloupe is not a colony but a French department. Our people
has never been consulted about its political status and therefore
has not been able to exert its right to self-determination” ( Pam-
bazuka News , 4 June 2009). The supporters of Lutte Ouvriere,
are more reticent, saying only that “workers will not counterpose
their own goals to anti-colonial and national aspirations, if they
appear” ( Combat Ouvrier, 18 April 2008). Flow big of them!
One group that explicitly does not call for independence for
France’s Caribbean colonies is the Ligue Trotskyste de France
(LTF, part of the International Communist League). In an article
on the 2009 general strike, the LTF claims that it “would be in
favor of independence” but ... “we do not currently call for
independence for Guadeloupe and Martinique, notably because
the large majority of the population is currently opposed” to it ( Le
Bolchevik, March 2009). To back this up it cites a poll published
in Le Figaro Magazine. So the position of these intrepid would-be
Trotskyists depends on opinion polls, or perhaps a colonial refer¬
endum! The LTF says it is against “‘unconditionally’ imposing
a separate state on a people.” This is a red herring. Just who is
proposing to “impose” independence on the Antilles islands? The
French government? Hardly. Leftists? Absurd. This “argument”
is a cynical justification for its failure to oppose colonial rule.
The LTF is not alone. In fact, during a visit of Segolene Royal
in 2007, a local nationalist group asked the former Socialist Party
presidential candidate how is it that she calls for independence for
Quebec, but not for Guadeloupe? The LTF has the same policy as
Royal. And while the question of independence for Quebec, an op¬
pressed nation in a multi-national state (Canada), is greatly influ¬
enced by the actual state of opinion, Guadeloupe and Martinique
are colonies. Genuine Trotskyists and Leninists are duty-bound
to oppose colonial rule anywhere and everywhere, and to sup¬
port national independence from the imperial power. Once upon
a time, the LTF called for “Immediate, total and unconditional
independence for Guadeloupe, Martinique and the other French
colonies” (Le Bolchevik, September 1985). But that was when it
upheld revolutionary Trotskyism and before it discovered a sup¬
posed qualitative regression of workers’ consciousness, which
it now uses as a “theoretical” excuse for its own opportunism.
Refusing to call for independence of France’s colonies is a
betrayal of the class interests of the proletariat and a capitulation
to imperialism. So was the abandonment in 1998 by thelCL’sU.S.
section, the Spartacist League, of its previous call for indepen¬
dence for Puerto Rico (see “ICL Renounces Fight for Puerto Rican
Independence,” The Internationalist No. 6, November-December
1998). It only takes one more step to go from this “socialist” tol¬
eration of colonialism to outright support for imperialist invasion,
as the ICL did in backing the U.S.’ “humanitarian” occupation of
Haiti following the earthquake last January. After three months
of loudly accusing the Internationalist Group of “nationalism”
because we demanded that all U.S. troops get out of Haiti, the
ICL did an about-face and admitted that its line was a betrayal,
that we were right to call it “social-imperialism,” and that it had
lied about the aims and actions of the U.S. military and even about
the ICL’s own position (see the ICL’s 27 April 2010 confession,
“A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism”).
The class struggle is not like the Catholic church where
you can confess to your sins and a priest grants you absolution.
Who can trust a “leftist” group that supports an imperialist
invasion, and then lies about it? Today the LTF argues that,
“in Guadeloupe and Martinique the crucial task is to break
the hold of nationalist false consciousness.” The is a key task,
but what about the struggle against the national oppression
inherent in colonial status?
That oppression is very real and concrete. After the 2009
general strike, the French government charged Domota in court of
fomenting racial hatred for saying that “we will not let the bekes
reestablish slavery.” Why did he say that? Because a leading spokes¬
man for the bike bosses, Alain Huyghes-Despointes, said in a TV
interview broadcast in February 2009 that “Historians only speak
about the negative sides of slavery, which is regrettable,” adding
that bekes “want to preserve the [white] race.” Currently, the police
are demanding DN A samples from unionists arrested during demos
and strikes, as if they were criminals.. .or escaped slaves.
The LTF and ICL have formally repudiated their admitted
social-imperialist support for U.S. occupation of Haiti. Will they
renounce their social-colonialist refusal to call for independence
for Guadeloupe and Martinique? Don’t hold your breath.
To be sure, supporting independence of French colonies
is no be all and end all. Some petty-bourgeois Guadeloupe
nationalists adopt a frankly chauvinist hostility to Haitian
refugees, who constitute as much as 10 percent of the island’s
population. Some no doubt support independence because they
want to reap the profits of the superexploitation of Guadaloupe
workers. And while the UGTG and other independantiste
unions have waged sharp class struggles (as in 2009), they do
not advocate socialist revolution.
If many in Guadeloupe do not favor independence today it
is because they rightly fear that under capitalism it would mean
increased poverty, as they see in other small islands around them.
Does this mean we abandon the call for independence? Not at
all. Trotskyists, who stand for proletarian internationalism and
permanent revolution, say that the liberation of the colonial
peoples of the Caribbean poses the need for a voluntary social¬
ist federation of the Antilles and extension of revolution to the
imperialist metropoles, France and the United States. ■
Dateline Paris: Reports on the
French Worker-Student Upsurge
In addition to the articles printed here, additional on-the-
spot reports are available on our web site, www.interna-
tionalist.org:
• French Students Mobilize: “Sarkozy, You’re Screwed,
The Youth Are In the Streets!” (26 October 2010)
• With the Paris Student Blockades, Assemblies and
Marches (27 October 2010)
• Seventh Day of Action in France: 2 Million in the
Streets Against Sarkozy Attack (29 October 2010)
• Paris Workers’ Assemblies Declare “We’re Continu¬
ing to Fight,” Call for General Strike (3 November 2010)
• Eighth Day of Action in France: The Unions and the
“Interpro” Assemblies (8 November 2010)
62
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Union Tops Call Off Strikes in Refineries, Port of Marseille
And Now comes the Stab in the Back
PARIS, 31 October 2010-The very
next day after millions marched in
the streets of France to oppose the
government’s pension “reform”
law, top union leaders moved to
end the strikes which had shut
down all 12 of France’s oil refin¬
eries and blocked the key port of
Marseille. Early on Friday, October
29, the five refineries still on strike
held almost simultaneous votes
on whether to continue the strike.
Leaders of CGT and CFDT union
federations, historically close to the
French Communist Party (PCF)
and Socialist Party (PS), told refin¬
ery workers that the strikes could
not be maintained. The ranks then
voted to call them off.
Later on Friday, the workers
of the oil terminals at the port of
Marseille also voted to return to
work after 33 days on strike. “A
certain number of elements have made it possible to propose
resuming activity, which was acted on by the workers,” accord¬
ing to Pascal Galeote, the head of the CGT union representing
port workers at the terminals in the Marseille area (Le Monde,
31 October). The strike had been totally effective, with 79 oil
tankers and 4 barges sitting in the harbor waiting to be un¬
loaded, some of them since the end of September, blocking five
refineries (one in Switzerland), at a cost of €10,000 to €20,000
(roughly US$14,000-$28,000) a day per ship and losses of
€35-40 million (US$48-55 million) to the oil companies.
Anyone with any critical faculty had to ask:
• What were these “elements” which “made it possible” to
overcome the bargaining impasse and lift the siege of the
port? Neither the port authority nor the unions would say,
although management said the deal allowed it to pursue
“port reform.” Yet it was precisely against that “reform”
that the unions had struck, objecting to plans to allow 40
percent private investment in a subsidiary to operate the
terminals. So what’s the story?
• “Why this strange defeat of the refinery strike?” asked a
blogger, noting that all 12 refineries had gone back in the last
two days (Bellaciao, 31 October). “What land ofblackmail
or intimidation were the heroic strikers subjected to?” he
asked, noting that everyone who visited a struck refinery
recently reported they were “extremely motivated.” More¬
over, the strikers were “firmly determined not to give in at Striking worker from Grandpuits refinery at
this moment, at the beginning of November, when they were Paris mobilization, October 28. The next day the
finally going to see the country’s gasoline supply dry up.” union bureaucrats moved to call off the strike.
Striking workers at the Grandpuits refinery outside Paris during attack by
gendarmes (paramilitary riot police) on October 22. Strikers held firm, shut¬
ting down fuel production until union tops moved to end strike a week later.
Benoit Tessier/Reuters
January-February 2011
The internationalist
63
Above: Tankers waiting offshore to unload at struck oil terminals in the port
of Marseille, October 17. Port and refinery strikes were solid until union tops
called them off. Below: Empty gasoline pumps in Nice.
At the Feyzin refinery of the
French Total oil company outside
Lyon, CFDT delegate Damien Gal-
era declared: “The situation was no
longer tenable. We made a balance
sheet of our forces and observed
fatigue, weariness. We also see
what’s happening elsewhere: the
mobilization on Thursday brought
out fewer demonstrators, the other
refineries are going back to work,
the same with the rail workers. It
couldn’t be Total against the rest
of France.” This defeatist evalua¬
tion sharply contradicted the actual
facts. Even Le Monde (29 October)
quoted the CGT delegate at the
plant, Michael Lavastrou, saying
sadly, “They were told to leave their
jobs to mobilize, and now they’re
being told that it’s all over. That’s
not at all clear.”
In fact, we saw workers from
the Grandpuits refinery about 100 km. outside Paris brimming
with energy and determination during the march on Thursday
(October 28) that brought out some 170,000 demonstrators
in the capital, according to the unions. The Grandpuits van
became a focal point for union militants at the end of the
march. Refinery workers and rail workers chanted, sang,
blew whistles, danced and vowed to keep up the struggle.
The amount of popular support they received from everyone
was unimaginable, they said. So many people brought food to
the pickets that they didn’t know where to put it. At the same
time, they added, other sectors had not gone out, and they were
under pressure to call off the strike.
Strikes Were at the Point of
Paralyzing French Industry
The fact is that the refinery workers had a powerful
stranglehold. The effects of their two-week-long strike were
threatening to bring much of French industry to a halt. The
oil companies said it had cost them “hundreds of millions of
euros.” This was the first time since the 1968 general strike that
the whole of the country’s oil refining capacity was shut down.
Despite imports of 100,000 tons of fuel a day, stocks were
rapidly dwindling (the strategic reserves are mostly unrefined
oil). And Belgian unions blockaded a refinery to stop it from
supplying tankers from France. What happened was not that the
strikes were running out of steam, but that the union bureaucra¬
cies were frightened by the prospects of an “uncontrollable”
struggle and the mounting denunciations by the government
and bourgeois spokesmen. So to show their “responsibility”
(to French capitalism), they called off the strikes.
To justify their betrayal, the union tops cited a declining
number of demonstrators, and the fact that other sectors hadn’t
joined the refinery and port workers. Nonsense. Everyone knew
beforehand that the demonstrations on Thursday would be
smaller than earlier marches because they came in the middle of
a two-week school vacation when many families had left town.
The fact that close to 2 million came out anyway for the seventh
day of action in as many weeks, full of energy and determina¬
tion, was remarkable. As for the fact that other sectors didn’t go
on open-ended strikes, this was the result of the decision by the
labor misleaders not to call them out, and instead leave it up to
each group of workers to decide on their own.
At the beginning of the month, union leaders began talking
of “renewable” or open-ended ( reconductible ) strikes. At first,
Le Monde (3 October) reported:
“In fact, the CGT doesn’t consider the political and social
terrain propitious for open-ended strikes any more than the
UNSA and CFDT do, and even less for the general strike
which the Solidaires and Force Ouvriere federations say
they would like if they had their way.... As for the CGT, it
suffered some setbacks in the SNCF (railways) and RATP
(Paris Metro) which inclined it toward caution.”
But following the mobilization on October 2, which once again
was unexpectedly large, CGT leader Bernard Thibault declared
Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP
64
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
that “in certain sectors, workers are available for strikes that
wouldn’t be limited to 24 hours.” If the government didn’t lis¬
ten, he said, “the movement could take on a new configuration”
after October 12. But, he added, this would be “on the basis of
decisions made by the workers” (AFP, 4 October). By putting
the responsibility for striking on the workers in the different
sectors, rather than calling out the ranks in a united show of
force, the union leaders virtually ensured that the walkouts
would be restricted to certain sectors.
On Friday, union leaders used the classical excuses of
reformists everywhere to justify their sellout. Charles Foulard,
the head of the refinery section of the CGT, argued, “We came
close to the objective, we only needed a few more occupational
sectors to join the strike,” but in any case, “the unions have
won the battle of ideas,” because their “arguments on the pos¬
sibility of having another reform ... have been heard” (AFP, 29
October). “The government lost the battle for public opinion,”
said CFDT head Francois Chereque. This is the same claim
put forward by spokesmen for the PS to argue that accounts
with Sarkozy can be settled in the 2012 presidential election.
Sarkozy himself cynically issued a statement saying “Worries
have been expressed, some of them legitimate. I have heard
them and am reflecting on them. 1 will take some steps.” Mean¬
ing precisely nothing.
At a local level, the CGT delegate at Feyzin, Lavastrou, even
as he doubted that it was all over, repeated the famous phrase of
Maurice Thorez in selling out the June 1936 general strike, “7/
faut savoir terminer une greve ” (you have to know how to call
off a strike), although the PCF leader added “once its essential
demands have been met.” But today, said Lavastrou, “Going back
to work under these conditions,” when refinery workers won noth¬
ing after two weeks on strike, “is not going to be pretty.” Even
so, said David Faure, the CFDT secretary of the plant committee,
“people are only waiting for a sign from the union organizations
to go into the streets. The next step is a general strike. And at that
point, the response of the workers will be violent.”
It has been an open secret for weeks that the union leaders
have been looking for the exit door, but no one wanted to be the
first to throw in the towel, for fear of being labeled a traitor, as
the CFDT’s Chereque was rightly called for breaking ranks and
selling out the 2003 battle over public sector pensions. Now
the sellout has begun, “all together” ( tous ensemble) this time,
as the striking union leaders act in concert to end the refinery
and port strikes. Everything indicates that the lntersyndicale
is planning to do the same and call off mobilizations of any
sort after the November 6 day of action. “If unity has lasted
so far,” Liberation (22 October) wrote last week:
“it is also and above all due to the determination of the dem¬
onstrators, who are still quite numerous. Because secretly,
a number of leaders of national union federations wouldn’t
look askance at the mobilization running out of steam in order
to call an end to the match.... And the longer the movement
goes on, the harder it will be to manage the frustrations of
the militants internally....
“On the other hand, some of the rank-and-file militants are
beginning to believe in it [the possibility of winning]. And
in the absence of a victory, they could end up demanding an
accounting from the respective union leaderships. The end
of the movement is looking to be difficult.”
Urgently Needed: A Revolutionary
Opposition in the Unions
But who is going to challenge the pro-capitalist union lead¬
ers? So far not a word of criticism from the New Anti-Capitalist
Party (NPA) or the Solidaires union federation associated with
it against the CGT and CFDT for calling off the refinery and
oil terminal port strikes. Nor, of course, from the leadership of
the Force Ouvriere labor federation under Jean-Claude Mailly,
close to the Independent Workers Party (POI) led by ostensibly
Trotskyist followers of the late Pierre Lambert. If the “far left”
were serious in its occasional references to a general strike,
it would loudly denounce this betrayal. But since its actual
politics are reformist and its support for a general strike is
merely platonic, complicit silence is to be expected.
