The Communist

Table of contents :
1-1989
Letters
Amplifications
Freedom and Dictatorship
Stalin's Successes, Humanity's Gains
Chinese Fascism: The Deng Hits the Fan
Revolutionary Reading
PL's Opinion
Freedom and Dictatorship, cont.
Chinese Fascism, cont.
Stalin's Successes, cont.
2-1990
Letters
Freedom and Dictatorship, Part 2
The High Price of the Free Market
Understanding Events in Eastern Europe
Can Hollywood Do the Right Thing?
PL's Opinion
PLP Schools for Revolution
3-1990
Red Letters
Freedom and Dictatorship, Part 3: Why PL Will Succeed
Make Communism, Not Imperialism, the World's Main Trend
Neo-Marxism, Neo-Confusionism
Historical Materialism and the Fight Against Racism
PL's Opinion
Red Reads
Red Eye on Television
4-1991
Cuban Smoke
Can Communists Use the Enemy's Culture?
The Oil War...
Chronology of Iraqi Political History
Oil and the Founding of Iraq
Red Reads
6-1992
Red Letters
Do You Want The Party To Grow?
How Our Party Makes Its Policy
Boston, '75
Boston, '75: Columbia Point
Peru's Tarnished Path
Yugoslav Civil War
Red Reads
1998
Defeat Right Opportunism: Open the Door to Revolution
Making Communist Politics Primary
Building a Base in the Working Class
Fascists vs Fascists: Old/New Money Split Among Bosses...
Splits Within Splits
Whose Fingers Will Be on the Triggers?
Capitalist Conflicts and the Nation of Islam
Fight Over Oil Profits Will Cause Mideast Bloodbath
The Pace to War Quickens
Imperialist Maneuvers Won't Stop Next Oil War
Economic Crisis in Asia
2001
Political Economy Pamphlet - Criticism
Cult of Personality
The Carpet Weavers of Kuyan-Bulak Honor Lenin
Days of Rebellion: A Cincinnati Journal
1892 Homestead Steel Strike
Lessons Learned in Meatpackers' Struggle
The Battle of Morristown
The Dialectics of Biology
Demise of the Soviet Union, Return of Capitalism to China Means...
Vietnam Syndrome
2003
U.S. 'Victory' in Iraw Intensifies Instability, War Worldwide
Iraqi Workers Need Communist Revolution
No Blood for Euro or Petro Dollars
France's Global Empire Oppresses World's Workers
Phillippines 1945: Tens of Thousands of GIs Refused to Fight the Communist Guerrillas
Airlines' Give and Take
Liberals Weaken Anti-War Action
Loyalty to Capitalism Has Wrecked Unions
Saddam-Baath Fascists Long-Time CIA Love Affair
Bolivia: Miners Lead 80,000 Fighting Army in Mass Uprising
Racism Still Achilles Heel of U.S. Capitalism
The Fight for Communism Is the Fight Against Sexism
Religion: Tool of Bosses, Enemy of Workers
Jailbreak! And Intro to the Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism
Fight to Control Oil Speeds U.S. Down Slippery Slope
50th Anniversary of the Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
2004
Attack the Source of Capitalism's Super-Profits: Fight Racism!
The Extraordinary Solidarity of the 1902 Teamster Strike and Chicago Rebellion
Cuban Contradictions
How Can Communists Do It?
Indigenous and African People in the Americas
Bolshevik Revolution: The Most Important Event of the 20th Century
Why Trotskyism is Reactionary
Review of "Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War"
The Further Balkanization of Kosovo
"Antagonistic and Non-Antagonistic" Contradictions
May Day '04 Speeches
2005
Workers Need a Social Tsunami...
"Dark Night Shall Have its End"
State Power
Who Rules the United States?
The 1910 Philadelphia General Strike
Communist Morality and Behavior Today
Industrial Workers Hold Key to Smashing Capitalism's "Covenant with Death"
Harvard Speech
Remarks on the Need for Revolutionary Work among Industrial Workers
Red Reads
2006
Letters
Traditional U.S. Liberalism is History
For Communism, Against Wages
Advancing Marx's Line: 'Communism, Not Socialism'
China's Imperialist Dream to Be Number One
War on Drugs Equals a War on the Working Class
The 1970 Postal Workers Wildcat
50th Anniversary of Khrushchev Lying Speech
Marching Behind Liberal Rulers is Death Trap for Workers
Class Struggle in China
Industrial Workers and the Lives They Live
Notes from the Boeing Strike
Review of "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim"
The Wonderful Christmas Celebration
Prelude to Spanish Civil War: The Asturian Miners Insurrection
Black Capitalism Won't End Racism
Black Nationalism: Bankrupt Strategy But With Strong Appeal
From Lebanon to Iraq: Imperialist Dogfight Leads to Endless Bloody Wars
Young Leaders Raise Anti-Racist Struggle in New Orleans
May Day '06 Articles
2007
New Times for The Communist Magazine
Letter to the Editorial Collective: Article on Drugs is Dangerous
State of the World: Central Committee, May 2007
A History of Middle-East Nationalism
A Class Analysis of the Israel Palestine Conflict
Red-Led GIs Blast Racist Brass: Soldiers Rebel During Vietnam Era
Stalin and HG Wells Debate Marxism vs. Liberalism
The Struggle for Revolutionary Dialectics: The Debate in 1960s China
Science vs. Intelligent Design (Working Class vs. Anti-Working Class)
2008
Work in Basic Industry Key to Fight for Communism
China Bashing Simply a Smokescreen for US Bosses' Weakness
A History of the Work at DC Metro
Workers Sold Out by Union Hacks... Need Red Leadership
Challenge Networks: Source of Pro-Communist Organizers Our Class Needs
My New Factory Job
Building Worker-Student Alliances Key to Fight for Communism
Operation Dixie
1968: How 10 Million Workers Shut Down France
Use the Power of the Working Class to Fight for Communism
"Internal Contradictions are Primary" A Key to Revolutionary Dialectics
My New Factory Job, cont.
Bosses Will Need More Soldiers for Imperialist Wars
2010
Letters
The Wars, the Banks, the Prisons: California's Financial Crisis
Unemployment Work and the Fight for Communist Politics
How the Depression Affects New York State
Getting It: The 2009 Seattle Summer Project
The Role of Universities and Colleges Under Capitalism
Global Warming Driven by the Profit System: Only Communism Can Create a Sustainable World
Review of "The Green Zone"
Young People in the Fight Against Fascism
Herr Hitler Goes to Hollywood
2014
Another Fascist Trojan Horse: A Critique of the 9/11 Truth Movement
A Brief History of Haiti
The Land of the Fee and the Home of the Slave
Reform and Revolution (1976)
Zizek: "Marxist" Loyally "Opposed" to Capitalism
Notes for Strike Talk

Citation preview

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Published By The PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY

Number I / Fall 1989 / $3.00

Comrade Lenin Sweeps the Globe Clean (Caption of 1920 Soviet poster)

IT’S CLEANUP TIME AGAIN

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Fall, 1989 Number

Published Quarterly by the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202

LETTERS

2

Usually letters from readers, but in this first issue, a letter from us.

FREEDOM AND DICTATORSHIP

5

The meanings of freedom, democracy and dictatorship have been turned inside out by reactionary ideologists promoting capitalism and “market socialism.” In fact, there can be no freedom or demo­ cracy for most people without proletarian dictatorship.

STALIN'S SUCCESSES—HUMANITY'S GAINS

9

If Stalin had accomplished for the bourgeoisie what he did for the world’s oppressed he would be hailed in bourgeois circles as one of history’s all-time greats. But instead, for 30 years he led the interna­ tional working class to heroic victories.

CHINESE FASCISM: THE DENG HITS THE FAN

13

Deng’s fascist gang find themselves challenged by groups, both inside and outside their party, who also want to share the wealth being stolen from the Chinese workers and farmers. What the Chinese people need is communist revolution.

REVOLUTIONARY READING

17

Some books, new and old, which we think will interest our readers.

PL'S OPINION Excerpts from recent

26 editorials give the view of events. A continuing feature.

CHALLENGE/DESAFIO

GRESSIVE LABOR PARTY’S

PRO­

The articles appearing in THE COMMUNIST are published becausl the Editors believe they are generally useful in the ideological development of the international revolutionary communist movement. They are not neces­ sarily the views of the PLP. Only articles signed by the PLP NATIONAL COMMITTEE represent the official policies of the PARTY. Readers are urged to contribute articles.

LETTERS • LETTERS • LETTERS • LETTERS•LETTERS Dear Readers: A generation and a half ago Bolshevism’s successes finally caused the world communist movement to split apart and dis­ integrate. The contradictory ele­ ments coftiprising Bolshevik

theory and practice had all by then developed to the fullest. The old relationships between these now-matured contradic­ tory parts were impossible to contain within a single move­ ment. All that originally had been carried over into communist the­ ory and practice from the social democratic movement; all that was idealist, fatalist, reductionist, mechanical; all that expressed and promoted the interests of the old nationalist bourgeoisies and the new state capitalist elites, was at war with all within the move­ ment that was egalitarian, all that was dialectical, all that was in the interests of the non-privileged masses of people.

Obviously something had been wrong with the ideas of the old movement. Obviously a ren­ ovation within Marxism-Lenin­ ism was required to rebuild a new international social revolution­ ary movement to fight for the interests of the exploited and op­

pressed. The old movement’s successful experiences in liberat­ ing the oppressed had confirmed the truth of Marxism-Leninism’s egalitarian, revolutionary, dia­ lectical core just as it exposed the falseness of its anti-egalitarian, nationalistic, communism-bystages strategy.

This rebuilding process began in the 1960s in many countries. PROGRESSIVE LABOR was one of its initiators. The major event in the inter­ national split and attempted re­ building of the 1960s was the civil war fought in China during what was called the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Briefly a mass-based, millions-strong egalitarian Left, the largest such movement in the world, conten­ ded for power. But, hog-tied by wrong ideas still carried over from the old movement, it was crushed and repressed by the elite’s army. Wrong ideas matter. The Chinese Left’s failure showed communists they needed a thorough, reorientation. In the years that followed PRO­ shouldered this ideological task, transformed it­ self, slowly grew and spread its work to many countries. GRESSIVE LABOR

LETTERS•LETTERS •LETTERS•LETTERS•LETTERS Meanwhile, the corpse of the former movement rotted away. State capitalist elites, nurtured by and within the ruling commu­ nist parties, matured as fullyfledged new exploiting classes, proclaiming “market socialism” as their newly-discovered ideal. Marxism-Leninism became the victim of gang rape. Political and ideological confusion was fost­ ered, cynicism and apathy spread, anti-communism streng­ thened. . Now a new period has opened. Now the socialist exploiters de­ mand legitimacy as a class of pri­ vate owners of society’s wealth. (Achieving this legitimacy is Gorbachev’s mission.) Their communist origin now embarasses and impedes them. The very word “communist” now is as odious to them (since it means equality produced by workers ruling society in their own interest) as they tried to make it to the workers they ex­ ploited in die name of “commu­ nism.” Now they run from the name “communist,” and reject die pro­ letarian dictatorship, which pre­ viously diey dishonored. Now they abandon the traditions of comradeship and proletarian in­

ternationalism, which previously they perverted. Now they openly renounce revolutionary Marx­ ism-Leninism, which previously they corrupted and falsified. All this has a good side. Now the situation is finally clarified. Now their essence is also apparent.

In this new period we launch Its mission is to assist die unceasing world-wide struggle for equality and free­ dom for the masses of people against their exploitation and oppression. Its job is to promote dialectical, revolutionary egal­ itarian Marxism-Leninism. Its method is to provide a place where the ideas and experience of our worldwide movement can be analyzed and debated. THE COMMUNIST.

We will publish in as many languages as we are able to, and distribute in every country we can. We invite every Marxist­ Leninist, every revolutionary minded person, everyone com­ mitted to the ideal of a commu­ nist world of freedom and equality to join us in our work. We need your thoughts in letters and articles, your money, your translating skills, your help in organizing our distribution. THE EDITORS

AMPLIFICATIONS POLAND: A LESSON ABOUT “UNCONSCIOUSNESS" Which brings me to a sad personal note. Nine years ago I traveled to Poland to greet the extraordinary re-entry onto the political stage of Polish workers “presenting their interests as the superior interests of society as a whole,” as Marx said. [Solidarity was] coming straight out of Marx, I argued, but I was honest enough to add that they were anything but Marxist; indeed, when it came to building socialism in Poland they were like Moliere’s M. Jourdain, talking prose without knowing it. It turns out that unconscious construction is inadequate...in recent years the trend has been in the opposite direction, toward capitalism. And this is the direction in which [Mazowiecki, the Solidarity Prime Minister] who once wanted to reconcile Christianity with socialism, now wants to take Poland. Yet where there is a will, there is not always a way. My hopes today, less sanguine than nine years ago, are linked not with the policy of Solidarity but with its contradictions. Daniel Singer, socialist author and European correspondent, The Nation, Oct. 9, 1989, pp 379-80

USSR: WORKERS LEARN THE LESSON OF PERESTROIKA The Soviet Union’s jobless rate is soaring to 27% in some areas, Pravda said. It said the situation is caused by efforts to streamline bloated factory payrolls [perestroika]. Unemployment has reached 27.6% in Azerbaijan, 25.7% in Tadzhikistan, 22.8% in Uzbekistan, 18.8% in Turkmenia, 18% in Armenia and 16.3% in Kirgizia... all but Kirgizia have reported rioting in the past six months. Pravda gave no estimate for overall unemployment but said an Association of the Unemployed has cropped up that says the number of jobless is 23 million Soviets, or 17% of the work force. The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2, 1989, p.B4. USA: OPPRESSED LEARN A LESSON ABOUT CAPITALISM Now that we have owner-occupied condos and coops we have people who are concerned about solving the problems of the homeless not for the sake of the homeless but because it’s a visual problem and property values are at stake. Robert Kupferman, Chairman of Community Board 7 on New York’s Upper West Side, in The New York Times, Nov. 3, 1989, pB4

FREEDOM AND DICTATORSHIP This is the first of a series of articles dealing with freedom and democracy in capitalism and in communism. What can we learn from the Soviets and Chinese to make proletarian dictatorship work? What is PL’s role, or the role of any party leading the working class?

hose of us who struggle against oppression in the “Free World” never know whether to laugh in dis­ belief or throw up in disgust whenever we hear one of its leaders pontificating about how “Western-style” democ­ racy is humanity’s highest achievement, and that we must choose either freedom and democracy (capitalism and free elections) or “communist dictatorship.” veryone knows politicians don’t care about free (in the sense offair) elections, but care only about win­ ning elections in any way possible, fair or foul. Lies, smears, dirty tricks, gerrymandering districts, disenfranchising voters, payoffs—anything goes. It is notorious that Chi­ cago, on election days, saw the dead rise and vote (vote early, vote often) and nothing miraculous was ever suspected. nce, during “Tricky Dick” Nixon’s leadership of the “Free World,” a CIA chief came up with the idea of organizing what he liked to describe as “really honest” elections in the then-existing South Vietnam, as a way of helping the U.S. win the Vietnam war. “Oh, sure, honest, yes, that’s right,” Nixon said, “so long as you win!” Thenhe winked, poked his elbow into the CIA-man’s arm and slapped his knee.

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FREEDOM AND DICTATORSHIP

Free is the last thing you can call elections. Running for office in the United States now costs so much that the bourgeoisie can­ not afford it, so they have ar­ ranged that the government will pay half the bill for them, with so-called “matching funds,” which are subsidies to candi­ dates. It costs $3 million to run for a local seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and much more to run for a state-wide seat in the Senate. In 1985 it cost the Mayor of New York City $7 mil­ lion to get reelected. In 1988 it cost $80 million to run for Presi­ dent. Free speech"! Here is the testi­ mony of Walter LaPierre, execu­ tive director of the Pentagon funded National Rifle Assoc­ iation’s Institute for Legislative Action (yes, the same NRA to which President Bush and most politicians in the country be­ long): “There’s free speech in this country only, it seems, if magazines or television agree with your opinion.” (N.Y. Times, June 23, 1989, p. D15.) Majority rule! Political scientists have a sophisticated view of that. They have cooked up a science of government, taught in all their schools, “proving” that demo­ cracy requires ignoring the maj­ ority. “I don’t bow to political pressure,” explains George

Bush, a great student of this sci­ ence. This bourgeois science of governing teaches that elected representatives are elected to be independent and not to follow the desires of those who voted for them. This is "democracy” inde­ pendent of majority interests and needs (because who is the majority, if not workers?) This is “democracy” alienated from the people, confronting the people as an independent force. The real aim of such demo­ cracy is expressed in the polit­ icians’ aphorism “all politics is local,“meaning “take care of lo­ cal business interests.” The highest achievement of bourgeois democracy is that the vast majority of the people feel alienated from it. Almost 53% of the eligible voters did not bother to vote for President of the Unit­ ed States; 80% stayed home when the government of the nation’s third largest city was last elected (and a lot of adults are not even “eligible” because they refuse to register.) The trick to bourgeois politics is to make the people think they govern, so they can be governed. When capitalism’s leaders pro­ pagandize about their demo­ cracy they imply the big lie that somehow (it is never clear how) it produces "equality.” To unrav­ el this riddle you must know that

FREEDOM AND DICTATORSHIP

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they understand “equality” dif­ ferently than does the average person. Most people think “equality” means “social equal­ ity,” or egalitarianism. But for the bourgeoisie “equality” only means an equal chance to com­ pete in the marketplace. For cap­ italists “equality" is not an end, buta means of realizing the “nat­ ural order” of inequality, namely, with themselves on top. When the capitalists propagan­ dize about their democracy they imply the big lie that it expands freedom. What freedom? Whose freedom? When they say "free­ dom” they mean your right to do what their laws permit. They lead us to think freedom means "you can do what you want to do.” That sounds good, but if you leave it at that all you are saying is that “wishing will make it so.” Is freedom just for God, or can people get in on it too? If people are involved then the real questions remain: What do you want? Why that? How can you get it?

you have no money. Roast chick­ ens won’t fly themselves onto your dinner table. There is a ma­ terial reality out there, a real world existing and developing according to its own inner laws. The real world exists indepen­ dently of our thoughts and de­ sires. It helps shape our ideas and our lives; we are part of it. But, at the same time, we can reshape the world and ourselves. We can transform it in accordance with our own ideas if we know what makes the real world tick, and act in accordance with those laws to realize our ideas. We can’t fly by flapping our arms, but we can fly once we know how to build and use air­ planes. It’s the same with free­ dom: we can be free once we know how to be free, and act on that knowledge. The real world has two aspects: social life and nature. Social life is primary for us because through society we can trans­ form nature. Without society there is no human life. We are not clams; clams cannot be free. Clams live as natural forces make them live. Freedom can exist and develop only as an attribute of the self­ conscious social life which prod­ uces it. Freedom is historically specific, both the result of the past and the inspiration for the future.

Freedom begins with “I want.” But there is a world of difference between “I want” and “I can.” Getting from “I want” to “I can” is what freedom is all about. You can’t do anything and ev­ erything. You can’t grow youn­ ger. You can’t stop working if

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We have to understand the ac­ tual structure of our society if we want to know what freedom in that society really is, what its lim­ its are, and what we can make it become. And if we understand freedom as it really exists—what we can want and how we can get it in the world in which we really live—we will know how to trans­ form our society.

So, when capitalists pronounce an anathema against “dictator­ ship,” that anathema is intended, like all religious instruction, to prevent you from understanding what is being cursed. “Accept what you are told or be cast out.” In this way, capitalist dictatorship can be hidden and go unchal­ lenged. The actual structure of capitalist society can be disguis­ ed. The mutual dependency between freedom and dictatorship character­ istic of all class societies remains an unknown, unknowable mystery to working people. "Western-style" democracy and capitalist "freedom” comp­ rise a regime in which a rich man’s joke is always funny; a re­ gime which teaches people day in and day out to value not equal rights, but special privilege. The cure for admiring “West­ ern-style” democracy, is to go and look at it.

FREEDOM AND DICTATORSHIP

THE MEANING OF DICTATORSHIP Although capitalist freedom and democracy are not what the capitalists claim them to be, still they do exist in many parts ofthe capitalist world—capitalist free­ dom and democracy, dependent on capitalist dictatorship. The U.S. is a democratic bourgeois dictatorship, as are the Western European countries. Gorbachev is striving to turn the Soviet Union into such a country.

This dependency of democracy upon dictatorship is not so para­ doxical as it first appears. What is “dictatorship?” It is “absolute au­ thority in any sphere,” or “abso­ lute control or power.” Where one person holds that absolute authority over society it is clear the dictator holds himself over, and against, everyone else. Where that absolute authority over society is held by a relatively small group, again it is clear that this small, despotic group holds itself over, and against, everyone else, against the immense maj­ ority.

Continued on page 31

STALIN’S SUCCESSES, HUMANITY’S GAINS Setting the Record Straight rom Moscow to Beijing to Washington the profit pundits have agreed to award a TKO to the free market system. Gorbachev proclaims Perestroika and gives Soviet yuppies a franchise to make rubles hand over fist. Munching on Big Macs, Deng christens the new Shanghai stock exchange. The vultures in the U.S. bourgeois press gleefully scribble that “Capitalism...is the wave of the fu­ ture” (Jerry Z. Muller, Commentary, December 1988) and chortle about “the coming crack-up of communism” (Radek Sikorski, National Review, January 27, 1989). nternational anti-communism has reached a new stage, dovetailing with the global spread of fascism. Now the rulers of the once-socialist countries unite with Rockefeller & Co. to warble that Marx and Lenin were wrong, that communism is unattainable, and that “human nature” demands the exploitation of the many by the few. The high priests of U.S. imperialism, both “liberal” (George F. Kennan) and “conservative” (Zbigniew Brzezinski), triumphantly mock: “We told you so...” oth sides in the progressively sharpening rivalry between U.S. and Soviet bosses for world domination need to discredit the Bolshevik revolution and the con­ struction of socialism in the U.S.S.R. between 1917 and the death ofJoseph Stalin in 1953.

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Establishment Soviet intellec­ tuals, the vanguard of the Gorbachev forces, outdo the United States Information Agency in shedding tears over the “reign of terror” under which the Soviet masses supposedly lived during Stalin’s leadership. On February 4, 1989, the New York Times gleefully headlined: “Major Soviet Paper Says 20 Mil­ lion Died As Victims of Stalin.” Twenty million is a nice round number. It also happens to be the generally accepted figure for the Soviet death toll at the hands of Nazi butchers during the Second World War. No one, certainly no Soviet worker, can miss the im­ plication. According to both the CIA and its new-found intellec­ tual soul-mates in the Kremlin, “Stalin equals Hitler” just as “communism equals fascism.” The blood of millions who fought and died to defend com­ munism against the Nazis de­ mands that the record be set straight. The working class today needs to know the truth about our history. The Bolshevik revo­ lution, the consolidation of so­ cialism in the U.S.S.R. under the dictatorship of the proletariat and the prodigious struggle against Nazi barbarism were all epochal achievements of revolu­ tionary communists.

__________ STALIN’S SUCCESSES

Our Party has analyzed the limitations of both the Soviet rev­ olution and socialism in general. In our pamphlets Road to Revolu­ tion III and Road to Revolution IV, we assessed the right-wing errors that led to the full restoration of capitalism in the socialist world. We identified at the core of these errors a mistaken judgment by communist leaders (Marx, Eng­ els, Lenin, Stalin, Mao) of the working class’s willingness to act immediately for the egalitarian concepts of the communist ideal. This misestimate produced crip­ pling concessions to capitalist ideology and practice: national­ ism, tactical and political unity with “lesser-evil” bosses, shared power schemes. Central to all these errors was the concept of socialism itself, a “transitional” strategy enunciated by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program, according to which the wage sys­ tem would be preserved under proletarian dictatorship as a stepping-stone to communist so­ ciety. The PLP now rejects this strat­ egy. We consider wages in any form to be capitalist exploitation. Maintaining wages under the dictatorship of the proletariat maintains capitalism. This is one of Soviet history’s key lessons. However, Soviet socialism had two aspects. True, it preserved

STALIN’S SUCCESSES__________

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wages and capitalism. But under Lenin’s and Stalin’s leadership socialism also injected a dose of healthy egalitarian communist ideas and practice into a society whose pop­ ulation spread over one-sixth the world. Because of these ideas and this practice, millions of workers, peasants, intellectuals, students and their leaders changed the world and proved that the masses will perform miracles to win communism.

Empire’s coal, iron and steel and 50 percent of the Empire’s oil. Huge profits were bled from the labor of the Empire’s workers and peasants by foreign pluto­ crats allied with the Czar. World War I was fought, in part, over which profiteer would get this booty. The cost of this profiteers’ war to the Empire’s working class was staggering: more than nine million battle­ field casualties, including dead, wounded, and missing and un­ told millions of civilians killed, maimed, or homeless. The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 altered the class content of these hostilities. The imperialists stopped squab­ bling with each other and launched a ruthless, desperate drive to recover the goose that had given them golden eggs. In the words of Winston Churchill, they wanted to "strangle the baby in its cradle.” By the summer of 1919 fourteen nations had in­ vaded the fledgling Soviet Union. They included Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Italy and the U.S. Fighting side by side with these armies against theRevolution’s Red Army were the White Armies, who were Czarist thugs hell-bent on restor­ ing the old order. At one point, the Bolshevik government controlled barely

In the following pages, we will attempt to show that, with all its imperfections, Soviet socialism under Stalin represented a gi­ gantic stride forward to freedom for the working class and human­ ity in general.

The Capitalists Destroy Everything.

REVOLUTIONARIES MUST START FROM SCRATCH. Soviet achievements in the revolution’s first two decades ap­ pear all the more remarkable when one considers the initial obstacles the Bolsheviks had to overcome. The Czarist Empire overthrown by .the revolution had actually been a semi-colony of Anglo-French and German fi­ nanciers. Anglo-Fropch capital controlled 72 percent of the

EASEdl--------------------------------one-sixteenth of Russia’s vast territory. The Red Army, later to become the world’s greatest mil­ itary force, was born because of this counter-revolutionary inva­ sion. For two and a half bloody years, against overwhelming odds, the Red Army rallied the Soviet working class and peas­ antry and smashed the reaction­ aries. This victory alone would rank the Bolshevik revolution as pre-eminent among the achieve­ ments of working class history. The cost of the capitalist inva­ sion was daunting. On lop of the losses caused by the World War, be­ tween 1919 and 1922, seven million Soviet men, women, and children died in battle or through war-caused starvation and disease. Millions more became refugees. Russia’s al­ readyfeeble industry and agriculture virtually collapsed. The Soviet gov­ ernment later estimated its material losses as the equivalent of$60 billion. The invaders made no reparations. Such were the ruins on which the Soviet working class set about the most sweeping economic and social transformation the world had yet seen.

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STALIN'S SUCCESSES

COMMUNISM_______ INSPIRES___________ SOVIET WORKERS TO TRANSFORM COUNTRY Soviet workers hurled their hearts and muscles into the task of reconstruction and develop­ ment with a vigor and enthusi­ asm that astounded the puny imagination of bourgeois cynics. The spirit infusing the first gen­ eration of Soviet development proves that social relations based on selfishness and acquisitive­ ness do not represent the apex of human achievement. Yes, social­ ism was ultimately defeated by its own internal contradictions. Yes, the Soviet party’s line proved in­ correct. But for thirty years or so, tens of millions carried out this line because they thought it would eventually lead to commu­ nism. This shows that workers everywhere are winnable to building a collective, egalitarian way of life.

Visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s who re­ ported their findings did not fail to acknowledge achievements of historic proportion. The key to Continued on page 48

CHINESE FASCISM: THE DENG HITS THE FAN he orgy of anti-communist snivelling in which the bourgeois press has wallowed all summer cannot obscure the truth about the bloody events last June in China. he “pro-democracy” movement represented wouldbe Western-style entrepreneurs unsuccessfully at­ tempting to supplant the ruling Deng/Li clique of state capitalists and big-time privateers. From a class point of view, the student demonstrations and their ruthless sup­ pression did not pit good guys against bad guys. Rather, this struggle arrayed one gang of exploiters against an­ other in a contest to become or remain top dog. Their rhetoric to the contrary, the demonstrators reflected an infantile form of yuppiedom yearning to achieve the status of corporate raiders. The massacre of students in Tienanmen Square demonstrates the deadly logic of capitalist restoration throughout China. urthermore, the apparently clearcut victory of the Deng/Li bunch over the so-called “moderate” (read pro-U.S. imperialist) forces represents a staggering blow to the U.S. ruling class. Bush 8c Co. made desperate, crude, painfully obvious attempts to intervene on the Zhao side while the demonstrations were underway. The CIA, the U.S. Information Agency, the TV networks, the press and every political hack from the “liberal” Rep. Stephen Solarz to the overt fascist Sen. Jesse Helms lent a hand to portray the Chinese students as freedom fighters and martyrs. The

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crocodile tears and Fourth-ofJuly rhetoric were a strategic and tactical flop. U.S. influence is waning in China, and U.S. bosses’ dreams of megaprofits off the backs of Chinese workers have at the very least been put on hold. These developments gen­ erally favor Soviet imperialism Finally, the horror of China’s

new capitalism is such that Deng &: Co. must justify their brutal acts as necessary to preserve the revolution. Throughout this cen­ tury, hundreds of millions of Chi­ nese have fought and died for communism. Millions of their survivors and descendants still believe in an egalitarian way of life. The same Deng who took power mouthing the slogan: “To Get Rich is Glorious” must now defend his vile acts in the name of communism because he dares not tell the truth, fearing to spark a genuine revolutionary Left. His demagogy in turn allows U.S. and other international capital­ ists to unleash torrents of anti­ communism and red-baiting. Communists and pro-working class progressives must grab the red flag away from these fascist murderers and expose their lies.