The World Socialist Web Site of the followers of David
North claims that this betrayal only proves “the treachery of
the unions” (WSWS, 30 October). By deliberately conflating
the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, who are literally agents
of the bosses within the workers movement, with the unions
themselves, which are the largest existing mass organizations
of the working class, these frauds frequently use leftist lan¬
guage to literally do the work of the employers (for example,
opposing union organizing drives). In this case, their calls for
organizing “committees of action independently of the unions”
means undercutting the urgent necessity to wage a struggle
within the unions to oust the sellout bureaucracy.
To pretend, as the WSWS does, that “the unions” are
simply capitalist institutions and do nothing but oppose the
struggle against the pension reform is to hide the contradictory
character of the labor movement, whose pro-bourgeois leaders
while acting as conduits for the bourgeoisie are also are subject
to pressure from the working-class ranks. All the recent mass
mobilizations in France were called by the unions, indeed by
the same treacherous bureaucrats who are now stabbing the
struggle in the back. The strikes in the refineries and the ports
were called by local union bodies. What this struggle shows is
not that unions must be opposed, but that even reputed hard¬
liners, such as Pascal Galeote of the Marseille dockers and
Charles Foulard of the refinery workers, are still bureaucrats,
beholden to the capitalist system, and when the chips come
down, they will do the bidding of the bosses.
That is why it is crucial to fight within the unions to
defeat and drive out not just particular individual leaders but
the whole parasitic layer that sits atop, holds back and when
called upon betrays the membership they claim to represent.
In calling for the formation of elected strike committees as
part of the struggle for a real general strike, the League for
the Fourth International does so as a means for combating the
union misleaders’ stranglehold and fighting for a revolutionary
leadership of the workers movement. This requires above all
building the nucleus of a proletarian vanguard party to lead the
struggle for a workers government based on workers councils,
and to fight to reforge the Fourth International as the world
party of socialist revolution. ■
January-February 2011
The internationalist
65
Profits Are Rising - Army, Military Police and Landowners Are Killing
In Haiti, in the Slums of Rio and in the Countryside
Brazilian Elections: The
Bourgeoisie Coes For More Lula
28 SEPTEMBER 2010 - in the current
Brazilian election campaign, the dominant
tone has been that of praising the “stability”
of the eight years of the presidency of Luiz
Inacio Lula da Silva, the historic leader of
the Workers Party (PT). The big bourgeoisie
is enamored of the fabulous profits they
have raked in and of the country’s rapid
economic recovery after only two quarters
of recession amid the world financial crisis.
Parao
Irasil segi
mudand
Dilma
CAST A BLANK BALLOT!
We Need to Build a Workers Party That
Fights for International Socialist Revolution
srasu seguir
mudando
The “left-wing” supporters of Lulaism cite
a reduction of extreme poverty due to the
government’s welfare programs. The PT
candidate, Dilma Rousseff, presents her¬
self as a guarantee of the continuity of the
policies of the popular front government. In
order to govern, the PT struck alliances with
bourgeois sectors, mainly the Party of the
Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB),
which supplied Rousseff’s running mate,
Michel Temer. Even her main opponent on
the right, Jose Serra of the Party of Brazilian
Social Democracy (PSDB), broadcast tele¬
vision commercials showing him with Lula,
and the other bourgeois competitor, Marina
Silva of the Green Party (PV), declared that her candidacy was
not against Lula’s project. On every side, these elections are
one big celebration of Lulaism.
Everything points to a big victory by the PT candidate,
possibly on the first round of voting on October 3. The opinion
polls give Rousseff close to a majority and a big lead among
low-income voters, while registering almost 80 percent
approval of Lula’s presidency. However, despite its huge
popularity, the government of the “worker president” has been
anything but a “fiesta” for working people the way it has been
for the capitalists. The current boom is not the result of some
economic “model” but rather of a (temporary) spike in the
export demand for commodities, fundamentally due to China’s
economic growth. While the profits of big companies went
into the stratosphere, wages have only progressed slowly and
have been accompanied by a drastic increase in jobs filled by
subcontracting or short-term contracts. During the first year of
his first term, Lula carried out a “reform” of the social security
system which was a frontal assault on government workers’
pensions. Now Dilma is announcing a new “reform,” to raise
the retirement age for public and private sector workers.
Contrary to the slogan “another world is possible,”
%
Diirria
Dilma
13
W
Di
'
Parao
Brasil seguir
mudando
Dilma
Dilma Brasi ‘
mud
Dilma B
Brasil
mud«*
Dilma Rousseff at the Workers Party (PT) convention in June 2010.
In the October 3 first round of the Brazilian presiden¬
tial elections, Dilma Rousseff, the candidate of the PT won
47% of the votes, while Jose Serra of the PSDB received
33% and Marina Silva of the PV got 19%. Although Rous¬
seff’s first-round score was higher than her predecessor
and mentor Lula ever received, this was portrayed as a
defeat by the right-wing bourgeois press, which launched
a last-minute campaign to stop the “former guerrilla Dilma”
from gaining a majority on the first round.
In the month between the first round and a second
run-off election, conservative forces stepped up pres¬
sure on Rousseff to renounce any support for the right
to abortion (which she did). The PT candidate also reaf¬
firmed her support for the pro-capitalist policies followed
by Lula, which won the backing of key bourgeois sectors,
while maintaining the PT’s base of support among poor
and working people. In the final round of voting, on Octo¬
ber 31, Rousseff won 56% compared to 44% for Serra.
Altogether the four left-wing candidates (PSOL, PSTU,
PCB and PCO) received barely 1% of the votes on the
first round, while 3 percent cast blank ballots, a traditional
way to register a protest vote. Rousseff was inaugurated
president on 1 January 2011.
Valter Campanato/Agencia Brasil
66
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
for Brazil’s workers and peasants, the urban poor, blacks,
women and other sectors of the oppressed and exploited,
Lula’s regime has been just another capitalist government.
His economic policy of “neo-liberal developmentalism”
doesn’t differ qualitatively from that of his predecessor,
Fernando Henrique Cardoso of the PSDB except for raising
the minimum wage. While in the rural areas the Bolsa Fa-
milia (family stipend) alleviated somewhat the incidence of
extreme poverty, the peasant population continues to live in
miserable conditions; and in the cities, due to the higher cost
of living and the elimination of other welfare programs, it
did not cut down on poverty in the favelas (slums). The main
difference with Henrique Cardoso, aside from the economic
conjuncture, was that the popular front in power managed
to diminish strikes and worker/peasant protests which under
the previous government had multiplied and radicalized. Lula
was able to do this because of the ties linking the PT tops
and of the reformist PCdoB (Communist Party of Brazil) to
the pro-government union bureaucracy of the CUT (Unitary
Labor Confederation) and the MST (Movement of Landless
Rural Workers) in the countryside.
But the relative “social peace” during Lula’s two-term
presidency was also due to the absence of a hard class op¬
position to the bourgeois popular front. The left-wing union
and party bureaucrats refused to carry out an all-out struggle
against the capitalist government which they elected. Thus
the PSTU (United Socialist Workers Party), the main force
in the leadership of the Conlutas labor federation, called to
vote for Lula on the second round of the 2002 elections. At
the time, the future founders of the PSOL (Party of Socialism
and Freedom) and leaders of the Intersindical union federa¬
tion were still PT functionaries and parliamentary deputies.
When they were chucked out over their timid opposition to
the first social security reform, the expellees continued their
parliamentarist and electoralist course in the new party. From
the outset, the reformists - both of the PSTU and the PSOL -
have pursued a policy of pressuring the mother party, the PT,
from the left. Some internal tendencies in the Workers Party
call for a return to the “original PT,” which in fact is the policy
of the overwhelming bulk of the Brazilian left, ft’s just that the
original PT, like today, was the party of Lula who (along with
Henrique Cardoso) began his political career in the Brazilian
Democratic Movement and today shares out ministerial posts
with its continuation, the PMDB. 1
The umbilical cord which ties the parties to the left of the
PT to the “PT family” partly explains its lack of mobilization
during electoral season. Where are the combative strikes or
tumultuous demonstrations of metal workers, oil workers,
bank workers, teachers and other public employees? There
are only negotiations in the corridors. If any left-wing force
intended to disturb the tranquil cruise toward a third term for
1 The Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) was a house “oppo¬
sition” group set up by the military dictatorship in 1965 in order to
keep a rein on dissidents. In 1979, it became the Party of the Brazil¬
ian Democratic Movement (PMDB) and has since functioned as the
bourgeois political instrument of govermnent functionaries, based
in the federal ministries and city and state administrations.
“Lulaism,” they would be in the streets loudly denouncing the
anti-worker plans of Dilma Rousseff and her vice-presidential
running mate Michel Temer of the PMDB. Instead, every two
years when elections roll around the supposed class-struggle
trade unionists and parties of the former “far left” abandon
workers’ struggles and devote themselves to the campaign
hustings. After the Supreme Electoral Tribunal excluded
what the bourgeois media have dubbed “midget parties” (all
of them on the left) from the televised debates between Rous¬
seff (PT), Jose Serra (PSDB), Marina Silva (PV) and Plinio
Arruda Sampaio (PSOL), the excluded parties were invited by
the left-wing news magazine Brasil de Fato to a September
21 debate broadcast on the Internet. Yet during the one-and-a-
half-hour-long chat between Jose (Ze) Maria de Almeida of the
PSTU, Rui Costa Pimenta of the PCO (Workers Cause Party)
and Ivan Pinheiro of the PCB (Brazilian Communist Party)
there was not a single call for workers action.
Rather than a hard-hitting denunciation of the fraudulent
and anti-democratic character of bourgeois elections, which
any revolutionary candidate would be duty-bound to make,
during the debate we only heard some soft-spoken complaints
about discrimination against them. Each of the participants
ticked off a list of almost identical reforms (a program of pub¬
lic works, agrarian reform, tax the rich, abolish the sales tax,
state takeover of the banks, cheap credit), none of which went
beyond the limits of the capitalist system. They made ritual
mentions of socialism and uttered pious wishes for the unity
of the left. In truth, those following the debate on the Internet
(“internauts”) would have had a hard time understanding why
there were three different tickets if not for the competition for
organizational influence (which is in fact the case). However,
real unity of the working people against capital is only pos¬
sible on the basis of a revolutionary program, which was the
big missing factor in these elections.
We in the Liga Quarta-lnternacionalista do Brasil are
opposed to voting for any candidate, party or member of a
bourgeois coalition, such as the PT’s popular front with capi¬
talist parties. We didn’t vote for Lula or his allies in 2002 or
2006. As opposed to the anarchists and some ultra-leftists, we
do not reject participation in capitalist elections on principle
- it can serve as a platform for revolutionary propaganda. We
seek to cast a class vote. Unfortunately, but predictably, as in
the past elections, none of the candidates to the left of the PT
puts forward a class opposition to the bourgeois parliamentary
game. Therefore, the LQB calls on working people to CAST
A BLANK BALLOT in the October 3 elections and prepare
for the coming struggles.
The Candidacies of the Left -
PTers of the Second Mobilization
Since the end of2009, like clockwork, the entire political
life of the Brazilian left turned to the electoral contest. Trade-
union struggles, those of slum dwellers, of landless peasants
were relegated to second or third place. The main large-scale
strike, of the APEOESP, the union of public school teach¬
ers in the state of Sao Paulo, took place in March and April
Sergio Moraes/Reuters
January-February 2011
The internationalist
67
The police are the armed fist of the bourgeoisie. Here, Rio de Janeiro state
military police using counterinsurgency techniques perfected in policing
Haiti for U.S. imperialism to occupy the Mandela 2 favela (slum), 23 November
2010. Drive Brazilian police and military out of Haiti and out of the Rio slums.
of 2010. After 30 days on strike, the paulista teachers were
betrayed by the pro-Lula leadership of the union, the Articu-
lagao caucus, which capitulated in the face of the onslaught
by the governor and PSDB presidential candidate, Jose Serra.
The governor dispatched the police to brutally repress the
strikers, and there wasn’t resistance capable of combating it.
However, one has to say as well that the various opposition
groupings inside the APEOESP were also unable to wage a
class-struggle fight against the popular-front leadership. The
PSTU (through Conlutas) and PCO were also immersed in their
election campaigns, and both of them - along with the POR
(Revolutionary Workers Party) - defend the police, claiming
that these professional repressors are part of the working class
and not, as Marxists insist, the armed fist of the bourgeoisie
and backbone of the capitalist state.
The concerns of the PSTU were concentrated on the
definitive collapse in December 2009 of its coveted Frente de
Esquerda (Left Front) with the PSOL. In the 2006 elections,
this Front supported the presidential candidacy of Heloisa
Helena, who at the time was a senator for the PSOL from the
northern state of Alagoas. But this candidacy could hardly be
considered leftist, and certainly didn’t constitute a working-
class opposition to the class collaboration of the popular front.
In playing footsie with various bourgeois politicians, notably
with the “labor” sectors of the PDT (Democratic Labor Party) 2
2 The Partido Democratico Trabalhista is a bourgeois party generally
classified as “middle-of-the-road” (rather than right- or left-wing),
whose ideology harks back to the populist “laborite” tradition of
Brazilian strong man Getulio Vargas’s Estado Novo in the 1940s
and ’50s. The PDT was founded in 1970 by Leonel Brizola, who
provided more of a European social-democratic tint of support for
“welfare state” programs.
and “progressive” elements of
the Catholic church, the coalition
headed by the PSOL candidate
ended up being, as we said at
the time, a “mini-popular front.”
Moreover, Heloisa attacked wom¬
en’s right to abortion, criticized
Lula for “lacking firmness” in not
insisting on compensation from
Bolivian president Evo Morales
for his nationalization of two oil
refineries belonging to Petrobras,
denounced landless peasants for
invading Congress in Brasilia, and
said that due to a constitutional
prohibition it was not possible
to expropriate productive land
(see our article, “Brazil: Lula vs.
Alckmin, Candidates of Capital
Against the Workers,” The In¬
ternationalist No. 25, January-
February 2007).
The Left Front disappeared
right after winning 6.8 percent on
the first round of voting in 2006. Sectors of the PSOL, includ¬
ing its current candidate Plinio Arruda Sampaio, announced
they were voting for Lida on the second round. However, in the
run-up to the 2010 elections, the PSTU wanted a second edi¬
tion of the Heloisa Helena campaign, this time with its own Ze
Maria for vice-president. These hopes vanished in December
2009 when Heloisa announced her support for Marina Silva of
the Green Party. In her campaign, Silva, who was environment
minister for the PT in Lula’s government from 2003 until 2008,
repeatedly declared her personal opposition to abortion, and
the eco-capitalist party included among its candidates depu¬
ties who had been expelled from the PT for supporting a law
for the rights of the unborn (Estatuto do Nascituro), which
would turn abortion into the crime of homicide. Even today
the PSTU wants to hold the door open for a turnaround by
Heloisa and is not running a candidate against her campaign
to return as senator for Alagoas. At the beginning of 2010, the
PSTU’s hopes of forming a new Left Front were focused on the
PSOL itself, but in vain, as the PSOL launched the candidacy
of Arruda Sampaio.
The PSTU is following in the footsteps of its mentor,
the late Nahuel Moreno, who from the start of his political
career always sought to tail after other larger political forces.