CHINESE FASCISM

NEVER HAVE_______ SO FEW____________ OWED SO MUCH TO SO MANY Capitalism returned to China on a socialist base. In the PRO­ GRESSIVE labor party’s strategic document Road, to Revolution HI, we analyzed the right-wing er­ rors that led to the defeat of the Great Proletarian Cultural Rev­ olution (GPCR). The Deng forces, who stood far to the right of the classic Maoists, had consol­ idated power by 1983. U.S. impe­ rialism had been billing and cooing with Mao & Co. since the Nixon years. With Deng’s tri­ umph, the grand passion grew hotter and heavier. The same politicians and media who now revile Deng as a “totalitarian” killer praised him to the skies throughout the 1980s as a liberal-minded reformer who opened up China to U.S. investment. Deng’s Central Docu­ ment Number 1 for 1983 drew up the blueprint for such wheeling and dealing. It:

• legalized the private hiring of labor, the private purchase of large-scale production equip­ ment, the pooling of capital for private investment and the leas­

CHINESE FASCISM_____________

______________________ PAGE IS

ing of collective property to indi­ vidual investors; • allowed individuals to lend money at usurious rates; granted tax holidays to new pri­ vate businesses and authorized private bank loans for venture capital; cut off credit to the existing so­ cialist village brigades; • granted more favorable credit conditions to private business as the business grew in size; • conceded private contractors the right to hire and fire, to set wage levels and profit margins, and eventually (depending upon the extent of reinvestment) to convert the entire enterprise into private property (See Wil­ liam Hinton’s “Response to Hugh Deane" in the March 1989 Monthly Review). Central Document Number 1 for 1983 quite simply paved the way for the greatest, most rapid give­ away ever of collectively owned property. In one stroke, Deng & Co. allowed a tiny ruling clique and their cronies—party cadre, their families, and assorted syco­ phants— to steal the agricultural and industrial productive forces that Chinese workers and farm­ ers had fought and toiled over decades to develop. Deng per­ mitted the new bosses to buy cap­ ital assets at a tiny fraction of

their real value with easy credit from state banks— and then not to pay back the loans. “It is doubt­ ful, "writes the U.S. Maoist, Wil­ liam Hinton, “if, in the history of the world, any privileged group ever acquired more for less.”

A TALE OF TWO CAPITALIST_________ FACTIONS__________ Once the capitalist roaders had smashed the egalitarian left and the Cultural Revolution, the main disputes in Chinese ruling circles concentrated on the most suitable form for capitalist dev­ elopment. Two groups took shape. The main force of power holders in­ cluded and still includes the Deng/Li clique of “Communist” Party bureaucrats who use the state apparatus as a profit-gener­ ating exploitation machine. They control the lion’s share of the economy’s public sector. They are in alliance with the most significant of the private enterprise forces, whom Mao had always tolerated as long as the remained “patriotic” na­

tionalists and who re-emerged from obscurity or disgrace after the Cultural Revolution. One such “Marxist Millionaire” is China’s richest man, RongYiren.

EAGEJ&--------------------------- ;----Rong hails from an old-line Shanghai bourgeois family and is a close ally of Deng, who person­ ally rehabilitated him after the GPCR. Rong holds a fortune worth a billion dollars and con­ trols 200 firms around the world, with offices in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris and Frankfurt; for­ ests in the U.S.; and factories in Australia and Canada. However, Deng’s Document Number One for 1983 had unwit­ tingly opened a Pandora’s box. It not only sti mulated monopoly capitalism on a socialist base, it also launched a huge epidemic of individual entrepreneurship. By the time of the Tienanmen dem­ onstrations, China had fourteen and a half million, mostly small, private businesses The anarchy and chaos of cap­ italist production rapidly began to cripple the Chinese economy. Eighty percent of the cash in China was circulating outside the official banking network. The new bosses didn’t want to give the Beijing home office its cut. They began scheming to avoid tax payment to the central gov­ ernment. Provinces started sta­ tioning armed guards at their borders to prevent raw materials from leaving and falling into the hands of competitors in other

_____________CHINESE FASCISM

provinces. (An analogous ab­ surdity would have the Texas Rangers standing at the Okla­ homa border to prevent the transportation of Texas oil to a New Jersey refinery.) The overproduction crisis in which the rest of the world cur­ rently wallows came to China like a nightmare tape recording played on speed-up. A two-tiered price system creates instant mil­ lionaires while gouging workers. Inflation rages annually between 20 and 30 percent. Food prices alone rise 50 percent a year. Per­ haps 20 or 30 percent of the urban labor force is looking for work, prompted by a govern­ ment-sponsored “austerity” plan to cut fixed investment and elim­ inate more than 10 million con­ struction jobs. A migratory unemployed population of 50 million (equivalent to more than 90 percent the population of France) has flocked to the cities with no permanent residence, sleeping in parks, railway sta­ tions or slums. Sound familiar? Unemploy­ ment, inflation, homelessness, prostitution, drugs, wide corrup­ tion led by government officials and “C”P bureaucrats. Now that he is about to leave office, New York’s racist ex-Mayor Ed Koch Continued on page 42

• REVOLUTIONARY READING» REVOLUTIONARY READING»

REDISCOVERING THE 1930’s RED WOMEN WRITERS PAULA RABINOWITZ and CHARLOTTE NEKOLA, eds. Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940, Feminist Press 1987

It is a myth widely propagated by the American critical estab­ lishment that the Communist­ led movement of the 1930s produced no enduringly valu­ able works of literature. Communism, the argument goes, puts pressures on writers that are at odds with the require­ ments of art: as opposed to “real” (i.e., bourgeois) art, which is apo­ litical and allows for the flower­ ing of the individual imagination, Communist art is narrowly propagandistic because of its subordination to the mech­ anistic requirements of a Leftist political “line.” If Depressionera Leftism did engender signif­ icant literary works, these were composed by writers (Dos Passos, Farrell, Steinbeck, Wright) who always kept the Communist

Party at a distance. Moreover, the argument continues, these writers were all men: no signif­ icant female writers identified themselves with 1930s literary leftism or managed to link gen­ der-based concerns and issues with the CP’s theory and practice of class struggle. Writing Red, a compilation of exciting and often inspirational poems, short stories, reportage and political theory written by radical women during the De­ pression years, makes one more bourgeois myth bite the dust. Drawing together works by somewhat-known writers such as Muriel Ruk^yser, Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, Josephine Herbst, Agnes Smedley, and Margaret Walker, as well as a number of virtually unknown women who published in the CPsponsored New Masses, Crisis, Op­ portunity, and the various leftist “little magazines” that sprang up during the decade, the anthology demonstrates that significant numbers of highly talented radi­ cal women saw workers’ revolu­ tion as the only way out for the

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masses of oppressed people, men and women. Moreover, the an­ thology reveals that these writers found both imaginative and in­ tellectually rigorous ways to cor­ relate the bosses’ need to accumulate capital with the mul­ tiple forms of sexist ideology and practice. In particular, the theoretical pieces by Grace Hutchins, Re­ becca Pitts, and Mary Inman re­ veal that 1930's women Marxists were analyzing the political economy of sexism, as well as its multiple superstructural mani­ festations, with considerable so­ phistication. Anti-communism continues to raise its ugly head, however, in the various analyti­ cal essays interspersed through­ out the volume by its editors, Paula Rabinowitz and Charlotte Nekola. To be sure, these editors raise some important criticisms of the CP’s many deficiencies in rela­ tion to the so-called “women question." The proletariat was frequently conceived of in masculinist terms by the CP’s leading literary theorists and critics, all of whom were male; aside from a token few, women writers were not urged to partic­ ipate in the Party’s various liter­ ary formations and publications; and, during the Popular Front— when the CP was proclaiming its

then-famous slogan that “Communism is twentieth-cen­ tury Americanism”—the Party increasingly endorsed a view of the nuclear family that mini­ mized consideration of the family’s frequently repressive and reactionary aspects.

Nonetheless, Nekola and Rabinowitz, like so many schol­ ars treating the 1930s Left, sub­ scribe to a theory of “Stalinism” that precludes any dialectical ex­ amination of the political strengths and weaknesses of this quite remarkable body of women’s writing. Asserting that these women writers managed to produce important work because the sexism of the organized Left reduced the party’s influence upon them, Rabinowitz and Nekola evade the inescapable conclusion that their anthology compels us to draw: the great ma­ jority of the female poets, fiction writers and journalists were com­ mitted to the Communist move­ ment, which, for all its many weaknesses, provided the defin­ ing context for these radical women’s meditations upon women’s emancipation and class struggle. It was hardly isolation from the CP that led Muriel Rukeyser to describe the Party organizer and orator Ann Burlak as one:

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PAGE I?

On the left, a typical sweatshop of the early 1900s, little differentfrom the conditions Chinese women emigrant workers must endure today in New York City. On the right, an anti-capitalist poster of that time.

[who] knows women cut down by poverty, by stupid obscure days, their moments over the dishes speaks them now, and thus scatters clews .. [and] speaks from all these faces and from the center of a system of lives who speak the desire of worlds moving unmade saying, ‘Who owns the world?’ and waiting for the cry.

As Writing Red reveals, for Rukeyser and many like her, questions of gender were not crushed by or subordinated to an authoritarian “Stalinist” dis­ course of class. Rather, they saw women’s emancipation as being intimately bound up in class emancipation; their anti-sexism was congruent with, rather than contradicted by, their commit­ ment to proletarian revolution.

By N. N.

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HOW CPUSA LED ANTI-RACIST STRUGGLES IN THE l940s-’50s GERALD HORNE Communist Front?: The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956 Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988

In this highly important and informative book, Gerald Horne gives badly-needed insight into the crucial role played in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the CPled Civil Rights Congress, which, he argues, laid the base for the massive anti-racist protests of the 1960s. The widely held view, dissem­ inated in the mass media, the public schools and the universi­ ties, is thatthe civil rights move­ ment began with the Mont­ gomery bus boycott and was based in non-Leftist institutions such as the churches. Horne demonstrates that, while the movement did indeed burgeon in the decade following, it was black and white Leftists in the postwar Civil Rights Congress who extended and deepened the anti-racist activities of the De­ pression-era CP (Scottsboro, anti-lynching struggles, anti-rac­ ist union organizing) by initiat­

ing the first major campaigns against Jim Crow, North and South. Moreover, the CRC under­ took its many battles against dis­ crimination and legal lynching at the same time that it was desper­ ately preoccupied with fighting against the Smith Act indict­ ments of many leading CPers, who came under vicious attack from the government as soon as the postwar “Iron Curtain” de­ scended. Refuting another wide­ spread misconception about concerns of Communists during this era, Horne demonstrates that the CP did not abandon its commitment to mass anti-racist struggle when it found itself under attack: even at the height of the Smith Act trials, the ma­ jority of cases on the CRC’s books dealt with racist attacks on work­ ing-class black people. While Horne might have or­ ganized his materials better— the book is unduly repetitious and at times confuses questions of chronology—he makes widely available for the first time mas­ sive amounts of material dug out of the archives of the CRC, the

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NAACP, the ACLU, and the Na­ tional Lawyers Guild. His coverage is encyclopedic, covering the better known cases such as those of Willie McGee (a black man framed, and later ex­ ecuted, for rape), the Trenton Six (six young black men whom a New Jersey court railroaded on trumped up charges of raping white women) and Rosa Lee In­ gram (a black woman charged with murdering a white man who attacked her), as well as other now-anonymous victims of racist abuse. In addition to describing the impact ofWilliam Patterson’s powerful UN-directed indict­ ment of American racism, We Charge Genocide, Horne details CRC activities in all parts of the United States. Anti-racist activ­ ists interested in investigating the history of early struggles for racial equality in their own geo­ graphical areas will find ample information in Communist Front? In his political stand, Horne can be faulted for somewhat un­ critically endorsing the CP’s es­ sentially unrevolutionary—if militant—outlook during this pe­ riod. He also could have done more to point out that not a few of the civil rights organizers who attained prominence in the

PAGE 21

1960s cut their teeth in the Com­ munist-led movement of the preceding decade. Horne seems, as his title indicates, perhaps overwilling to downplay the leadership role played by Com­ munists. But Horne’s book is very use­ ful to people interested in the real history of the anti-racist movement in the U. S. Horne stresses the crucial role played by the mass rank-and-file organ­ izing that the CP consistently coupled with its; courtroom work. His accounts of the CRC’s bold multiracial moves to de­ segregate public facilities, as well as of the “white women’s bri­ gade” that the Congress quite creatively sent to Mississippi to build support for Willie McGee, are among his many tributes to the courage of these earlier, com­ munist, “freedom riders.” What is more, Horne quite shrewdly points up the interpen­ etration of racism and anti-com­ munism, demonstrating how the ruling class quite consciously attempted to justify its repres­ sion of Communists by branding them as pro-black and, con­ versely, attempted to justify its continuing subugation of blacks by playing upon fears of com­ munist “subversion” in the

PAGE 22--------------------------------- --------

ranks of the movement for racial justice and equality. Finally, Horne also astutely describes the process by which the government, during this postwar era of national libera­ tion movements, gradually came to realize the necessity of remedying the more blatant fea­ tures of Jim Crow if the U. S. were to have any credibility among the newly decolonized nations attracted to the Soviet Union. As it slowly granted conces­ sions to anti-racist activism, then, the ruling class took care to ob-

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scure the leading role of the leftled CRC and to bestow the credit upon the virulently anti-commu­ nist NAACP. Even as the CRC was playing a leading role in set­ ting the stage for the subsequent wave of Civil Rights activity, Horne points out, the ruling class was preparing to bury the histor­ ical link between anti-racism and communism. Hence the noxious myth that anti-racism is intrinsic to American “democracy," and that Martin Luther King is its most fitting exemplar and sym­ bol. By N.N.

THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE MARTIN BERNAL Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots Of Classical Civilization. Volume I: The Fabrication Of Ancient Greece 1785-1985. Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987. For two centuries Western im­ perialism has justified itself with the idea that Western European civilization is uniquely superior to other cultures — more ratio­ nal, moral and scientific. Bernal reveals that the capitalist schol­ ars of this era have covered up the fact that Ancient Greek cul­ ture, including philosophy and

science, were largely taken from Africa and the Near East.

Ancient Greek writers ac­ knowledged this, as did the secu­ lar writers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But with the intensification of racism as ideo­ logical justification for 19th cen­ tury imperialism this “Ancient Model” gave way to the “Aryan Model”, which argued that West­ ern civilization owed nothing to Africa. The “Broad Aryan Model” recognized some Middle Eastern influences; the “Ex­ treme Aryan Model,” dominant until the fall of the Nazis, allowed none.

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With overt Naziism in disre­ pute, the “Broad Aryan Model” has reasserted itself in academic respectability, and this is Bernal’s chief target. He pro­ poses to replace it by the “Re­ vised Ancient Model,” basically a restatement of the acknowledge­ ment of African/ Egyptian and Near Eastern influences in the light of the research of the past two centuries. Bernal’s book is very useful in showing how “knowledge” is shaped by politics. The whole field of Classical studies and the history of Western civilization are shown to be the product of racist and imperialist false­ hoods. Further, it is not mainly the “reactionaries,” the overt racists and defenders of clerical author­ ity, whom Bernal chiefly attacks, but the liberal mainstream. This aspect of Bernal’s book is essen­ tial and fascinating. But it is not a communist analysis, and there­ fore is not and cannot be consis­ tently anti-racist, anti-elitist, and anti-imperialist. Bernal has no revolutionary perspective. Nor does he really have a class analysis. He opposes imperialism, but never examines the class or elitist basis for the ideas (“knowledge” or “wisdom”)

PAGE-23 taken by the Greeks from Egypt or the Middle East. He never dis­ cusses the class struggle as the motive force of history, whether in Ancient Egypt, in Europe, or today. With the open abandonment of communism by the old com­ munist movement, “radical” na­ tionalism and "anti-imperial­ ism” are all the rage in left-lib­ eral academia. In the Introduc­ tion, Bernal reveals that he undertook this study as a result of a personal crisis brought on by the failure of the Cultural Revo­ lution in China, of which he apparently was a supporter. His own life and research reflect a “retreat from revolution.” Bernal’s book implicitly holds out the view that, by purging it­ self of “cultural biases”, acade­ mia in the capitalist world could be “truthful,” and not reflect any bias. Of anti-working class, i.e. elitist, ruling-class bias, he says nothing. In this way his book is very congenial to the liberal elit­ ist movement to criticize ethnic and gender-based biases in re­ search, and oppose them to class as the primary motive forces of history. Bernal’s book is there­ fore, in a true sense, not “loosely” Marxist, as he claims, but anti­ Marxist.

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Bernal’s book is congenial particularly to Black and Pan-Af­ rican Nationalism. He associates himself with nationalist reaction­ aries like Jacob Carruthers, John G. Jackson, Sheikh Anta Diop, Ali Mazrui, Ben Jochanan, and G.G.M. James. All are Black Afri­ can and American writers who advance, in strongly elitist and nationalist — even overtly racist — terms, the superiority of Afri­ can culture as a reaction to the racist denigration of Africa in Western culture. During the Stalin years schol­ arship was usually much sharper in class analysis than stuff written

today, even though the discovery of more facts often leaves the demonstration of earlier works outdated. For a class analysis of ancient Greek science and philosophy, there is still nothing to compare with Alban D. Winspear’s 1940 work, The Genesis of Plato’s Thought, and his shorter work (with Tom Silverberg) Who Was Socrates? (1940). Both expose how Greek thought emerged out of the class struggles of the An­ cient World and reflected class oppression.

By D.E.

TRASHING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION SIMON SCHAMA Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution Knopf, 1989 Simon Schama’s Citizens has three main themes: the actions of individuals, not class conflicts, were the deciding factors that led to the revolution; revolutionary violence was immoral; the rev­ olution was unnecessary because the ruling aristocratic class was already providing needed re­ forms.“ More than any inequality in a society based on pri­

vilege...the revolution was occa­ sioned by these decisions of state [to keep costly armies in Europe and America].” Schama preposterously down­ plays the frustration of the rising bourgeoisie and the misery of the masses under the old order. This view of history as a random series of events, unaffected by class an­ tagonisms, emerges often. “Nor does the Revolution seem any longer to conform to a grand his­ torical design, preordained by in­ exorable forces of social change. Instead it seems a thing of con­

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tingencies and unforeseen con­ sequences..." But Schama shows a class bias on the ethics of armed rebellion. “[Violence] was not merely a by­ product of politics, or the dis­ agreeable instrument by which other more virtuous ends were accomplished or vicious ones thwarted. In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the revolution itself.” Recoiling at the violence of the progressive forces, Schama im­ plicitly condones the far more deadly terror of the nobles. In reality, revolutionary vio­ lence was beneficial and neces­ sary. Eliminating the feudal landlords, for example, ended an economic system that starved thousands of people every year. And the Republicans faced ex­ tinction both from the nobles’ 40,000-man army in the Vendee, and from foreign invasion; they prefigured the Bolsheviks, who after 1917 had to fight for sur­ vival against the White armies and the troops that the United States, Britain and twelve other countries sent in to crush the rev­ olution. No class takes power from an­ other without struggle. Royalist

.PAGE 25

Schama, however, says the strug­ gle in France was pointless: the bourgeoisie and the masses should have waited for the inno­ vative nobles to improve things. “From the king downward, the elite were less obsessed with tra­ dition than with novelty, and less preoccupied with feudalism than with science.” Clearly, Schama’s goal is to discredit revolution as the chief means of social change, while workers everywhere face wors­ ening conditions from decaying capitalism. Citizens appears as rulers from Washington to Mos­ cow to Beijing intensify their at­ tacks on Marxism. A Harvard professor with an Oxford pedi­ gree and rave reviews in the New York Times, Schama speaks for today"s bourgeois, who are every bit as moribund as the ancien re­ gime and have no positive outlook to offer. Schama cynically de­ fames the French Revolution just as scores of other “historians” re­ pudiate the monumental social advances of the Stalin era. We need to reclaim the objective his­ tory of revolution.

By R.D.F.

PL's OPINION Excerpts from recent CHALLENGE/DESAFIO Editorials

OOPS! LOVE’S LABOR LOST. The recent gunning down of thousands of Beijing protestors is the logical result of the restoration of capitalism in China. Now the embarrassed U.S. imperialists and others have suddenly restored the “communist" label on the same Chinese leaders who, up until a few weeks ago, they happily referred to as capitalist readers. U.S. rulers are using these recent events to whip up an orgy of anti-communism. Obviously, most of the student protestors and others hitched their star to the Zhao pro-U.S. faction. To one extent or another, these students were used by the “liberal” faction to try to wrest state power from the Deng/Li faction. (June 14)

WHAT’S IN A NAME? Raising the idea that black workers and students are African- Ameri­ cans is an attempt to “include” blacks into America. An America that offers black babies some of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, tops among imperialist countries. An America that forces black youth to join the Army, or face a 50% unemployment rate. An America that finds homicide as the leading cause for death among young black men. An America that disproportionaly forces blacks into prison. An America that means lower wages for more work with less opportunity. An America that increasingly means unemployment, sickness, homelessness and poverty. An America that is drifting towards depres­ sion, fascism, and war. Jesse Jackson and the New York Times want black workers to be patriotic to that America.

EL’S OPINION________________________________________ PAGE 27 The young black rebels who fought the police in Miami a few weeks ago aren’t looking to change a label, they’re looking to change their lives. Jackson is offering meaningless words to distract them and the millions more who are fed up with capitalism. He is cynically using this issue like he has used others in the past, in order to get the bosses to accept him as a politician who is one of them. Exploited black workers and oppressed black youth won’t jump onto the name-change bandwagon. (Feb. 8)

LABOR “LEADERS” DESTROY OWN UNIONS In the U.S. trade union membership has declined from 31% of the workforce in 1970 to 17% in 1985-86. Some say this loss of union membership occurred because the unions have been sharply attacked during the last 20 years. This is not the primary reason. The loss of members can mainly be attributed to the fact that most union leaders have either sold out to the bosses or have been passive in the face of the bosses’ sharper attacks. Why would you join a union when its leaders always sell you out to the bosses? The union grew when they were communist-led and more militant. Getting members credit cards or new and bigger bosses is not going to win new members. Only fighting unions with red leadership can win new members and put the rulers on the defensive. (April 12)

THE LOOMING WEST GERMAN-SOVIET AXIS In the background a new “axis” is being formed. This is a reality that is most dangerous for U.S. imperialism. The powerful West German capitalist economy is trying to use Gorbachev’s perestroika, to rebuild the Soviet economy based on a capitalist alliance with Ger­ many. This will make the German capitalists the most powerful rulers of all of Europe. And the billions in credits the West German bosses are giving to the Soviet bosses will help consolidate this axis. (May 17)

PACIFICISM CAN’T BEAT GUN-TOTERS Civil disobedience and pacifism cannot defeat the violent coal bar­ ons. Civil disobedience can’t beat armed scabs, gun-toting cops and troopers and helicopters. Only the miners’ historic tradition of armed counter-attack has a chance of beating the bosses’ assault. (July 12)

EASL2S.

PL'S OPINION

BUILD INTERNATIONAL STRIKE SOLIDARITY Workers are not only fighting back in the poorer countries of the world, but also in the heart of the imperialist beasts (U.S, Britain and even the Soviet Union.) In recent months we have seen: •General strikes in Ecuador, Spain, Italy, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Portugal, Brazil, Peru, Sudan, etc. •Mass strikes by teachers in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Guate­ mala, Los Angeles, •Militant strikes by miners in the U.S., the Soviet Union, Peru. •The strike by Eastern airline employees in the U.S. • Repeated one-day walkouts by London underground and bus workers and British Rail train workers. Also strikes by dockworkers in Britain and even “lightning walkouts” by BBC workers. •One-day walkouts by hospital workers in New York City. •The almost two-year old militant anti-racist rebellion (Intifada) by Palestinian workers and youth in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. •The continuous struggle against the fascist apartheid regime in South Africa. It is up to workers and students to revive international solidarity. We in PLP and the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) are internationalists. We have always tried to support workers fighting back anywhere to the best of our abilities. We played the most militant role in the struggle in the U.S. against the war U.S. imperialism waged in Vietnam. We have also done quite a bit in support of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and against the U.S. intervention in Central America. (August 9)

BUSH’S “WAR” ON DRUGS Did you ever ask yourself this question: if capitalism is so good—and communism is so bad and is dead as a political force in the world—why do tens of millions in the belly of the imperialist beast take all kinds of drugs to escape the misery and racism caused by the capitalist system? Bush’s war on drugs is really an attack on workers, especially young Black and Latin men and women. The war on drugs is racist to the core. It is going to be used by the bosses for more racist terror and to invade Latin America to protect the billions that the U.S. bosses have

PL'S OPINION________________________________________ PASL22 invested in that region (80% of all U.S. investments in the world are in Canada and Latin America.) The main domestic aspect of Bush’s phony war against drugs is to build more prisons. Already the U.S. has more people in jail than any other country (except maybe South Africa.) The new jails will be used to hold more young Black, Latin and Native American men, and will be used as Nazi-like concentration camps against anyone who rebels against racist terror, or against any workers who fight for their interests (like the hundreds of Pittston miners who have been arrested in the last few months.) So instead of building more and better schools, low rent apartment buildings and hospitals, the bosses are building more death camps. (August 20)

CAPITALISM FAILS IN THE USA, USSR, CHINA The constant daily headlines screaming about how communism is “dead again” defy logic. After all, people can only die once. Can systems die more than once? All the pronounced “deaths of commu­ nism,” and the ones yet to come, make one wonder. Perhaps it isn’t communism that is dead. The bosses “doth protest too much.” If communism is as dead as the rulers claim, why do they keep heralding its death and their victory? It is to hide the fact that capital­ ism, for over a quarter of a century, has been restored in Russia and China. It is Soviet and Chinese capitalism that has miserably failed. Soviet and Chinese nationalism, racism, selfishness, inflation, unem­ ployment and alienation of the working class are but some of the contradictions of capitalism, not of communism. The exalted “market system” has left Asia, Latin America, Central America and Africa in ruins. Mass starvation and early deaths are the “rewards” of capitalism in these continents. Has the heralded market system provided a good life for workers in the western world and for the so-called “prosperous” Japanese? The answer is a resounding NO! Drugs, especially among the youth, is one of the “great” fruits of capitalism, AIDS is another. The capitalist tree of goodies is huge: millions are homeless in tire "rich” U.S. Racism is rampant all over the western world. Mass unem­ ployment and starvation are common. The medical system collapses all around us. War and fascism, however, are capitalism’s greatest “rewards.”

PAGE 30___________________________________________ PL’S OPINION

In the U.S. the workers are so happy that hundreds of thousands have pushed their union bosses, or pushed past their union bosses, and taken to the picket lines. Mass strikes have engulfed the air, coal, hospital, phone and other industries as workers are fed up with being screwed by the bosses, and their own union bosses. These strikes are hardly a ringing endorsement of capitalism. (August 13)

ONLY BOSSES BENEFIT FROM RACISM Recent racist incidents from Bensonhurst to Virginia Beach show that racism is increasing. Racism and fascism will continue to grow as long as capitalism—the profit system—exists. The only way to destroy racism is to crush capitalism, and build a communist society. As the profit system in the U.S. sinks into oblivion the bosses find it more and more necessary to pit one group of workers against the other. The rulers, who make huge profits from our labor, want us to blame one another for our plight. The bosses would much rather have us fight one another than to unite and fight them. Don’t be a sucker for bosses’ racism. (August 13)

WORKERS NEED COMMUNIST LEADERSHIP Workers have learned that giving in to the bosses’ demands for cuts does not save jobs; does not prevent plant closings; and simply in­ creases the profits of the bosses.. We need to put working class principles, guided by communist ideas, front and center, and organize to carry them out: • No wage cuts or concessions of any kind; make the bosses take the losses for their degenerate system; • No scabs allowed! Working class violence must be organized to defeat the bosses’ cops’ attacks on workers; • Support strikes throughout the U.S. and the world. Organize InCAR Strike Support Committees wherever InCAR exists; • Build multi-racial unity and expose and attack racism internation­ ally; build the International Committee Against Racism. • Spread communist ideas as the only ones capable of taking on the bosses’ system, beating it and smashing it. (August 27)

fREEDOM AND DICTATORSHIP_________________________ PAGE 21

FREEDOM AND DICTATORSHIP Continued from page 8 Obviously, in these examples the dictatorship benefits the dic­ tator or the small group, sup­ pressing (and therefore oppressing) the vast majority. Human history is full of such ex­ amples, and it is what we usually think of when we think of “dicta­ torship.” But what happens if the worm turns, if the immense majority seize power from, and exercise absolute authority over this small group? This is no less a dictatorship. (Ask the formerly privileged.) Only now it is a dic­ tatorship by and for the immense majority over and against the small group. Now the former op­ pressors are oppressed. For the majority the former agency of their oppression—dictatorship— becomes the vehicle to their free­ dom. Can it be that in modern bour­ geois democratic society a small group exercises dictatorship, monopolizes absolute authority for itself and maintains control over and against the immense majority? The inescapable an­ swer is “yes.” But the truth goes farther. The truth is that the more democratic a bourgeois soc­

iety is, the easier it is for its dicta­ tors to control that society.