He began as the “socialist wing” of Peronism, a bourgeois
nationalist movement in Argentina, then went on to chase after
Guevarism, Maoism, Sandinismo [in Nicaragua] and finally
ending up as a plain old social democrat. Although Moreno
claimed to be a Trotskyist, his policies were diametrically op¬
posed to the struggle of genuine Trotskyism to forge a Marx¬
ist vanguard on the program of permanent revolution. The
Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky fought against the
nationalist and conservative dogma of the Stalinist bureaucrats
68
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
of building “socialism in one country” and rejected any politi¬
cal alliance with bourgeois forces. Trotsky insisted only with
the conquest of power by the working class, supported by the
poor peasants, could bourgeois-democratic tasks be achieved
by going directly over to socialist tasks and extending the
revolution internationally. In Brazil, ever since its origin in the
Convergencia Socialista current inside Lula’s PT, the PSTU
has always following the capitulatory line of Moreno rather
than the revolutionary policy of Trotsky. Today the Brazilian
Morenoites are divided, including some tendencies inside the
PSOL (the CST and MTL), but they are all reformist social
democrats to the core.
Faced with the repeated failure of its project of a new Left
Front with the PSOL, the PSTU is now brandishing a “Socialist
Program for Brazil,” which in the space of 80 pages offers a
catalogue of electoral proposals. It criticizes the popular front
for having “a class character as bourgeois as the previous” par¬
ties and “creating the illusion that the workers had conquered
power” - only leaving out that the PSTU fed those illusions by
calling for a vote to Lula on the second round in 2002. It insists
on the need for a socialist answer to the right-wing candidates,
but only a few months earlier it was seeking an alliance with
the PSOL, which promotes the same “popular democratic”
and explicitly non-socialist project which has characterized
the PT since its beginnings. Moreover, the grab-bag of “social¬
ist” proposals of the PSTU contains nothing that breaks the
framework of the capitalist regime. Above all, the Morenoites
are ever-ready to abandon any socialist pretensions in order to
form their desired front. Thus in the state of Goias, the PSTU
made an alliance with the MTL, the right wing of the PSOL,
led by Mariniano Cavalcante, putting forward Washington
Fraga as candidate for governor. The platform of the PSOL/
PSTU candidate explicitly admitted that it was “a program
within the framework of capitalism.”
The laundry list of measures cited by Ze Maria during
the cyber-debate - agrarian reform, nationalize the land, tax
reform, program of public works, low-cost public transport,
construction of public housing, suspending debt payments,
changing the economic structure - all have been carried out by
one or another bourgeois government. The call for a “respect¬
able minimum wage and decent pension” are utterly vague.
“State ownership of the large enterprises, beginning with the
multinationals” may sound very radical; however, in Mexico
during the reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
the economy was dominated by state companies. If the bank¬
ing system is bankrupt, as the PSTU candidate insisted, then
calling for “state ownership of the banks” would not be an
anti-capitalist measure but rather one to save capitalism from
the danger of collapse, as was the case of the nationalization
of the Mexican banks in 1982. And it is not so, as the standard-
bearer of the PSTU claims, that with these measures “we
will see to it that all the wealth will be channeled in order to
attend to the needs of the working people.” Even under state
ownership, the enterprises will be subject to the iron hand of
the world capitalist market.
As for the other tickets to the left of the PT, they don’t
differ substantially from the program of the PSTU. Ivan Pin-
heiro of the PCB also calls for state ownership of the financial
system, although with more honesty, presenting this measure
as part of a democratic program, to be sure, of a Stalinist-
style “new democracy.” Even though the PCO is a centrist
organization, with socialist rhetoric, in practice it has the same
catalogue of reformist measures as the PSTU: no consumer
sales tax, agrarian reform, state takeover of the banks, etc.
Of course, Rui Costa Pimenta spoke in his summary remarks
about a struggle against capitalism and for a “government of
the working people built on its organizations” in the struggle
for socialism. But in the absence of an insistence on bringing
down the capitalist state or regime, a “government of the work¬
ing people” which carries out the above-mentioned measures
would only be a regime slightly to the left of other bourgeois
governments. This is the classic vocabulary of social democrats
who struggle day-to-day for a minimum program of reforms
under capitalism and reserve their hosannas to socialism (the
maximum program) for Sunday speechifying.
Any real Trotskyist candidacy would insist on the need
for an agrarian revolution carried out by the peasants them¬
selves, not by the bureaucrats of some agrarian reform agency.
It would emphasize that ripping the financial system out of
the hands of capital can only be the result of the seizure of
the banks by the workers themselves in the course of a work¬
ers revolution which would go beyond the state takeover of
large companies to expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class. We
fight for transitional demands, such as a substantially shorter
workweek with no loss in pay, to create jobs for all. It would
seek to unite the working class by defending subcontracted
workers and workers on short-term contracts, demanding the
same rights for all. Rather than dropping the campaign for
withdrawal of troops from Haiti during the electoral period,
as the PSTU has done, it would fight to drive the military out
of the Caribbean country and out of the hillside slums of Rio
de Janeiro, where they use the “counterinsurgency” tactics
which they tried out as mercenaries for Yankee imperialism in
repressing the population of the first-ever black nation.
A proletarian Marxist would explain that the conquest
of power by the working class may begin the revolution
within the national framework, but there is no program for
a solitary “socialist Brazil.” It is necessary to extend the
revolution internationally throughout Latin America and
into the imperialist heartland of North America, Europe and
Japan. A revolutionary intervention would use the bourgeois
elections as a platform to denounce the systematic fraud of
capitalist “democracy” and its electoral machinery, and in
accordance with this it would present its candidacy in the
framework of a campaign for mobilizing the workers and
peasants, in the factories, in the streets, on the haciendas
and modern “agro-businesses,” in preparing the working
people for a struggle for power. In order to do so, it would
focus its intervention on emphasizing the need for a Lenin¬
ist and Trotskyist revolutionary workers party, built in the
struggle to reforge the Fourth International as the world
party of socialist revolution. ■
January-February 2011
The Internationalist
69
Build a Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government!
Quebec: What's Needed to
Defeat Privatization and
Defend Public Services
75,000 workers participated in the demonstration called by the trade unions’
Front Commun in Montreal on 20 March 2010.
The following article is trans¬
lated from L’Internationaliste No.
7, April 2010.
March 31 marks the end of the
no-strike, wage-freeze “contract”
imposed by decree on 550,000 em¬
ployees of the Quebec government
by Liberal Party prime minister
Jean Charest in December 2005.
Across the province, the Common
Front of public sector unions will
be sending a message to the popula¬
tion on the need for fight for public
services. On April 1, a coalition of
labor, community and student or¬
ganizations will be demonstrating
in the business district of Montreal
against schemes for privatization
and introducing or raising fees on
services and social programs. But
on the eve of the mobilizations, the
government announced a budget
attacldng worldng people, public
services and social programs down
the line. The battle lines are drawn.
A real show of strength could be a warning to Charest and
the federal government of Conservative Stephen Harper. Already
on March 20 [2010], more than 75,000 workers went into the
streets of Montreal in response to the call of the Common Front.
However, for months the leaders of all three labor federations
(FTQ, CSN and SISP) have repeated that they are only asking
the government to “negotiate,” and they are prepared to “target”
(reduce) their demands accordingly. Nothing about the possibil¬
ity of a strike. Yet the Liberal cabinet is wedded to its program
of privatization and raising/introducing fees, and it is backed by
the official opposition of the Parti Quebecois (PQ). They will
not be stopped by discussion and appeals to reason.
The real stakes are political, and workers, students and
community activists urgently need a party representing the
mass of working people. Not an electoral party but a workers
party to lead hard class struggle to chase out the privatizers
and freemarketeers in Quebec and Ottawa in the fight for a
workers government. Going back to the Common Front of
1972 and before, Quebec unions have been hamstrung by
ties to bourgeois parties, from the Liberals to the PQ, and the
refusal of the labor bureaucracy to challenge the capitalist
state. This means that professions of socialism and talk of
independence will remain a dead letter. To win real victories
will require a workers leadership that fights for international
socialist revolution.
Battle of the Budget -
“Re-Engineering” the Capitalist State
In October 2009, the Common Front of public sector
unions opened negotiations with the government by calling for
all percent raise spread over three years. A month later, the
government responded with a counter-offer of 7 percent over
five years - less than half as much. After stalling for months, on
the eve of the March 20 Common Front mobilization, the head
of the Quebec Treasury Council, Monique Gagnon-Tremblay,
called on the unions to engage in a “blitz of negotiations” to
arrive at an agreement by March 31. But on March 30, the
government issued a budget calling for a freeze on the total
wage bill until 2014. Any raises would be paid for by shrink-
70
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
ing the workforce through attrition - increasing the workload
of those who remain.
The Charest government is using the economic crisis as an
excuse to ram through plans he has been pushing since 2003
for “re-engineering” the state in order to lighten the “burden”
of social services on the capitalists. But it is not alone. Earlier
this year, PQ leader Pauline Marois declared that the unions’
minimal wage demands were “a little high,” and the bourgeois
nationalist party focused its March 13-14 congress on calls for
an economic policy centering on “individual enrichment” and
opposing a welfare state. Marois & Co. are clearly chasing
after the votes of the right-wing populist-chauvinist electoral
clientele of Mario Lamont’s ADQ (Action Democratique
du Quebec), which has made free-market economics and
anti-immigrant chauvinism its calling card. But even the ban
on the SPQ Libre, a political club trade-unionists in the PQ
hasn’t stopped bureaucrats from continuing to support this
bosses party.
The budget announced on March 30 includes a 30 percent
increase in the sales tax (TVQ), raising $1.5 billion; a tax on
fuel; a increase of electricity rates of 20 percent over five years,
raising $1.6 billion, to be paid to the banks to cover Quebec’s
debt; and the introduction of a fee for using Quebec’s health
care system, up to now free, rising to $200 per adult, bringing in
another $1 billion and opening the door to hefty co-pays (ticket
moderateur). The spokeswoman for the Quebec Employers
Council approved, saying “at least there are no new fees, new
harmful taxes”! True enough, for the bosses - the new taxes
will by paid by poor and working people, and the electricity
rate hike only affects consumers and small companies, not
large enterprises.
There will also be an increase in university student fees,
already rising by $ 100 a year, how much to be determined later.
Earlier this year, a committee of the Finance Ministry called
for raising fees by a staggering $3,000, a 150 percent increase
over the present level, already up by a third since 2007 (ASSE,
Ultimatum Express, 4 March 2010). These hikes could lead
to tens of thousands of students dropping out. A committee of
political, business and private university leaders headed by
former PQ prime minister Lucien Bouchard went even further,
calling for all increases in university financing to be paid for
by students. In 2005, Bouchard issued a manifesto “Pour
un Quebec lucide” calling for rate hikes, consumers taxes,
increasing student fees and a series of privatization measures
which are now being carried out by the Charest government.
Accompanying the privatization and “tarification” of
public services, Quebec workers have come under increasing
attack. 2009 opened with the lockout of 253 workers of the
Journal de Montreal, owned by the conglomerate Quebecor,
one of the largest printing companies in the world, based in
Quebec, whose CEO (Karl Pierre Peladeau) is a former Maoist.
Using loans from the Quebec provincial pension fund (Caisse
de depot et placement du Quebec), whose board includes
union representatives, Quebecor bought up Videotron, the
main cable TV distributor in the province, and then broke a
strike by Videotron employees. While the CSN is circulating
petitions calling on Quebecor to bargain in good faith with the
locked-out employees, the unions should mobilize thousands of
workers to shut down operations of the union-busting company.
A second hot spot are the workers of Quebec’s health
care system, particularly nurses. Recently there has been an
explosion of overtime and use of outside agencies to fill in
for the system’s refusal to hire more full-time nurses. Over
the last month, nurses at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont, Haut-
Richelieu and Charles-Lemoyne hospitals refused the forced
overtime that has obliged many to work 16-hour shifts. This is
a particular hardship for the many single mothers (98 percent
of the nurses are women). As the refusals spread, the ministry
of health called for urgent negotiations with the health workers
union, FIQ. But when they arrived at the bargaining table, they
were met with demands to increase the nurses work loads. The
unions slammed the door and issued orders to prepare a list of
essential services, in case of a walkout.
Meanwhile, after working without a contract for six
months and attending 20 fruitless negotiating sessions, some
2,500 adjunct professors (charges de cours) at the Universite de
Montreal have been on strike since February 24. The university
has been demanding a number ofgivebacks, including loss of
seniority, and wants to exclude a whole sector of the workforce
that recently joined the union. The adjuncts are fighting a two-
tier academic labor system which superexploits the majority
of university instructors, who receive poverty-level salaries.
Class Struggle Education Workers and CUNY Contingents
Unite, an organization of adjunct faculty and staff at the City
University of New York, are publicizing the Montreal strike,
and the CUNY faculty union, Professional Staff Congress
raised it with leaders of the American Federation of Teach¬
ers and the National Education Association, who are issuing
statements of support.
Key to all these labor struggles, to the fight against privati¬
zation and tarification, and to the battle of the budget, is build¬
ing a proletarian leadership, the nucleus of a workers party,
on a program of revolutionary class struggle against all wings
of the capitalist rulers, whether “federalist” Liberals and even
more right-wing forces, or the bourgeois-nationalist PQ which
long ago stopped talking of independence and has increasingly
left even its “pro-sovereignty” pretensions behind. The experi¬
ence of seven years of the Charest government underlines that
it is necessary to bring down the entire bourgeoisie, which is
firmly united in defending its fundamental class interests, and
to gird the working class for battle with the capitalist state,
which our class enemies will not hesitate to use against us. To
defeat such powerful forces, the revolutionary vanguard must
act as the champion of all the oppressed under the banner of
proletarian internationalism.
Building an Class-Struggle
Workers Leadership Is Key
The struggles that are posed this April 1 [2010] are a direct
outcome of the fight against the Charest government in 2005,
which the unions lost, and along with them allied sectors, such
as the students. Under Law 142, which was rubber-stamped in
SCCCUM
January-February 2011
The internationalist
71
Adjunct faculty of the SCCCUM union at the University of Montreal struck from
late February to mid-April 2010 against takeback demands by the adminis¬
tration. By maintaining solid picket lines with up to 400 union members, the
adjuncts managed to defeat the takebacks and win a modest raise.
a one-day session by the National Assembly in Quebec City,
hospital workers, teachers, school support staff and other
state employees were subjected to a three-year wage freeze,
followed by minimal raises, far below the rate of inflation.
Under the decree, labor unions lost the right to bargain over
wages and working conditions while strikes in the public sec¬
tor were outlawed. Any workers who walked out were subject
to loss of two days pay for every day on strike and a fine of
up to $500; union officials faced fines of up to $35,000 a day,
and the unions would be subject to potentially crippling fines
of up to $125,000 per day.
The labor leadership had carried out a series of rotating
strikes from late November to early December, region by
region and sector by sector, notably by health and education
workers. These were intended as pressure tactics to induce
the government to make concessions at the bargaining table,
leading up to a last-minute showdown in Quebec. But when
the final face-off arrived, the Charest government refused to
budge and used its majority in the National Assembly to im¬
pose its anti-labor law. The effect on the union tops and public
employees was that of an “electrical shock,” as La Presse (15
December 2005) headlined. They thought they were playing
by the usual rules. “The government has gone over the top
and set off a psychodrama,” said Henri Masse of the Federa¬
tion de Travailleurs du Quebec. “The government mocked the
democratic process,” said Claudette Carbonneau of the Confe¬
deration des Syndicats Nationaux. A spokeswoman for the PQ
opposition said the government’s tactics were “preposterous.”