THE BOURGEOIS DICTATORSHIP: FREEDOM ONLY TO BE BOURGEOIS To understand how, in the “Free World,” and in all capitalist societies, a small group monopo­ lizes absolute power over, and against, the immense majority of people, it is only necessary to think about the most common aspects ofour daily life. The most basic experience, the experience common to everyone, is that we have to go to work. If we cannot get a job, we cannot live. We have to find a boss to hire us; workers do not hire bosses. In our society there are a lot of workers, or pot­ ential workers; there is a relative handful of bosses. The immense majority of the people must have a job. This matter of “getting a job” is an example of what Marxism­ Leninism terms a social relation. In this capitalist social relation bosses (a small group) hire work­ ers (the huge majority) to pro­ duce, or to provide services, or to do whatever it is the boss wants

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done. (The right to decide what is to be done belongs to the boss; that is another capitalist social relation.) Getting a job means that one group, the workers, sell their ab­ ility to work to another group, the bourgeoisie, who buy it for a price, called a wage. That buying and selling relationship within the system of production defines each group as a class. Now it happens that no matter what wage we agreed to work for, it is never enough. If yesterday it bought the bare minimum need­ ed to live and raise a family, to­ day it no longer does. Inflation wipes out its purchasing power, or new needs make themselves felt for which the old wage isn’t enough. If the wage bought a tol­ erable standard of living yester­ day, today we feel we have slipped somehow. We are living more poorly. This relative impoverishment of the working class is a natural, inevitable consequence of capit­ alism. According to Congress, in the United States between 1979­ 87 (both peak economic growth years) the income gap between the richest 20% and the remain­ ing 80% of the population grew on average by nearly 11.5%, (The gap between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% grew

by nearly 40%.) Even Congress concluded that the “rich got richer and the poor poorer.” The poorest 40% of the people actually saw their income fall ab­ solutely during those nine years by over 9%; for them impover­ ishment was both relative and ab­ solute. In this same period the life expectancy of Black workers (always less than that of white workers) fell below the relatively low level it had been. Do you suppose the workers “democrat­ ically” exercised their "freedom” to get poorer and die sooner? We need to earn more. We have to ask the boss for more money. (Of course, we can never earn as much as the boss does, that goes without saying. In­ equality is an inseperable part of capitalism.) In fact, we cannot ask the boss for too much more or the boss will lose money. If he cannot make a profit he will close up shop and we will lose our jobs. No one thinks twice about this ; it is just accepted.

What are we accepting? If we accept that the boss has a right "to make a profit” we really mean he has a right to keep, or appropriate, the profit we have created during production. So underlying the capitalist social relation of selling and buying the

freedom and dictatorship ability to work is capitalism’s most basic social relation: work­ ers agree to work to give the owners a profit; the boss hires us in order to appropriate a profit. That is capi­ talism. This capitalist social relation­ ship is a reality, not an abstrac­ tion. This reality is the dictatorship, the absolute power exercised by the bourgeoisie over modern bourgeois society. This right to ap­ propriate, this commonplace we never think twice about, is how they control society absolutely. In capitalism a small group— the capitalists—has the right, the freedom, to own as its private property all the means ofproduction which society as a whole needs in order to stay alive. (This right makes productive labor an attri­ bute, a burden, solely of the working class.) This freedom, which is the foundation of the existence of the bourgeoisie, transforms the means of producing life chiefly into a means of subordi­ nating and enslaving labor. Isn’t this dictatorship? But for the bourgeoisie it means freedom . The right, the freedom, of the bourgeoisie to appropriate and possess as its own private prop­ erty the wealth that is produced socially, makes the labor of many the wealth of the few. Isn’t this dictatorship? But it is what free­ dom means to the bourgeoisie.

-------------------------------- ËAGL31 These rights, together with the freedom of the appropriating class to decide what and how to produce (based solely on its own need to produce a profit) gives this small group, this capitalist class, absolute authority over so­ ciety: •They say: “Make usa profit or die!” and they can, and do en­ force that, thereby subordinat­ ing all economic life, and the living conditions of whole na­ tions, to benefit themselves. •They say: “Don’t steal our property!” and they can, and do, enforce that, thereby setting the standards for what is legal and illegal, constitutional or uncon­ stitutional, moral or immoral, defining the relations among na­ tions and the conditions for peace or war, all for their own benefit. •They say: “Perpetuate us, emulate us, serve us, glorify us, justify us, aspire to be us, or die!” and they can, and do, enforce that, thereby restricting the free­ dom of educational, scientific and cultural development to those narrow limits which can be­ nefit the bourgeoisie, thus turn­ ing education, science and culture into mere tools for con­ tinued bourgeois domination. Isn’t this dictatorship? This is the dictatorship of the bourgeoi­ sie. This is bourgeois freedom.

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Lenin wrote that So long as classes are not abolished, all talk of liberty and equality is self­ deception. So long as the question of the ownership of the means of prod­ uction remains unsolved, there can be no possibility of any real liberty of human individuality, nor of a real equality of mankind, but only of a class freedom of the proprietors, of a hypocritical equality of the haves and have-nots, of the satisfied and the hungry, of the exploiter and the exploited. (Lenin, Fallacies About Freedom)

which guarantees their reproduction; which suppresses all challenges to these social relations. This State it an historically specific development, the product of the class struggles that were needed to make the capitalist way ofproduction socially dominant. This State is the mechanismfor guar­ anteeing bourgeois freedom by op­ pressing the working class. Every State must have a politi­ cal system, a method for regulat­ ing the public power, which in the capitalist State was created to guarantee and perpetuate cap­ italist social relations. The cap­ italists have created two alternate political systems. The system they prefer is political de­ mocracy, or “Western-style” de­ mocracy, such as exists today in the U.S., Japan and Western Eu­ rope. The other, a “crisis man­ agement” system, is fascism. Fascism is turned to when capitalism’s very existence is at risk because of threatened rebel­ lion. Fascism is the market econ­ omy run without political democracy; with extreme, naked brutality, violence and nation­ alist fervor, such as we see in El Salvador, South Africa, Israel, nd Eastern Europe and China. Whether the democratic rep­ ublic, or fascism, the essential as­ pect of the capitalist political system is that it exists only to guar-

THE BOURGEOIS STATE Rights that are not enforced do not exist. There are no rights without a mechanism for enforc­ ing them. The capitalists must have enforceable rules codifying their social relationships; laws to regulate them; institutions to ad­ minister and enforce them. The capitalists need foremen, man­ agers, lawyers, bureaucrats, po­ licemen, teachers, soldiers, generals, jail house guards, pol­ iticians. They need schools to train both a docile labor force and managers to control them, and they need courts and jails. In short, they need a State, their State: their public power which objectifies and enforces the production relations which allow them to exist as a class;

freedom and dictatorship antee and perpetuate the domination over society by private wealth; that it may not allow society to abolish the private ownership of the means of production, nor abolish production for profit, nor abolish the private ap­ propriation of social production. The expropriators may not be expropriated. The means of pro­ duction, capitalist property, and therefore the means for en­ slaving and exploiting labor, may not be converted into the tools for free and cooperative labor. The distinctive feature of “Western-style” democracy, or capitalist democracy, and the source of its ideological strength, is that the social inequality charac­ teristic of capitalism occurs simultaneously with the fullest devel­ opment ofpolitical and legal equality. That is why capitalist exploita­ tion and reproduction occur most efficiently in a bourgeois democracy.

HOW EQUALITY IN CAPITALISM IS THE BASIS OF INEQUALITY We all understand that free commodity exchange is the ex­ change of equivalents: $10 worth of something, say, oil, is sold for

------------------------------------ PAGE 35 $10, and that $10 of money can buy $10 worth of anything else. That is the free market, free ofall distortions. That is how the law of value works. But Karl Marx pointed to a necessary precondi­ tion which a free market needs to be able to exist: not only must the values of the commodities being exchanged be equal, but this trade presupposes the traders who are party to the exchange, the contracting par­ ties, also are equal. Each trader agrees that the other has the right of a private owner; each possesses a property. Between themselves they establish a legal relation expressed in a contract, whether written or unwritten, whether part of a developed legal system or not. Capitalism is no more than a way of life in which all important social relations become ex­ change relations, become buying and selling. This starts with prod­ uction, and the capitalist social relations required if anything is to be produced. Capitalist prod­ uction requires buying and sell­ ing labor power; it is not slavery. But this means that the worker is a holder of rights, of legal equal­ ity. He or she is a free person and is therefore able to enter into a contract, just as the buyer of labor power, the capitalist, is able to do. Both the buyer and the seller of labor power are legally

EASEJA_____________________

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equal persons, because they are both private proprietors, both owners of commodities. As Marx wrote: “Wage labor on a national scale, and hence also the capit­ alist mode of production, is not possible unless the laborers are personally free. It is based on the personal freedom of the la­ borer.” But this relation of equality is actually purely formal, and therefore a total fiction; its exis­ tence is only a legal formality. This legal equality is an appear­ ance that conceals the real in­ equality in the relation, which is its content. The inequality stems from the nature of the property that each party owns. The "property” the worker owns is his or her ability to work. But this is property only in appearance. Actually it is the opposite. It is a state of need. The reason this is so, Marx points out, is that if his capacity for labor remains un­ sold the laborer derives no benefit from it, but rather he [or she] will feel it to be a cruel, nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its re­ production. In other words, “in the concept of the free laborer it is already implicit that he [or she] is a paup­ er, or virtually a pauper. Accord-

ing to his economic conditions he [or she] is pure living working capacity.” This working capacity is saddled with the requirement of living. The worker in whom it is embodied has to stay alive if he or she is to be “pure living work­ ing capacity." But the worker is deprived of the means of staying alive. The worker owns none of the means of production except the ability to work. So in reality rather than legal appearance, his property is not property, but “indigence from all points of view.” On the one hand the worker is free, in the sense that he or she is “a free owner of his [/her] own working capacity and of his [/her] own person. On the other hand, he[/she] is free in the sense that he[/she] is expropriated from the means of production, that is, dep­ rived of everything necessary for the realization of his[/her] labor­ power." The result of this formal equality of rights, in a situation where only one—the capitalist— is really a property owner, is the “law of the stronger:” “...produc­ tion proceeds more smoothly with modern police than, for ex­ ample, under club law...how­ ever...the law of the stronger, only in a different form, still sur-

freedom and dictatorship vives in [the] constitutional state.” The exchange of equivalents, the or­ iginal operation with which we start­ ed, has now become turned around in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labor power is itself but a portion of the product of others’ labor appropriated without an equiva­ lent; and secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its pro­ ducer but replaced together with an added surplus...At first the rights of property seemed to be based on a man’s [or a woman’s] own labor. At least, some such assumption was nec­ essary since only commodity owners with equal rights confronted each other, and the sole means by which a man [or a woman] could become possessed of the commodities of oth­ ers was by alienating his[/her] own commodities; and these could be re­ placed by labor alone. Now, how­ ever, property turns out to be the right on the part of the capitalist to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its product and to be the impossib­ ility on the part of the laborer of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labor has become the necessary consequence ofa law that apparently originated in their iden­ tity. (Marx, Capital, Vol.I, Emphasis added.) What is the political conse­ quence of this separation of property from the working class? The most important is that social inequality is the precondition for the appearance of bourgeois legal and

_____________________ EASL31 constitutional principles; social in­ equality can never be eliminated with­ in the bourgeois system of rights.

THE IRRELEVANCE OF “HUMAN RIGHTS” ACTIVISTS TO FREEDOM Even the full realization of “hu­ man rights” could not dissolve social inequality. Just the rever­ se, bourgeois legal and constitu­ tional principles strengthen and develop social inequality; social inequality is the precondition for the existence of bourgeois legal and constitutional principles. There have always been those for whom socialism “ought to exist” because it is “more moral,” because it produces “human rights.” This “ethical socialism” is traditional Social Democratic ideology, the ideology which the communist movement rejected when it developed out of social democracy, and the ideology to which the vestiges of the old com­ munist movement have now reg­ ressed. (The various European Labor parties, the Italian Com­ munist party, both the Nicara­ guan Sandinistas and a section of die Contras are all examples of Social Democrats.)

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Such “socialists" believe capit­ alism is not a man-made histori­ cal phenomenon, but a natural phenomenon, maybe a conse­ quence of human nature, but anyway not developing on the basis of a specific set of internal contradictions. They believe cap­ italism could be regulated into a “moral” and “just” society. Therefore, for them, the State has no historical specificity, no intrinsic, specific class-power content. Marx said such people saw soc­ ialism “as the realization of the ideas of bourgeois society.” Such socialists ...affirm that exchange, exchange value, etc. originally (in time) or in their concept (in their adequate form) are a system of liberty and equality for all, but have since been adulter­ ated by money, capital, etc...The an­ swer to them is that exchange value, or more precisely the monetary sys­ tem, is in fact the system of equality and liberty, and that what seems to them to distort the subsequent de­ velopment of the system is distor­ tions immanent to that system itself, precisely the realization of the equal­ ity and freedom which reveal them­ selves as inequality and despotism...To want exchange value not to develop into capital, or the labor, which produces exchange value, not to become wage-labor, is as pious as it is stupid. What dis­ tinguishes these gendemen from the

bourgeois apologists is firsdy, their awareness of thecontradictions con­ tained in the system; but secondly, the utopianism which prevents them from discerning the necessary dis­ tinction between the real and ideal forms of bourgeois society, and hence makes them want to under­ take the vain task of trying to re-realize the ideal...(Marx, Grundrisse) In bourgeois society, bourgeois class domination rests on real ec­ onomic relations which start with equal rights. Reform legislation cannot transform the fundamen­ tals of this system because: No law obliges the proletariat to submit itself to the yoke of capital­ ism. Poverty, the lack of the means of production, obliges the proletar­ iat to submit itself to capital.. And no law in the world can give to the proletariat the means of production while it remains in the framework of bourgeois society, for no laws, but economic development, has tom the means of production from the pro­ ducers...Neither is the exploitation inside the system of wage labor based on laws. The level of wages is not fixed by legislation but by economic factors. The phenomenon of capital­ ist exploitation does not rest on a legal disposition...In short, the fun­ damental relation of domination of the capitalist class cannot be trans­ formed by means of legislative re­ forms, on the basis of capitalist society, because these relations have not been introduced by bourgeois laws, nor have they received the form of such laws...People who pro-

FREEDOM and dictatorship

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Bounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the con­ quest of political power and social revolution do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society, they stand for surface modifications of the old soci­ ety. (Rosa Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution!) But these liberals imagine that the basic social problem is that political democracy has to be ex­ tended to counter the growing concentration of economic po­ wer. Moved by this supposed “contradiction” between politics and economics, their “solution" is populism. The Social Demo­ crats state: “Transfer democracy from the political sphere (where it is alive and kicking—or could be, if workers would only vote) to the economic sphere. Of course, no such transfer should be done sub­ versively. No extremes, like un­ dermining the right of private ownership of the means of pro­ duction. Instead, elect a govern­ ment that will regulate the corporations!” So instead of organizing class struggles leading to a demand for a workers’ dictatorship, you have populist leaders like Jesse Jack­ son, in the U.S., leading a move­ ment to try to convince working people not to ignore the vote.

More tragically, in El Salvador (where the bourgeoisie has main­ tained its freedom by murdering 70,000 rebels in ten years—the equivalent of more than 3.5 mil­ lion murders in the U.S.)Joaquin Villalobos, the leading rebel commander, now states that the Farabundo Marti National Lib­ eration Front proposes to betray the revolution by turning away from workers’ and poor peas­ ants’ power in favor ofa program to modernize [the bourgeoisie] and of­ fer it new opportunities for devel­ opment... to combine the private and public sectors for a more rapid dev­ elopment of Salvadorean soc­ iety...[to guarantee all this with] electoral democracy [which] confers legitimacy [and] a reconstitution of the military...that will neither des­ troy the army (the oligarchy’s funda­ mental support) nor disarm the FMLN. Ultimately it is not a ques­ tion of sharing or not sharing power, but of forging a true democracy in El Salvador. (Villalobos, A Democratic Revolution for El Salvador, Foreign Policy magazine #74, Spring 1989, Wash., D.C.) Certainly extending the vote diffuses formal political power in­ to the hands of working people. Actually, that is the political his­ tory of the United States. When the U.S. was founded, only wealthy white male property owners could vote (about 10% of the population), and only certain

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offices were directly elected even by them. Then the property re­ quirement was lowered, then it was eliminated. Then non-white males were allowed to vote. Then more offices were open for direct election. Then Blacks were de­ nied the vote. Then women were allowed to vote. Then young peo­ ple could vote. Then Blacks again were allowed to vote. This took 200 years. Now the rule of wealth is more secure than ever. The Jesse Jacksons (and Villaloboses) are not proposing to establish democracy on a new basis. The existing bourgeoisba­ sis for democracy is all that is possible. For them the problem is that capitalism has diverged from the equality they think is mandated by the Constitution. What can be their response to one of the greatest of the United States’ founding fathers, who ex­ pressed the Constitution’s fram­ ers intent with these words: “I love liberty. I hate equality.”? Only Marxism-Leninism sub­ jects the constitutional order of modern bourgeois democracy it­ self to a class analysis which re­ veals the contradiction to be within capitalism and within the Constitution. The comprehensive contradiction of this constitution, however, consists in the following: the classes whose

social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts into pos­ session of political power through universal suffrage. And from the class whose old social power it sanc­ tions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this pow­ er...From the ones it demands that they should not go forward from political to social emancipation; from the others that they should not go back from social to political resto­ ration. (Marx, The Class Struggles in France)

To summarize: •Freedom for the bourgeoisie is based on its private ownership of society’s means of production. •Freedom for the working class is based on abolishing this private ownership and returning the means of production to soci­ ety. Working class freedom alone provides the basis for dem­ ocratic self-government by and for the majority of the people. •Freedom for the bourgeoisie grows from its right to buy the working class’ ability to work. •Freedom for the working class grows from abolishing the buying and selling of labor pow­ er. This ends the wage system. This abolishes the working class as a class, and all the old class struc­ tures. Working class freedom alone provides the basis for egalitarianism

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and the development of human indi­ viduality. •Freedom for the bourgeoisie develops from the bourgeoisie’s power to keep for itself what the working class produces (espe­ cially the surplus value for which the bourgeoisie doesn’t pay) and its power to decide what the working class can produce, (deci­ sions made not on the basis of what is needed by the public, but based only on the bourgeoisie’s need to produce what it can sell at a profît.)

These together are the basis for ending every type of oppression and for preventing the rise of new exploiting classes. •This is what it means for the working class to go forward to its social emancipation. At the same time it moves itself and all hu­ manity, to the realm of true free­ dom by creating a classless, egalitarian communist social order. •But to do this the working class must transform itself into a ruling class. To do this the working class must destroy the capitalist constitutional order, destroy the bourgeois state, de­ stroy the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and impose instead its own absolute authority over society, its own dictatorship, its own State.

• Freedom for the working class develops from suppressing production for the market. Workers’ freedom requires that production be based on meeting the needs of society. This new system of production permits a new system of distribution.

By B. T.

AMPLIFICATION THE WORLD BANK REVEALS SOME OF THE "BENEFITS” OF CHINESE COUNTER-REVOLUTION'S “REFORMS'* In a reportjust released...The World Bank offers the most revealing macro­ economic portrait of China’s reforming economy that has appeared to date... ...an array of.. forces...have been unleashed by the reforms. These include the weakening of the social safety net, legalisation of inheritance, restoration of the dowry system, and new opportunities for investment in housing and small-scale businesses. “Carry on Mr. Li,” in Far Eastern Economic Review, Nov. 2, 1989, pp 49-50

PAGE 42_______________________________________ CHINESE FASCISM

ON THE DUNG HEAP IN CHINA Continued from page 16

ought to retire to become a con­ sultant in Beijing where he could recruit an entire crooked Park­ ing Violations Bureau and Police Force without having to train them in graft.

U.S. BOSSES LOSE THEIR CHINA CARD The U.S. ruling class enthusi­ astically welcomed Deng’s acces­ sion. They had no illusions about his class identity. They knew he was irrevocably committed to capitalism. By mid-1989, six hundred U.S.-Chinese joint ven­ tures, with a value of $8 billion, were doing business in China.

To a certain extent, Deng wanted to encourage such invest­ ment. However, he and his cro­ nies had no interest in letting it get out of hand: they didn’t want China to become a U.S. neo-colony. They have their own longrange imperial designs. However, Deng/Li’s version of China, Inc. isn’t strong enough to constitute an indepen­ dent third force in the worldwide struggle between U.S. and Soviet imperialism. Geography, logic, recent political history and con­

temporary China’s own internal economic contradictions all favor an alliance with Soviet im­ perialism. Soviet and Chinese rulers succeeded in negotiating away their primary differences, which included, among other dis­ putes, the large Soviet military presence along the Chinese bor­ der, the Soviet war in Afghani­ stan and the military adventure of pro-Soviet Vietnamese forces in Cambodia. Now that these differences have been at least temporarily resolved, the restoration of So­ viet-Chinese ties is virtually com­ plete. The new realignment culminated with Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing at the height of the student demonstrations. But the marriage of conve­ nience between the state capital­ ists of the USSR and the Deng gangsters could be consummated only at the expense of weakened ties between China and the U.S. The faction headed by the nowdeposed Zhao represented the small and medium-sized Chinese bosses, the newest of new money. This gang could not match the Deng/Li clique’s economic base. Zhao &: Co. therefore favored ac­ celerating the development of private investment and the mar­

CHINESE FASCISM_____________

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ket economy far beyond the rates envisioned by Deng/Li. The Zhao model depended on the rapid expansion of economic ties with U.S. business. Deng/Li had greater foresight. Li studied in the USSR. He speaks Russian and is known for his love of large­ scale Soviet-style capital invest­ ment projects. More significantly, the vast Soviet-Chi­ nese border makes the two coun­ tries natural trade partners; and the long-range decline of the U.S. economy argues in favor of a Chinese capitalist tilt toward the emerging Soviet-GermanJapanese axis. Anyone who analyzes events objectively can see that the Tienanmen protesters and their allies had hitched their star to the pro-U.S. Zhao faction. The class content of the demonstrations was strictly profit-oriented. At no time did the students decry the return of capitalism or the be­ trayal of proletarian dictator­ ship. Never did they demand a return to the egalitarian princi­ ples of the revolutionary Red Guards. Not once did they ex­ press militant solidarity with the millions of workers and working class youth struggling in South Africa, Latin America, other parts of Asia, indeed the world over, against apartheid, imperi­ alism, and all the racist indigni-

ties and brutalities of the world­ wide profit system. The leaders of the Tienan­ men demonstrations were the same who five months earlier had organized or tolerated dis­ gusting racist attacks against Af­ rican students in major Chinese universities. Where were the zealots of freedom then? They didn’t lift a finger to support the African students. In fact, only our party and the International Committee Against Racism or­ ganized small protest demon­ strations at the time against Chinese consular offices in the U.S. In doing so, we were guided by the principle of working-class internationalism militantly ex­ pressed by the left Red Guards during the GPCR. The final tip-off about the true nature of the Tienanmen protes­ tors came when they unveiled their symbol— a lily-white “God­ dess of Democracy,” a crude im­ itation of the Statue of Liberty. This obvious curtsy to U.S. impe­ rialism spat in the face of the millions in China who suffered savage colonial oppression at the hands of European and U.S. bosses for centuries before the revolution. One can easily imag­ ine the C.I.A. supplying boththe idea of the statue and the artistic masterpiece itself.

PAGE 44

IMPERIALISM, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE The Deng/Li gang had to view the demonstrations as a serious threat to their state power. Such differences are rarely resolved amicably. Deng/Li called out the army. Despite wild pie-in-the-sky speculations in the pro-U.S. Western press about mutiny, the armed forces remained over­ whelmingly loyal to the ruling faction. The repression spilled blood, both the demonstrators’and non-participants’. The death and injury toll was high, although probably not nearly as high as the U.S. press claimed. For weeks, the U.S. elec­ tronic media wallowed in maud­ lin anti-communist sentiment­ ality over the “martyrs to democ­ racy.”

Of course, for racist terror against civilian populations, no one, with the possible exception of South African and Israeli bosses, can match the United States government over the last twenty-five years. In the original Statue of Liberty’s homeland, police have been killing black youth like flies. The drug trade, abetted by U.S. government pol­ icy and corrupt law enforcement agencies, destroys millions of

_____________CHINESE FASCISM

young people—most of them black or Latin—annually. At cur­ rent rates, nearly one in five black men will go to jail during his lifetime. In New York, where black prisoners outnumber white ten to one, the prison population is 150 per cent greater than South Africa’s. School dropout rates in major U.S. cities hover around 50 percent. The U.S. ruling class is as well qualified to shake the fist of out­ rage at Deng’s butchery as Hitler was to upbraid the Brownshirts, his junior partners in crime. What government has slaught­ ered more working people around the world than the U.S., through military intervention and economic terrorism? In the wake of the massacres, the Deng bunch went about strengthening their position. In typical fascist fashion, they exe­ cuted a few opposition ring­ leaders to show they meant business and to discourage fur­ ther thoughts of revolt. They threw a large number of others in jail. Most significantly, in early August they cracked down sharply on China’s 14.5 million individually owned businesses, when Deng launched a two­ month tax-evasion “inspection” campaign aimed at squelching the new-money private bosses and re-asserting the hegemony

€H1NKE FASCISM____________

--------------------

of the state-capitalist public sec­ tor and the Rong monopolists. Two reactions accompanied these developments in the U.S. On the one hand, the politicians and media seized the occasion to spew the vilest anti-communism in the name of democratic prin­ ciple. This campaign was both absurd and obscenely hypocriti­ cal. Absurd, because for nearly a decade, the U.S. ruling class had hailed Deng as “one of the great­ est reformers in Chinese history” (L.A. Times, June 4). Hypocriti­ cal, because U.S. bosses, who can claim bragging rights to Pinochet, Marcos, Duvalier, Stroessner, Argentina’s generals, a laundry list of Vietnamese Quislings, et al., take a back seat to no one in the matter of aid and comfort to mass murderers. On the other hand, the more lucid heads in the U.S. imperial­ ist camp don’t want to fall prey to their own rhetoric. They would have preferred a Zhao victory; nonetheless, they want desper­ ately to continue dealing with Deng. Henry Kissinger, the Rockefeller agent who drew up the blueprints for Nixon’s var­ ious genocidal “peace” plans dur­ ing the Vietnam war, most clearly represents this viewpoint. His syndicated article published in late July underscores the im­ portance of China to U.S. inter-

ests, calls on U.S. policymakers to avoid punitive sanctions, and re­ asserts confidence in Deng as “the driving force behind Chi­ nese reform.” So far, the Bush White House seems to be heed­ ing Kissinger’s advice in the des­ perate hope that it can keep a slice of the pie it can no longer hope to eat whole. The pre-Tienanmen U.S.China economic courtship in­ cluded a deal to give the U.S. military three listening posts in northwest China to spy on the latest Soviet missiles. The equip­ ment used is U.S.-made. The technicians who operate it are Chinese. After Tienanmen, Gorbachev 8c Co. may well take advantage of their new strength­ ened position vis-a-vis China to demand that Deng & Co. hand over the goods. Bush-Kissinger are wetting their pants over this possibility. They can’t do much more than cajole or threaten the Chinese rulers. For the time being, they recognize the impo­ tence of their threats. The stakes for the U.S. military position in Asia are enormous. One U.S. “in­ telligence” source told colum­ nists Evans and Novak: “It would be devastating if (the Soviets) got it all” (New York Post, June 8). Despite the feeble maneuvers plotted by Bush, Kissinger, and other Washington bumblers, the

_______ PAGE 45

PAGE 44________ ______________ long term will bring sharpened contradictions between U.S. and Chinese capital. To be sure, the love affair between Beijing and Moscow will have its rocky mo­ ments. Each camp has its own interests. Nonetheless, collabo­ ration is and for the foreseeable future will remain the main as­ pect of relations between the Chinese and Soviet rulers. The U.S. bourgeoisie is going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Their international maneuver­ ability is dwindling. Increasingly isolated by the defections of their former allies and by the hostile realignment of the world’s eco­ nomic powers, the Washington/Wall Street tattered moneybags find themselves forced into the desperate inevita­ bility of a hemispheric “Fortress America” bunker mentality. Soon they will have to send in the troops somewhere to protect the sinking ship. Latin America ap­ pears the likely target However, regardless of the contingencies that may arise, recent events in China have clearly added fuel to an already inflammatory inter­ national situation. They have hastened the outbreak of the next world war.

CHINESE FASCISM

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW Inter-imperialist rivalry, the shifting sands ofbosses’ alliances, and profit wars are as old as cap­ italism. However, a new element has entered the picture. The So­ viet and Chinese emperors still insist on calling themselves com­ munists. Deng pointedly justified his crackdown as a necessary measure to squelch the counter­ revolutionaries. He and Gorbachev fear the wrath of mil­ lions who remember what life was like in a socialist society whose leaders sincerely wanted to achieve communism. There­ fore, like all craven opportunists, they still cling to the name or communism, just as Bush and the rest of the U.S. ruling class dem­ agogically wrap themselves in the flag of democracy. Thus, inter-imperialist com­ petition has spawned a new stage of worldwide anti-communism. As the Deng clique has most re­ cently proved, anti-communism, capitalism, and fascist brutality are absolutely interdependent. In the face of these develop­ ments, should communists and militant workers abjectly capitu­ late? Absolutely not! We have a mountain to climb, but we

CHINESE FASCISM_____________

mustn’t allow the task to daunt us.

As always, facts reveal them­ selves to be most stubborn things, and the facts show that the working class and humanity in general have strode forward only under communist leader­ ship. An article in this issue or the communist describes the brilliant achievements of Soviet society under Stalin’s leadership, despite many weaknesses and eventually fatal errors. Similar developments took place during the Chinese revolu­ tion and the GPCR. The energies of workers and peasants strained for a chance to win an egalitarian life. The Chinese working class, like its Soviet predecessors, showed the miracles humanity can perform when guided, how­ ever imperfectly, by communist principles.

REVOLUTION WILL DUMP ALL BOSSES ON THE DENG HEAP The recent struggle between the Deng/Li gang and the Zhao new money entrepreneurs was a heads-they-win-tails-we-lose

------------------------------------ PAGE 47 proposition for workers. Our class has nothing to gain by fos­ tering illusions about “lesserevil” plutocrats. By the same token, in the fac­ tories, on the forms, in the cities, in the schools and on the cam­ puses of their vast country, mil­ lions of Chinese workers and students must be comparing the greedy ruthlessness of their pres­ ent rulers to the honesty and self­ lessness that characterized life when China was a proletarian dictatorship. The re-emergence of a real left in China, of a revo­ lutionary communist party plan­ ning and organizing to win state power for the working class, is only a matter of time. Communism is still a better idea. It always will be. Our Party wants to grab the red flag away from sleaze merchants like Deng and Gorbachev. We have full confidence that workers and their allies in China, the Soviet Union, and everywhere else will want to do the same. Our class and our movement have a long and glorious history. We will eventually win because workers are the majority and because only communism can meet our needs. By A.T.

PAGE 48

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SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT Continued from page 12 its success lay in the radical trans­ formation of social relations.

Walter Reuther, who became a trusted anti-communist labor lieutenant of U.S. industry (the United Auto Workers president who, later, to protect his per­ sonal power, led the drive to sweep out of the union the very communists who placed him into leadership) in his youth was swept away by the promise of communism. He spent some time working in a Soviet auto factory. Writing to Detroit friends, Reuther compared labor’s conditions under Soviet socialism and capitalism: What you have written concern­ ing the strikes and the general labor unrest in Detroit...makes us long for the moment to be back with you in the front lines of struggle. However, the daily inspiration that is ours as we work side by side with our Rus­ sian comrades in our factory, the thought that we will forever end the exploitation of man by man, the thought that what we are building will be for the benefit and enjoyment of the working class, not only ofRussia, but of the entire world, is the compensation we receive for our temporary absence from the strug­ gle in the United States. And let no one tell you that we are not on the road to socialism in the Soviet

Union. Let no one say that the work­ ers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are not on the road to security, enlightenment, and happi­ ness... Here are no bosses to drive fear into the workers. No one to drive them in mad speed-ups. Here the workers are in control. Even the shop superintendent had no more right in these meetings than any other worker. I have witnessed many times already when the super­ intendent spoke too long. The work­ ers in the hall decided he had already consumed enough time and the floor was given to a lathe hand who told of his problems and offered suggestions. Imagine this at Ford or Briggs. This is what the outside world calls the “ruthless dictatorship in Russia.” I tell you...in all countries we have thus far been in we have never found such genuine proletar­ ian democracy... We are witnessing and experienc­ ing great things in the USSR. Weare seeing the most backward nation in the world being rapidly transformed into the most modern and and scien­ tific, with new concepts and ideals coming into force. We are watching, daily, socialism being taken down from the books on the shelves and put into actual application. Who would not be inspired by such events? (Bonosky, Phillip: Brother Bill McKee: Building the Union at Ford-, New York; 1953; pp 135-6) This “inspiration,” which was nothing other than political com­

STALIN’S SUCCESSES__________

mitment to Bolshevism, led to economic achievements that in any other society could only have been folk tale and legend. In 1929 (then the peak capital­ ist boom year), Soviet industry accounted for 3.8 percent of world production. By 1932, when the capitalist world had fallen into the deepest depres­ sion of its history, Soviet produc­ tion was 11 percent of world production. By 1936, it had risen to 15.2 percent of world prod­ uction. The third Five-Year Plan for socialist construction would have plausibly reached onethird ofworld output had the Sec­ ond World War not disrupted the process. British economist J. Miller, who studied the Soviet economy between 1936 and 1937, wrote: “...it (is) not an unrea­ sonable prediction that within the next generation the Soviet Union will be as powerful, industrially, as the rest of the world pul together" (Hewlett Johnson, The Soviet Power, p. 93). The capitalist world wallowed in the downside of its boom-bust “cycle.” By 1937 its combined in­ dustry had increased a measly 3.5 percent over 1929. On the other hand, total Soviet industrial pro­ duction grew by 371 percent, and modern large-scale industry alone reached 428 percent of the 1929 figure.

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PAGE 49

Workers’ Power The Reason

SOVIET WORKERS PROSPERED _______ WHEN CAPITALISM STARVED ITS WORKERS While tens of millions of work­ ers starved, lost their homes, or desperately sought relief in the U.S., Britain, and France; while wages in Hitler’s fascist “para­ dise” of 1937 declined by 21 per­ cent relative to 1929; while youth in the "advanced” capitalist na­ tions had little to do but hang around street corners, the workers’ dictatorship of the U.S.S.R. improved the quality of life as measured by any conceiv­ able yardstick.

Although we understand today that all types of wages inevitably reproduce capitalism, and that even socialist wages therefore cannot lead to communism, the structure of the wage system under Soviet socialism nonethe­ less dramatically improved the living standards of the working class. The average annual wage nearly doubled between 1929 and 1933 and nearly quadrupled between 1929 and 1937. During the same period, wages in the

EáGEJQ--------------------------------

_________ STAUN’S SUCCESSES

depression-ravaged capitalist countries shrank absolutely. The reality of improved Soviet living conditions flew in the face of imperialist lies about the “starving” Russian masses. Not only did Stalin’s government raise ■wages, but at the same time it consis­ tently lowered the prices of staple goods. Between 1934 and 1937 bread prices were lowered by more than half, butter the same; the price of eggs was cut by nearly three-quarters; prices for meat were slashed by 63 percent and for lump-sugar by 73 per­ cent. Social services boomed. Stalin’s 1938 budget increased maternity benefits by 30 percent over 1937. The number of fac­ tory workers and office-workers accommodated in rest homes and of children admitted to “Pio­ neer” camps increased in equally dramatic fashion. State expendi­ tures for workers’ cultural needs, social insurance, education, heal­ th insurance, and aid to mothers of large families were scheduled to rise by two-thirds between 1937 and 1942. (The fascistinva­ sion, of course, disrupted these plans.) The population increased. Child mortality plummeted. The number of kids in day care centers and kindergartens soared. Industrial accidents fell

by almost half. Cotton produc­ tion all but tripled. Grain produc­ tion doubled. All these developments took place while imperialist shills and scribblers shed buckets of croco­ dile tears over Stalin’s supposed “reign of terror.” Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, they protested too much, reveal­ ing their own guilt: the real reign of terror against workers was oc­ curring in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Hewlitt Johnson, one of the most important leaders of the Church of England aptly wrote, Fear haunts workers in a capitalist land. Fear of dismissal, fear that a thousand workless men stand out­ side the gate eager to get his job, breaks the spirit of a man and breeds servility. Fear of unemployment, fear of slump, fear of trade depres­ sion, fear of sickness, fear of impov­ erished old age lie with crushing weight on the mind of the worker. A few weeks’ wages only lies between him and disaster. He lacks reserves. (The Soviet Power, p.187).

With all its imperfections, the So­ viet proletarian state provided a life without the crushing burden of such fear. Everyone had the opportunity to work. Every child could go to school and learn. Decent, affordable hous­ ing was being built. Medical care was universally available. Sick-pay was guaranteed with no time-limit. Older workers could retire with pensions

STALINS SUCCESSES_________

-------------------------------- BASill

that allowed them to keep their dig­ nity.

where one finds numerous and ex­ cellently appointed nurseries and kindergartens. A network of schools covers the whole of this huge state, and their numbers are increasing with incredible rapidity. There are children’s playgrounds, children’s movies, children’s cafes, and excel­ lent children’s theaters. The older ones are taken care of by the univer­ sities, by innumerable courses in the various trades and in the collective economic system of the peasantry, and by the cultural centers of the Red Army. The physical conditions in which the Soviet youth grows up are more favorable than anywhere else in the world (Moscow 1937, p. 14).

BOLSHEVIKS GAVE YOUNG____________ “EVERYTHING HUMANLY__________ POSSIBLE“ Nothing characterizes a soci­ ety so aptly as its treatment of youth. Capitalism deals with young people in one of three ways: as labor to be super-ex­ ploited, as cannon-fodder for profit wars or as useless burdens best drugged or terrorized into submission. In the U.S. today, drugs are claiming teenagers’ lives in battlefield proportion. The national high school drop­ out rate exceeds one in four; in the major cities, one of two. Sui­ cide, accidents and child abuse are the leading causes of prema­ ture death among those younger than twenty-five. In stark contrast to this abys­ mal record, Soviet socialism in the 1930s treated the youth as its most precious asset, the legiti­ mate heir to the revolution. Con­ temporary observers like the author Lion Feuchtwanger wrote: Everything is done for the young that is humanly possible. Every-

In Road to Revolution IV, our Party’s operating strategic docu-, ment, we wrote: “Children will understand (the principle of col­ lectivity) the moment their senses awaken.” The giant labo­ ratory of Soviet education proved they could learn to do so. From the earliest years, Soviet infants were taught to work with others. Soviet educational psy­ chologists (unlike their modern racist U.S. counterparts, who are obsessed with proving the “ge­ netic inferiority” of the most op­ pressed workers’ children) devised tactics for getting tod­ dlers to co-operate with each other. For example, the bricks or cubes used for play were often purposely too large for a single child to handle. The child would

EASEJ1_____________________

_________ STALIN’S SUCCESSES

call a companion, and together they would build their play house. Collectivity became in­ stinctive. As Paul Robeson sang it, the Soviet song said: “To our youth now every door is open:” open through the spread of literacy; through the availability of excel­ lent, free schooling; through the many “Palaces of Youth,” with their free classes in ballet, sculp­ ture, history and geography, me­ chanical experimentation, aviation, short-wave transmis­ sion, and music; through the re­ creational facilities built next to every large factory and complex of small industries in the Union. No Soviet child languished in the city during summertime for lack of camp tuition. No child had to agonize over the future, to con­ template a choice among jail, fighting a rich man’s war or the unemployment lines. Within its economic limitations, Soviet social­ ism did morefor youth than any soci­ ety before or since.

ments of Soviet rule was socialism’s bold attempt to create new human relations within the working class. With a taste of communism on their lips, work­ ers discovered that they could throw off the yoke of backward­ ness imposed on them by centu­ ries of feudal and capitalist exploitation. Nowhere did this breakthrough de­ velop more spectacularly than in the revolutionary transformation of women's roles and status. Few societies had oppressed women more savagely than the Czarist Empire. In the Christian West, women were systemati­ cally treated as chattels. The church encouraged flogging disobedient wives. In the Moslem East, bridegrooms received whips as wedding gifts. A wife slept on the bare floor while her husband enjoyed the comfort of rugs on a couch and then kicked her upon awakening. All women in Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan were made to wear a foul, hot veil of horsehair (the paranja) to hide their faces from the world. The revolutionary movement that arose in 19th century Russia knew from the beginning that this hideous oppression could not continue if the fight for a new society were to succeed. Women revolutionaries organized and fought side by side with men.

BOLSHEVIKS LED

FIGHT FOR_________ WOMEN’S__________ FREEDOM. EQUALITY More significant yet than the breathtaking economic achieve-

STAUN‘S SUCCESSES_________

_____________________ EASL51

Men and women Bolsheviks lived communally in Czarist exile, sharing money and food. Women on the outside helped prisoners escape. In and out of jail, women revolutionaries stud­ ied science, the classics and Marxist theory in a time when women were generally kept un­ educated.. In 1905, on “Bloody Sunday," women demonstrators bled and died along with men in the brutal repression of the march on the Petrograd Winter Palace. When Kornilov’s White Army attacked Petrograd at the height of the Civil War, 200,000 women marched to the front. Women flung themselves with similar vigor and commitment into the task of building the new society. The socialist govern­ ment moved to eliminate every trace of laws and practices rele­ gating women to inferior status. The Soviet Constitution of 1938, which summarized Soviet practice up to then, and which was known as the "Stalin Consti­ tution,” guaranteed women "equal rights with men in all fields of economic, state, cul­ tural, social, and political life.” This was not an idle promise. Women were encouraged to become workers, a high status in the workers’ state. In 1937, 41 per cent of all students in workers’ faculties were women.

The Soviet Union had 100,000 women technicians and engi­ neers by 1940. Educational facil­ ities at all levels granted equal access to men and women. Ma­ ternity leave with full pay was made available both before and after confinement. New mothers had no worry about losing their jobs once they were ready to re­ turn to work. Nursing mothers who worked in factories could pause every three hours to feed their babies. Soviet society provided an ample supply of kindergartens, day care centers, nurseries, milk­ kitchens and playgrounds, as well as communal dining rooms at factories and elsewhere to allow women to work and abol­ ish housekeeping as “women’s work.” Under these conditions, working­ class women were able to exercise the freedom not only to help build the new society but also to help lead it. The victory over the veil (called the paranja) in Central Asia provides an inspiring example. Thousands of Bolshevik cadre, men and women, had moved east after the seizure of power to pave the way for socialism. Women communists played a decisive role in this process, entering the yurta (tents), sharing the horrible lives of Asian peasants, patiently winning them over to revolu-

EASLM_____________________

_________ STALIN'S SUCCESSES

tionary ideas. The paranja sym­ bolized the most oppressive as­ pects of the old life. It had to go. Finally, with the political work done, the time came for action.

liamentary body in the world could then boast a similar pro­ portion. In 1940, the President of Tashkent, the largest and most important city of Soviet Central Asia, was a woman who a few years before had been an illiter­ ate servant girl hidden beneath a paranja. So great were the strides made by millions of working class women under the Soviet prole­ tarian dictatorship that Clare Booth Luce (the most articulate of the right-wing feminists) wrote: “...Communism preaches and, since the Revolution of 1917, has tried to practice the inherent equality of men and wo­ men” (Life Magazine, June 28, 1963). Luce’s husband, Henry Luce, owned Life, Time, and Fortune magazines, and was among the most fervent of the cold warriors. Her views on the life and death struggle between communism and capitalism mirrored his. If anything, she wished to mini­ mize the accomplishments of so­ cialism. But she acknowledged that between 1929 and 1961, the number of Soviet women earn­ ing wages and salaries increased from 3,118,000 to 31,609,000; that between 1917 and 1961, the number of women engineers in­ creased from 600 to 379,000 (31% of all engineers in the

The Danish writer Fanina Halle describes the mass rejec­ tion of the paranja that the Com­ munist Party organized on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1928: On that day...tens of thousands of women, huddled in paranjas and chachvans poured like a menacing avalanche through the narrow choked streets, squares and bazaars of the ancient Central Asian cit­ ies...the vast multitude, including a number of men and children, gath­ ered around the Lenin monu­ ment...and the women waited breathlessly for what was to come..All the bands struck up the Internationale...(the paranjas) were flung aloft into the quivering air, timidly at first, but then with ever wilder and more frenzied speed, these symbols of slavery that the women cast off, paranjas, chachvans, and chadras. They were piled in rap­ idly growing heaps, drenched with paraffin, and soon the dark clouds of smoke from the burning common abjuration of a thousand year old convention, now become unbear­ able, flared up into the bright sky of the spring day... (Women in the Soviet East, cited in Johnson, p. 235) By 1940, 189 women—virtu­ ally all of proletarian or peasant origin—sat on the Supreme So­ viet of the U.S.S.R. No other par-

STAUN’S SUCCESSES_________

_____________________ PAQE-ii

U.S.S.R.); that 26% of the Su­ preme Soviet were women, and 20,000 Soviet villages were headed by women in 1961; and finally, that in the same year women comprised 74% of all So­ viet physicians and surgeons. Proletarian dictatorship has been reversed for more than three decades in the Soviet Union. Much of the progress women’s equality enabled the whole working class to make has dissipated. Divorce, promiscuity, alcoholism and other capitalist diseases now characterize Soviet society. The “new woman” of perestroika is a starlet who takes off her clothes for Playboy and anyone else with a camera and a few bucks. Yet beneath the sur­ face of this travesty looms the collective memory of millions who recall how Bolshevism smashed the paranja. A new day will come once again

and abroad—against all forms of racism. Ultimately, these strug­ gles failed, because of a flawed strategy. In the tradition estab­ lished by Marx and Engels, the Bolsheviks thought that national oppression could be defeated by promoting nationalism among the oppressed. Lenin, Stalin, and others acknowledged that na­ tionalism was in essence reac­ tionary. They thought, however, that certain temporary conces­ sions to it were necessary. These concessions fell into the same logic as the line that wages and social stratification had to be preserved during socialism. Na­ tionalism is the antithesis of communism: it subordinates class interests to “national” in­ terests and therefore promotes all-class unity to serve one ex­ ploiter or another. For example, the Jews whom the Soviets could not win to as­ similate received the District of Birobijan in the Far East as a “homeland”— twenty years be­ fore the state of Israel was estab­ lished. Birobijan was replicated in dozens of cases for other na­ tionalities. The idea must have sounded good at the time: why not allow each nationality to forge its own separate development as it built socialism? But the contradic­ tions of socialism guaranteed

COMMUNIST-LED WORKERS* STATE FIRST GOVERNMENT IN HISTORY TO MAKE RACISM ILLEGAL____________ Soviet socialism also con­ ducted great struggles—at home

EAGEJA_____________________

_________ STALIN’S SUCCESSES

that the nationalist aspect be­ came primary over the working­ class aspect, not only in the individual “autonomous” repub­ lics but also throughout the U.S.S.R. as a whole. Thus, when the Soviets established these “au­ tonomous” republics and regions they unwittingly set the stage for capitalist restoration, for resurg­ ant Great Russian nationalism and for the current wave of ultra­ rightwing chauvinist “indepen­ dence” movements behind local bosses in Armenia, Azerbidjian, Georgia, the Baltic states and elsewhere. Despite nationalism the Bol­ sheviks during the Stalin period nonetheless broke new ground in attempting to liberate their so­ ciety from the appalling human cost of racist division within the working class. Czarist Russia had been a swamp of deliberately fostered racism. The weaker the Czar grew, the more his government promoted “divide and rule” tac­ tics. In the Empire’s eastern re­ gions dark-skinned workers and peasants had to bear oppression and indignity in every way wor­ thy of the U.S. slave states or South Africa. In the west, violent pogroms periodically terrorized and massacred Russian Jews. In one bold stroke, under Lenin’s leadership the Bolshevik

government declared all forms of racism to be illegal and then imposed severe penalties for vio­ lating this principle. Unlike the U.S. today, where the rulers hyp­ ocritically prattle about constitu­ tional equality and then engage in the most vicious racist prac­ tices imaginable, the Soviet gov­ ernment under Stalin vigilantly enforced this strong anti-racist policy. On several occasions in the 1930s and 1940s, the black American writer Langston Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union. Having extensively, and courageously, denounced Jim Crow in the U.S., he was curious to see if the workers’ dictatorship could build a multi-racial society. He found overwhelming affir­ mative evidence. In 1934, Hughes rode a train to the Soviet East. He struck a conversation with a fellow passenger:

..... a man almost as brown as I am...Some Asiatic factory worker who has been to Moscow on a vaca­ tion, I think. We talk a little. He asks me what I do for a living, and I ask him what he does. I am a writer. He is the mayor of Bokhara, the Chair­ man of the City Soviet! I make a note in the back of my mind, “In the So­ viet Union dark men are also the mayors of cities...” In the course of our conversation, I learned that there were many cities in Central Asia where dark men and women are

STALING SUCCESSES_________

in control of the government. And I thought about Mississippi, where more than half the population is Negro, but one never hears of a col­ ored person in the government... ("Going South in Russia," in Portrait Against Background, p. 77) The laws against racial intoler­ ance stemmed from the proletar­ ian internationalism that had been a characteristic of Bolshe­ vik theory and practice from the outset. Contrary to the lies and vilification still prevalent in the capitalist press that Lenin and Stalin were anti-Semites, under their leadership the Soviet Com­ munist Party and the Soviet Union provided leadership to the entire world in the fight to smash anti-Semitism. In 1913, Lenin had written: The school, the press, the Parlia­ mentary Tribune—everything and anything is being utilized in order to sow ignorant, evil and savage hatred against the Jews. In this black­ guardly business there engage not only the scum of the Black Hun­ dreds, but also reactionary profes­ sors, scientists, journalists, deputies, etc. Millions, even milliards of rubles are spent in order to poison the mind of the people (cited in The So­ viet Power, p. 289).

Stalin seconded this view. “Communists,” he stated, “as consistent internationalists, can­ not fail to be irreconcilable and sworn enemies of anti-Semitism” (ibid., p. 289). Soviet socialism de-

------------------------------------ EASL5Z stroyed the ghettoes that had im­ prisoned Jewish workers since the Middle Ages. The new society made vigorous efforts to become multi-racial and multi-national. Its military arm especially achieved great success in this re­ gard. The Red Army that went forth to destroy Nazism was ...an international army. Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Mongols, Jews, Georgians, and so on, men [and women] of scores of races, are found among its high officers. Racial barri­ ers are not permitted to block indi­ vidual advancement. As this principle also applies in Soviet soci­ ety, the conscripts are highly literate and intelligent. (Edgar Snow, Peo­ ple on Our Side, p. 214) At the height of World War II] in the midst of the most barba­ rous racist slaughters in history, Stalin took pains to underscore the political character of the struggle against the Hitlerites: ...the strength of the Red Army lies...in the fact that it does not and cannot feel racial hatred for other peoples, including the German peo­ ple; that it has been trained to recog­ nize the equality of all peoples and races, and to respect the rights of other poples (ibid., p. 189).

One should not romanticize the accomplishments of Soviet anti-racism. With the wisdom of hindsight, the futility of attempt­ ing to build internationalism on a base of supposedly “progres-

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_________ STALIN'S SUCCESSES

sive” nationalism appears obvi­ ous. Supposedly tactical conces­ sions to nationalism were in fact routs. The Soviets fought World War II ultimately on a nationalist basis. “Mother Russia” became the rallying cry over interna­ tional proletarian revolution. The national-chauvinist policies of the contemporary Soviet bosses have deep roots in the seemingly innocent nationalism of socialism’s earlier period. The widespread revival of fanatical, Czarist-style anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union today is no ac­ cident. Nationalism begets rac­ ism. There even is an organization, the Pamyat. This Klan clone calls for expelling Jews from the country, demands the listing ofJewish bureaucrats, bewails the demise of Russian “racial purity,” and proposes vi­ olent, Nazi-style solutions to the “problem.” All this is part of glasnost. The communist movement has digested the error of nation­ alism and today can conduct anti­ racist struggle on more solid ideological ground than the Sov­ iets did under Stalin’s leadership. The fight against racism no longer need turn into its oppo­ site. By the same token, while our Party recognizes the deadly con­ sequences of nationalism in all its

forms and while we refuse to sen­ timentalize Soviet socialism’s achievements or minimize its weaknesses, facts are facts. Within the framework of its severe limita­ tions, the U.S.S.R. in the Stalin pe­ riod advanced anti-racist consciousness and the principle of multi-racial unity to levels hitherto undreamt in human history. No other society could have with­ stood and then destroyed the Nazis’ genocidal onslaughts. In the Soviet experience of anti-rac­ ist struggle, there is much to crit­ icize— and also much to emulate.

THE RED ARMY With all its politial shortcom­ ings, inevitably reflecting those of socialism itself, the Red Army must be ranked among the So­ viet Union’s most stunning achievements. Its virtually sin­ gle-handed defeat of the Nazi ar­ mies during World War II assumes added luster when one takes into account the true rela­ tionship of forces at the moment of the Nazi invasion. The standard myth popular­ ized by U.S. and British imperi­ alist apologists attributes the Soviet victory to the availability of limitless human hordes used as cannon-fodder, and vast stocks of U.S. donated arms. This ex-

STALIN’S SUCCESSES_________

_____________________ EASEJi

hausted the enemy. Russian win­ ters also get a big play in these fairy tales—as if the weather had been warmer for the communists than for Nazis. The opposite of the racist “horde” lie is in fact the case. The Nazi invasion represented far more than an onslaught of an “outnumbered” seventy million Germans against one hundred ninety million Russians. In real­ ity, almost all of Europe as­ saulted the USSR in June 1941,a total of 310 million people. The Germans had been on a war foot­ ing for a full year and a half, and had overrun the rest of Europe before turning on the Soviet Union. Hitler had at his disposal one hundred eighty million Ger­ mans and active German allies and one hundred thirty million conquered people whose labor power, albeit unwillingly, aided the fascist war effort. With his vast labor reserves, Hitler could mobilize an army numbering be­ tween fifteen and eighteen mil­ lion troops. The Soviets could mobilize about ten million troops. A mil­ lion of these were needed in the Soviet Far East and on the Af­ ghan, Iranian, and Turkish bor­ ders, more than offsetting the Nazis’ need for troops to occupy western Europe. Nazi manpower superiority at the time of the invas-

ion can therefore be reckoned as three to two. The quality of Soviet materiel was second to none. As far back as 1935 Nazi General Guderian noted the superiority of Soviet tanks and tractors. Nazi Colonel von Bulow praised the high tech­ nical level of Soviet war planes and cited the USSR’s capacity to continue military production in­ definitely for a protracted war. Nonetheless, Germany invaded the Soviet Union enjoying a 5:2 quantitative superiority in the hard­ ware of warfare, thanks to Hitler’s previous victories. The Nazis had inherited the rest of Europe’s arsenal practically in­ tact and controlled Europe’s en­ tire war industry. Within the first month of the invasion, however, the Nazi blitz­ krieg was stalled. The Red Army suffered massive losses but couldn’t be knocked out in the first round. On the contrary: it gave better than it got. At its fast­ est, the blitzkrieg never ex­ ceeded fifty percent of the Nazis’ rate of advance in conquering western Europe. By the end of the war’s third month, the Hitler­ ites had lost one-third of their original invading force and equipment By the fourth month the Red Army stopped the Wehrmacht at Smolensk for an entire month. By the fifth month

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_________ STALIN’S SUCCESSES

the Nazis had been slowed to one-sixth of their initial rate. The war’s essential course had been determined before the end of 1941. Although the turning point was to come months later during the heroic battle ofStalin­ grad, and although the Soviet working class needed a Herculean collective effort to win, the beginning of the end had already appeared. The Nazis lost because the So­ viets, though tainted with nation­ alism and other capitalist poisons, fought to uphold com­ munism as they understood it. The fascist army that invaded the USSR was deeply committed to Hitler’s genocidal ideology. This commitment had sustained it during the days of easy victory over capitalist opponents. But the Wehrmacht bit the dust largely because the Soviet Union’s forces enjoyed over­ whelming ideological superior­ ity.

museums, will halt further improve­ ment and progress and strip them of their freedom and of other values that make their life worth living. This is thoroughly understood from the top-ranking marshall down to the company cook. This conscious­ ness is part of the Red Army morale, which is part and parcel of the mo­ rale of the whole nation (Sergei N. Kourashoff, Russia’s Fighting Forces, p. 107

Hitler’s troops fought to con­ quer "living space” for the "mas­ ter race.” The Soviet troops, though enveloped in a national­ ist cloud, fought for the glimpse of communism that a generation of socialist life had given them: Men, officers, and generals alike, understand that any conqueror will rob them of their collectively owned factories, farms, schools, theaters,

Edgar Snow echoes this senti­ ment, when he cites Solomon Lozovsky, assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs, during an in­ terview given in 1942:

Why do the Russians fight so hard and how can they go on fighting today, that is what Americans want to know, is it so? Listen, Americans did not understand us in the past. Some were influenced by lies about us; they would not believe the truth. That is why they judged wrong about us. Now they see how our peo­ ple fight and they realize there is something here is Russia which keeps them going. Do you want to know what that is? The answer is that the revolution has created here a new social consciousness and that men and women in this country have something to fight for, to die or to live for,as the case may be, but to fight for! (Edgar Snow, op. cit., p. 70, emphasis ours) Armed with a vision, however murky, of a communist future, and with a feeling of national sol­ idarity, the Red Army troops had little anxiety about the welfare of their families in the rear or the

STALIN’S SUCCESSES__________

-------------------------------- BAGLAI

intensity of effort being put forth to aid the war on the home front. Venereal disease, a scourge in the imperialist armies, was al­ most totally unknown. “Battle fa­ tigue” (war neurosis), epidemic in the western military, was min­ imal in the Red Army. (Snow, op. cit., p. 136). As the men went off to the front, women replaced them in every conceivable job. Women engineers constructed the de­ fense works; women became pol­ ice, locomotive drivers, miners, and steel workers. Youth rapidly matured under these conditions, and most sixteen year olds could perform any task. Children be­ tween the ages of twelve and fif­ teen did one-third an adult’s work share. Other than the in­ firm and very old, non-producers were unknown during the war. Women and children partici­ pated in the fighting, on the front, as well as among the parti­ sans in the occupied territories. Even craven imperialist shills like Harrison Salisbury had to marvel at the skill, and commit­ ment with which thirteen-year old Soviet Jewish boys became guerrillas, taking up the gun to kill Nazis (Russia on the Way, Pp. 233 ff.). Edgar Snow tells the moving story of three young women guerrillas, Panya, Liza, and Kenya, who had seen

...crimes committed by the Nari« in their neighborhood...murders and hangings, rape as a daily occurrence, torture and all the rest of it. Many of the victims were their own friends (op. cit., pp.175-6). When asked by Snow if she had ever killed a man, Panya replied simply, “Not a man, exactly. I’ve killed some Nazis...I was proud that I could bring vengeance on them (op. cit., p.175).” Yet her hatred and that of her comrades was in some sense a class hatred. Liza pointed out: “We are fighting only Hitlerites, and we don’t want to exterminate the good Germans. Our best machine gunner is a German and we like and trust him. He is afine man”(op. cit., p. 175). Only some­ one influenced by communist ideas could make such a state­ ment.