But the union tops did nothing. They had not prepared
the ranks for such a struggle, not could they, for their entire
“strategy” is to pressure and use the capitalist state, not to
combat it. They see their role as
working within the system, pos¬
sibly winning a few crumbs and
social programs, or not, depend¬
ing on the political winds. As the
bosses’ union-busting offensive
escalated during the last years of
the anti-Soviet Cold War and then
continued without let-up, these
“labor lieutenants of the capital¬
ist class” would preside over the
destruction of “their own” unions.
This occurred to many unions in
the United States, and if the pro¬
cess has been somewhat delayed
in Quebec, it is because the labor
movement is stronger there (over
40 percent of the work force,
compared to less than 10 percent
in the U.S.). But the same forces
are at work.
It was even worse than in
2003, when on another fateful De¬
cember 15 thousands of unionists
ringed the National Assembly to
oppose the government’s bill to end the ban on outsourcing.
Yet even though they could have easily taken the parliament,
they stood by as the mortal threat to the labor movement was
approved. Today, if the government cracks down, it will be
no different. The Common Front has already made it clear
that it has no intention of striking. The CSN even feeds into
the government’s phony argument that it has no money by
proposing other cuts and sources for increased revenue. CSN
president Carbonneau commented that “clearly we must share
the bill, but in function of justice and equity among citizens”
(Ultimatum, November-December 2009). Yet the issue here
is not budget priorities but class power.
And to wage a struggle for power, the workers move¬
ment must defend the oppressed. At present a debate over the
government’s Bill 94, introduced in late March, which would
ban women wearing Islamic veils such as the burka or niqab
which cover the face from employment in government offices,
public services, health care and education. Marois of the PQ
wants to go even farther and ban the Islamic headscarf, the
hijab. Even in the petty-bourgeois “left” nationalist coalition,
Quebec Solidaire, some wished to ban all religious insignia
from public services. In practice, what this would mean is
an anti-Muslim witchhunt, as has occurred in France with
the ban on the hijab in public schools. While claiming to be
about “secularism,” this measure is in fact an act of religious
exclusion by the capitalist government and must be opposed
by all defenders of democratic rights.
Certainly, the Islamic veil symbolizes the subjugation of
women, which is institutionalized in the family and ideolo¬
gized in different ways by Christianity and Judaism as well.
As atheists, Marxists fight the obscurantism and subjugation
Internationalist photo
72
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Montreal demonstration against privatization, 1 April 2010.
of women ingrained all organized religion and inherent in
capitalist society. But to do away with the retrograde effect of
religion, it is necessary not only to promote a scientific under¬
standing of the world but also to provide social institutions that
can fulfill the needs that are filled by religious reaction. And
it is necessary for the entire workers movement to combat all
forms of religious discrimination. Union federations like the
CSN, which has a strong presence in the public sector, cannot
duck this issue. Genuine class-struggle militants would fight
for the unions to defend their Muslim members and oppose
this discriminatory bill.
Likewise the workers movement must be in the fore¬
front of defending immigrants against discrimination in the
name of “Quebec values.” Hypocritical “reasonable accom¬
modation” that leaves immigrants without equal rights is no
answer - labor must fight for full citizenship rights for all im¬
migrants. The unions should massively mobilize their ranks
to protest against police brutality, such as the cop assault that
killed Freddy Villanueva in Montreal-Nord in August 2008.
Labor must oppose discrimination against homosexuals. The
workers movement must also come to the aide of indigenous
peoples under attack by the state, such as the police/army
assault on the Kahnawake Mohawk Warriors no further from
downtown Montreal than Chateauguay on the other side of
the St.-Lawrence River.
And workers should use their power against imperialist
war and occupation, such as Canada has been carrying out for
years in Afghanistan and Haiti, and which has been a staple
for the Quebec police and military units who put on U.N. blue
helmets in “peacekeeping” missions in Africa. Such a struggle
can forge powerful links with the sizable Haitian and North
African immigrant populations in Montreal. There have been
innumerable and very large antiwar demonstrations in Mon¬
treal and elsewhere in Quebec. But workers strikes against
imperialist war , of which the May Day 2008 port shutdown
by the ILWU dock workers union on the Pacific Coast against
the war on Iraq and Afghanistan was a small taste, would pose
a fundamental challenge to the capitalist state. Internationalist
communists seek defeat the imperialist war in fight¬
ing for socialist revolution.
The League for the Fourth International
calls for independence for Quebec, an oppressed
French-speaking nation within the Canadian state.
All talk of “sovereignty-association” and other PQ
circumlocutions only serves to disguise continued
subjugation. The persistence of national oppression
of the Quebecois has made separate states necessary
in orderfor the working people to fight the respective
bourgeoisies who use the nation to organize their op¬
pressive class rule. From the early 1970s on, militant
trade-unionists and much of the left supported the
Parti Quebecois, a capitalist party. Even today, as
the PQ stands exposed as a class enemy of Quebec
working people, most of the reformist left and some
sectors of labor support Quebec Solidaire, a petty-
bourgeois nationalist electoral vehicle that can only
be an obstacle to united class struggle against all wings of the
ruling class. As proletarian internationalists the LFI supports
Quebec independence in order to overcome national oppres¬
sion to the extent possible under capitalism and thereby more
easily defeat nationalism in all its variants.
Quebecois nationalists of various hues have periodi¬
cally sought to make their peace with U.S. imperialism as
a counterweight to Anglo Canadian domination. (For its
part, the CIA has also considered whether an independent
capitalist Quebec with suit U.S. imperial interests.) Hydro
Quebec was set up in order to provide a source of riches
for the Quebecois bourgeoisie so it could compete with the
Toronto banks by supplying the New York energy market.
It is no accident that the future PQ founder Rene Levesque
played an important role in nationalizing the hydroelectric
companies, as minister of natural resources in the Liberal
government of Jean Lesage. But as the saga of Quebecor
strikebreaking shows - or Bombardier downsizing and
outsourcing, or the Alcan buyout by Rio Tinto, or the
bankruptcy of AbitibiBowater - having Quebec-based
companies does not alter the exploitation of the workers
that is the motor force of capitalist production, whatever
the nationality of the bosses.
A struggle against privatization, “tarification” of public
services, cutbacks of social programs and all forms of the capi¬
talist offensive against working people can only be successful
through a socialist revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie
as a class and extends the revolution internationally. In fighting
the effects of “free trade” in destroying trade unions and liv¬
ing standards, Quebec workers must ally with working people
throughout Canada as well as with their U.S. and Mexican
sisters and brothers. While Quebecois nationalists may look
back to Louis-Joseph Papineau and the Patriotes of 1837-38,
communist internationalists are inspired by the example of
Lenin and Trotsky who tore asunder the tsarist prison house
ofpeoples. We seek to build a Quebec workers republic as part
of a socialist federation of North America, in alliance with a
socialist United States of Latin America. ■
January-February 2011
The internationalist
73
G20 Protests: Largest Mass Arrests Ever in Canada
Police
State in Toronto
On June 26 and June 27
[2010], an army of 20,000 troops
and cops turned downtown To¬
ronto into a police state, arresting
over 1,100 demonstrators. It was
the largest number jailed at one
time in Canadian history, twice
as many as when the Canadian
army occupied Quebec in 1970.
The excuse for this exercise in
naked police power was the sum¬
mit of the leaders of the world’s 20
largest economies (G20). While
Barack Obama tried to browbeat
China into accepting the competi¬
tive devaluation of the U.S. dol¬
lar, a form of monetary warfare,
finance ministers talked about
how to slash budget deficits by
making working people pay for
the capitalist crisis.
Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper decided to use
the occasion to stock up on “riot control” weaponry and try out
the latest repressive tactics. As at the April 2009 London G20
summit, crowds of demonstrators were “kettled” for hours in
the rain, turning Queen’s Park into a giant holding pen. As in the
2004 Republican Convention in New York City, hundreds were
arrested at a time to get them off the street. The police bought
water cannon and an ear-splitting Long Range Acoustic Device.
To facilitate this, the Ontario cabinet secretly passed “enhanced
arrest powers” allowing police to grab anyone they wanted near a
three-metre high fence that snaked through the financial district.
Protesters’ chants of “This is what democracy looks like” soon
became “This is what a police state looks like.”
Labour leaders held a large (30,000) march early in the af¬
ternoon on June 26, bragging that they worked closely with the
cops. But all it took was a few smashed bank windows and some
torched police cruisers for the defenders of capital to launch a full
scale assault on the protesters. Tear gas was used (a Canadian
first) along with rubber bullets and paintballs filled with pepper.
Youthful demonstrators and random passers-by were set upon at
every turn by the uniformed thugs. Even before the protests began,
scores of demonstrators from Quebec were picked up. Of those
arrested, 800 or so were eventually released without charge, many
after spending days in the degrading “Prisoner Processing Center,”
while another 200 had charges dismissed or stayed.
In the aftermath, various social-democratic left groups
such as the International Socialists have joined with liberals
in calling for a public enquiry into the police brutality and for
the resignation of the Toronto police chief. This only fosters
illusions that the police - the backbone of the capitalist state
- can be reformed. But the reformists saved their real venom
for the anarchists of the Black Bloc, claiming they “gave the
cops ammunition to brutalize and jail over 900 innocents”
(Barry Weisleder of Socialist Action). Fightback was even
more foam-flecked, saying the anarchists “used our move¬
ment in order to highjack it” and “comparing” them to “agents
provocateurs.” Quite a statement from an outfit (part of the
International Marxist Tendency) which considers cops to be
workers! Against the police occupation and assault on civil
liberties, we demand that charges against everyone detained
in the G20 protests be dropped. The criminals were the police,
not the protesters. ■
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Christinne Muschi/Reuters
74
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Hundreds Come Out for Mumia at Philly Federal Court Hearing
No Justice in the Capitalist Courts
Mobilize Labor/Black Power
to Free Mumia Now!
Mumia Abu-Jamal
On November 9, some 500 demonstrators con¬
verged on the federal courthouse in Philadelphia to
defend Mumia Abu-Jamal, the renowned radical
journalist and former Black Panther who has been sit¬
ting on Pennsylvania’s death row for the last 28 years,
sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit. It was
the first large mobilization for Mumia in more than two
years, and was accompanied by demonstrations else¬
where. In France, where 300 demonstrated in Paris,
the left-wing daily L ’Humanite devoted its front page
to Mumia. The occasion for the worldwide protest was
a hearing on Mumia’s case by a three-judge panel of
the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, on orders of the
U.S. Supreme Court. In July 2008, the appeals court
had upheld a ruling by federal judge William Yohn
which, while dismissing every challenge to the gro¬
tesque frame-up trial that declared Mumia guilty, set
aside the death penalty on the grounds that the judge’s
instructions to the jury on sentencing were confusing.
Then in January 2010, after earlier refusing to hear
Mumia’s appeal on the exclusion of black jurors and
other instances of flagrant racism during the trial, the
reactionary high court instructed the appeals court to
reconsider its earlier verdict and possibly reinstate
the death penalty.
Jamal, the author of Live from Death Row and several
other books on the racist injustice system and hundreds of
commentaries on the crimes of capitalism and imperialism,
was convicted of the December 1981 killing of police officer
Daniel Faulkner. In fact, Mumia, an innocent man, nearly bled
to death from a cop bullet to his lung. He had been in the cops’
gun sights for years, ever since he was Minister of Informa¬
tion for the Philadelphia Black Panther Party at the age of 15,
and then later reported on the murderous police siege of the
predominantly black MOVE organization. The trial judge, Al¬
fred Sabo, was notorious as a “hanging judge” who sentenced
more defendants to death than any other sitting judge in the
United States. Sabo was a lifetime member of the Fraternal
Order of Police (FOP) and was heard by a court reporter to
say of Mumia that he was going to help the prosecution “fry
the n—r.” The judge helped the prosecution shield cops from
testifying, and during the 1995 appeal (which he presided over)
of his earlier verdict, Sabo even had a witness arrested on the
stand after she recanted her earlier coerced testimony, as well
as ordering the arrest of a defense attorney.
The narrow issue now being heard in the Third Circuit
Court is whether Judge Sabo’s instructions to the jury during
the sentencing phase of the trial suggested that they would
have to unanimously agree to any mitigating circumstances
favoring life imprisonment over execution, when a majority
is sufficient. The Supremes told the appeals court to use as its
guideline a case they decided a week earlier concerning a Nazi
in Ohio, Frank Spisak, who murdered three people because
they were black or - he mistakenly believed - Jewish. The
Philadelphia district attorney argued on November 9 that the
case of Jamal and Spisak were essentially the same. Mumia’s
attorney pointed to big differences: aside from the fact that the
Nazi bragged of his guilt in his trial while Mumia has stead¬
fastly upheld his innocence, the jury in the Ohio case wasn’t
told explicitly that unanimity was required for mitigating
circumstances, whereas in Jamal’s trial Judge Sabo repeatedly
said jurors had to be “unanimous.” This was noted by two of
the judges on the panel. But that only means that if they do
reinstate the death penalty, it will be knowing full well that
Jamal was railroaded. The rulers’ goal is to silence the “voice
© Lou Jones
January-February 2011
The internationalist
75
IG marches for Mumia in Philadelphia, 9 October 2010.
of the voiceless.”
On the eve of the November 9 hearing,
the defense legal team was thrown into
commotion when attorney Robert Bryan
refused Mumia’s request that Judith Ritter,
a law professor who had previously argued
the issue of jury instruction and mitigating
circumstances to the same panel, make the
presentation - whereupon Jamal fired him.
In his submission to the court withdrawing
from the case, Bryan disgustingly claimed
it was because he had been “threatened”
by Jamal’s supporters. Earlier, in 1999,
Jamal had to fire his then-attorneys Leon¬
ard Weinglass and Dan Williams after
Williams published a book saying he had
“no idea whether Mumia Abu-Jamal is
innocent or guilty.” Bryan, like Weinglass
and Williams, focused exclusively on the
legal issues of the trial and refused to pres¬
ent evidence of Mumia’s innocence or the
confession of Arnold Beverly that he, and
not Mumia, was one of two killers who shot
police officer Faulkner in a contract “hit.” Bourgeois liberal
lawyers simply refuse to recognize the fundamental fact about
the legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal: that the bourgeois
state is trying to kill an innocent man because it considers him
a dangerous black revolutionary who it must silence.
The issue of the capitalist state has sharply divided Mu¬
mia’s supporters for years. Liberals and reformist leftists want
to argue that this was a “miscarriage of justice,” all due to a
L’Humanite, formerly the newspaper of the French
Communist Party, featured Mumia on its front page
the day of the appeals court hearing in Philadelphia.
racist judge, an aberration which could be rectified by insist¬
ing that the law be fairly applied. They refuse to admit that
the relentless persecution of Jamal is part of a system of racist
injustice rooted in the bedrock American capitalism. Black
people have been subjected to this “lynch law” since the days of
slavery, from which the barbaric death penalty stems. A decade
ago, the issue was the liberal/reformist call for a “new trial,”
which implied that a different verdict would result. Presenting
new evidence to a different judge won’t save Jamal any more
than appealing for a new trial by the apartheid judges would
have won freedom for Nelson Mandela, to whom Mumia has
often been compared. Revolutionary Marxists insist that while
lawyers should pursue every avenue of legal defense, there is
no justice for the oppressed in the capitalist courts. The key is to
mobilize the power of the working class and the black, Latino
and immigrant population to demand that Mumia be freed.