BOLSHEVIKS NOT AFRAID TO ARM___ THE PEOPLE________ The Soviet concept of anti-fas­ cist struggle was “unusually sim­ ple and staggeringly grandiose” (Kourashoff, op. cit., p. 207). Ba­ sically, it regarded the entire country as the theater of war and every Soviet citizen as a soldier. Non-combatants worked fever­ ishly to guarantee production. The fighting forces themselves

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_________ STALIN’S SUCCESSES

were divided into three distinct but complementary groups: the Red Army, fighting in the front zone; the guerrilla army, spread­ ing havoc throughout the Nazi rear; and the armed population, denying the fascists access to the Soviet rear. The concept of the Soviet people in arms is not wellknown in the West and merits mention. The magnitude of the Soviet war effort cannot be com­ prehended otherwise. Stalin had figured since the 1919 War of Intervention that the imperialists would not give up their dreams of reconquering Russia and smashing socialism. The only issue in doubt was whether the second invasion would involve as much inter-cap­ italist unity as the first, and So­ viet diplomacy was devoted to splitting the Soviet camp. In any event, the Soviet Union had to prepare. Contrary to the re­ hashed lies of vulgar western anti-communists who pretend that the Soviet people mysteri­ ously rose up all of a sudden in 1941 despite their leaders, his­ tory shows that these leaders had meticulously planned for war since the 1930s. They tried to avoid war, but they also prepared to fight to win if war was imposed on them. Production for war formed a key element of the plan. Defense

appropriations rose from 395 million rubles in 1924 to 34 bil­ lion in 1938. The Red Army’s motor component (the number of mechanical horsepower per soldier) rose from 2.6 in 1929 to 13.8 by the end of 1938. Soviet tractor plants were constructed to be easily convertible into tank plants. Starting from scratch, by 1935-6, the U.S.S.R. already boasted seventy-four aircraft fac­ tories, of which the most impor­ tant group was situated well beyond the reach of enemy bombers. Therefore, Soviet tank and aircraft production had been guaranteed six years before the invasion. The most impressive aspect of socialist preparations for war, however, remained the human side. Right after the invasion, So­ viet ability to wage guerrilla op­ erations in the Nazi rear proved decisive. How was such activity possible? “How is it,” asked mili­ tary historian Sergei Kourashoff, “that plain peasants, working men, clerks, teachers, and such can pit their strength against the mighty Wehrmacht? Where did they learn the use of modern arms?” (op. cit., p. 204). The answer is simple. For years beforehand the Soviet gov­ ernment had armed, trained, and organized the entire popula­ tion for total war in the future.

STAUN'S SUCCESSES_________

_____________________ EASEJ3.

The main government organiza­ tion carrying out this task was the Osoaviakhim ("Voluntary Soci­ ety for Assistance to the Air Force and Chemical Defense"). Its membership numbered fifteen million. It carried out military training among all sections of the Soviet population, particularly among youth. Instruction was provided by army reserve offi­ cers and included marksman­ ship, horse cavalry skills, aviation, parachuting, skiing, and other military sports. In 1938, six million adults and mil­ lions more youth had won riflery badges. The skills of Soviet parti­ sans in all aspects of guerrilla warfare were due in large part to this training.

The Osoaviakhim existed. It did all these things and more, and no objective historian denies these facts. The conclusion is in­ escapable. The Soviet government was not afraid to arm its people. It was not afraid to teach its people military science. It welcomed these de­ velopments and considered them nec­ essary. It had full confidence in the majority of the population, and this attitude was reciprocated. Such a re­ lationship between government and people is absolutely inconsistent with the absurd premise that Stalin ruled like a "despot" and that his power emanatedfrom the intimidation ofthe masses.

This brings up an important point. Anti-communists have spilled gallons of ink bemoaning the “terror” to which the Soviet people were subjected in the Sta­ lin period. But facts are facts, and as Stalin often pointed out, their own logic has infinitely greater coherence than the logic of mere words. Either the Osoaviakhim ex­ isted or it didn’t. Either it trained millions of civilians in the arts of war or it didn’t. Either it trans­ formed collective farms and fac­ tories into miniature military bases in peacetime or it didn’t.

OUR TERRORISM “OK.” SAY THE CAPITALISTS The question of terror cannot be avoided in assessing the ac­ complishments and shortcom­ ings of Soviet socialism during the Stalin period. Cold warriors and other capitalist shills wring their hands and write elegies lamenting the millions of lives allegedly snuffed out by Stalinist brutality or wasted in Stalinist slave labor camps. Entire gener­ ations of children in the U.S. and western Europe have been taught since the end of World

PAGE 64-------------------------------

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War II to believe that Stalin com­ mitted more murders than any dictator in world history, even more than Hitler. Imperialism has created a Stalin devil-cult more fanatical than most reli­ gions. The supposed reasons for the alleged terror were the resistence to the various stages of ag­ ricultural collectivization and the internal batle fought in the So­ viet Communist Party during the period known as the “purge tri­ als.” An exhaustive analysis of these events lies beyond the scope of the present article. However, certain general conclusions are inescapable. The Soviet Union during this period was indeed a dictatorship, a dictatorship of the proletariat, the first in history to hold power and organize society. As the foregoing pages have demonstrated, never before had workers anywhere enjoyed such broad democracy or stood at the threshold of such vast material and cultural power. The U.S.S.R. was a revolution­ ary state, and revolution, as Mao Zedong succinctly pointed out, is not a tea party. It is a protracted, violent struggle during the course of which one class wrests power from another and then at­ tempts to rule society in its own interests. The displaced exploit-

ers inevitably act with the sav­

agery of cornered rats as the des­ peration of their predicament increases. At first, as we have already pointed out, the Czarist forces joined with fourteen capitalist nations to snuff out the socialist revolution in its infancy. It bears repeating that seven million Soviet men, women, and children died from violence, starvation, or dis­ ease directly attributable to the 1919-21 War of Intervention. Yet the CIA’s anti-communist chorus led by Brzezinski, Sidney Hook (before his recent death) and Robert Conquest sing no la­ ments over these massacres

The fledgling Soviet Union was by far the most backward of the world’s powers. The back­ bone of the old society had been the peasantry, which toiled under conditions not much dif­ ferent from the Middle Ages. So­ cialism required modern, collective agricultural production. Within the limitations of their line, the Bolsheviks attempted to win the peasantry politically to this perspective. But a stratum of the peasantry had class interests contradictory to the new ap­ proach. These were the so-called “rich” peasants, the “kulaks," who owned some land and means

STALIN'S SUCCESSES_________

______________________ PAGE 65

of production and who therefore had a stake in capitalism. The question resolved itself through force of arms. The dicta­ torship of the proletariat fought the recalcitrant kulaks. There was bloodshed. Some kulaks died. The government impris­ oned and exiled others. Exact numbers are impossible to ob­ tain. Some anti-communist min­ strels wail about the many millions who languished in slave labor camps. Other died-in-thewool right wingers with a passion for professional “objectivity," have disproved these fantasies. For example, in May, 1948, Pro­ fessor N.S. Timasheff of the Jesuit Fordham University (not exactly a haven for the Left, much less for admirers of Stalin) attempted to reckon the 1938 So­ viet prison population by calcu­ lating the discepancy between the number of voters and the number of disenfranchised per­ sons. ("The Postwar Population of the Soviet Union." in The Amer­ ican Journal of Sociology Vol. 54, 1948) Timasheff calculated the dif­ ference between all those older than eighteen, and those who voted, as being two percent of the population, or 3.3 million peo­ ple. This was the number of “dis­ enfranchised persons.” He further estimated about a million

of these to be insane persons and persons deprived by the courts for non-political reasons of their electoral rights. “The rest,” he writes, “about two million, must be slave labor [Timasheffs term] in other words, inmates of prison camps” (p. 150). Timasheff also estimated that the number of prisoners in labor camps had hardly increased ten years later, in 1948. Using similar methodology thirty years later, another scholar, S.G. Wheatcroft, con­ firmed Timasheffs figures. Wheatcroft further demon­ strated that the number of per­ sons in Soviet labor camps during that period could not, even in the most outlandish of scenarios, exceed “four or five million."("On Assessing the Size of Forced Concentration Camp Labor in the Soviet Union, 1929­ 56," Soviet Studies, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2, April 1981, p. 286). Considering the stakes and the growing imperialist threat Wheatcroft’s speculative figure of four or five million (an admit­ ted outermost extreme) appears modest. By comparison, one should look at the "democratic” racist U.SjL, which had the greatest adult prison population of any country in the world at the end of 1985,2.9 million (New York Times,

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_________ STALIN’S SUCCESSES

January 2,1987). Today it stands at well over 3.5 million, and is expected to increase by more than 100 percent over the next decade.

Woman in the Soviet Union, Putnam, 1935, p. 129).

How many workers and peas­ ants would have starved to death, how many would have fallen prey to disease and all the rav­ ages of the old system had the Five Year Plans (for which collec­ tivization was key) not been im­ plemented? How many millions more would have fallen victim to Hitler’s genocide had the Soviet Union failed to organize both its industry and its agriculture for the coming war? The issue can be judged only from this perspec­ tive: The Russian peasant who saw disadvantage to himself and his fam­ ily in joining the collective farms, who distrusted his neighbors, either their integrity, their intelligence or their willingness to work, who habit­ ually and by years of hard labor had learned to rely on his own efforts and to take for himself what he could lay hands upon, fought hard and lost The peasant who caught the vision of a new political economy and a new society, who recognized the individual weakness of himself and his neighbors, who decided that one might better trust one’s neigh­ bors than the unkind Russian ele­ ments, fought equally hard; and with the fervor of a new faith, he won. (Susan M. Kingsbury and Mil­ dred Fairchild: Factory, Family, and

The greatest weakness in the collectivizations was not the amount of state violence directed against the right-wingers. The main error lay within the collec­ tivization process itself: social­ ism, by definition, perpetuated wages, material incentives, and therefore capitalist class rela­ tions. But large sections of the peasantry had shown their read­ iness to act upon the communist concept of equality and upon po­ litical incentives. Once again, the very limitations of the line, of the party, and of socialism itself, inevitably fostered new capitalist forms from within. These, and not the justifiable, necessary vio­ lence of the proletarian dictator­ ship against its class enemies, was the new society’s Achilles heel.

DEFENSE OF THE REVOLUTION IS “UNCIVILIZED TERROR“___________ SAY THE___________ CAPITALISTS The second article of faith on which the anti-Stalin demonol­ ogy rests is the supposed “reign of terror" that the Soviet Com-

STALIN’S SUCCESSES_________

___________________ PAgE»•>•»»

I— ** —■ *

«

PAGE 4«

and take out an enemy leader, preferably the biggest boor we could find. As we began our gal­ lop up the hill, our group-of-three leader pulled the two of us back, yelling: “Hey, wait upl I’m in charge here; I go first!” I was only third-in-command, thank god, and figured I could always rely on my numbers one and two. But as we met the enemy at the hilltop— since #1 insisted on beingfirstand because I was slower than #2—I got there just in time to see the two of them being arrested by mo­ torcycle cops who had tried to out­ flank us after they became astonishingly aware that we were advancing up the hill before ROAR had a chance to charge down it But I didn’t have the luxory to contemplate the irony of my situ­ ation because I found myself face­ to-chin with a hockey-stick -wielding behemoth about to beat my brains in, and I now knew why I’d always hated hockey. Instinc­ tively I deflected the miserable stick with my left hand and whipped my unrolled belt at his disbelieving face with my right Bleeding profusely from his puffy cheek, eyes agape in awe, he fled, dropping the hockey-stick, which I quickly picked up for the first and only time in my life, and which I naturally started using as if it were a more familiar baseball bat. As usual, I kept striking air only, but I nevertheless managed to empty the space around me of

TAKING COLOMBIA POINT

enemies. How pleased I was to see them stepping over one another back down the other side of the hill away from the parking lot beaten back toward the projects!

Next I noticed that this helterskelter retreat was the pattern along the breadth of the hill, as by now all the cops were huffing to regroup behind us to block our return to the sound truck. I sensed my horror become elation when I felt the presence of the fattest beast in blue barreling up at me—baton drawn but gun bol­ stered. I knew that evn slow­ footed me would be able to bend below his blkoated belly and dis­ appear safely down the hill. I hurredly helped to gather those of us who hadn’t been arrest4ed or disabled so we could regroup for the counterattack which never came because by this time the buses—some with shattered win­ dows but most unscathed—were rolling into the untaken parking lot and red-hatted reinforce­ ments disembarked to guarantee the starting point’s security for good.

Now that I found myself the titu­ lar head of the growing security forces, I followed the pattern in­ stilled in me throughout the pre­ paring for and carry ing out of this assignment: I did what I could my­ self, and relied on others to do what I couldn’t or didn’t know how to do. Through quick and ongoing consultations with other arriving Party leaders, whatever

TAKING COLOMBIA POINT

hesitancies I had about following through to ensure the integrity of the march itself dissolved as I sub­ sumed any lingering fears and doubts in the Heroic We phe­ nomenon I saw unfolding around me. Incoming comrades swarmed around the sound truck, con­ gratulated us for successfully de­ fending the command post, and took initiative after initiative to see to it that the personal safety and communal spirit of all our members and friends were main­ tained. There was no need for me myself to solve every problem that was fast developing, or answer every question that was being asked. The Party Collective exhibited an almost instantaneous creativity under these still-tense conditions. But the main factor was that our mass heroism, based on our com­

PAGE 47

mitment to egalitarian commu­ nism, melted away the enemy’s menacec and made May Day 1975 a signal event in my life particu­ larly and in the life of the PRO­ GRESSIVE LABOR PARTY in general. A few comrades, it is true, ran up and down Colombia Point Hill, fought valientiy there, and then left the Party due to the rude, rough awakening of the threat of fascism that the day’s events rep­ resented. But most of us twenty five defenders ofMay Day '75 have remained active PL’ers. The three of us, in fact, who were given the opportunity to lead this action are still responsible—these seventeen years later—in important ways for securing our Party’s survival and growth under any and all condi­ tions of fascism.

ByC.P.

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH “How’s business?” “It’s dead.”

Since 1980 this has perfectly de­ scribed all of Latin America’s tradi­ tional exportbased capitalist economies. It is why Latin Ameri­ can economists call this the “dead time.” Nowhere is it deader than in Peru. Between 1988 and 1991 total Peru­ vian economic output shrank 30%. By 1991 traditional exports had fallen to onethird what they were worth in 1975. Workers' living condi­ tions were cut in half. The political system shriveled with the economy, as the main parties, each representing a different faction of property, failed to figure out how to get the world market to accept its commodi­ ties. Even the traditional “Left” tried. Bankrupt ideas, bankrupt econ­ omy—they go hand in hand.

But it is not true that capitalism doesn’t work at all in Peru. Only traditional capitalism is in crisis. The capitalists are able to make one part of their system work—the cocaine business. They just don’t like to talk about it But cocaine is Peru’s largest industry. Roughly 15% of the entire Peruvian workforce is employed in the coca trade.1 Coca paste

1

Andreas and Sharpe, “Cocaine Politics in the Andes,” in Current History,

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

PAGE 49

accounts for anywhere from 33% to 70% of the country’s total ex­ ports (estimates of the value of this illegal export naturally vary.)2

next 25 years the business system forced another nearly 5.5 million working people to move to Lima to try to earn a living.

Drug trade dollars finance Peru’s imports.3 Drug trade dollars are

Today nearly eight million (almost all desperately poor workers) are jammed into Lima and more keep arriving every day in a search for paid work. They are forced to live in a series of shantytowns, each of several hundred thousand popu­ lation, thrown up on garbage dumps, or on any bit of vacant land thay can seize. There is no housing, no schools, no sewers, no public transport, no garbage collection, no electricity, no in­ door plumbing, and—because Lima is in the middle of a desert— no water. And, of course, despite the workers’ needs and hopes, there are no jobs. Unemployment and underemployment for Peru as a whole is over 90%.

soaked up by the Peruvian Central Bank and the rest of the govern­ ment owned banking system to the tune of up to US$4.7 billion per year, and are used by the gov­ ernment to service the country’s US$21 billion foreign debt (prin­ cipally to pay USA banks)4 and as

collateral for more loans. Imagine what it must be like to be a worker forced to earn a living in Peru. If you are not a farm worker or a miner you have to live in Lima. That is where the capital­ ists have put the jobs. Nearly everything manufactured in Peru is produced in Lima. Lima is also the national capital and most of the white coller jobs are located there as well. So Lima is bursting at the seams. From a population of just under 230,000 in 1920, Lima mushroomed to 2.4 million by 1964. But that is nothing. In the

Lima’s poor cannot even afford charity. A typical network of soup kitchens in one shantytown (called Villa El Salvador) gets its food from U.S., Spanish, Cana-

February, 1992, page 77 shining path,”

2

Phillip Smith, “Grappling with 1991, page 95

3

U.S. Department of Commerce, Peru, U.S. Government Document 1234C, 1991, page 12

4

Andreas and Sharp, ibid, page 78

in New Politics, December

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH .

PAGE 50 dian and Italian “aid" agencies. Despite the feet that it gets free food, the soup kitchen network scandalously and outrageously charges 30 cents a meal. This may seem cheap, but it isn't. The net­ work’s manager told the New York Times, “Eating in a soup kitchen is becoming a luxury. About 65 per­ cent of Villa’s population [which is 320,000] eat in soup kitchens. A lot of the rest can’t afford it” 5

more than the highland Indian workers. The Indian workers can expect to be dead by the time they are 45; the mestizo workers live a little longer.

Still, all things considered, living in Lima is better than living any­ where else in Peru. That is why, outside of Lima, Peru is pretty sparsely populated. Eight million are crammed into Lima. Thirteen million are spread throughout the rest of this immense area.6

If you were forced to earn a Uving in Peru, you would be trapped in a racist capitalist system which over the years has been domi­ nated by one social class—Spanish-speaking, European-cultured, white, Lima-based owners of huge country estates, descendants of the 16th-century Spanish con­ querors. This class was dominated first by Spain’s rulers, then by English bankers and finally by U.S. bankers (Italian and Japa­ nese bankers playing a smaller part up to now.)

Living on the coast (where Span­ ish-speaking, mostly mestizo workers live, as do black and Chi­ nese workers) is easier than living in the Andean highlands (where mostly Quechua-speaking Indian workers Uve.) The coastal mestizo workers are paid seven times

The Peruvian ruling class made its money by enslaving workers in a racist system and playing ball with the international bankers. If the bankers wanted to lend money to develop phosphate, rubber, cotton or copper exports, the Peruvian rulers obligingly bor­

5

6

New York Times, April 15, 1992, page 12

Peru is pretty big. It is as big as all of Mexico from the Rio Grande to below Mexico City (an area in which 52 million people live). It is as big as Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany combined (where 213 million people live.) It is as big as all the eastern states of the USA from Maine to Florida put together, with West Virginia and Tennessee thrown in (where 96 milUon live.) It is as big as the West Coast of the USA—Washington, Oregon and California, with half of Arizona added (an area where 35 millón live.)

PAGE 51

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

rowed the money and had their workers expand phosphate, rub­ ber, cotton or copper production until the bottom fell out of these markets. (This had no connection with the needs of Peru’s working people. For example, these huge farm-owners always imported food since it was more profitable for them to grow cotton for ex­ port than to grow food to eat This raised the price of food sky high, but that didn’t bother the land­ owners—they could afford it. Only the farm workers starved.) When the bankers wanted to lend money to build unnecessary rail­ roads, the Peruvian rulers bor­ rowed the money and their workers built railroads to no­ where. (But no road or rail system adequate for the Peruvian work­ ing people’s needs for transport and communications was ever built.) It was in this way, by bor­ rowing for projects whose only benefit was the profits they pro­ duced for the elite, that the gov­ ernment built up a US$21 billion foreign debt

In the view of the U.S. govern­ ment, “It is a fact of life that..the country is on the edge of disas­ ter. ”7 Are they kidding? The Peru­

the business class, not the working class, that is the U.S. govern­ ment’s concern. The “disaster” the U.S. government is worried about is communism. What the U.S. officials mean is that if the breakdown of traditional capital­ ism alone could produce a com­ munist revolution, there would be one in Peru. But as it happens, a communist revolution requires communists. That doesn’t mean anyone who chooses to call himself or herself a communist. It means MarxistLeninists organized in a party with correct ideas of what commu­ nism is and of how working peo­ ple can transform their ideology and take steps to reorganize their society from capitalist to commu­ nist Is there such a party, with such a line, in Peru? (Communists are not like Christian evangelists, who can promise anything they want in heaven. The evangelists will never be tested. No one will ever be able to prove they are wrong. But communists who win power have about twenty years to make good on their plans. If you do the wrong things, a new ex­ ploitative class structure emerges, and you are back to square one.)

vian working people have long been buried in disaster. But it is

7

U.S. Department of Commerce, ibid, page 11

PAGE 52 A BRIEF HISTORY OF SHINING PATH Now, since May 17, 1980 there has been an armed revolt in Peru led by an organization calling it­ self the Communist Party of Peru, but known more popularly as the Sendero Luminoso, or SHINING PATH.8 SHINING PATH claims it now rules “liberated areas” in which 30% of the Peruvian people live.9

This achievement cost some 24,000 lives (most murdered in cold blood by the reactionary government army and its death squads.) The SHINING PATH originated in 1959, when a group of young pro­ fessors teaching at the university in the southern mountain city of Ayacucho joined the Peruvian Communist Party’s regional com­ mittee. One of them, Abimael Guzman Reynoso (SHINING path’s future “President Gonzalo”), a philosophy professor, and later Dean of the Faculty, became chairman of the Party regional committee. Guzman soon formed

PERU'S TARNISHED PATH

a secret group within the Party, which called itself the “Red Fac­ tion.”

In 1964 the Peruvian party split, with a smaller group (including the leadership, which historically had close ties with the Communist Party of the U.S.) supporting the Soviet party, and the larger part supporting the Chinese. The “Red Faction” allied with the pro­ China party.

Guzman spent most of 1965 in China studying the Chinese Com­ munist Party’s then current politi­ cal line and military tactics, returning to Peru determined to carry out this strategy. Within a few years the “Red Fac­ tion” had secured a base in the student federation and among the faculty in Ayacucho. It helped organize an Ayacucho municipal federation of community organi­ zations and helped lead a massive regional movement against gov­ ernment plans to eliminate free education.

8

SENDERO LUMINOSO—Spanish for shining path—is the name the bourgeois press hung on the Communist Party of Peru (CPP) to distinguish it from other Peruvian organizations also using the name “Communist Party.” The name’s origin is from a CPP slogan: “Follow the shining path of Mariategui.” This is to honor Jose Carlos Mariategui for being the founder of Peru’s communist movement He died in 1930.

9

Comments by representatives of the CPP leadership at a meeting with a PLP delegation in February, 1992

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

In 1970 (Guzman was in jail at the time) the pro-China party was convulsed by an inner-party strug­ gle (in part over the question of whether or not a “revolutionary situation” existed in Peru), and as part of this struggle, Guzman and his “Red Faction” were expelled. When Guzman got out ofjail later in 1970, the “Red Faction,” which held that there was a “revolution­ ary situation,” decided to trans­ form itself into the “Communist Party of Peru.” The membership (which was, and remains, secret) was made up mainly of professors and students at the Ayacucho uni­ versity. The new party spent its first five years working out a systematic ideological and political line (a line identical to what Guzman was taught in China in 1965), training its members in this line, and try­ ing to develop a base of support. Guzman’s plan was to hold a party congress in 1978, at which the call to start the “peoples war” would be issued. But despite everything, a significant part of the party’s members and leaders—apparantly the majority—disagreed

10

PAGE 53

with the idea of armed struggle. A congress to initiate armed strug­ gle could not be organized. So Guzman decided to start the armed struggle first, and then hold the congress (finally held ten years later.)

This [situation] led us in 1978 to post­ pone the congress in order to carry it out when we would be amidst the peoples’ war. Our reasoning was plain and simple: being in war, who could oppose the people’s war? A congress and a party with arms in hand, with a vigorous people’s war, how could there be anyone who would oppose the development of the people’s war? They would not be be able to gener­ ate any harm for us any more.10 For the next two years the small party fought over the question of armed struggle. At a Central Com­ mittee meeting late in 1979 Guzman was able to expel from the party most of those who op­ posed starting the armed struggle. At a followup meeting in Febru­ ary, 1980 the remainder of the opposition was expelled. “We had to prune the Central Committee itself strongly.”10 11

Abimael Guzman, “President Gonzolo Breaks the Silence: An Interview From the Underground,” El Diario, Lima, July 24, 1988, reprinted by Red Banner Editorial House, page 39. This document was given to a PLP delegation in February, 1992 by representatives of the GPP leadership as an authoritative document of the CPP. The account of shining path’s history given here is based on this interview.

PAGE 54

That done, concrete plans were made for the first actions. On May 17, 1980, the day before the first national presidential elections in 17 years, a group of young people broke into the town hall in the mountain town of Chuschi, about thirty miles southwest of Ayacuchco, took the ballots and voting lists to the town plaza, and publicly burned them. This was the first “armed action” by the first of the party’s “armed detach­ ments.” Dynamite bombs were set off in the following weeks in other places. The “people’s war” had begun.

In Peru in 1980 the civilian gov­ ernment did not trust the army. (A 12 year military dictatorship had just ended.) For its part, the army command was completely demoralized. As a result, the army could not be called out against the SHINING PATH. The SHINING PATH was left alone by the army from May, 1980 until the end of 1982. Militarily the SHINING PATH had only the local police forces to con­ tend with. For more than two years SHINING PATH armed de­ tachments were relatively free to spread north and south to villages throughout the southern moun­ tains to destroy police outposts

11

Guzman, ibid, page 66

12

Guzman, ibid, page 55

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

and chase away the police and the local political bosses, replace them with secret “People’s Com­ mittees,” capture weapons, and recruit.

We generated a void in the country­ side and we had to establish a New Power without having defeated large armed forces because they had not taken part, and if they did, if they participated, it was because we had established the People’s Power?2 By December, 1982 the national government’s fear of the rebels was finally greater than its fear of its own army, and the army was sent in. The army’s plan was simple: kill the SHINING PATH and reestablish the old structures of power by ter­ rorizing the local population, kill­ ing indiscriminately, expelling people from their villages (to make it impossible for SHINING PATH to organize) and forcing peasants into anti-SHINlNG PATH paramilitary groups (called, in Peru, “rondos.”)

SHINING PATH’S leadership met in early 1983 and decided to de­ fend their “New Power” against the army’s campaign in two ways. First, by reorganizing their armed

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

PAGE 55

detachments into a centrally-led ‘Teople’s Guerrilla Army.” Sec­ ond» by organizationally grouping the secret village “People’s Com­ mittees” in each area to form “base areas.”

Revolutionaries need base areas to rest in, grow their food, train and recruit They need places that are secure and stable. Otherwise these places are not base areas. A base area can be secure only if and when the local population sup­ ports the revolution and enters into it It can be stable only if and when the government army is un­ able to enter and occupy the ter­ ritory of the base area. This means the revolutionary armed forces are big enough, experienced enough and powerful enough to fight and win in positional warfere. (Hit-and-run sneak attacks are not good enough; it is the enemy who has to run away.) A base area therefore starts out inse­ cure and unstable, and gets transformed over time, through political work and fighting. But the whole process is impossible unless the revolutionaries have al­ ready achieved a certain military strength.

Whether or not the SHINING PATH leadership felt it was militar­ ily strong enough to take on the army (their forces had no actual combat experience), they were convinced they had no other choice. They had already “cre­ ated the void,” and filled it with their organization. They had cre­

ated embryonic base areas. What choice but to try to defend them? And if they were defended suc­ cessfully, then they had to be de­ veloped. A highly bloody and merciless geno­ cide took place. We responded by fighting fiercely. The reaction, and concretely, the armed forces, be­ lieved that by 1984 they had already defeated us. I refer to [their] docu­ ments...where it even said we were not a danger anymore...But what was the result? That the People’s Committees and the base areas multiplied them­ selves, and that led us. later on, to develop the base areas.19

By the end of 1984 the SHINING PATH claimed to have a larger army, more “People’s Commit­

tees,’ more base areas and a larger party. For its part, the army extended military rule over 40% of the country and continued a merciless reign of terror, torture and assassination against any sus­ pects it could get its hands on. In 1985 SHINING PATH took the next step with its “Plan To De­ velop Base Areas.” The result13 14 was a string of base areas running throughout the central high­ lands, led by secret SHINING PATHcontrolled “Peoples' Commit­ tees.” They ruled these base areas in the way they thought appropri­ ate for the “united-front new bourgeois revolution.” The “Peo­ ples’ Committees” maintained se­ en city, distributed land, administered market relations by setting production targets and prices, ran a school system, judged civil disputes, provided welfare for the elderly and re­ cruited new members for the revolutionary forces. One policy the SHINING PATH is proud of is its effort to convince coca farmers to stop growing coca and grow food and fruit instead. They claim this

policy is successful in their base areas. Other policies they are proud of include eliminating drug use and prostitution in their base areas, and not tolerating wife or child abuse, going so far as to shoot offenders. By 1990 SHINING PATH felt so strong that they re­ vealed the membership of the Peoples’ Committees. They also decided to set up a national gov­ ernment, based on the twentyfour base areas and led by “President Gonzalo,” to rival the bourgeois state led by Fujimori. (But a SHINING PATH leader told a PL delegation he did not know how this new "Republic of New Democracy” actually functions.)

The army high command, who control an 80,000 man force, re­ vealed in November, 1990 that it was prepared to crush the SHINING PATH, and they thought it would take a 20-year military dictator­ ship and killing 600,000 people to do it15 More than half the coun­ try was already under military rule when, on April 5,1992, President Alberto Fujimori took what looks like the next step in the army high

13

Guzman, ibid, page 57

14

The following account was given by representatives of the CPP leadership to a PLP delegation, February, 1992.

15

Nelson Manrique, “Time of Fear,’’ in NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 24, Number 4, page 38

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

command’s plan and suspended the constitution and the judicial system in the rest of the country and dissolved the Congress alto­ gether. Just because the army plans to suppress the SHINING PATH doesn’t mean it will be able to. But that is the army’s concern. We have a different concern. What if SHINING PATH wins? If SHINING PATH wins, will it bring about a classless society—no exploitation, no oppression, no privilege, equality for all in satisfying every­ one’s needs—in short, commu­ nism? Nothing short of communism will solve the prob­ lems of Peru’s working people. And communism is what SHINING PATH seems to be promising. This is what has won them a huge fol­ lowing from Peru’s young people and from the poorest of Peru’s poor, who know they have no fu­ ture in capitalism, and who des­ perately want a complete change in society. They think that by sup­ porting SHINING PATH they are fighting for a communist Peru. They admire SHINING PATH be­ cause it kills oppressors, crooks and thugs; because it seems to know what it is doing and seem­ ingly can’t be stopped; because its

16

PAGE 57

cadres are disciplined and moral. The poor look on itas their aveng­ ing angel. We decided to meet with the SHINING PATH to leam from them directly what they are all about. We concluded, unfortunately, that SHINING PATH doesn’t aim to, and isn’t capable of, leading Peru to communism. After speaking to their representatives, and study­ ing their material, it is clear to us that no one should count on SHIN­ ING PATH for this. Despite all the “communist” hoopla, their poli­ tics are really very reactionary.

SHINING PATH’S 'MAOISM’ SHINING PATH promotes some­ thing they call “Marxism-Len­ inism-Maoism, principally Maoism, and Gonzalo Thought,” as the latest word in revolutionary Marxist thinking. As they describe this “new, third and higher stage of Marxism:” ...Marxism leads us to Leninism and Leninism to Maoism. Of all these three, Maoism is principal. Moreover, Maoism leads us to Gonzalo Thought, which is the universal truth specific to the concrete reality of Peruvian soci­ ety and specific to the concrete con­ ditions of the class struggle today.16

Guzman, Speech “On the Rectification Campaign Based on the Study of the Document No To Elections, Yes To Peoples' Wear," Central Committee, Communist Party Of Peru, August, 1991, page 4

PAGE 58

There is not much in this “Marx­ ism-Leninism-Maoism, princi­ pally Maoism, Gonzalo Thought,” and what little there is in itis false. As the above quote makes clear, it all hinges on whatever it is they call “Maoism.” But a problem arises immediately when you try to learn what exactly is in “the new, third and higher stage of Marxism.” After all, Mao himself never claimed to have developed a new stage of Marxism, so you can’t refer to his writings for any insight In fact, SHINING PATH tells you outright that Guzman, not Mao, invented “Maoism.” “The principal contribution of Gonzalo Thought is to have developed the definition of Maoism as a new, third and higher stage of Marx­ ism.”17 But what is it? The closest Guzman gets to “defining” “Maoism” is this:

Revolutionary violence, class strug­ gle, socialism, proletarian dictatorship and struggle against revisionism. Of these four, socialism and the dicta­ torship of the proletariat are principal.18 But this combination of ideas originated with Marx many years before Mao was bom. They were more fully developed by Lenin

17

Guzman, Speech, page 24

18

Guzman, Speech, page 24

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

when Mao was still a child. Lenin added to these ideas the idea of the revolutionary, democraticcentralist working class party, and alltogether this was the legacy of the Bolshevik revolution to all communists. Mao was one of the inheritors of this legacy, which he applied unchanged to Chinese conditions.

The only conclusion which Mao drew from Chinese revolutionary experience which he felt was a new, unique contribution to Marxism-Leninism which could be applied by revolutionaries in other countries besides China was what he called “peoples’ war.” He held that whenever the working class had to make war, whether to seize power in a revolutionary civil war of class against class, or in a war of national defense against imperialist aggression, that war should be fought in a protracted way, based on communist political organizing, and emphasizing guerrilla warfare to annihilate the enemy army. Important as this is, and true as it may be, it is not an ideology. Mao never claimed it was anything more than a contri­ bution to Marxism-Leninism in the political and military fields.

PERU'S TARNISHED PATH

There was one other area where Mao began to develop a distinc­ tive body of ideas, but he didn’t get too far before he died. These ideas were conclusions Mao drew from the experience of all the so­ cialist countries, and not only of China. Mao concluded that in so­ cialism there is a constant move­ ment to restore private capitalism. This movement has a social base in socialist society’s new privi­ leged elite groups, such as manag­ ers, professionals, intellectuals, artists and bureaucrats, rather than in the old dispossessed classes. The movement’s leader­ ship was within the leadership of the ruling communist party itself. So Mao felt the working people should rise up, overthrow the party leadership and institute new social policies which restricted privilege, with the long term goal of eliminating it The workers should be prepared to do this over and over again, as needed. This process he called “Cultural Revo­ lution.” But he had no clear idea how to do these things success­ fully, or how to ensure that privi­ leged groups don’t arise to begin with, and he opposed those within the Cultural Revolution—the Left—who did have such a pro­ gram. In developing his ideas, both about “peoples’ war” and about the need for “cultural revolu­ tion,” Mao relied on the charac­ teristic method of Marxist-Leninist reasoning,

PAGE 59

called the principle of contradic­ tion. Mao developed a slogan to help people use this method: “One divides into two.” Other phrases with which he, and other Cultural Revolutionaries, ex­ pressed the same idea, were: “Analysis is primary, synthesis is secondary.” “Struggle is constant, unity is temporary.” During the Cultural Revolution this slogan, “One into two,” be­ came an important political issue. Mao’s opponents—Liu, Deng and the other “capitalist read­ ers”—were accused by Mao of be­ traying Marxism-Leninism by misstating the principle of contra­ diction. They were charged with putting unity first and class strug­ gle second—or “two into one.” For this they had to be struggled against and overthrown.

Now, bearing all this in mind, when we return to considering SHINING path’s “Maoism” we find a very curious thing. They oppose Mao's insistence on the primacy of the idea of “One into two.99 Instead they support the capitalist waders9 formu­ lation of Two into one.99 “President Gonzalo” said this very clearly:

Pay attention to analysis and synthe­ sis. These are two aspects of a contra­ diction and synthesis is the principal one...Synthesis is the decisive aspect, the main aspect ..from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism...syn­ thesis is the principal aspect19 While SHINING PATH states that the “Cultural Revolution is the

PAGE 60

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

greatest achievemment of Chair­ man Mao,” they oppose Mao’s whole idea for the Cultural Revo­ lution. Mao felt there was a ruling socialist elite class, led and pro­ tected by the Communist Party leadership, which was implement­ ing policies and laws which were capitalist They had to be thrown from power, and society had to be reorganized to eliminate privi­ lege.

important elements of SHINING path’s politics. They are all reac­ tionary.

SHINING PATH opposes this. They don’t see any privileged social class or even any social process. They oppose Mao's conclusion that capitalism develops out of socialism. As they see it,

First—the most reactionary thing—is what they aim for. They are trying to reform capitalism. They are not trying for commu­ nism. They talk a lot about com­ munism, but the talk is all deception. Communism for them is a goal for the distant, unknown future, a goal they don’t believe the Peruvian working people can reach through their own efforts and, moreover, a goal they them­ selves have no idea how to reach. As Guzman put it:

The revisionists...in China with Deng from 1976 to the present usurped the dictatorship of the proletariat, re­ stored capitalism and destroyed so­ cialism.20

From this viewpoint there was no point to the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966—ten years before the “revisionist conspiracy destroyed socialism.” There is not much one can say about a “Maoism” which crucifies Mao, and then pretends to wor­ ship him. Instead (and more fruit­ fully) we examine the three most

19

Guzman, Speech, page 3

20

Guzman, Speech, page 6

The imperialists are cocky and arrogant these days, and it would be nice if some revolutionary communists were already strong enough to really hit them in the head with a two-by-four. But it won’t be the SHINING PATH.

1. SHINING PATH’S AIM

...as a Communist Party we have one goal: communism...This is our final goal...But until everybody on earth will arrive there, nobody enters com­ munism...Either everybody or no­ body will enter communism... [So] we believe the road to communism is a 21 long one.

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH Everybody at once?21 22 How in the

world could this ever happen? It seems childish, but really it is just reactionary politics.

SHINING PATH apparently has de­ cided that Marxism-Leninism is wrong in its conclusion that capi­ talist societies develop unevenly, some faster, others slower. It is this uneven development that pro­ duces a world capitalism that can be imagined as a chain with some strong links and some weak links. It is in the “weak links” that pro­ letarian revolution has its best chances of succeeding. That was Lenin’s idea. It is the basis of the communist movement It was the basis for Mao’s work. Guzman ob­ viously disagrees with Lenin and world communism, and instead agrees with the old rightwing so­ cial democrats, from whom Lenin

PAGE 61

split to form the communist movement in the first place.

SHINING PATH obviously believes the oppressed can’t free them­ selves from oppression. They are not bashful about calling their revolution a “bourgeois revolu­ tion [our emphasis] of a new type, which only the proletariat can lead...[and which] is the only way to transform the world.”23 This is what they mean by “New Democ­ racy” (as in “Republic of New De­ mocracy.”) Where they have political power, and the ability to put their plans into practice, they do no more than supervise capi­ talism to smooth out its roughest edges.

Mariategui—whose heritage SHINING PATH claims to be re­ deeming—must be turning over in his grave at this. He completely

21

Guzman, Interview, page 110.

22

This reminds us of the fight in the Bolshevik party in the mid-1920s over whether they could build socialism in the Soviet Union even though the socialist revolution in the main European industrial countries had failed. The rightwing, then led by Trotsky, argued that the Bolsheviks could not go forward alone to socialism, and they shouldn’t try. But even Trotsky didn ’ t demand that “everybody on earth” be ready to spring into socialism. He would have been content with Germany. Is Presidente Gonzolo more rightwing than Trotsky?

23

Central Committee, Communist Party of Peru, “On MarxismLeninismMaoism,” in Fundamental Documents, Red Banner Editorial House, 1988, page 12. This document also was given to a PLP delegation in February, 1992 by representatives of the CPP leadership as an authoritative document of the CPP.

PAGE 62

disagreed with any kind of bour­ geois revolution, either the “old type” or the “new type.” When people claiming to be communists get involved with “ne^ type” or “new democratic” bourgeois revolutions it is be­ cause they are trying to win over peasants, a group they believe are really capitalists. The problem for these would-be communists is, what should you do with the land owned by the feudal landlords? The “new style” bourgeois revolu­ tion breaks up the huge latifundia into small farms and distributes them to the peasants, who be­ come small landowners. This “ful­ fills” the peasants’ presumed capitalist dreams. SHINING PATH follows this policy in the areas they control. But, of course, this is ex­ actly what happened in the “old style” bourgeois revolutions the capitalists led! SHINING PATH de­ ludes itself into thinking it is do­ ing something new because it concerns itself with the problem “who should get what?” Should the poor peasants get everything? Should the middle peasants get anything? What about the rich peasants? How do you distinguish between one group and another? But in the end, what’s the differ­ ence? The end result will be that

24

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

some group will become property owners, (just as in Poland, for ex­ ample, where the communists fol­ lowed the same policy. That was a great success!) What the capital­ ists did, and what SHINING PATH is doing, is the same. Capitalism is being reproduced and expanded.

SHINING PATH’S policy is com­ pletely oppposed to wtiat Peru’s peasants need or want. Mariategui himself (and not PL) was the first to point this out As far back as 1928 he wrote: Everyone must know that according to individualist ideology, the liberal solution to this problem [the prob­ lem of how to abolish the great feudal farms] would be the breaking up of the great feudal farms to create small property... [This is] orthodox...capi­ talist and bourgeois...

I believe that the moment for at­ tempting the liberal, individualist method in Peru has already passed. Aside from reasons of doctrine, I con­ sider that our agrarian problem has a special character due to an indisput­ able and concrete factor: the survival of the Indian “community” and of elements of practical communism in indigenous agriculture and life.24 This is the key to Mariategui’s unique contribution to commu­

Jose Carlos Mariategui, “The Problem of Land,” in Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Beatify, University of Texas Press, 1990, pp 33

PERU'S TARNISHED PATH

nist theory, his actual “SHINING PATH.” He felt Peru needed a com­ munist revolution as the only way to end the oppression of the In­ dian and the worker. He felt Peru was ready for communism be­ cause there already existed a com­ munist structure on which to build a communist Peru.

This structure is the traditional Indian ayllu (“community”) with its collective ownership of land and cooperative labor. The ayllu existed a thousand years before the Inca, who founded their em­ pire only in 1400 A.D. Inca civili­ zation used the ayllu as its social basis. (For this reason Mariategui characterized the Inca period as “Inca communism,” even though the Inca ruling elite forced the ayllus to support their parasitical aristocratic class system.)2526The ayllu continued a vibrant exist­ ence in Mariategui’s time (he ar­

PAGE 63

gued in 1928 that “the Indian ‘community’ is still a living organ­ ism and...shows unmistakable po­ tentialities for evolution and development.” The ayllu is alive at this very moment The Indian...has not become an indi­ vidualist And this is not because he resists progress, as is claimed by his detractors. Rather, it is because indir vidualism under a feudal system does not find the necessary conditions to gain strength and develop. On the other hand, communism has contin­ ued to be the Indian’s only defense. Individualism cannot flourish or even exist effectively outside a system of free competition. And the Indian has never felt less free than when he has felt alone...27

In Peru, communal property does not represent a primitive economy that has been gradually replaced by a pro­ gressive economy founded on indi­ vidual property...The latifundium compares unfavorably with the ‘com-

25

“If the historical evidence of Inca communism is not sufficiently convincing, the ‘community’—the specific oigan of that communism—should dispel any doubt..Modem communism is different from Inca communism...The two communisms are products of different human experiences. They belong to different historical epochs. They were evolved by dissimilar civilizations. The Inca civilization was agrarian; the civilization of Marx...is industrial...It is therefore absurd to compare the forms and institutions of the two communisms. All that can be compared is their essential and material likeness, within the essential and material difference of time and space.” Mariategui, ibid, page 74

26

Mariategui, ibid, page 56

27

Mariategui, ibid, page 57

PAGE 64

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

Mariategui (in bed) meeting with comrades shortly bfforehis death

munity’ as an enterprise for agricul­ tural production [in terms of crop yield]...28

The ‘community’...is a system of pro­ duction that keeps alive in the Indian the moral incentives that stimulate him to do his best work...in a relaxed and pleasant atmosphere. [A Peru­ vian sociologist] very correctly ob­ serves that “the vigor, industry and enthusiasm with which the commu­ nal farmer [works], joking with his companion...present a profound and

28

Mariategui, ibid, pp 5860

29

Mariategui, ibid, page 61

decisive contrast to the indolence, in­ difference, apathy and apparent fa­ tigue with which the [workers on a feudal farm] do the same or similar work.”29

During the 1960s, when the leaders of what became the SHIN­ ING PATH drew up their capitalist reform program for the future (they had a written draft ready by 1968 and they haven’t strayed far from it since) they ignored 4,500

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

active ayllus whose members com­ munally worked 11% of Peru’s farmland. Apart from the commu­ nal farmers, 60% of the rural fami­ lies in Peru were landless farmworkers?0 The general pic­

ture has not changed to this day. By what crazy logic are Peruvian communal farmers and rural workers a capitalist-class-waitingto-be-bom?

All of this shows not only the reactionary nature of SHINING path’s “new bourgeois” or “new democratic” revolution, but also that SHINING PATH opposes Mariategui’s own shining path.

2. SHINING PATH'S STRATEGY There achieve present SHINING

is no way the CPP can communism with their reactionary politics. As PATH explains it,30 31 today

they are leading a united front people’s war of the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie (the self em­ ployed and the professionals) and themselves (representing the working class.) The peasants are the base, the working class leads. This united front is fighting for the “new style bourgeois revolu­

PAGE 65

tion.” Their aim is to replace the old bourgeois state with the new “front-state,” called the “Repub­ lic of New Democracy.” That is happening now. The “front-state” already exists (based on 24 base areas the CPP controls) and is now assuming nationwide respon­ sibilities. The minute it controls the whole national territory, the revolution automatically will turn “socialist” and all productive ca­ pacity will be nationalized. A “party-state” will replace the “front-state.” The “party-state” will build socialism and lead cul­ tural revolutions to prevent capir talist roaders from creeping into power. Meanwhile, it will wait for the “international proletariat and the oppressed nations” to carry out their own people’s wars so eve­ ryone can enter communism.

The CPP actually embodies many elements of the most Left­ wing version of the old interna­ tional communist movement’s fatally flawed strategy of “revolu­ tion for socialism.” That strategy had a lot of truth and latent strength buried in it Among those truths were: that revolution­ ary violence to win state power is

30

InterAmerican Committee on Agricultural Development, in Hector Bejar, Peru, 1965, Monthly Review Press, 1970, ppl3839,14142

31

Comments by representatives of CPP leadership to PLP delegation, February, 1992

PAGE 66

the only way working people can liberate themselves from oppres­ sion, and the most generalized ex­ pression of this is people’s war; a revolution needs a revolutionary party; and the party must rely on base building. Hie CPP has obvi­ ously applied these correct ele­ ments of the old strategy to the horrible conditions Peruvian capitalism has created. This is the reason for SHINING PATH’S current success, a success which baffles and amazes anti-communist po­ litical analysts. In the old strategy these truths serviced an overall false idea— somehow socialism leads to com­ munism, so to get to communism you should fight for socialism. Of course, this has already been tried many times. It never worked, and for a good reason. After all, what is socialism? Socialism is nothing more than a form of state capital­ ism. Lenin pointed out that social­ ism’s only purpose is to develop economic production within capi­ talist forms, but under the “super­ vision” of a party claiming to be devoted to “ultimately” bringing about communism.

But results showed that socialism doesn’t “grow” into communism any more than any other form of capitalism does. Who controlled the party and dominated society in socialism? It was the educated cadres, the managers and admin­ istrators, the intellectuals. There was a cult of “expertise.” The highest goal for a worker or

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

farmer—who remained trapped having to sell their ability to work in return for a wage—was to be­ come an engineer, or scientist or other expert Then he or she could leave the working class. Ex­ pertise naturally brought rewards in the form of higher wages and effective ownership of property; otherwise why bother to be an ex­ pert? This privileged group, cen­ tralized in the party, fought for socialism against the communist needs and desires of those who actually worked on the land and in the factories. Socialism, like all forms of capi­ talism, has to be overthrown in a ^Stationary struggle for commu­

nism. So far the only attempt to do this was by workers and students in the socalled “Cultural Revolu­ tion” in China during the last part of the 1960s. That revolution was led by a coalition of Left and Right elements. Within the revolution­ ary coalition there was intense, violent struggle. The Left was overthrown by the Right Then the Right was defeated by the so­ cialist state capitalists in a bloody struggle for power. The name “Cultural Revolution” hardly de­ scribes what was at stake or what was happening. It was a commu­ nist revolution against socialism. Its necessity proves that for work­ ing people, whose needs can only be satisfied by communism, so­ cialism is a wrong path.

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

Although SHINING PATH says “cultural revolutions" will be needed in the future, they actually have no understanding of the Cul­ tural Revolution. They don’t agree with the communist cri­ tique of socialism that was the ba­ sis for the Cultural Revolution, the critique which shows that so­ cialism actually strengthens and reproduces capitalism. They don’t understand the political economy of socialism. They don’t see the facts because they look at socialism in the light of Marxist concepts that prevailed before there was a Marxist critique of so­ cialism. In their view the Cultural Revolution was needed because traitors snuck into the leadership and “diverted” socialism to a capi­ talist path through a coup. It was all a conspiracy. If you ask them how a cultural revolution would work in Peru, they confess they have no idea, since it is inconceiv­ able to them that traitors will suc­ ceed in inflitrating their leadership. To make sure this won’t happen, they promote a cult of their leader, “President Gonzalo.” Fol­ low him and you won’t go wrong. (Their slogan is “Long Live Presi­ dent Gonzalo, Guarantor of Vic­ tory!”) They learned this from Chinese socialism. Socialism re­ quires this “cult of personality,” but not, as bourgeois sociologists explain it, because of any desire to create a “secular religion.” Social­ ism requires it because the party

PAGE 67

establishes a hierarchical society and uses its control of the means of production to plan production on the basis of profitability. It can­ not be supervised by the masses of working people. (This supervi­ sion we call the “mass line”). As a result, the party which is supposed to be the party of the working class instead appears as its boss. (Stalin was actually called “The Boss.”) The working class remains alien­ ated from the means of produc­ tion and from political power. Therefore to maintain its link to the working class, the party requires a party institution appealing directly to the w&rking class behind the back ofthe party! This institution is the cult of the party leader. This was the rea­ son for the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union and the Mao cult in China.

But in communism, because an egalitarian society is being built, not a hierarchical one, the work­ ing class exercises supervision over the party, and production is planned to satisfy workers’ needs. To bring about these conditions requires a hard class struggle to help people transform their ideol­ ogy and consciousness. The peo­ ple must also forge new ways of relating to each other based on a communist spirit of class solidar­ ity. (Production of what people actually need and want expands as a by-product of the new social relations of conscious class soli­ darity. Shoddy, rotten goods aren’t tolerated because the aim

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

PAGE 68

PERU: 1980-1992

GUERRA POPULAR EN PERU DEMUESTRA LA VIGENCIA DEL MARXISMO-LENINISMO

¡VIVA EL PRESIDENTE gonzalo! A SHINING PATH leaflet displays the Gonzalo cult

isn’t to increase production as an end in itself») The implicit authoritarianism behind a cult of the party leader would only get in the way of the revolutionary trans­ formation of social relations re­ quired by this communist organization of society.

The cult of “President Gonzalo” already plays the same reactionary

role (replacing the mass line) for the SHINING PATH as it did in Soviet and Chinese socialism. A U.S. so­ ciologist who has studied women in the SHINING PATH, confirms this, reporting: shining path cadre see the centraliza­

tion of political authority in ‘Presi­ dente Gonzalo’ as a guarantee that grassroots power will not be sub-

PERU'S TARNISHED PATH yerted...Paradoxically, the existence of hierarchy in the party is regarded as an assurance that selfishness or egotism on the part of local cadre will pot prevail over the common good.32

3. SHINING PATH OPPOSES ANTI-RACISM The third significant reactionary element in SHINING PATH's politics is its attitude to racism. “Racism" is a word that de­ scribes two separate parts of mate­ rial reality. (1) Racism is a set of social relations, ranging from dis­ crimination to mass murder, all based ultimately on one relation: the super-exploitation of a socially distinct group. (2) Racism also is a set of ideas, all of which ulti­ mately boil down to the notion that all groups, other than the rac­ ist’s own group, are sub-human. We know that today racism is capitalism’s main ideological weapon and nowhere is this more true than in Peru. But what is often overlooked is that racist so­ cial relations have always been one of capitalism’s main struc­ tural elements. (The Social Democrats have never under­ stood this.) After all, why should a boss pay a worker what that worker wants if he can force an­

32

PAGE 69

other worker to do the same job for less? (This is the highest point of capitalist efficiency.) So one group of workers is singled out to be super-exploited because it is easily identifiable by color or be­ ing foreign. However little most workers get, the super-exploited workers get less. The justification for this is that super-exploited workers “deserve” to get less be­ cause “they wouldn’t know what to do with more,” or some vari­ ation on the real theme—the super­ exploited are really subhuman.

The super-exploitation of a so­ cially distinct group of workers is like a rope tied to the rest of the workers' legs. The capitalists jerk the rope to pull the other workers down to the level to which they have forced the super-exploited. The general level of capitalist profitability is set by this maneu­ ver. In addition, (taking only the USA as an example), every year tens of billions of dollars of extra profits, profits above “normal,” are squeezed out of U.S. minority workers through racist super-ex­ ploitation.

When the mass of workers ac­ cept the racist idea preached to them constantly by the ruling class that super-exploited workers

Carol Andreas, "Women At War,” in NACIA Report on the Americas, Vol. 24, Number 4, page 27

PAGE 70

deserve to be abused by racist so­ cial relations because they are “subhuman” (or, when minority workers respond with racism’s mirror image, nationalism, which asserts that the minority is supe­ rior to the majority) then they are all lost Even penny-ante pay raises become almost impossible to win. Definitely such workers cannot re­ alize themselves as a conscious working class able to act in their class interest. They are con­ demned to remain mere labor power, merely an atomized com­ ponent of capital, at the beck and call of capital. Do you want to unite isolated workers into a working class, and then go forward to win the libera­ tion of the working class from ex­ ploitation? Well, that obviously requires that anti-racist struggle, both to change social relations and to change ideas, be in the forefront of your activities. You cannot wipe out capitalism any­ where in this world without mak­ ing anti-racist struggle primary. Karl Marx long ago made this point Especially in Peru is capital­ ism composed of racist exploita­ tion combined with racist ideas.