Lately, as a string of adverse court decisions has made the
call for a “new trial” ever more illusory, the liberals and re¬
formists are petitioning President Barack Obama and Attorney
General Eric Holder to pardon Mumia or conduct a civil rights
investigation. (A petition being circulated in France calls on
Obama to initiate a new trial.) Yet black Democrats Obama
and Holder are capitalist rulers who depend on the machinery
of repression to maintain their class domination. Obama has
said, specifically in reference to Mumia, that he supports the
death penalty for “cop killers” - which is what Jamal was
wrongly convicted of. And the FOP endorsed Holder as the
nation’s “top cop.” Some liberals may believe that a new trial
or intervention by Obama could actually save Mumia from the
executioner. Most reformists know better, but instead of telling
the truth, they promote illusions in bourgeois “democracy,”
calculating that when it doesn’t deliver justice people will be
radicalized. Instead, most will become demoralized, lacking
continued on page 78
Internationalist photo
76
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Healthcare “Reform” Law: Bonanza for
Wall Street, an Attack on Working People
The following articles are reprinted from Class Struggle
No. 2 (October-December 2010), the newsletter of Class
Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), a trade-union tendency
active in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) represent¬
ing public primary and secondary’ school teachers and staff
in the New York City public schools, and in the Professional
Staff Congress (PSC), representing faculty and staffat the City
University of New York. The program of the CSEW, which is po¬
litically supported by the Internationalist Group, is published
in The Internationalist No. 28 (March-April 2009).
By Class-Struggle Education Workers/UFT
March 24, 2010
President Obama and the Congressional leaders say
they’ve just passed a “historic” healthcare reform. It’s not.
• It’s not historic, it’s not a reform, and it’s not even a step
in the right direction. The healthcare “reform ” is an
attack on working families and a gift to the insurance
companies, the drug companies and the private hospital
corporations. It’s going to hurt our healthcare coverage
in the UFT. It’s a setback in the struggle for universal
healthcare coverage.
• If people aren’t aware of that, they haven’t been reading
the fine print. Just like many people didn’t pay attention
when Obama said he had the same education program as
John McCain, and when he said he wasn’t going to pull
all the troops out of Iraq and he was going to escalate the
war in Afghanistan.
• First, it won’t mean anything like universal health cov¬
erage. Even by the most optimistic estimates 23 million
people will remain uninsured, many of them immigrant
workers in dangerous and low-paid jobs. Not only are
undocumented immigrants not covered, the care they
now receive in emergency rooms will be cut back because
the government is slashing $40 billion out of funds to
“disproportionate share hospitals” to cover the uninsured.
• Probably many more will remain uninsured. Why? Be¬
cause the insurance plans they will be required to buy are
so expensive and provide such lousy coverage. In Mas¬
sachusetts the basic plan costs $2,800 for an individual
and has a $4,000 deductible, so people will pay almost
$7,000 before they see a dime of benefits. As a result many
people, especially younger people, may figure they’re
better off paying a fine.
• Second, this is the biggest government attack on women’s
right to abortion since Jimmy Carter signed the Hyde
Amendment in 1976. Yet “pro-choice” Democrats in
Congress knuckled under and women’s organizations like
NOW and NARAL didn’t say boo. The ban on abortion
will now apply to community health centers, and abortion
coverage will be dropped from all insurance plans.
Third, this “reform ” is a giant subsidy to the insur¬
ance companies, the drug companies and the for-profit
hospitals. The insurance companies are supposed to pay
$70 billion in taxes, but in return they are going to get
subsidies of $450 billion and hundreds of billions more
in new customers who are going to be forced to buy their
defective products.
The right wing pretends that this is a government take¬
over of medical care. Wrong. It’s the consolidation of
corporate control of medicine. Rather than socialized
medicine, it’s going more towards the corporate state, just
like all the corporate “education reform.”
Fourth, a main way this “reform ” is going to be paid
for is by taxing our insurance plans. The excise tax on
so-called “Cadillac health plans” is the biggest source of
additional funds to pay for the subsidies. Yet individual
high cost health insurance plans like Wall Street execs
have are exempt from this tax, it’s the union plans they’re
going after.
The Senate bill originally said the tax would bring in $140
billion by 2019. Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO did some
last minute horse-trading and reduced that to “only” $32
billion. He must be taking lessons from [Randi] Weingar-
ten [the former UFT president, now head of the national
American Federation of Teachers]: hand over two-thirds
of the givebacks the bosses are demanding, then claim
“victory” because you didn’t give away the whole store.
In any case, this is an illusion. The AFL-CIO tops just
postponed the tax, so that it starts in 2018 instead of2013.
It’s still going to be a whopping tax and the main outside
source of funding, and it will be taking an increasing bite
out of our health plans as medical inflation increases.
Employers won’t agree to a 40 percent increase in cost,
instead they’ll cut benefits to come in under the ceil¬
ing. Since dental and vision care were exempted, it will
probably be cut from long-term hospitalization and major
surgery. People don’t go into the hospital for a month or
have a major operation frivolously. So now we will have
to pay out of pocket or buy super-expensive additional
private insurance.
What it comes down to is they are taking tens of billions
of dollars from the pockets of working families and giv¬
ing them to the capitalists of the medical industry. That’s
the bottom line of this health insurance “reform.” On top
of that they plan to cut “hundreds of billions of dollars”
out of Medicare payments.
And they’re not stopping there. Next up is “reform” of
the Social Security system. The New York Times reported
on March 23 that the administration plans to raise the
January-February 2011
The internationalist
77
retirement age and reduce benefits for Social Security,
which is “the other big entitlement benefits program and
one that Mr. Obama has suggested in the past that he is
willing to tackle.”
• Many younger teachers don’t grasp the role of a union
because they’ve never seen a real union struggle. Many
tend to see the UFT as an agency for providing health
insurance. Why? Because that’s how the union leadership
acts. When Trumlca goes to the White House to negoti¬
ate to postpone the tax, he’s just following the insurance
company execs’ playbook.
• A fighting union leadership would insist on national
health insurance as a first step. And it would not only
refuse to support Obama and the Democrats’ corporate
healthcare “reform, ” it would bring tens of thousands of
union members out into the streets to oppose it. Instead,
the union leaders leave opposition to the ultra-rightist
Tea Party racists.
• What we need is exactly what the right wing and the
corporate interests and the Tea Partyers fear - real so¬
cialized medicine, so that universal healthcare is a right ,
not a commodity. And to do that, it’s necessary to break
with the Democrats and build a class-struggle workers
party that fights for a society in which the working people
rule, not the corporations.
• So when you find your health insurance premiums
going up and your coverage cut, when your Medicare
benefits and Social Security payments are slashed, don’t
be shocked. The UFT bureaucracy’s Unity caucus and the
reformist ICE-TJC opposition don’t warn about this be¬
cause neither is prepared to go up against the Democrats.
They are blocking a real fight against corporate takeover
of the schools and healthcare.
• Whether it’s education “reform ” or healthcare “reform, ”
it’s all an attack on working people. And it’s all coming
straight from the top, from the White House and Wall
Street. Until labor is ready and willing to fight those forces,
it will just go from defeat to defeat, losing membership and
sacrificing union gains piecemeal until the unions them¬
selves are destroyed (or become an empty shell), as has
happened with many already. That’s one more reason why
we need to build a class-struggle opposition in the unions.
Class Struggle Education Workers Statement
On the Healthcare Crisis
The CSEW issued the following statement on 16 Septem¬
ber 2009.
1. A burning issue in class struggles in the United States
is the crisis of healthcare, with an estimated seventy million
people uninsured or underinsured, untold numbers pushed
into bankruptcy by medical costs, and millions more bound
to unsatisfactory jobs for fear of losing their costly and insuf¬
ficient healthcare. With its grotesque class and race inequali¬
ties, denial of medical care to millions of poor and working
people, and domination by outright criminal insurance and
pharmaceutical monopolies, the “healthcare system” is a
dramatic condemnation of American capitalism. We call for
full socialized medicine, while recognizing that only through
a socialist revolution in the U.S., and in the most powerful
capitalist countries throughout the world, can full access to
high-quality comprehensive healthcare be provided for all.
2. The current spectacle in Washington underscores the
need for class-struggle militants to oppose the attacks of Oba¬
ma’s healthcare plan on immigrants, unionized workers and
Medicare benefits. Clearly, the Democratic administration’s
objective is not to see that healthcare is available to all, but
to respond to major capitalist forces concerned about rising
health-care costs at the same time as it seeks the favor of the
insurance and pharmaceutical giants, who were major contribu¬
tors to Obama’s election campaign and who stand to rake in
billions from the extension of insurance under his plan.
3. The reactionary nature of the “debate” between the
capitalist parties is illustrated by Obama pledging that “illegal”
immigrants woidd not be covered, only to be interrupted by
a frenzied Republican congressman screaming “You lie!” As
bourgeois politicians compete over who is the most effective
enemy of the oppressed, it has never been more urgent to fight
for labor to break from all wings of the ruling class.
Having worked overtime to spread illusions in Obama,
the unions’ bureaucratic leadership preaches submission, pas¬
sivity and collaboration in the face of escalating attacks on
the working people. Key to defending the most basic rights
and conquests of the workers and oppressed is the building
of a class-struggle opposition in the unions, committed to the
struggle for a workers party and workers government.
4. The demand for a “national single-payer healthcare
system” has been put forward as a call for providing compre¬
hensive healthcare, including to undocumented immigrants,
within the present U.S. capitalist system. Although it leaves
the providing of healthcare in private hands, if actually carried
through, such national health insurance would substantially
benefit millions of working people, and would also represent
a political defeat for the enormously wealthy private health
insurance industry that profits from death and disease. Thus,
the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) gives critical
support to this demand. While rejecting “popular-front” strat¬
egies which would tie this struggle to the Democratic Party,
we will participate where appropriate in united-front actions
and protests around this issue. At the same time, we recognize
that were the single-payer plan to be implemented, the capital¬
ist system would continue to place profit-seeking pressure on
it such that, even on its own terms, the call for comprehensive
coverage would be distorted. Access to healthcare is further
78
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
impacted by systems of oppression that are manifested in the
allocation of both power and resources within a given society:
for example, housing, education, the criminal injustice system,
and the limitations on democratic rights inherent in capitalism.
5. Although every other advanced capitalist country has
such a system, given the sway of “free market” ideology in
the U.S., even national health insurance, let alone socialized
medicine, would likely not be won short of a mass upheaval
threatening the bourgeoisie with the spectre of socialist
revolution. Having long since become a brake on human
progress, capitalism rips up past gains of the working class
and proves incompatible even with lasting reforms. This
fundamental aspect of capitalism in the “imperialist epoch”
has been demonstrated with particular force since the 1970s
- a striking example being the case of open admissions at
CUNY, a significant gain which the rulers of New York City
began to dismantle almost as soon as it was won. When the
bourgeoisie is forced to “give” concessions with one hand,
it seeks to take them away with the other. Thus, while sup¬
porting every real, even partial gain, we link this always and
everywhere to the question of power, that is, for the working
class to take power into its own hands in alliance with all
the oppressed.
Free Mumia Now!
continued from page 75
a revolutionary perspective to bring down racist U.S. capital¬
ism which, with 2.3 million people behind bars and more than
3,200 on death row, jails and executes a far higher percentage
of its population than any other country on Earth.
The attitude toward the capitalist state underlay the scan¬
dalous action by some leading U.S. members of the World
Coalition Against the Death Penalty, who sent a secret memo
to the organizers of the February 2010 WCADP congress in
which they opposed highlighting the case of Jamal, who has
come to symbolize the struggle against the racist death penalty
around the globe. “Continuing to give Abu-Jamal focused
attention unnecessarily attracts our strongest opponents and
alienates coalition partners,” they declared. Noting that the
FOP calls for a boycott of anyone who supports Mumia, these
lily-livered liberals declared: “The support of law enforce¬
ment officials is essential to achieving abolition in the United
States.” So in order to get police to oppose the death penalty,
they want to “throw Mumia under the bus,” as one leader of
Murder Victims Families for Human Rights put it. Outraged
death penalty abolitionists rejected the secret memo, but the
fact that its authors could achieve prominence in such a move¬
ment is due to the fact that it only attacks “flaws in the capital
punishment system” and “reprehensible actions” by the police,
not the racist “justice” system itself.
The question of the capitalist state is also key in two re¬
cent movies on Mumia Abu-Jamal. A well-financed pro-police
film. The Barrel of a Gun, by Tigre Hill, whose specialty is
producing pseudo-documentaries for Philly Republicans, was
shown to a crowd of several hundred cops and family mem¬
bers on September 21 while a police motorcycle gang, the
Centurions, cruised up and down Market Street to intimidate
the population. Hill’s movie is police propaganda. The liberal
Philadelphia Inquirer (21 September 2010) showed where it
stood by celebrating the film with a major article titled “The
Case Against Mumia.” Meanwhile, a few blocks away at
the National Constitution Center the second film, Justice on
Trial, by Johanna Fernandez, a professor at Baruch College,
and filmmaker Kouross Esmaeli was being shown. The movie
goes over the many glaring contradictions in the prosecution’s
story, shows ballistic and photographic evidence belying their
claims, reports the several witnesses who saw two shooters
fleeing, and has valuable footage about the FBI war on the
Panthers. But while dissecting the legal frame-up, Justice
on Trial leaves out the key evidence of Mumia’s innocence,
weakening an otherwise strong presentation.
The film doesn’t mention the confession of Arnold Bev¬
erly, who has stated in detail that he and another mob hit man
were hired to gun down Faulkner, who corrupt Philly cops
suspected was acting as an informant to a federal investigation
going back to 1979 of center city police involvement in drug
and prostitution rackets. Liberals and reformists don’t want to
deal with this because they feel that it would not be “believ¬
able” to their audience that the police were acting as a gang of
criminals. Another revealing incident, the police firebombing
of the MOVE commune on Mothers’ Day 1985, authorized
by black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, which murdered
eleven black men, women and children and burned down the
entire neighborhood, destroying 61 homes, is touched on only
briefly in the film. Yet to understand the vendetta against Jamal
it is necessary to come to grips with how the racist cops, courts
and capitalist politicians act in concert to “serve and protect”
the interests of the ruling class against the population it rules
over. “Speaking truth to power” will not save Mumia - it is
necessary to mobilize a superior force to stop the machine of
state murder.
The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth
International seek to mobilize labor/black power in fighting
for freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Our Brazilian comrades
sparked the first-ever strike action for Mumia, in April 1999,
stopping work in schools of the state of Rio de Janeiro to hold
teach-ins about his case, in conjunction with the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) which the next day
shut down every port on the U.S. West Coast declaring “An
injury to one is an injury to all, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” This
fall IG comrades from New York traveled to Philadelphia to
help in providing security at the September 21 showing of
Justice on Trial, which we have also shown at Hunter College
in NYC. We sent a team to an October 9 march for Mumia in
Philly and attended the November 9 hearing. We also highlight
the case of Troy Davis in Georgia, another innocent black man
on death row, whose appeal was turned down by the Supreme
Court in October. Against the capitalist parties of death.
Democrats and Republicans alike, we fight for a revolutionary
workers party. And to the many trade-unionists, unions and
labor bodies who over the years have defended Mumia we
say: the time to act is now. ■
January-February 2011
The internationalist
79
LIFT, Students, Parents and Working People Have the Power
We Can Stop the School Closings
By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT
15 DECEMBER 2010 - As he heads toward the door, New
York City’s departing schools chancellor Joel Klein (aka
“The Terminator”) is still at it. After announcing at the end of
October a total of 46 schools it wanted to shut down, at the
beginning of December the Department of Education issued
a list of 25 public schools to be closed starting next fall. The
hit list includes major high schools such as Columbus and
John F. Kennedy in the Bronx, Norman Thomas in Manhattan,
Jamaica and Beach Channel in Queens and Paul Robeson in
Brooklyn. Altogether 15 of the 19 schools Klein tried to shut¬
ter last year are back on the list, despite the court suit by the
United Federation of Teachers, the NAACP and others which
temporarily stayed the dead hand of the DOE.
The rich and powerful forces who are behind the “strat¬
egy” of “turning around” schools by closing them hope to
wear down the opposition. Last January 26, thousands of
parents, students and teachers came out to Brooklyn Tech to
loudly voice their opposition to the last round of school clos¬
ings. In a marathon meeting that went until 3 a.m., only one
of the 300+ speakers supported Klein’s demolition plan. Then
[NYC mayor Michael] Bloomberg’s hand-picked majority on
his puppet “Panel for Educational Policy” voted to close the
schools anyway, without a word of explanation for why they
were ignoring the clear voice of the largely black and Latino
as well as white working-class and middle-class families who
pay the price for the DOE’s crimes.
A couple of months later, a sympathetic judge ruled in
favor of the UFT/NAACP court suit to hold off the closings
because the DOE didn’t follow the state law on public notifica¬
tion. But that didn’t stop Klein. The very afternoon the court de¬
cision came down, the DOE sent out ninth-grade assignments
excluding the affected schools. So the schools stayed open, but
with tiny incoming freshman classes. And now they’re on the
chopping block again. The billionaire mayor (the tenth richest
man in the U.S.) and the well-heeled hedge fund moguls who
bankroll the charter schools think they are the masters of the
world and can do as they wish. They’re wrong. The fact is that
we have the power to stop Bloomberg’s wrecking ball But
we have to use that power or lose it.
By now, the battle lines have been drawn and the argu¬
ments made. The claims by the advocates of wholesale school
closings have been shown to be false. A study of schools that
were closed during the five years of U.S. education secretary
Arne Duncan’s tenure as CEO of the Chicago public schools
showed that most students saw little or no benefit, even on
the standardized tests that are now the holy grail of the edu-
crats. “Most students who transferred out of closing schools
re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak,” said
the report by the Consortium on Chicago School Research.
Furthermore, there was a precipitous drop in reading scores in
the six months after the closings were announced (New York
Times, 29 October 2009).
In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg claimed last year
that for the 91 schools that he has already closed since tak¬
ing office in 2003, graduation rates in the new schools that
replaced them went up 15 percent over the citywide aver¬
age. This is lying with statistics, as the DOE does regularly,
with their inflated scores on state tests, the unfathomable
methodology behind the school report cards, etc. The char¬
ter “replacement” schools raise test scores and graduation
rates by excluding English language learners and special ed
students. And of displaced students, up to half from the last
two classes at closing schools are forced to transfer to GED
programs or disappear from school records. 1 They are forced
out to boost Bloomberg/Klein’s “metrics.”
Bloomberg has proclaimed his goal of closing another
10 percent of NYC’s 1,450 schools in the remaining three
years of his term, while opening 100 new charter schools.
Arne Duncan wants to close 1,000 schools a year nationwide
in the next five years. This goal is accompanied by a bribe of
$3 billion in “stimulus” money to be doled out as part of the
“Race to the Top” to school districts that buy into this scheme.
This is not about improving education. It is part of a wreck¬
ing operation against public education, in New York City and
around the United States.
Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani famously vowed to “blow
up” the NYC Board of Education, and that is exactly what his
successor Bloomberg has been doing. There are various fac¬
tors going into how they choose which schools to close. Real
estate interests who want to grab some juicy properties are an
element in Manhattan. Making room for hedge fund-backed
charter schools run by mayoral favorites such as school space
imperialist Eva Moskowitz is another. Shutting down big
high schools has been a key goal of the corporate education
“reformers” for years. Instead of having campuses offering
a rich range of educational opportunities, they want to pare
down secondary education to basic skills training, tracking
and regimenting students in small schools.
This strategy has the special attraction, from the bosses’
standpoint, of targeting schools that are bastions of teacher union
militancy. In New York, the big high schools have often been
opposition strongholds in the UFT (possibly a reason why the
bureaucracy has done so little to defend schools like Jamaica,
Norman Thomas, etc.) The capitalist education “reformers”
want to destroy the unions on the road to privatizing what they
can of the public schools via charters and corporatizing what’s
left, turning them into profit platforms for vendors and the like.
1 See the study by Columbia sociologist Jennifer Jennings
and Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, “Fligh School
Discharges Revisited” (30 April 2009) at: http://www.dass-
sizematters.org/High_School_Discharge_Report_FINAL.pdf
80
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
But a key factor is that closing schools is part of a rac¬
ist agenda to destroy public education. Just look at a map
of where the schools on the closing lists are located and see
what student populations they serve. The billionaires pushing
this campaign, such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates and real estate
mogul Eli Broad, want to turn the black and Latino population
against the unions, like the Ford Foundation did in the 1960s
over community control. That’s why Bloomberg reportedly
first offered the schools chancellorship to Geoffrey Canada,
but the black capitalist education entrepreneur of the Harlem
Children’s Zone turned him down.
This time, however, the cynical ploy is backfiring. Black
parents have seen through the lies and realize it’s their kids’
education that is being ripped up. Voters dumped Mayor
Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C. and his broom-wielding
schools chief Michelle Rhee is gone. From Harlem to Rhode
Island, virtually every candidate supporting charter schools
was defeated in elections this fall. In NYC black and Latino
parents and education advocates have been in the forefront
of the struggle against Bloomberg’s new chancellor, Cathy
Black. Today there is a historic chance to unite the oppressed
majority population of New York City with the unions in a
labor/black struggle that can actually defeat the charterizers
and school closers.
The UFT Delegate Assembly will be voting on a resolu¬
tion presented by the leadership calling to “build a grassroots
movement of opposition to school closures.” While that is
certainly needed, the resolution fails to demand that all school
closings be stopped now (instead it has a mealy-mouthed call
for a moratorium on closures where the DOE has not given the
school adequate resources and support). It leaves each school
on its own, instead of bringing teachers, parents and students of
the threatened schools together. And while calling for the D. A.
to march today to DOE headquarters at Tweed Courthouse, and
for a mass demonstration at the February PEP meeting, it does
not call for a citywide mobilization well before the vote that
could bring out the forces that can actually stop the closings.
The rhetoric in the resolution is tougher than the usual
mushy fare from the UFT bureaucracy (aka the Unity Caucus
and its hangers-on). Union militants and education activists
should call on the UFT to actually lead a mass labor/black
and immigrant struggle against the racist school closings and
the “educational apartheid” of the charter schools. But what’s
centrally needed is to build a class opposition the pro-capitalist
union bureaucracy, which has given up vital rights such as
seniority transfers, and let Bloomberg/Klein introduce “merit
pay” (on a school basis), teacher evaluations using student test
scores, and is now caving in on teacher tenure (see below).
Class Struggle Education Workers seeks to build such an
opposition, to fight the privatizing education “reform” agenda.
While teachers union leaders (both AFT and NEA) and many
union oppositionists and education activists backed Obama
in 2008, either openly or tacitly, the CSEW warned from
the outset that the Democrats’ and Republicans’ education
agendas (as well as their support for imperialist war in Iraq
and Afghanistan) were identical. We say the assault on public
education is coming straight from the top, from the Democrats
in the White House and Congress, to Democrat Cuomo in the
New York statehouse (elected with the votes of the UFT-backed
Working Families Party).
In waging this struggle, we rely not on the courts (which
enforce the bosses’ law and order, such as the anti-strike Tay¬
lor Law) or on capitalist politicians but on the power of the
working people and the oppressed, building a workers party
that fights for a workers government that can revolutionize
education under teacher-student-parent-worker control.
The DOE Goes After Teacher Tenure
They’re on a tear: one day, it’s closing schools, the next
day it’s trying to blast teachers names across the tabloid press.
On Monday (December 13), the DOE announced new tenure
“guidelines.” They are bad news. Among the new provisions
are:
• Principals will use a four-point “effectiveness frame¬
work,” not just “S” (satisfactory) or “U” ratings as until now.
This rating will be based, among other things, on student test
scores. This is the wedge for bringing in their “value added”
model, which they want to use to bust union wage scales and
seniority job protection.
• New “expanded” data will be considered, like whether
or not you are an ATR. This is victimization - teachers do not
control when/if their school is closed and they become ATRs.
• Instead of a check list, principals now have to write several
paragraphs justifying granting tenure. It’s a transparent attempt
to make it easier to deny, or delay than to grant tenure. And for
some of these principals just out of the "leadership” academy,
we wonder if they can even write an essay.
• Most sinister is the financial incentive for denying
tenure: if a principal denies a teacher tenure, they are per¬
mitted to hire a new teacher and ignore the hiring freeze.
This will also be used to intimidate teachers - stay in line,
work through lunch, do cafeteria duty etc., or we’ll get
somebody who will.
For years the teacher-bashers, the chancellor, the mayor,
the New Teacher Project, et al. have been screaming about ten¬
ure. New chancellor Cathleen Black says tenure is a “lifetime
guarantee.” This is false. What tenure does is give teachers
“due process” after three years probation. In order to fire a
teacher, the DOE has to provide “cause” (which can include
successive annual U-ratings, charges of “insubordination”
and the like).
The DOE intends to keep teachers on lengthy probation,
so they are free to fire at will. In response, UFT president
Mike Mulgrew rushed to say that the UFT has no role in the
process of granting tenure. While complaining about DOE
“pontificating,” he ends up saying he hopes that the new
procedure “can help solve the system’s real problems.” A
continued on page 86
January-February 2011
The internationalist
81
Let NYC Muslim Center Be Built!
Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!
Mobilize Against Racist Attacks
on Muslims and immigrants!
Internationalist Group, CUNY Internationalist Clubs and Class Struggle Edu¬
cation Workers at September 11 demonstration against racist anti-immigrant
attacks on plans for an Islamic center near NYC’s World Trade Center.
5 SEPTEMBER 2010 - Over the
last few months and particularly
in recent weeks there has been
a concerted drive by reactionary
forces to whip up hysteria against
a project to build a Muslim com¬
munity center in New York City, a
few blocks from the World Trade
Center, target of the 11 September
2001 (9/11) attack. It is cynically
claimed that building a “mosque”
in proximity to “Ground Zero” is
somehow an affront to the 2,700
people who were killed in that
attack. How so? The implicit
message: that Muslims were re¬
sponsible for the indiscriminate
terror. The same rationale pres¬
ents the U.S. imperialist war on
Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a
“Judeo-Christian” crusade against
Islam. What do these bigots care
that the organizers of the Muslim
center chose the site in order to
promote “multi-faith dialogue”?
The hysteria is part of the violent
racist campaign targeting Muslims and immigrants for attack
ever since 9/11. Thus a couple of days after an August 22 anti¬
mosque hate fest, a passenger stabbed and slashed a NYC taxi
driver after he confirmed to the would-be murderer that he was
a Muslim. Now the bigots plan an even bigger Muslim-bashing
event at the WTC site for September 11. This provocation must
be met with a vigorous labor/immigrant countermobilization
to defend Muslims and drive out the racists.
As the mid-term election campaign heats up, right-wing
forces are vituperating against immigrants. In a number of
states, bills have been introduced imitating Arizona’s racial-
profiling law, SB 1070, instructing police to stop and question
anyone on “reasonable suspicion” of being an “illegal alien”
- which in practice means anyone who "looks Mexican.” This
was followed up by a manufactured frenzy over so-called
“anchor babies,” alleging that immigrant women come to
the United States to give birth so that the parents can obtain
residency (a total myth, particularly as the U.S. govermnent is
deporting tens of thousands of parents of U.S.-born children).
This morphed into a frenzy over “terror babies,” product of
the fevered brain of Texas congressman Louis Gohmert, who
claimed Muslim moms come to the U.S. to have children
who grow up to be terrorists. From there it was only a short
step to the mid-summer mania about abolishing the post-Civil
War 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants
citizenship to anyone born in the United States. (Many of the
anti-immigrant racists would no doubt like to get rid of the
13th Amendment as well and bring back slavery.) Against the
xenophobes, the Internationalist Group calls for full citizen¬
ship rights for all immigrants.
The uproar over the Muslim community center in lower
Manhattan is also a blatant electoral ploy by the reactionary forces
Defeat U.S. Imperialist War on Afghanistan, Iraq!
Internationalist photo
82
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
that coalesced in the so-called Tea Party movement. These are the
people who during the 2008 election campaign staged rallies for
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin who accused
Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” and where
death threats against the black Democrat were yelled from the
crowd. Now right-wing Republicans want to get their Christian
fundamentalist base mobilized to vote out Democrats in the
November 2010 elections. Newt Gingrich compared building a
mosque to support for Nazi Germany and the genocide of Jews. At
the August 22 anti-mosque rally there were loud chants of“Obama
Must Go!” and references to “Imam Obama.” Time magazine (30
August) reported that nearly a quarter of Americans think Obama
is a Muslim. Yet Obama, as president and commander in chief of
the U.S. military, is responsible for waging and escalating the war
that is slaughtering Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. As usual
Obama equivocated on the Islamic community center, first com¬
ing out for the “right” to build a mosque there, then backtracking
the next day on the “wisdom” of doing so. This only emboldened
the anti-Muslim bigots.
Other Democrats were even more explicit in pandering to
the right-wing mob, including Senate majority leader Harry Reid
(who said the mosque “should be built someplace else”), liberal
darling Howard Dean (who said a mosque near the World Trade
Center would be an “affront”) and New York governor David
Paterson, who proposed a “compromise” by building the center
away from the WTC area. Looking to Democrats and bourgeois
liberals to oppose the anti-Muslim hysteria is a recipe for disas¬
ter. New York’s billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg has opposed
attempts to stop the mosque, on the grounds that this kind of
virulent Muslim-bashing is bad for business - and bad for war.
Same concern from Obama, who needs Muslim allies to justify
the U.S. terror war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
But as the polls show two-thirds of New Yorkers opposed to
construction of a mosque at “Ground Zero,” no doubt the push
for moving the Islamic center will grow. It should be clear to
all that any such riding-class “compromise” would hand the
bigots a victory and constitute an assault on freedom of speech,
supposedly enshrined in the 1 st Amendment.
The racist instigators of the anti-Muslim protests spew
out wild claims that this would be a “Ground Zero victory
mosque,” a “command center for terrorism,” a center to “train
and recruit Sharia law advocates who become terrorists,” etc.
Yet the sponsors of the Park51 project (named for its location
at 51 Park Place), Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan
(his wife and founder of the American Society for Muslim
Advancement), stated as their purpose “to promote inter¬
community peace, tolerance and understanding.” Rauf and
Khan have also sponsored the Cordoba Initiative, recalling
when a thousand years ago “Muslims, Jews, and Christians
coexisted and created a prosperous center of intellectual,
spiritual, cultural and commercial life in Cordoba, Spain.”
Their brand of Sufi Islam is considered heresy by the Salafi
and Wahabi Sunni Islamists such as the World Islamic Front
(A1 Qaeda) of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. So
why the over-the-top rhetoric about a “terror mosque”? Be¬
cause the promoters of the anti-mosque frenzy are pushing a
war on Islam, and anything that goes against that undercuts
their warmongering. As an Internationalist Group sign at a
counterprotest on August 22 stated, “Imperialist War Abroad
Breeds Bigotry ‘At Home’.”