33

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

But this isn’t so obvious to the SHINING PATH. In feet, the SHINING PATH doesn’t agree with this. They think that anti-racist struggles are wrong. In their view anti-racist struggle would only call attention to differences within the working class and hold back mobilizing working class unity for the revolution.”

People who want to look for ex­ cuses for SHINING PATH react to this by saying, “Well, this is a group which thinks the class strug­ gle is primary, so they take a tacti­ cal hands-off position on racism. It’s not as good a position as it could be, but at least it’s not rac­ ist” But it is racist There is no way to be neutral about racism. This is the way liberal capitalists are rac­ ist This is the way people who don’t want to understand any­ thing about the objective struc­ ture and laws of capitalism, and who despise dialiectical reason­ ing, are racist

Marxism holds that insofar as they are expressed, ideas are ma­ terial things. This may be hard to understand, but a deduction from this is very simple and clear, one way an idea takes material form is

The shining path leader who explained this to a group of PLers responded to their shock at what he was saying by assuring them that naturally shining PATH “opposes prejudice.”

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

as the basis for social action. Then it exists in the material world as the activity of social classes, as a way in which one class relates to another. As an example, one way in which racist ideas are real ma­ terial things is as they are embod­ ied as a set of activities, founded on racist super-exploitation, and ranging from discrimination to mass murder.

Now, if these racist social activi­ ties are constantly going on (as they are in this world), and if SHIN­ ING PATH chooses to ignore them (as it does), does that make them disappear? Only psychotics imag­ ine the real world disappears when they choose to ignore it. Marxism teaches that life is con­ stant activity. Social life is con­ stant class struggle. “Struggle is constant” Everything we do has its effect Everything we foil to do has its effect To not do something is another way of doing that thing’s opposite. We are swamped in a racist high tide. To go with the flow is to go with racism. To op­ pose racism we need to swim ac­ tively against the current That is why SHINING PATH’S handfroff atti­ tude to racism appears to be neu­ tral, but can only take material form as the opposite of neutral— as partisan, as pro-racist

There is a good example from the Second World War of how central anti-racism is to the strug­ gle against capitalism. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Un­

PAGE 71

ion in 1941 to re-establish capital­ ism, anti-Jewish racism (antiSemitism) was the main way they tried to win over the Soviet citi­ zens they were trying to con­ quer—mainly Russians and Ukrainians, who, before the Com­ munist revolution, had been well trained in anti-Semitism. The Stalin leadership didn’t try to dodge the issue. They rejected the SHINING PATH line that they should be “neutral” on racism, or that would hold back mobilizing support for the Soviet state. In­ stead, the communists took a forthright anti-racist position. Ilya Ehrenburg, then the leading So­ viet writer, put it this way: ‘You are either an anti-Nazi or an anti-Sem­ ite.” What was the result? Support for the Soviet state was never higher than during World War II, although by SHINING PATH logic, that should not have happened. On the other hand, there are two instructive examples of how SHINING PATH “neutralism” be­ comes open racism. The March, 1991 issue of the SHINING PATH monthly newspa­ per refers on page 4 to Peruvian President Fujimori (whose par­ ents were Japanese) as “the slantyeyed ruler.’’The actual colloquial meaning of the phrase in Peru is much more vicious. It is a brutal racial insult typical of the Klan, of France’s racist politician Le Pen, of Hitler and Goebbels. It is un­ imaginable that such a phrase could be uttered by a communist,

PAGE 72

much less be printed in a commu­ nist newspaper.

The second example has to do with the USA. group that SHINING PATH refers to as its close ally, a group which also promotes “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Go nzalo Thought” This is a small group which calls itself the “Revo­ lutionary Communist Party”, and which has been around since the early 1970s. Its line on racism has always been the same SHINING PATH line we have been discuss­ ing. In 1974-76 fascist forces in Boston tried to organize a mass racist movement, using opposi­ tion to school integration as their organizing device. At first they were very successful, and they were looking forward to leading a nationwide anti-black racist mass movement PLP determined to try to stop this dangerous fascist threat by killing it in its cradle. PL sent cadres to Boston, organized volunteers, and worked with work­ ing people in Boston to organize against the Boston fascists' move­ ment. PL succeeded, which was important. Conditions in the USA would have been even worse if there had been a mass racist movement active. But guess who joined the fascist effort and participated in the fascist demon­

34

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

strations? Right—the “Revolu­ tionary Communist Party.” What was their excuse? The SHINING PATH line, expressed this way: “Busing black students to predominently white schools to inte­ grate the schools is a liberal plot to divide the working class, and stir up whites against blacks." Marxism holds that the main way humans are different from each other is through class divi­ sion. The working class has interests and needs which are antagonistic to the capitalists. The working class outlook on life is in basic conflict with the capitalist outlook on life. The idea that “anti-racist struggles would only call attention to differences within the working class and hold back mobilizing working class unity for the revolution” actually amounts to justifying the oppos­ ing notion: that humans are unbridgably divided by skin color and culture, and that class divi­ sions in society are a secondary division. (By this logic Peruvian bosses are not as bad—for Peru­ vian workers—as U.S. bosses, whereas Peruvian bosses are worse—for U.S. workers—than U.S. bosses.)

See “Boston, '75" in this issue of The Communist for details about this campaign.

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

But this is completely senseless. Are differences in skin color or in culture the product of different species of humans? Are there dif­ ferent species of humans? Are hu­ mans like cats and dogs, lions and lambs—not to be stirred up? If this is the working class’ true na­ ture, then the working class would be able to achieve its liberation in communism only if it remained ignorant of its true nature!

Modem science has given the lie to what is implied by the SHINING PATH position. Modem science has conclusively shown that all people alive today are descended from common ancestors who arose about 200,000 years ago in Africa, and that class division in society is the primary way humans are “different” from each other. SHINING PATH is justifying pre­ cisely what the Nazis said in a crude way and what today’s socio­ biologists promote in a sophisti­ cated “scientific” way. A “communist” movement that doesn’t combat this kind of think­ ing tooth and nail isn’t worth spit SHINING path’s idea also attacks the great history of Peruvian peo­ ple’s resistance. The history of the Peruvian people from the Spanish conquest in 1583 up to the pre­ sent is one of horrible racist op­

35

PAGE 73

pression and heroic resistance. The largest of hundreds of revolts was put down at a cost of 200,000 Indian lives. In no country has racist oppression been more fero­ cious than in Peru.

When Pizarro, the Spanish rep­ resentative of burgeoning Euro­ pean capitalism, “discovered” Pern in 1526 there were some 20 million Peruvians living in an agrarian communist society in the continent’s most developed and powerful civilization. By 1570, as a result of the Spaniards’ holocaust (which combined slaughter, smallpox, slavery and starvation) the population had been reduced to 1.3 million. Continued oppres­ sion killed another half, so that only 600,000 remained alive in 1630.35 The Inca civilization was destroyed, although the basis of Indian society—the ayllu—was not. (The population didn’t re­ cover to pre-Conquest levels until the 1980s.) The Spanish capitalists came to Pern to loot and enslave. In 1532 alone they melted down enough Incan art objects to ship back to Spain seven tons of gold and four­ teen tons of silver—a value greater than any European king had then at his disposal. In 1534 they shipped back another four

Ronald Wright, Stolen Continente New York, 1992, page 185

PAGE 74

tons of gold.36 Adventurers, gold and silver prospectors, priests and lawyers came to Peru, not settlers. They super-imposed a feudal sys­ tem of huge forms on the ayllus, turning the free Indian fanners into serfs, bound to the soil, abso­ lutely dominated and controlled by the landlord and forced to work for him for free. This feudal landlord ruling class controlled Peru until the 1970s. But the capitalists’ policy was contradictory and self-defeating. From the capitalist point of view, there were both too many Indians and too few Indians. There were too many Indians because the rul­ ing class was too small to control them. To solve this problem the rulers took two tacks. First, they needed a buffer population to stand between the mass of ex­ ploited and oppressed Indian la­ bor and themselves. They created a native class of ruling-class hangerson: judges, policemen, and other petty power-holders to help police and administer the feudal order. And they imported slaves from Africa. (By 1600 there were

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

already 30,000 African slaves in Lima, the colonial capital.) The second tack had three aspects: ex­ terminate the Indians; breed the “inferior race” out ofexistence; assimilate them (ban Quechua, their language, force them to learn Spanish, ban their culture, etc). Still, no matter how hard the Spanish rulers tried (and they tried very hard indeed), they couldn’t get rid of the Indians and Indian culture.

But the problem of controlling too many Indians was over­ whelmed by a more serious prob­ lem: the ruling class found it actually didn’t have enough Indi­ ans. The rulers needed more la­ bor power to exploit the natural wealth they had conquered. They tried importing slaves from Af­ rica, but that didn’t work because they couldn’t import enough. In time they couldn’t import any at all. When they ran out of black slaves they imported contract la­ bor from China. It was in this way, through agony, murder, slavery and racism, that the capitalists

36

Wright, ibid, pp 82,179

37

From this arose the mestizos, people of mixed Indiancaucasian parentage who today number more than 40% of the population. Though most mestizos are working people, there is an upperclass small town mestizo elite. This is the group that traditionally oppressed the Indian peasants, and spread the “mestizo ideology” that “Indians are inferior.”

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

created their Peruvian labor force. From colonial times until today labor was always a shameful and oppressive condition forced upon mainly nonwhite workers. The white ruling class always lived a life of luxurious indolence in Lima. How well they benefited from rac­ ist exploitation is easy to see. In the mid-1960s (a time when every­ body agrees life was better in Peru than it is now) the 24,000 indi­ viduals who basically made up the white Lima ruling class each had an average annual income equivilant to US$62,500. The rest of the population combined had an average annual income equivilant to US$157. Indian farmworkers had an average an­ nual income of $10. Moreover, in 1965 the mostly mestizo workers living on the coast were paid seven times more than the mostly In­ dian workers living in the moun­ tains were paid.38 Racism, therefore, has been the ideo­ logical, political and organizational pivot ofPeruvian capitalism. The Pe­ ruvian working people are ex­ ploited and oppressed by Peruvian capitalism, which is a racist exploitative system. Peru is a hothouse of ruling-class-pro­ moted racism: anti-Indian, anti­

38

PAGE 75

black, anti-mestizo, coastal groups against highland groups against forest groups. Racism is deep in the Peruvian social consciousness. No one, except the SHINING PATH, denies this. Racism runs through every social issue of the last 400 yearsup to this very moment You can’t get rid of the exploitation without at the same time getting rid of the racism, just as you can’t get rid of the racism without at the same time getting rid of exploita­ tion. Both the market for labor power and the ideology of racism are primary targets of communist revolution. Anti-racist struggle therefore must be a central aspect of the Peruvian communist move­ ment and its revolution.

A FINAL WORD In the early 1960s the Left within the old communist movement de­ nounced almost all the existing parties for having turned into fas­ cist organizations. They de­ nounced the socialist countries for having become fascist socie­ ties. The old movement disinte­ grated, as the Left split from the old parties and set up new parties. This is how PL was formed. In those days Mao explained how a Communist Party could eas­ ily “change color” and become a

Peruvian National Planning Institute, in Bejar, ibid, page 27

PAGE 76

fascist party. All it needed to do was promote pro-capitalist poli­ cies and abandon the mass line. This would cause it to change class position and turn it from being a workers’ party to being a capitalist fascist party.

The Cultural Revolution carried the process of defining what a communist party should stand for a step further. The communist re­ bels who destroyed the old Chi­ nese Communist Party, because it was turning fascist, wanted to re­ place it with a communist party that stood for egalitarianism, no money relations, no buying or selling of labor power or of any­ thing else, planned production of those goods and services which working people needed, the mass line in politics, culture, education and health care, and democratic centralism. This is what the PRO­ GRESSIVE LABOR PARTY stands for.

Now along comes the SHINING PATH, endlessly quoting Mao’s words, while consistently oppos­ ing their meaning. Despite what

PERU’S TARNISHED PATH

they may think about themselves, or say about themselves, what are they actually up to? The SHINING PATH themselves tell us they are trying to lead a new bourgeois revolution to set up centralized state control over a bourgeois economy. They don’t believe you can carry out commu­ nist revolution. Their political theory is to be guided by the authoritarian cult of the all-know­ ing Leader, not practicing demo­ cratic centralism based on the mass line. In fact, their only inter­ est in the masses is to mobilize them to support the Leader’s or­ ders. They explain to us why it is not so bad to be implicitly racist, but already they are a little explic­ itly racist.

Our experience as communists already has taught us that there is no way any working class can benefit from this program. This is not the shining path to commu­ nism. ByB.T.

IT’S NAZIS vs NAZIS IN YUGOSLAV CIVIL WAR

Serb prisoners of war in Bosnia giving the Nazi salute on orders from their Croatian captors.

While the whole world watches the bloody conflict among the peoples of Yugoslavia with justifiable horror, the western media, the U.N., Euro­ pean political institutions and western military experts are at a loss to explain fully the roots and the nature of the conflict The warring parties (in Bosnia and Herzegovina alone at least a half a dozen heavily armed groups are fighting each other and murdering civilians) are set on prolonging the slaughter. But all of them, as well as western imperialist powers, agree that 45 years of “communism” and “communist repres­ sion” in Yugoslavia caused the current civil wars.

Contrary to this ideological portrayal by the imperialist powers and their servants, this essay will argue that it wasn’t communism but the lack of communism led directly to the disintegration of the country and the bloodshed. The essay will focus on the role of the Communist Party of

PAGE 78

Yugoslavia (later renamed "The Yugoslav League of Commu­ nists”) which successfully led the fight against the Nazis during World War II and won power in the country. However, after seiz­ ing power, the party, at first gradu­ ally and then with accelerating speed, abandoned its revolution­ ary role and paved the way to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the restoration of capitalism in its most ferocious form — Nazism. Although the current interna­ tional situation —the rampage of the extreme right throughout the world — certainly helped both the disintegration of the country and the upsurge of Nazism, the Yugoslav League of Communists with its reformist and revisionist policies on ethnic and economic issues bears the main responsibil­ ity for what the West refuses to recognize as a civil war between competing groups of Nazis. The historical analysis of the mistakes which the Yugoslav communists made, frequently with the best in­ tentions, should serve as a lesson and a warning for communists and the radical Left around the world.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND A brief historical overview of Yu­ goslavia and its peoples provides a necessary introduction to an analysis ofThe Yugoslav League of Communists’s role in post-Worki War II Yugoslavia. History contra­ dicts the wide-spread belief, pro­

YUGOSLAV CIVIL WAe

moted by the western capitalist press, about supposed “centuries old animosities” among the Yugo slav peoples. The country encompasses an area of roughly half the size of California. It is home to over 23 million people. Depending on who is counting it can be said that the peoples of Yugoslavia consist of at least six major ethnic groups. In Tito’s Yugoslavia all these eth­ nic groups, except for the Yugo­ slav Albanians, used to be called "nations.” These groups speak at least four (some would have it five) different languages, and are influenced by three major relig­ ions (Catholicism, Christian Or­ thodox and Muslim). These peoples lived in six relatively autonomous republics/states (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Mace­ donia and Serbia) and two autonomous provinces within Serbia (Kosovo and Vqjvodina) whose rights in the federal parlia­ ment equaled the republics’. Gen­ erally the republic/state borders did not follow ethnic divisions.

Throughout history, different conquerors occupied large por­ tions of the land for periods of time that stretched from several years to several centuries. From the Middle Ages, when some eth­ nic groups had their independent kingdoms, until the nineteenth century when Serbia and Mon­ tenegro established their own kingdoms after the deterioriation

JUGOSLAV CIVIL WAR

of the Ottoman Empire, Yugoslav peoples lived subjugated by their more powerful European and Asian neighbors. The upper, mostly feudal, classes adopted the customs and languages of the con­ querors in return for a share of power, while the peasantry and the nascent working class lived in abject poverty.

In 1918, after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, representatives of the old em­ pire’s south slavic ethnic groups (today’s Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) trav­ elled to Belgrade to accept the Serbian King and form a new country named “The Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.” This later was renamed “The King­ dom ofYugoslavia.” With the for­ mation of the Kingdom the peasants and workers had their foreign exploiters replaced by do­ mestic ones — the nerdy emerg­ ing capitalists.

Inside the kingdom the workers started to organize under the in­ fluence of the Bolshevik revolu­ tion. The new communist party competed against various nation­ alist parties, and was so successful in bourgeois elections in the late 1920s that the king imposed a dic­ tatorship, banning political par­ ties. Throughout the 1930s the communists were regrouping in an attempt to organize despite their illegal circumstances, and Tito emerged as their leader. Af­ ter participating in the Spanish

PAGE 79

Civil War the communists were the only political force in the old Yugoslavia trying to warn and edu­ cate people about the threat of fascism. In 1941, when Hitler’s war cam­ paigns were well under way throughout Europe, Duke Pavle (ruling in place of the still under­ age heir to the throne, Peter) signed a pact with Hitler and his allies. The people, organized by several thousand communists, op­ posed the pact with demonstra­ tions in the major cities. The young Peter assumed the throne and renounced the pact The Axis invaded Yugoslavia from all sides, and defeated the king’s army in a few weeks. The royal court fled to England, leaving be­ hind small bands of the king’s elite soldiers (called “chetnicks”) supposedly to fight the Nazis. The fascist conquering powers di­ vided the country into quisling states that had varying degrees of independence. One of the most infamous was the “Independent Republic of Croatia” (NDH), which emulated the Nazi ideol­ ogy. It organized a variety of death camps for the mass executions of Serbs (primarily), Jews, Commu­ nists and Gypsies. The victims of the biggest camp, Jasenovac in Croatia, numbered in the hun­ dreds of thousands. In the summer of 1941 Tito’s communists started to organize an insurrection throughout Yugo­ slavia. The communists were

PAGE 80

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table of contents New Times for THE COMMUNIST Magazine

1

Letter to the Editorial Collective

2

State of the World-International

3

A History of Middle-East Nationalism

7

A Class Analysis of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

22

Fort Lewis Soldiers Rebel During Vietnam Era

36

Stalin and H.G. Wells Debate Marxism vs. Liberalism

49

The Struggle for Revolutionary Dialectics

56

Science VS. Intelligent Design

64

published by CHALLENGE PERIODICALS, GPO 808, BROOKLYN, NY 11202

online version available at WWW.PLP.ORG

what we fight for ✪ PLP fights to smash capitalism–wage slavery. While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim”communism is dead,’ capitalism is the real failure for billions all over the world. The Soviet Union and China returned to capitalism because socialism maintained too many aspects of the profit system, like wages and divisions of labor. ✪ Capitalism inevitably leads to wars. PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers to turn these wars into a revolution for communism. This fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat requires a mass Red Army led by the communist PLP. ✪ Communism means working collectively to build a society where sharing is based on need. We will abolish work for wages, money and profit. Everyone will share society’s benefits and burdens. ✪ Communism means the party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers – eventually everyone – must become communist organizers. ✪ Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of race. ✪ Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women workers. ✪ Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one party.

JOIN US!

THEcommunist

1

NEW TIMES FOR THE COMMUNIST MAGAZINE In this time of sharpening imperialist rivalry, where rival ruling classes around the world are clashing over markets, profits and the world’s reserves of energy supplies, Progressive Labor Party needs to step-up its analysis of the world and up the ante of revolutionary communist politics.

All articles will be edited by a committee to ensure that they contain the Party’s line and are relevant to current Party struggle. Each magazine will have a theme and articles will be solicited in advance in order to create a cohesive magazine that will be both correct in line and be a useful tool amongst Party members and their base.

THE COMMUNIST is an important tool for building and sharpening the politics of Party members as well as those in the Party’s base. A new magazine editorial board was assembled hopefully to meet the needs of our class and to add light to darkness caused by capitalism all over the world.

We encourage our base and our comrades to write for The Communist. Just like CHALLENGE, our newspaper, the magazine is only as strong as the workers, students, teachers and soldiers who write for it.

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PLP

LETTER TO THE EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE

Article on Drugs in the Communist is Dangerous When our club first received The COMMUNIST (Summer 2006) I immediately flipped to the article “War on Drugs Equals a War on the Working-Class.” I was hoping to find a good article to introduce to friends still caught in the trap of drug use on how the bosses use drugs as a method of control and persecution; I was disappointed to find an article that seemed to make the argument that drug use was somehow okay. The article contained some good information about how the War on Drugs has been used to justify a police state, build a slave labor army in US prisons, and brutalize working class people who have the most to gain by dropping capitalism, but it quickly loses validity when it begins to argue that street drugs are in fact harmless. The article gives us silly nuggets of information like the fact that “Marijuana… has at least 60 compounds of therapeutic value.” While this is interesting I am more interested in the one compound that it has that the bosses’ love, its ability to lure workers into passivity and away from organizing against their oppressors. While marijuana may not be chemically lethal the escapism that it provides is lethal to the creation of a strong working class movement against capitalism. The drug’s prevalence also gives the bosses the ability to make arrests and gain convictions with ease. This combination of factors makes the seemingly harmless marijuana deadly to working class movements. The articles portrayal of cocaine and heroine as non-dangerous and non-addictive drugs represents a serious miscalculation by the author that can be potentially very dangerous to new people just learning about the Party. As I am sure everyone who organizes youth to join the Party can attest drug use is a serious impediment to winning people over. Just as anyone who has experience dealing with drug users understands that the author’s conclusions about the harmlessness of cocaine and heroine are laughable. These drugs are most certainly addictive and they are most certainly deadly as most people’s personal experience confirms. In order to understand the dangers of these drugs it might be instructive to look at the history of cocaine and heroin. After World War II the world opium trade was at an all time low. The CIA aided the Kuomintang (anti-Communist forces in China) in the construction of the Golden Triangle, an enormous heroin production and smuggling ring, in the 1950’s in order to fund antiCommunist insurgencies in South-East Asia. During the 60’s the CIA funded the construction of a massive heroin network in Laos in order to fund anti-Communist groups in Laos and Cambodia. The CIA even organized a system of transporting the drug called Air America. During the final years of the Vietnam War when US soldiers began openly rebelling against the imperialist occupation of South Vietnam the heroin being produced in Laos managed to find its way into US military camps. The drug was used as a sedative to keep rebellious soldiers in line and prevent a full scale uprising among enlisted men. This drug that worked so well against rebellious soldiers in Vietnam was then shipped to the US where it was pushed heavily by the police in order to kill worker’s

movements and for the most part it worked. The counter-culture through half-retarded gurus like Timothy Leary and idiotic artists like Jim Morrison urged kids to drop and get high in order to change the world. Police looked the other way as drugs flooded into rebellious working class neighborhoods and college campuses where students were most active against the war. We might take a second to reflect on a particularly clever line from an old PLP song that asks, “Ain’t it strange how all the grass and skank, they push hardest where there’s workers fighting back and GI’s too? Oh it don’t make sense, must be a coincidence.” In the late 70’s and early 80’s the story remained the same although a few details changed. The geography of the Cold War had shifted and the CIA found itself trying to stem the tide of workers’ movements throughout Central America. Resorting to their old tactics the CIA created a drug running network that would funnel cocaine from CIA backed producers in Colombia and Bolivia through Central America and into the US. The gangs used to run this drug operation became the CIA’s chief antiCommunist forces in the region and used money from the drug trade to terrorize workers in places like Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and others. The cocaine that was being moved through these groups magically found its way into working class, primarily black, neighborhoods where at one time groups like the Black Panther Party had once thrived and thus began the crack epidemic. That PLP song concludes with the line “When you’re flying high, don’t you know you can’t organize, you can’t fight their racist lies, and the cops they know its true.” Heroin and cocaine sales helped to fund the massacre of hundreds of thousands of workers by anti-Communist thugs in South-East Asia and Latin America while it poisoned the working class in the US contributing to the destruction of the Old Left and ruining hundreds of thousands of lives. Narcotics were a powerful weapon in the capitalists’ arsenal as they did battle with the working class all over the world. Reflecting on this history, this article represents two steps back for anybody who accidentally gave it to a member of their base. It seemingly approves of drug use by claiming it is non-addictive and non-lethal. It uses comparisons to alcohol and tobacco to justify these claims. These arguments are moot because they pre-suppose that alcohol and tobacco are not also substances used to control and oppress working class people. The reality is that they are all chemically deadly and they allow for escapism which is deadly for the Party. Comparing these substances is the equivalent of debating whether you would rather be shot or stabbed! The PLP argues that drugs and alcohol are used as weapons against the working class. They are instruments of control that allow for capitalism to brutalize the working class another day. Luckily the members of our club discovered this article before the magazine could be distributed to any of our base members, but I fear that others might not have been so fortunate.

THEcommunist

3

State of the World

Delivered at Central Committee in May 2007 A century ago, the major imperialist powers were on a path towards World War. They were creating alliances, building up their military, and promoting nationalism to convince millions of workers to die in their quest for power. Today we appear to be on a similar trajectory towards war. The world is divided and the imperialists are fighting over areas of influence. While we cannot predict the future, it appears that the contradictions are beginning to sharpen and world war is not an unimaginable future. Since 1945, it has been clear who the dominant superpower in the world was. The US bosses came out of World War 2 yielding considerable influence in Europe and around the world, although they were still limited in their actions. The Soviet Union (which by the late 1950s had finally turned into its opposite and gave rise to a new bourgeoisie), the growth of Communist China, and the international communist movement challenged US imperialism on many fronts, most notably in Vietnam. It was in Vietnam that the weaknesses of the US ruling class were exposed to its enemies. However, it was the internal weaknesses of the international communist movement that allowed the US bosses to come out of the 20th century wielding its power. By the 1990s, the Soviet Union had broken up, China had returned to a full blown capitalist state. The international communist movement had collapsed due to its internal weaknesses. The US recognized this and tried to take advantage. The US-led multilateral invasion of Iraq in 1990 and the NATO occupation of the Balkans during the mid-1990s, exemplified both the power and the weakness of the US ruling class. By the end of the 20th century, many inside the dominant wing of the ruling class realized they were facin a troubled future. In 1998-1999 the Hart-Rudman Commission was devised to lay out the vision of the US bosses as they head into the 21st century. The report was a blueprint for war and fascism, which Challenge-Desafio has recognized time and again. A more centralized police state under the name of “Homeland Security” and the needed buildup of the US military were two main features of the report. Hart-Rudman foresaw a 9-11-type attack and emphasized the need to use such an attack to build patriotism and support for war. The report also recognized that control over energy resources shapes the politics of the world, particularly as Asian economies become more oil-dependent. Preceding the First World War, a number of alliances began forming, some as early as 1879 (between Germany and Austria Hungary). Throughout the rest of the 19th century, we saw the buildup of the two major alliances

that would eventually bring the major imperialists and its allies in a head on confrontation. From reading the bourgeois press one can see the current contradictions sharpening. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which originally formed in 2001 with the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is a clear rival to the US and its allies, especially in the Central Asian region. At the heart of this alliance are two countries looking to rival the powers in the West – Russia and China. They both continue to spread their influence throughout Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas at the expense of the US and European bosses. As the 20th century came to a close, the Russian ruling class was forced to make a strategic retreat by abandoning their client states and looting state-owned property in primitive accumulation. The Russian working class paid for this. Life expectancy fell by 10 years during the 90s, while unemployment, alcoholism, suicide, and murder all increased. Going into the 21st century, Russia’s economy stabilized, in large part due to rising energy costs. The Russian ruling class, led by Vladimir Putin, began to take firmer control of the economy, disciplining the bosses that acted too selfishly and made concessions to the west, a hallmark of fascism. The most notable target was Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The richest man in Russia in 2004, Khodorkovsky was owner of Yukos oil, which was one of the largest private-sector oil companies in the world. When Khodorkovsky began negotiating to sell some of its shares to Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco, Putin quickly stepped in. Khodorkovsky was eventually imprisoned on counts of fraud and tax evasion, and Yukos came under state control. This was not about tax evasion; capitalists get away with that all the time without punishment. The Russian ruling class sent a signal not only to their domestic capitalists but also to the US and European bosses: stay out of Russia’s backyard. This was seen more clearly during the Sakhalin 2 project. Sakhalin Islands, which are part of Russia located in the Pacific Ocean, were first being developed by Exxon-Mobil. Originally agreed upon under the Yeltsin period, Royal Dutch Shell was working on the Sakhalin II, which is the world’s largest combined oil and natural gas development. In late October 2006, Russia once again stepped in. Citing “environmental” violations, Shell was forced to hold off on the project. After accumulating high costs and not being able to develop any of the reserves, they eventually sold 50% + 1 shares to the Russian state owned company Gazprom. Gazprom and Shell also have