Right-wingers complain that Imam Rauf commented (on
the CBS-TV 60 Minutes program, 30 September 2001) that
“United States policies were an accessory to the crime that
happened.” Despite U.S. espousal of democracy and human
rights, he noted, “we ally ourselves with oppressive regimes
in many of these countries” and “in the most direct sense,
Osama bin Laden is made in the U.S.A.” Nothing radical
about this, these statements are undeniable facts. Imam Rauf is
currently speaking on a tour of the Middle East sponsored by
the U.S. State Department, as he has done before. Some have
complained that he did not forcefully oppose the U.S. attack
on Afghanistan or the round-up of thousands of Muslims in its
wake. In fact, the Cordoba Initiative reports, “At the request of
the F.B.I. after 9/11, he provided cultural training to hundreds
of F.B.I. agents”! Far from denouncing the war, Rauf ends his
book What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America
(2005) with a ruling by five Islamic clerics titled, “Fatwa
Permitting U. S. Muslim Military Personnel to Participate in
Afghanistan War Effort.” To top it off, Rauf declares: “I am a
supporter of the State of Israel” (New York Times, 22 August).
Many “progressives” argue that Muslims have a right to
build a mosque, the issue is where. Chris Mathews on MS¬
NBC’s Hardball argued with an opponent of the mosque that
the issue is “location, location, location.” The whole brouhaha
over the location of the cultural center is phony. In fact, Imam
Rauf has led a mosque located only 12 blocks from the WTC
site in Tribeca for the last 27years. There is another mosque
only two blocks away from the Park51 center. On the other
hand, there have been right-wing protests against a mosque in
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn and plans to turn a Roman Catholic
convent into an Islamic community center on Staten Island. In
the latter case, a meeting of a civic association this past June
erupted into an orgy of bigotry. Anti-mosque rallies there have
taken on the quality of lynch mobs, with the few defenders
of the mosque who showed up in physical danger. And all
the talk of the “Ground Zero” area as “hallowed ground” is
hogwash, the area is full of strip joints and betting parlors: a
block away are the “gentlemen’s clubs” New York Dolls and
Pussycat Lounge, an OTB location is only a few doors down
from 51 Park Place. (Just to be clear, we have no objection to
those business establishments being there either.)
Politically, we are no friends of Imam Rauf, who is a
supporter of U.S. imperialist and Zionist war and occupation
which communists seek to defeat. As Marxists and atheists, we
are ideologically opposed to all religions - whether “moder¬
ate” or “extremist” Islam, evangelical, mainstream Protestant
or Catholic Christianity, the different varieties of Judaism,
Buddhism, Hinduism - which throughout history have served
to justify the rule of exploiting ruling classes and blind the
exploited population to a real solution to their misery. As
Marx noted, at the same time that it serves as the “opium of
the masses,” religion can be an illusory refuge for those seek-
January-February 2011
The internationalist
83
ing salvation from distress. To finally overcome religion, it is
necessary to abolish the oppressive conditions that produce it,
through international socialist revolution, and lay the basis for
the masses to achieve a scientific understanding of the world.
From Afghanistan and Iraq to Egypt and Algeria, we oppose
Islamism as a political movement while fighting to mobilize
the working class and the oppressed to defeat the imperialist
occupiers and “secular” dictatorships. Back when the U.S.
(and much of the Western left) was backing the likes of Osama
bin Laden in Afghanistan, Trotskyists hailed the Red Army
intervention against the Islamists.
Various leftist groups have taken up the cause of the
Park51 Islamic cultural center. For the most part, however, they
have done so not on a class basis but by joining in political
coalitions with various liberal and supposedly “progressive”
bourgeois forces, and even appealing to outright reactionar¬
ies. The International Socialist Organization (ISO), which in
the 1980s praised the Iranian Islamic “revolution” and hailed
the victory of the CIA’s anti-Soviet Afghan cutthroats, is now
campaigning against Islamophobia. Recently the ISO has
helped initiate an NYC Coalition to Stop Islamophobia which
issued an appeal, stating in part:
“We call upon the leaders of hate groups such as Stop Is-
lamization of America (SIOA) and their supporters to end
their campaign of venomous falsehoods, intimidation, and
hate speech against the Park51 project and its supporters, as
well as against the Muslim community more generally.... In
particular, we call upon SIOA to stop politicizing the grief
that all New Yorkers will feel this September 11th....
“Finally, we call upon both local and national politicians, as
well as media outlets, to stop using the so-called ‘Mosque
Controversy’ for partisan political ends, and to take a strong
and unequivocal stance against Islamophobia.”
There is certainly a good deal of hatred of Islam as a religion
among the opponents of a “Ground Zero mosque.” Televange¬
list Franklin Graham has for years vituperated against Islam as
“a very evil and wicked religion,” a “religion of violence,” and
fundamentalist Christian evangelicals make up a sizeable part
of right-wing forces in the U.S. But the current hysteria goes
beyond religion. As Daisy Khan remarked on ABC’s This Week
(22 August), “This is like a metastasized anti-Semitism.... It’s
not even Islamophobia, it’s beyond Islamophobia - it’s hate
of Muslims.” And this organized anti-Muslim bigotry will
not be stopped by appealing to the conscience of the bigots or
municipal unity (“all New Yorkers”). The idea that the SIOA
and right-wingers will stop bashing Muslims is an illusion.
This coming September 11, another orgy of chauvinist
hatred is in the works. A Florida pastor says he will burn
the Koran. In New York there will be a larger anti-mosque
mobilization at the Islamic community center site. Dutch
ultra-rightist politician Geert Wilders has announced he will
speak there. On the other hand, while many liberals inveigh
against bigotry, most are loath to publicly protest the bigots. A
left-wing version of this is the Spartacist League (SL), which
published a front-page article on the chauvinist anti-mosque
mania. The article notes that on August 22 anti-mosque protest¬
ers outnumbered counterprotesters, but doesn’t mention that
the SL only bothered to send a couple of newspaper salesmen.
The Internationalist Group came out on August 22, as seen in a
Newsweek video where our spokesman recalled the attacks on
Jews in Nazi Germany and denounced the racists for seeking
to stigmatize Muslims. We will be there again this September
11 with our signs calling for workers defense guards against
racist anti-immigrant attacks. For the IG, this is not an abstract
issue. Starting the day after 11 September 2001, when there
was a danger of anti-Arab attacks, we patrolled at night for an
extended period in Arab neighborhoods of Brooklyn. When
the City University of New York tried to carry out an “anti¬
immigrant war purge” of undocumented students by doubling
their tuition, we led a struggle that resulted in substantially
rolling back this chauvinist measure.
The current anti-Muslim frenzy in the United States is
whipped up by bourgeois rightists. Nobody was bothered by
the Islamic center until the New York Post and Zionist bloggers
seized the issue. It is of a piece with anti-Muslim mobilizations
by the Lega Nord and other government parties in Berlusconi’s
Italy, or the current hysteria against Romanis (Roma) in France.
The media have fed the hysteria by exaggerating its popular sup¬
port. While noting that polls in New York City show a majority
against building the mosque, they do not highlight that this is
of registered voters , which excludes a huge percentage of the
population in a city which is 40 percent foreign born, nor that a
majority of those in Manhattan, where the cultural center is to
be built, support it. At bottom, the witchhunt against Muslims
is an integral part of the anti-immigrant campaign fostered not
only by Republican conservatives but also by the liberal Demo¬
crats. While media attention and protests by immigrants’ rights
groups focus on the Arizona law, the Obama administration has
sent more than 1,200 troops to patrol the U.S.-Mexican border,
500 of them in Arizona. And while among the racists there are
fascistic forces involved in the anti-mosque mobilizations, the
far greater threat to immigrants and Muslims is the U. S. imperi¬
alist government, currently controlled by the Democratic Party.
Thus the fight against the Muslim-bashing hysteria over the
New York mosque must be part of a struggle to build a revolution¬
ary workers party that champions the cause of all the oppressed.
Communists vigorously defend bourgeois democratic rights
including freedom of assembly and the separation of church and
state (which were united under feudalism and in theocratic Islamic
regimes). While expropriating the holdings and breaking the
secular power of the church and its control of education, as well
as combating religious prejudices among the masses and the use of
religion as a cover for counterrevolution, the Russian Bolsheviks
under Lenin and Trotsky upheld the freedom of religious belief
and worship. As Leninists and Trotskyists, the Internationalist
Group defends the building of an Islamic cultural center and place
of worship (mosque) near the World Trade Center and anywhere
else, and comes to the defense of immigrants and religious mi¬
norities under attack. Rather than looldng to the Democrats and
bourgeois liberals, who are supporters of the imperialist rulers, we
defend democratic rights through mobilizing workers, oppressed
minorities and immigrants against the entire ruling class and its
racist capitalist system. ■
Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!
The Dream Act Swindle
OCTOBER 2010 - Recently there has been a campaign on
campuses and in immigrant communities to push for passage
of the DREAM Act. This legislation, which has been around
for a number of years, would make some undocumented im¬
migrant youth eligible to apply for citizenship after complet¬
ing two years in college ... or two years in the military. The
latest device to get it past anti-immigrant forces in Congress
was to attach it to the military appropriations bill. But in late
September, it failed in the Senate (despite a majority vote in
favor) because the Democrats said they couldn’t overcome
a Republican filibuster against it. El Diario-La Prensa (23
September) headlined a report on a rally at New York’s City
Hall, “Students Feel Used.”
Immigrant students are indeed being used, not only by
rightist opponents but also by promoters of the DREAM
Act. This supposedly pro-immigrant bill is supported by
the Pentagon as a way to make up for the fact that fewer
young people are signing up to kill and be killed in the
U.S. war and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. As we
wrote in “CUNY and the Imperialist War” {Revolution No.
4, September 2007),
“With the help of the ICE (Immigration and Customs En¬
forcement branch of Homeland Security) Gestapo, and the
new drive for segregation in education, the imperialists are
scheming ways to beef up their dwindling recruiting totals.
One example of this is the DREAM (Development, Relief
and Education for Alien Minors) Act. Many reformers hope
this proposal will help undocumented immigrant students
to continue with their higher education once they are out of
high school, but the Pentagon has its own reasons to look
forward to this ‘immigration reform’: a ‘hidden provision in
the DREAM Act... would tie permanent legal residency to
military service.’ Offering oppressed immigrants the ‘choice’
of racist persecution or ‘earning’ citizenship by serving as
cannon fodder for the class enemy is a tried-and-true recruit¬
ing method for the U.S. war machine.”
Recently, the Class Struggle Education Workers newsletter
(October-December 2010) published a note on “DREAMS
of Citizenship, Nightmare of War,” saying that this deceptive
bill in reality “is a Trojan Horse for the Pentagon to target
the already vulnerable Latino population, together with ad
campaigns like ‘Yo Soy el Army’.”
In case anyone had any doubts about this, USA Today (24
September) spelled it out, noting that in “the less publicized
part” of the DREAM Act, “the Pentagon is pushing for it as a
means to staff the armed forces” in the face of a looming “cri¬
sis in military manpower.” The article quotes Jorge Mariscal,
director of Latino studies at the University of California-San
Diego, who stressed that many families of undocumented
students are too poor to pay for college education: “Our con¬
cern is that people are just going to get trapped for economic
reasons into the military.”
Several statements by Latino immigrant youths are
being circulated saying they no longer back the DREAM
Act, for a number of reasons. A September 17 letter by
Raul Al-qaraz Ochoa, “My Painful Withdrawal of Support
for the DREAM Act,” noted how the Democrats are using
it “as a political stunt to appeal to Latino voters for the
November elections.” Raul’s letter was greeted by many.
One Latina wrote: “thanks a million for voicing... these
feelings and reflections out. 1 think many of us have felt
afraid and impotent to hold this conversation.” Latino youth
r No Alliance with Democratic Pols! ^
Last March 4, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs
participated in protests in New York as part of a na¬
tional day of action in defense of public education
(see reports in Revolution No. 7, April 2010). We
warned, however, that the coalition calling for the
March 4 rally was a “platform for class-collaboration,”
the purpose of which, farfrom organizing a powerful
worker-student struggle, was to unite students and
workers with supposed allies in the capitalist Demo¬
cratic party. This is the war party that from Albany
to the White House is leading the charge to destroy
public education in the service of Wall Street! Sure
enough, the star speaker at the March 4 citywide rally
was Democratic city councilman Charles Barron,
who called on the protesters to “support” Democratic
governor and budget-cutter-in-chief David Paterson!
Now Barron is officially part of the October 7 pro¬
test coalition. While currently running for governor on
the ballot line of the recently formed Freedom Party,
he remains emphatically a Democratic member of the
New York City Council. The inclusion of Democrats
by the protest organizers (many of whom claim to be
socialists) is a promise that the “movement” they are
building won’t go beyond the limits of what’s accept¬
able to the capitalist class. Such a coalition can only
be an obstacle to any serious attempt to mobilize the
kind of class power needed to stop the attacks on
public education. Any real fight against tuition hikes,
budget cuts, union-busting and imperialist war is
centrally a fight against the Democratic Party with
whom the phony socialists want to ally.
v___y
January-February 2011
The internationalist
85
in the Vamos Unidos group in the Bronx wrote that they
now oppose the DREAM Act as a “de facto, military draft”
targeting undocumented immigrants.
The October 7 NY C demonstration “in defense of public
education” originally called for passage of the DREAM Act.
In the face of mounting opposition to it, that demand mysteri¬
ously disappeared from some e-mail messages for the demo.
However, it is still on the official flyers and call. The organiz¬
ers knew long ago what the DREAM Act was about, but they
went along with it because as always they tail after Democratic
liberals, just as they did in organizing a “socialist contingent”
for the pro-Democratic Party get-out-the-vote mobilization in
Washington on October 2.
The Internationalist Clubs oppose the draft (military
conscription) for the imperialist army, and have taken the
lead in defending undocumented immigrant students, as
we did in the fall of 2001 in initiating the several-hundred-
strong mobilization against CUNY’s “war purge” of im¬
migrant students. We demand: full citizenship rights for
all immigrants!
Abolish the Board of Trustees!
For Student-Teacher-Worker Control of CUNY!
Part of the revolutionary program of the CUNY Inter¬
nationalist Clubs that sets us apart from those who just want
to reform the system is our attitude toward the university
administration. As we exposed in “Look Who’s Trusteeing
at CUNY” (Revolution No. 5, September 2008), the CUNY
Board of Trustees (BoT), like similar “public” governing
boards nationwide, is a den of union-busters, McCarthyite
witch-hunters, police-state enthusiasts and other ideological
opponents of public education.
It is this BoT that has been campaigning longest and
loudest to raise tuition at CUNY and eliminate remedial Eng¬
lish and math programs, effectively driving out many poor,
working-class, minority and immigrant students. Recently,
CUNY Trustee and former FBI counter-intelligence agent
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld signed onto the hate campaign against the
so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” We internationalists dem¬
onstrated in defense of the proposed Islamic center against the
Muslim-bashing bigots.
The CUNY Internationalist Clubs call for the BoT and its
campus administrations to be abolished, and for CUNY to be
run by democratic bodies of students, teachers and workers!
Moreover, the private universities, those bastions of class and
race privilege, should be expropriated and annexed to a free
and universal public university system.
We noted: “[The BoT’s] composition corresponds to its
function: to run CUNY in the interests, not of the people who
work and study here, but of the parasitic elite of money-men,
speculators, real-estate moguls and ruling-class politicians.”
The reformist organizers of the October 7 rally carefully avoid
the issue of who controls education, no doubt figuring it would
cause problems with their desired Democratic Party “allies.”
In fact, one of the first things the International Socialist
Organization (ISO) did in response to the current round of
cuts and tuition hikes was to author a petition to Hunter Col¬
lege President Jennifer Raab, who was a political flack for
Republican former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, calling on her to
“come out against tuition hikes and support student activities
in opposition to tuition hikes.” Like calling for a boss to sup¬
port a union organizing drive.
Recently one prominent campus leftist, Frances Villar, a
former NYC mayoral candidate for the Party for Socialism and
Liberation (PSL) and spokesman for its ANSWER Coalition,
went a step further. Villar, a student bureaucrat at Lehman
College who is on the University Student Senate (the tame
“student government” owned by the CUNY administration)
ran for the token student seat on the BoT. (Only USS delegates
can vote in this election.)
No mention of socialism, though. Her election platform
was full of calls for things like “university pride & parties,”
including a CUNY-wide senior ball and “CUNY-wide mas¬
querade ball.” More importantly, her program was pro-admin¬
istration, pro-U.S. military, and pro-police. She promised to
“work with” the anti-student, anti-union CUNY administration
and to “help advocate and get the DREAM Act” being pushed
by the Pentagon as a way to fill a “manpower gap” with im¬
migrant youth (see above).
But that’s not all: Villar’s manifesto stated she would “Support
our CUNY Public Safety Ofticer[s] in their struggles, because they
are one of us!!” Really??!! We’ve seen the CUNY cops “strug¬
gling” - like when they savagely beat Hostos Community College
student leader Miguel Malo for the “crime” of holding up a sign
during a campus protest against cuts to ESL classes in 2001. Or
when they attacked parents with pepper spray at a graduation
ceremony at Medgar Evers College in 2003.
No, the campus cops are not “one of us” - they’re one of
them, the oppressors. CUNY “Public Safety” officers are armed
with a staggering weapons stockpile with “100,000 rounds of
ammunition, including at least 4,000 rounds of nine-millimeter
hollow point bullets” which even the NYPD are not supposed
to have ( Village Voice, 5 May 1999). Anyone who’s been to a
campus protest should know which side the cops are on: they
are the armed fist of the capitalist government and its school ad¬
ministrations whose job is to repress us if we fight for our rights.
PSL/ANSWER has its own experience with the police at
student-faculty demonstrations: this group called the cops on
a protest by CUNY Contingents Unite and students against
tuition hikes, budget cuts and layoffs outside a BoT meeting at
Baruch college in December 2008 (see “What Program to Fight
the Crisis” in Revolution No. 6, April 2009).
The Internationalist Clubs demand: All cops off campus!
Abolish the Board of Trustees! For Student-Teacher-Worker
Control of CUNY!
86
The Internationalist
January-February 2011
Teacher Tenure...
continued from page 80
fighting union leadership would point out how the new pro¬
cedures can be used to victimize teachers. Instead the UFT’s
leader washes his hands of a crucial decision determining a
teacher’s future.
On one issue after another, the UFT bureaucrats bow to the
initial step in the offensive on teachers’ rights, then complain
they were “betrayed” when the assault keeps on coming. They
accepted linking teacher ratings to student test scores, on an
“experimental” and “confidential” basis of course, then scream
when the DOE wants to publish the teachers’ individual scores
in the press and use them for tenure decisions. Administrators
will go after teachers by pushing them down the “effectiveness
scale” increments until they are pushed out the door.
The UFT must stand up to defend teacher tenure instead
of how it didn’t defend seniority transfers. Already chancellor-
designate Black is saying that she wants to lay off experienced
teachers so she can get “younger, newer, fresher ideas” (Daily
News, 6 December). The handwriting is on the wall. ■
Haiti Elections...
continued from page 88
From Earthquake to Cholera
Despite all the hoopla about providing shelter, more than
1.3 million Haitians are still living in tents and (mostly) under
tarps in 1,376 camps strewn about the ruins of Port-au-Prince.
Very little of the rubble has been removed. After the quake
Haiti was inundated with missionaries and “non-governmental
organizations” (NGOs) financed by various governments, in¬
ternational agencies, capitalist foundations and humanitarian
telethons. In a much publicized “donors’ summit” at the United
Nations at the end of March, presided over by Hillary and
Bill Clinton, almost US$10 billion in reconstruction aid was
pledged, half of that in the first two years. However, not even
30% was ever concretized in firm commitments, and altogether
less than a tenth of the amount promised has arrived in Haiti.
The U.N.-appointed Haiti Interim Reconstruction Com¬
mission (H1RC) headed by Bill Clinton approved $1.6 billion
in projects last August, but these are still mostly on paper.
Another meeting of the H1RC was scheduled to be held in
Port-au-Prince in mid-December, but Clinton decided to move
it to the Dominican Republic because of fear of cholera: result,
no Haitians attended. But one form of “humanitarian aid” is
functioning: the city of Petion-Ville, home to a camp managed
by Hollywood film star Sean Penn, has set up a “clearance
plan” offering inhabitants of the camp at Place Saint-Pierre
15,000 gourdes (about US$400) to get out. “The amount is not
enough to relocate, but those who refuse are being forced to
leave anyway” (Ouest France, 21 December).
During the June-September hurricane season, the camps
were regularly inundated. Health officials repeatedly warned
of the danger of an epidemic due to lack of sanitation and
contaminated water supplies. Then in October, a cholera
epidemic broke out in the central Haitian region of Artibo-
nite. Once again much emergency aid was promised by the
“international community,” but very little delivered. At last
count (26 December 2010), the U.N. Health Cluster says that
almost 150,000 cholera cases have been reported, more than
80,000 have been hospitalized and more than 3,300 have died.
Cholera was an unknown disease in Haiti, which had not ex¬
perienced a case in over a century. The panic-stricken population
and medical professionals alike wondered where it came from.
Soon the finger was pointed at a MINUSTAH base. U.N. of¬
ficials issued denials and refused an investigation. Still, Haitians
demonstrated with signs proclaiming “MINUSTAH = Kolera,”
blaming the occupation troops for bringing in the disease. The
U.N. troops shot down demonstrators, claiming “self-defense.”
Imperialist media cautioned against ignorant suspicion.
But a month and a half later a suppressed report by an
epidemiologist dispatched by the French government, Renaud
Piarroux, revealed by Le Monde (5 December 2010), placed the
origins of the outbreak at the MINUSTAH base. No longer able
to deny it, on December 9 the Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta, a U.S. government agency, which until then had said
tracking down the source was “not a good use of resources,”
finally admitted that the strain of cholera in Haiti, a particularly
virulent form, was virtually identical to one that hit Katmandu,
Nepal last summer, shortly before the Nepalese troops departed
to join the MINUSTAH base in Artibonite.
The MINUSTAH occupation troops should be driven out
of Haiti, not only because they are responsible for the cholera
epidemic which has killed more than 3,000 Haitians in two
and a half months, but also because the “mission” of these
“peacekeepers” from the outset has been to “stabilize” Haiti
by brutally repressing the population in the interests of U.S.
imperialism. The Brazilian-led force was brought into Haiti to
replace the U.S./French/Canadian forces who had invaded in
March 2004 in order to oust populist president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, who was bundled off to Central Africa. Although in¬
stalled as president by Democrat Bill Clinton a decade earlier,
Aristide was persona non grata to the Republican conservatives
around President George W. Bush.
While some on the left scandalously supported the U.S.
military invasion of Haiti following the earthquake, buying the
Pentagon lies that its aircraft carriers and paratroops were sup¬
plying humanitarian aid, 1 and various reformists called on the
U.S. imperialism to supply “aid not troops,” the Internationalist
Group and League for the Fourth International have called
throughout for U.S. and U.N. troops and police to get out of
Haiti. Our comrades of the Liga Quarta-lnternacionalista do
Brasil have campaigned for this, winning the support of Rio
de Janeiro state and national teachers unions for resolutions
calling for the expulsion of the Brazilian military from Haiti -
and from th efavelas (slums) of Rio, where troops and officers
use counterinsurgency techniques perfected in occupying the
shantytowns of Haiti.
1 See “Spartacist League Backs U.S. Imperialist Invasion of Haiti”
and “SL Twists and Turns on Haiti” in The Internationalist No. 31,
Summer 2010.
January-February 2011
The internationalist
87
Sham Elections Ordered by Washington
Barely ten days after mass demonstrations in a number of
Haitian cities demanding that U.N. troops get out, “elections”
were held on November 28 in which the country’s main party,
Fanmi Lavalas, was excluded and less than a quarter of the vot¬
ers cast ballots. It was absurd from the outset to hold elections
in such conditions, but the vote was ordered from Washington
in order to provide a veneer of “democratic” legitimation to
the U.S./U.N. occupation under the MINUSTAH mercenaries
and imperialist donors’ protectorate under Bill Clinton’s H1RC.
Various personalities joined the contest, including the
Haitian American hip hop star Wyclef Jean who was barred on
the grounds that he hasn’t lived in Haiti for years. Washington
likely favored Mirlande Manigat, the wife of Leslie Manigat
who was briefly president under a military junta in 1988. The
candidate sponsored by the Inite (Unity) party of the current,
widely despised president Rene Preval was a non-entity, Jude
Celestin, the head of the government road construction unit.
Another entertainer, Michel (“Sweet Mickey”) Martel-
ley, was a leading contender. The imperialist media focused
on Martelly’s tendency to drop his pants on stage during
performances. They neglected to mention that he was a close
associate of the head of Haiti’s death squads, Lt. Colonel
Michel Francois; was a prominent supporter of the 2004 coup
against Aristide; was a close associate of U.S. military officials
and intelligence operatives; was a defender of the “Tontons
Macoutes” thugs who terrorized the poor under the Duvalier
dictatorship; and during the years of military dictatorship ran
a nightclub frequented by the miltiary elite.
Unrest broke out during the voting itself as thousands
of voters were prevented from voting because their names
were not on the official lists (although many who died in the
earthquake were listed). The protests got serious when Preval’s
hand-picked Provisional Electoral Council announced that the
official candidate Celestin had nudged out Martelly for second
place, so that he would run against Manigat in the runoff elec¬
tion. Crowds of Martelly supporters took to the streets, burning
tires and calling to “hang Preval.” But the anger over the phony
elections (which many called a “selection”), the non-existent
reconstruction, the U.N. occupation and everything else was
so great that the protests turned into a more general revolt.
Now the Organization of American States (OAS), that
imperialist agency which Che Guevara rightly called a “Yankee
ministry of colonies,” has taken control of the election process,
displacing Preval and his electoral council. The second round has
been put off until February, to permit a recount of the fraudulent
November 28 vote, thus prolonging the political impasse. With
everyone from right-wing Macoutes like Martelly to left-wing
organizations like Batay Ouvriye protesting the election mess,
there has been a good deal of political maneuvering.
Today, while opposing the bourgeois populist wing of the
Haitian bourgoisie around Preval, as well as the business elite and
death squad supporters around Manigat and Martelly, B.O. talks
of the need to organize a second “camp” on the program of “au¬
tonomy,” with “the goal of a regime in the interests of the popular
masses, of the working masses, of the working class” (Declaration
No. 2, “On the Electoral Process,” 2 December 2010). But the
struggle is one of classes, not of “camps,” and what’s needed is a
struggle for workers power, supported by the vast masses of rural
and urban poor, for a workers and peasants government. And to
lead this struggle what’s needed is a revolutionary vanguard party
of the working class, built on not on some nebulous concept of
“autonomy” but on the program of permanent revolution, that
proceeds from democratic to socialist tasks.
Beset by earthquakes and cholera, with more than a mil¬
lion people living on the street, blocked from rebuilding by a
government of kleptocrats, exploited by avaricious capitalists
who profit from the misery of the workers, groaning under an
imperialist occupation by U.N. mercenary troops, and facing
the guns of a “national” police force made up of former death
squad members, the weakness of the tiny Haitian working
class in the face of the enormous forces arrayed against it
is obvious. But that only means that it must look to its class
allies, fellow workers on the other side of the border in the
Dominican Republic and in North America, where hundreds
of thousands of Haitian emigres reside.
The Internationalist Group, which has been active in de¬
fending Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic and the
U.S., urges that even relatively modest forces can make a start in
building sorely needed working-class solidarity by mobilizing
against the threatened deportation of Haitian refugees to their
ruined homeland - an act of such spectacular cruelty that it could
be blocked, even in the present atmosphere of racist hysteria over
“illegal immigration,” by a determined opposition that brings
out the Haitian immigrant population while appealing the most
conscious sectors of the U.S. labor movement. ■
League for the Fourth International
LFI, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY
10008, U.S.A. E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com
Internationalist Group/U.S.
Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street
Station, New York, NY 10008, U.S.A.
Tel. (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711
E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com
Liga Quarta-lnternacionalista do Brasil
Brazil: write to Caixa Postal 084027, CEP 27251-
740, Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil
Rio de Janeiro: write to Caixa Postal 3982, CEP
20001-974, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
E-mail: lqb1996@yahoo.com.br
LIVI/Deutschland
Germany: write to Postfach 74 06 41,22096 Hamburg,
Germany
Grupo Internacionalista/Mexico
Mexico: write to Apdo. Postal 70-379, Admon. de
Correos No. 70, CP 04511, Mexico, D.F., Mexico
E-mail: grupointernacionalista@yahoo.com.mx
January-February 2011
Internationalist
A Year After the Earthquake, Over a Million Still Homeless
Haiti: Occupation Elections
in Times of Cholera
On November 18, anniversary of the last battle for Haiti’s independence, thousands demonstrated in Port-
au-Prince demanding that the MINUSTAH occupation forces leave.
Drive Out U.N. Troops, Police - Bill Clinton Keep Out!
Almost a year after the monster earthquake that killed
upwards of 300,000 people and flattened Haiti’s capital last
January (2010), the hard-hit Caribbean nation is in truly dire
straits. Already one of the most impoverished countries in the
world in “normal” times, it has had to deal not only with the
vast destruction - almost none of which has been rebuilt - but
also with a deadly epidemic of cholera, a crudely rigged elec¬
tion that is still dragging on, a corrupt and barely functioning
government, and a mercenary occupation force that has brutally
repressed the Haitian population for the last six years. And
now, adding insult to injury, two days before the January 12
anniversary of the quake, the United States government plans
to start deporting Haitians back to the devastated island!
Haiti, the first black republic in the world, resulting from
the only successful slave revolution in history, is oppressed
by capitalism and imperialism like nowhere else on the planet
today. Blockaded by the former colonial masters for most of the
19th century, repeatedly invaded and occupied by the U.S. in
the 20th and 21st, it has been saddled for decades with rulers
selected by the imperial overlords. The latest is Bill Clinton,
the former U.S. president who is now Haiti’s neocolonial
gouverneur, controlling the billions in promised reconstruction
aid - little of which has materialized. And while the U.S. troops
who seized control of Haiti last January using the pretext of
providing humanitarian aid are now gone, the United Nations
Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH) remains.
Haiti today is in desperate need of a new revolution led
by its workers and backed by the huge numbers of urban and
rural poor. And Haitians are fighting back. In November tens
of thousands went into the streets denouncing the MINUSTAH
for bringing cholera to Haiti and demanding that the occupa¬
tion troops and cops leave. In December, thousands protested
the sham election. But ultimately, the key to any revolution
is in the United States, seat of the empire as well as home to
hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants and refugees.
continued on page 86
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