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agreements on future projects in Russia. Gazprom’s rise is significant, not only in the development of Russia, but also in the strategic purpose of Russia’s control over oil production and flow. Over the past ten years, Russia has built a number of pipelines extending into Europe and Asia. The Yamal European Pipeline (which runs through Belarus, Poland, and into East Germany), the Northern European Gas Pipeline (which would run from Northern Russia, underneath the Baltic Sea, and into northeast Germany), the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline (which runs eastward and will empty out along the Pacific Rim making it easy for major oil exporting countries such as China, Japan, Korea, and the US) and a new pipeline agreed upon between Russia, Greece, and Bulgaria which will transport oil and gas from the Caspian Sea to the EU are all efforts by the Russian government to control the flow of oil to Europe and parts of Asia. Before their deal with Greece and Bulgaria, which took place in March, New York Times March 16, 2007 reported that Russia already provides other parts of Europe with a third of its oil and 40% of its natural gas. While the controlling of these energy reserves certainly bothers US bosses, another big problem that they see is Russia’s relationship with Iran. According to a Council on Foreign Relations report from February of this year entitled U.S.-Russia Interests on Collision Course, a big concern that the US rulers have is the amount of arms that Russia has provided Iran. The value of arms transfer agreements between 1998 and 2001 was $300 million. From 2002-2005, it was $1.7 billion. Russia has also upset Washington through their agreements with Venezuela, offering to sell them fighter jets after the US back out of its deal with Venezuela. But with all the attention that is on the rise of Russia, another member of the SCO, China, seems garner more attention to those in the US. According to the World Bank, China had the highest economic growth rate in the world during the 1990s. China is now seen by many as the number one contender to the US for world dominance. While the U.S. is a waning imperialist giant, China is on the rise and can offer better deals to many of the client states of the U.S just as the U.S. did in the Middle East to undercut Britain around World War II. While the US bosses have been occupied with the Iraq war, China has used the 21st century to build on relationships that the US has let slip away. In 2004, according to the Washington Post, China eclipsed the US as Japan’s largest trading partner (out trading the US $213 million to the US $197 million). In November 2004, the NY Times ran articles on the growth of China in both Latin America and Southeast Asia. During that time, Hu Jintao, President of China, toured through Latin America, stopping at both Argentina and Brazil. In Argentina, China agreed to invest in over $20 billion in railways, oil and gas exploration, and construction and communication satellites. In Brazil, China worked on building an already burgeoning

relationship with the South American country. In 1999, Brazilian exports to China were worth $676 million. In 2004 it was $5.4 billion. But the real attention is being paid to the oil sector. Oil is essential to the Chinese ruling class. According to an April 2007 Economist article, in 2005 China produced 3.6 million barrels/day, slightly up from the 2.8m b/d in 1990. It consumed, however, 6.9m b/d in 2005, which was a 100% increase from a decade ago. Of China’s oil imports, 40% comes from the Middle East, 23% came from Africa, and 21% came from Asia. But China is now looking towards Latin America for resources as well. One reason for that is that three of China’s top five oil suppliers in 2005, Saudi Arabia, Angola, and Iran remain at risk of political upheaval or terrorist attacks. Also, 80% of China’s oil imports pass through the unstable Strait of Malacca, where high levels of piracy (239 attacks in 2006) pose a continual threat to maritime traffic. This is one reason for Hu’s November 2004 Latin America trip, where he pledged investing $100 billion over the next ten years. China has been looking mainly to invest through China’s two major oil firms, the China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) and the China Petroleum and Chemical Corp (Sinopec). Although there is private investment in these two firms, the Chinese government still retains a majority stake in each. 200405 were busy years for these two firms: • Among CNPC’s first ventures was a US$200m purchase of a 45% stake in an Argentinian-owned Peruvian unit, PlusPetrol Norte, in February 2004. PlusPetrol Norte is the main crude oil producer in Peru, and produced approximately 17.8m barrels in 2006. • In September 2005 a CNPC-Sinopec-led consortium, Andes Petroleum, agreed the US $1.42bn purchase of the Ecuadorian assets of a Canadian oil firm, Encana. This deal gave Andes Petroleum control of five blocks, producing in total approximately 75,000 b/d, and with proven reserves of 143m barrels. The consortium also acquired a strategic 36% stake in Ecuador’s Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados (OCP, the new heavy crude oil pipeline), which pumps 450,000 b/d, and as such CNPC will be able to exert some control over direction of exports through the OCP pipeline. • A year later, Sinopec formed a consortium with India’s ONGC Videsh to spend US$850m on a 50% stake in Colombia’s Ominex de Colombia, a subsidiary of US-based Ominex Resources. Ominex de Colombia’s oilfields produce 20,000 b/d and have proven resources of 300m barrels. • In 2004 Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petróleo Brasileiro (Petrobras), signed a co-operation agreement with Sinopec which will involve China providing technical assistance in the recovery of

THEcommunist mature oil fields, while Brazil will assist with deep sea drilling in the China Sea. They have also signed a memorandum of understanding regarding the proposed US$1.3bn gas pipeline linking the northeast and the south-east of Brazil--it could in future be linked to the proposed Gasoducto del Sur (Gasur) pipeline which proposes to connect Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina. Future involvement in Gasur could prove beneficial for China should it seek to diversify its energy holdings in Latin America into natural gas, rather than primarily in the oil sector (as it is doing at present). • But it is China’s relationship with Venezuela that is the strongest in the region. In Venezuela CNPC has signed a US$350m deal to invest in 15 oil fields with proven reserves of 1bn barrels in Anzoategui state, and US$60m in natural-gas projects. CNPC has also agreed a joint venture with state-owned oil firm Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) to develop fields in the Orinoco river belt. As well as the US$1.5bn already committed to Venezuela, the Orinoco joint venture could require further investment of US$3bn-4bn, making Venezuela by far the greatest recipient of Chinese investment in the region. Chavez said that Venezuela’s goal is to send China 1 million barrels a day by 2012. At the same time, Venezuela bosses have talked about reducing their oil exports to the US, now around 60% of its oil products. So what does this mean for China? The results right now are small. China still depends on many Western competitors that it does business with, particularly Exxon Mobil which has projects currently going on in Southern China. Also, in 2005, Latin America sent 47% of its exports to the US, 14% to the EU, and just 4% to China. The US still has much more influence in the region. But China’s developments are significant, considering that for most of the 20th century Latin America was controlled solely by the US. Every Chinese gain has come at the expense of the U.S.

5 Europe, the United States, and also China. As of January 2006, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) announced it would buy a 45 percent stake in an offshore oil field in Nigeria for $2.27 billion. This move, along with China’s contracts with countries like the Sudan, where they receive half of Sudan’s oil exports, shows China’s seriousness towards building a stronghold in Africa. This marks a strategic move by China to depend less on Middle East oil and more on African oil. But even as we see China begin to challenge the US bosses indirectly, they are not ready for a confrontation in the near future. The example of World War I shows that economic ties do not prevent war; confrontation is delayed because militarily China is a young country. It has only been recently that China began to build up their Navy. In 2005, China received at least seven new submarines and one new missile destroyer from Russia, their ally in the SCO. The newly acquired subs can fire missiles from a submerged position. This not only gives China more influence in the Taiwan Strait against Taiwan and Japan, but also against other Asian powers. But besides the buildup of the Navy, rival capitalists are concerned at China’s increased military budget. In 2000 their budget was $14.6 billion. In 2005 it more than doubled to $29.9 billion, and in 2007, China announced a military budget just under $45 billion. On top of spending more militarily, China and the rest of the SCO have been working closely. Not only has China begun buying arms from Russia’s high-tech arsenal, but they are also participating in joint military drills. Called the “Peace Mission of 2005,” Russia and China competed in war games, with Russia using its latest technology. This is significant because it is the first time that both Russian and Chinese bosses have worked so closely. It was also during this year that SCO member Uzbekistan evicted the United States from one of their major bases, one that was used in the Afghanistan war. Additionally, Russia has now pulled out of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty

But geographically and strategically Latin America presents a problem. Because Latin America and China are so far from each other, it would be difficult for China to defend the supply routes in case of a global conflict. Thus, China enters Africa.

This has caught the attention of bosses around the world, particularly Iran, who has shown interest in joining the SCO. For now they have only granted Iran observer status (along with India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan), but the relationships between Iran and these countries continue to grow, both economically and politically.

China’s growing relationship with Africa can be seen through its economic investments in the continent. China’s trade with Africa was $39.7 billion in 2005 and rose to $55 billion in 2006, over 5 times its 2000 level. In 2006, Angola replaced Saudi Arabia as China’s main supplier of oil. Also in the same year, China and Africa signed more than a dozen trade deals worth $1.9 billion and announced an $8 billion contract to build a railway in Nigeria. Nigeria, coincidentally, is a member of OPEC and also the largest oil producer in Africa. It supplies Western

Many Western bosses, particularly the US, are worried about this. Citing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as two of the main obstacles for the US bosses in treating the rise of the powers, a push to a more multilateral approach is expected with next year’s new President. A report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations entitled “The New New World Order” by Daniel Drezner joins the rest of the crowd in citing the neo-cons unilateral policy as a failure and urges to work closer with China and another rising power which this report did not mention much but

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probably should have, India. Citing Goldman Sachs’ report from 2004 “Dreaming with BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), Drezner talks about the importance of coopting these rising economies. By 2010, these economies will be greater than US, Japan, Germany, the UK, and Italy combined and by 2025 it will be twice that of the G-7 (the group of the highly industrialized countries). For now, however, it looks like India is more in line with the SCO, especially since it agreed to a pipeline agreement between Iran and Pakistan called the Dehli Declaration, which will be built by Russian firm Gazprom.

pressure on China to pull out of Darfur. Clearly the Save Darfur movement is an attempt to organize students and workers against Chinese imperialism while trying to give the US military a humanitarian face.

Yuliya Tymoshenko, a member of the opposition party of the Ukraine, gives the same advice to the US ruling class in her recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled Containing Russia. She urges the US to look at the EU as an ally to break Russia’s growing power. It is the EU that will be the Western bosses’ answer to a rising Russia & SCO.

The conflict in Somalia earlier this year was an attempt by US bosses to reclaim the land in which they had contracts for oil exploration before President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown. While they were able to drop enough bombs to kill Somali children, US military might is strained because of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. What was once a world dominated by the US ruling class, is now a world where inter-imperialist rivalry is sharper and growing powers, such as China and Russia, are now contesting the US for world supremacy. A few years ago, the US would not have sat down to talk with Iran, but now they are in a position to do so. Rival ruling classes, particularly Putin, are no longer afraid to confront to the United States.

Made up of 27 countries, the EU is beginning to grow in size and power. The Euro is gaining value and some of its member-nations, particularly those near Russia’s borders (Estonia) are beginning to challenge Russian power. Although the EU does not have a military, US bosses have responded by putting pressure on China’s support of the Sudan. The liberal wing of the US ruling class as well as human rights groups around the world are putting

While the contradictions are certainly getting sharper, many of these rising powers still need more time to develop militarily as well as politically in the different regions before they can openly confront the US. No matter the timetable, however, imperialism will push the bosses into world war. The working class must take advantage of whatever time there is before world war to prepare to turn world war into communist revolution.

THEcommunist

7

A History of Middle-East Nationalism Over thirty years ago, Progressive Labor Party criticized nationalism as a dead¬-end for workers, pointing out that nationalism was the ideology of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalist class, invented in its climb to power over the feudal interests of the past and in its imperialist conquest of the world. Yet prior to that, communists had long considered nationalism a progressive force. This belief grew out the notion that the working class could achieve communism only in stages that accorded with the development of the productive forces in the economy. First workers would rid the nation of outside (imperialist) exploiters by allying with progressive local capitalists then they could move on to socialism, and only later to communism. Writing during the Vietnam War, PLP rejected the idea that nationalism was a progressive force as a result of its own practice and from study of the experience of many of the national liberation struggles of the post World War II era. Despite the bravery and dedication of communist and national liberation fighters, national liberation struggles in country after country proved to be a defeat for the working class as new capitalist forces came to power. Since then, PLP has moved even further in its critique, pointing out in Road to Revolution IV that the working class must fight for communism, not socialism, and organize itself into one communist party not multiple national movements. Today, as the United States occupies Afghanistan and Iraq in a deadly effort to control the oil at the center of its imperialist power, it is imperative that anti-imperialists understand the role and history of nationalism. Since the final dissolution of the Soviet Union, inter-imperialist

rivalries have intensified, and the world’s boundaries are being rewritten as imperialism (globalization) penetrates areas that had previously been outside of its reach. Civil wars between ethnic and religious group and terrorist tactics are on the increase. These conflicts are occurring world-wide, but especially in the Middle East, a region strategically important to all capitalist powers, and are the early stages of world war. In times of war, nationalism is over and over again offered as the main way workers should identify their interests. In the United States, conservatives and liberals alike appeal to US patriotism to get workers to support its war efforts. They denounce the “tribal” nature of regions in turmoil, and then propose to fix these regions by teaching them a proper nationalism (often called “civil society”) in which workers accept their status and local political leaders and capitalists play by clear rules that welcome US investors (i.e. learn what “freedom” means). Such proposals include the rewriting of history as the US plans to do for Iraq.1 NGOs and peace groups promote nationalism and “nation-building” as the antidote to imperialist “oppression” and as a way for “the people” to get power. For example they advocate allowing small nations to set wages and to define economic rules that will protect them against imperialist economic penetration. In the Middle East, the resolution of the displacement of the Palestinians by Zionist and Arab elites alike is most often presented as in need of a nationalist resolution— that of giving the Palestinian “nation” its own land and Palestinian elites control of investment opportunities and contracts with US, and perhaps other, capitalist interests. Yet nationalism can never eliminate the exploitation of working people. It can only guarantee continued exploitation. Nationalism—whether US or French or Iraqi or Zionist or Arab—is a product of imperialism that serves the interests of the capitalist class. While nationalism can wear a “progressive” veneer when it attacks the rule of the most powerful, it is a tool in the imperialist toolkit, a Trojan horse that undermines working-class power as it assists rising imperialists. Nowhere has this been truer than in the Middle East where the very boundaries and identities of nations are the products and the vehicles of inter-imperialist rivalries. In the Middle East, the constant has been the imperialists’ need to control trade routes and resources. The variable has been the multiple contingencies through which imperialists have operated as they invented nations and marshaled nationalisms against both rival imperialists and the working class. The relationship between imperialism and nationalism in the

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PLP

Middle East falls into three broadly defined periods. The first period, which begins in the early twentieth century and continues through the 1920s, is defined by the British and French contest to take the region from the Ottoman Empire. The second period, roughly from World War II through the 1960s, is defined by the rise of the United States as it replaced Great Britain as the dominant power in the region. The third period begins in the 1970s, when the United States, seemingly at the top of its game and able to eliminate Soviet influence in the region, began to experience limits on its power. In each period, the pattern of inter-imperialist rivalries led to the elevation of particular nationalisms, first the invention of the nations of the region (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia among others), second the promotion of nationalist leaders and the use of coups and other destabilizing efforts, and then the arming of regional strong men and the creation of Islamic fundamentalism as a tool of US imperialism. These past events live on in the wars of today, as the nationalist and religious divisions invented in earlier inter-imperialist contests become the vehicles through which the US confronts its newest rivals, including the Europeans and China. This manipulation of nationalisms has created a dense tapestry of events, but by identifying the recurring patterns of imperialist and class power underlying these events, workers of the world can turn the present world war that has begun in the Middle East into the war that ends capitalism forever!

The Nineteenth Century Origins of Nationalism: Middle Eastern nationalisms, both Arab and Zionists, have their intellectual origins in the late 19th century. The consolidation of the nation-states of the West and the beginnings of modem imperialism/colonialism also date from this period. In the United States, the industrial capitalists triumphed over southern planters and then over the remaining Indian tribes, and then embarked on overseas expansion to Hawaii, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Great Britain laid claim and conquered India, Egypt, and much of eastern Africa. France took control of Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and much of North Africa. Germany and Italy were unified in 1880s and each likewise began to seek control of other parts of the world. By the late nineteenth century, the Middle East was a target of these rival imperialists, especially of France and Great Britain. Much of the Middle East, from Turkey in the west up to the borders of Iran in the east, was part of the Ottoman Empire, an empire that once included within its borders the Balkan region and parts of Eastern Europe. Great Britain, which had gained formal control over India and over Egypt (both important sources of cotton for British manufacturing) wanted to maintain a weak, non-¬threatening Ottoman empire in order

to protect her trade routes. France, on the other hand, hoped to form an Arab Middle Eastern state, independent of the Ottomans and under French domination to block the expansion of British imperialism. France began setting up Christian missions in Syria and Lebanon in the 18th century; in the 19th century, American Protestants also set up missionary schools. American Protestants learned Arabic and employed Arab scholars to translate their evangelical Bible. By the late 19th century, these missionary schools and European universities became the centers for a variety of Arab secret societies and nurtured Arab nationalist intellectuals, who often worked as journalists or teachers. Arab nationalists won over many wealthy merchants, landowners, and urbanites as they competed with socialist and religious parties for mass support. Initially Arab nationalists didn’t call for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Rather they demanded greater equality within the empire, especially in the form of more administrative positions for Arab-speaking elites and the use of Arabic as well as Turkish as an official language, a movement that intensified in the decade before World War I as the “Young Turk” reformist elements demanded increased use of Turkish within the empire. Like Arab nationalism, Zionism also emerged in the late nineteenth century and grew out of the philosophical notions of ethnic affinity that lay behind late 19th century German nationalism. At that time many working-class Jews had responded to anti-Semitic oppression by joining internationalist socialist and communist movements. Zionism, however, called on all Jews to reject multi-ethnic, class-based organizations and to unite across class lines to form a new Jewish nation. According to Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, a wealthy journalist, only the formation of a Jewish nation could fight anti-Semitism, which he claimed was inevitable and ineradicable as long as Jews and non-Jews lived together. At its core, Zionism was a form of nationalism fully compatible with European imperialism. Intellectually, Zionism reflected the racist, proto-fascist ideology that lay behind much of European nationalism of that period. On the one hand it saw Jews as part of a Jewish nation that was defined by culture, religion and race, and thus “organically” separate and distinct from other peoples. On the other, Zionism echoed the call of European imperialists for the establishment of European enclaves to “civilize” (i.e. exploit) the world. Like the British and French imperialists, Zionists saw Palestine as an empty place (“a place without people for a people without a place”) since it was not inhabited or developed by Europeans. Zionism fit perfectly with two British imperialist goals, one of using European settler colonies to exploit the resources of other regions, the other of creating multiple small nations to enhance its power in the Middle East. From 1919 until the beginning of World War II, British administrators encouraged Zionist immigration to Palestine.

THEcommunist Great Britain, France and the creation of the nations of the Middle East Middle Eastern nationalisms were given a big boost with the outbreak of World War I, which pitted the European imperialist nations of Great Britain, France, and Russia, on one side, against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, on the other. Both the French and the British saw World War I as an opportunity to take the Middle East from the Ottomans. By 1914 the Middle East had become increasing important to the imperialists. Oil had been discovered in (non-Ottoman) Iran and in Mosul, an Ottoman province now part of Iraq; and as the British navy switched from coal to fuel oil, petroleum emerged as a strategic military asset. In these new circumstances, the British became boosters of Arab nationalism, promising to support Arab independence in return for Arab military aid against the Ottomans. The British were allied with Hussein, the Sharif (governor) of Mecca, who wanted to restore the supremacy of Mecca and Medina with him as caliph, the spiritual and political leader of Arabia. The British provided Hussein with arms and money and promised to create an independent Arab nation in the former Ottoman Arab provinces. In 1916, Hussein, his sons Faisal and Abdullah (the Hashemites), and their Arab nationalist allies rose up in revolt against the Ottomans. Aided by the British spy T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), Faisal led Arab forces to take Damascus in October of 1918, as British troops took Basra and Baghdad. The British goal in promoting nationalist rebellion against the Ottomans was to establish client regimes and rivalries that would allow them to secure British control of the region. The British and French imperialists had signed a number of conflicting agreements about the control of the region. In 1916, the British and the French signed the Sykes-Picot agreement which divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire between the two imperialist powers. In 1917, the British also issued the Balfour Declaration, announcing British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which at the time was 90% Arab. The Balfour Declaration, like the British deals with Arab nationalists, was opportunistic. In the short term, the British hoped that the Balfour Declaration would induce Jews in Russia and the US (which was not yet in the war) to push their governments to support the British during World War I. In the longer range, British antiSemites hoped the declaration would lead to an exodus of European Jews, and British imperialists imagined that a Jewish Palestine (under British tutelage, of course) would strengthen British power in a post-World War I Middle East by protecting the Suez Canal and extending British control of the eastern Mediterranean. When World War I ended, the Ottoman Empire had been defeated. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and other former

9 Ottoman officers led a Turkish nationalist movement against the British, French, Greeks, and Armenians to establish the borders of an independent Turkey. And the British and French were given a mandate from the League of Nations to administer the rest of the Middle East. In this process, the British and French invented new nations—Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine— along lines that the imperialists felt would protect their interests in the region. The invention of these nations took place through a number of concrete steps. In the first place France and Great Britain redrew the map, creating formal boundaries as they divided the region between them. The French, given the mandate to administer the Ottoman region of greater Syria, proceeded to divide the region into two countries, the nearly land-locked Syria, with its Islamic majority, and the coastal Lebanon, which included a narrow Christian majority and a Frenchspeaking elite. The French division of the region had the goal of maintaining control of the region it thought most important by creating an ethnic/religious unity that it could exploit. The British, with a League of Nations mandate over the remaining area, declared the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra to be the new nation of Iraq and crowned Faisal, who had been expelled from Syria by the French, as its king. Faisal’s brother Abdullah was installed as the king of the newly created Emirate of Transjordan, an area that possessed no earlier independent economic or administrative identity. A separate Palestinian Mandate, the first time that Palestine had been a unified political entity, was defined and administered by the British. Egypt was granted a nominal independence but was ruled as a British protectorate. The British continued to control Egypt’s foreign policy, its king, and to maintain troops in both the Suez Canal Zone and Cairo. In 1924, the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, which were governed by Hussein, the former British client (and father of Faisal and Abdullah) who had become disaffected from the British, were conquered by another British client, ibn Saud. Ibn Saud, who claimed to be a descendent of a former king of Arabia, waged a war for conquest of the Arabian Peninsula from inside the British protectorate of Kuwait. In 1932, he proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia would be bordered on the east and south by a series of small nations and principalities (Kuwait, etc.) whose borders reflected the sheikdoms that the British had sponsored through its earlier trade and transportation networks in the region. Thus by the mid-1920s, the French and British imperialists had created a series of new, often competing countries in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. In inventing Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine, the French and the British turned old Ottoman provinces into neocolonial units of rule, organized as nominal republics

10 by France and as constitutional monarchies by Britain. Once these countries were established the British and French relied on a mix of four tools to rule them: military power, the elevation of elites whose fortunes were tied to the empire, the invention of new national cultures, and divide and conquer techniques. The British and French militaries were of course the ultimate ruling force upholding the pro-imperialist regimes of these new nations. In Iraq, for example, when in the 1920s regional elites led rebellions against the British-imposed king, the British military responded with air power, including the use of poison gas.2 At the same time certain local elites gained power at the feet of the imperialists. In general, the British formed local armies and bureaucracies, which were seen as the cheapest way to administer these outposts. Jobs in the British-created bureaucracies became a source of status and wealth for ambitious men. But at the same time, the British (and the French) retained direct control of the top military offices in their client states, a policy that created its own contradictions since it limited the rise of the ambitious Iraqi, Jordanian, and Syrian nationalists they were training. In addition, the British and French changed the rules of property ownership, transforming formerly tribal lands into the private possessions of sheiks. The privatization of land created on the one hand a small, rich landowning class allied with the imperial power and tied into imperial trade networks and on the other, a large impoverished and exploited peasant class nominally connected by religious and tribal bonds to their exploiters. The British also invented new national “traditions” for these new countries, often in a deliberate effort to defeat the pan-Arab ideology they had exploited in the uprising against the Ottomans. These new national identities were then taught in schools and in the military, where youth were given new maps, new mythologies, and new anthems. In Iraq, for example, the British spy and archaeologist Gertrude Bell helped found the Iraq Museum, which emphasized the region’s ancient preArabic and pre-Muslim civilizations as the source of the historic nation. Other museums such as the Costume Museum, presented “ethnic” dress as a mechanism to teach that the Hashemites were really a natural ruling family, not a foreign one.3 In the Palestinian Mandate, on the other hand, where a US survey indicated that many elites wanted to join with Syria or the Hashemite kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq, the British insisted that people should identify as Palestinian not Arab. In Transjordan, John Bagot Glubb, the British general who commanded the Jordanian army, created a military corps out of formerly migratory Bedouins. Glubb then used his Bedouin troops to control the cities and towns, which he feared as potential centers of rebellion against the king and British rule, to define and patrol newly imposed borders on the remaining tribal peoples, and later to

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police the Palestinians. Glubb’s elevation of the Bedouins also influenced the invention of a Jordanian nationalism that centered on a Bedouin culture of his imagination. For example, Glubb devised a costume for his Bedouin Desert Patrol that included a red and white checkered head cloth (where previously only white head cloths had been worn). By the 1970s, this shmagh or hatta was being worn by the king (who was pictured in this costume on Jordanian currency) and by youth as the symbol of Jordanian nationalism. Palestinians within Jordan also began adopting a version of this Bedouin military dress as their own, and in the 1970s the black and white hagga became the costume of the Palestinian nationalists. In a similar fashion, Bedouin-inspired commercial music and food came to be redefined as Jordanian culture, adopted by urbanites with no cultural connection to Bedouin life before the invention of Transjordan.4 The creation of these multiple nations reflected imperialist efforts to divide and conquer the region. In addition, the imperialists encouraged minority groups, including Jews, Kurds, Berbers, and Armenians, to claim special rights. By funding minority-group nationalisms within the borders of the nations they had only recently defined, the imperialists multiplied the players they might manipulate. In Lebanon, for example, the French enhanced sectarian divisions inside Lebanon by basing the governmental structure on religions differences (Catholic Christian, Orthodox Christian, Druze, Sunni and Shia Muslim, etc). In another example, Kurdish nationalists asked for nationhood at the Versailles negotiations that turned the Middle East over to France and Great Britain. The Kurds’ request was denied. But the British (and later the Americans) periodically funded and armed the Kurds so Kurdish rebellion might put pressure on Iraqi regimes they were at odds with, only to then increase weapons for suppressing the Kurds when an Iraqi regime had regained favor. The Zionists were the most visible beneficiaries of the British policy toward minority claims. During the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish migration from Europe to Palestine accelerated. Most importantly, using money from wealthy European Zionists, the Jewish National Fund began buying land, often from large, absentee landholders who lived outside new borders of the Mandate. Longterm Palestinian tenants were forced off their land to become rural and urban proletarians. As Jewish and Arab workers cooperated in strikes and labor organizing, Zionist leaders adopted a policy of building Jewish enclaves, hiring only Jewish employees, and setting up Jewish-only labor organizations. The British rewarded Zionist businessmen with key economic concessions to develop electrical networks, mining enterprises, and irrigation and drainage projects, and allowed them to set up separate school systems and to block the establishment of a multi-ethnic Palestinian parliament. In this period British support for Zionist immigration, settlement,

THEcommunist and state-building gave the Zionists essential protection for overcoming opposition to land grabs and laid the foundation for the future state of Israel.5 While the details of this history give it an appearance of almost impenetrable complexity, the essence can be easily summarized. The nationalisms of the Middle East are not the products of genetics or local culture or religion. Both the ideas and the events have their origins in the interimperialist rivalries and imperialist inventions of the World War I era. The fact that the region’s rivalries have an actual, material beginning suggests the possibility of an end. But finding a solution requires an accurate understanding of the contradictions involved, and a clear understanding that to defeat imperialism, the working class must defeat nationalism as well.

Enter the United States: As the British and French imperialists carved the Middle East into new nations, the United States became increasingly interested in the region. During the 1920s and 1930s, as oil became the key fuel for transportation and military operations, more and more oil was found in the area. Oil was discovered in Kirkuk (northern Iraq) in 1927, in Bahrain in 1932, in Saudi Arabia in 1933, and in Kuwait in 1934. American oil companies began entering the region in the 1920s, and in the 1930s held key contracts to produce oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. By 1939, 15% of oil coming out of the Middle East was going into the accounts of US companies. During World War II, the United States declared the Middle East a strategic concern of its foreign policy, a declaration that placed the US on a permanent collision course with its British and French allies. This declaration reflected the belief of the US ruling class that the United States was the world’s rising imperial power, and that World War II was the beginning of what Henry Luce called the “American Century.” At the time, the United States didn’t need Middle Eastern oil for domestic consumption (that would not occur until the 1970s), but rather saw oil as power over others. With oil replacing Europeanproduced coal as the fuel of industry and military power, European capitalists and governments would increasingly depend on the country that controlled the Middle East. In addition, the Soviet Union shared a long border with the region, and John Foster Dulles worried that the USSR might “take over the area, and... thereby control Europe through the oil on which Europe is dependent.”6 While the Russians were a potential threat, the British and French were the actual powers that had to be moved out. For imperialists, conflict is absolute, alliance relative and temporary. Thus during the course of World War II, the US treated its formal allies as rivals, demanding that they give up their colonies in exchange for US aid in the war against Germany. In the Middle East, US attention during World War II focused on Saudi Arabia

11 and Iran, both of which were oil producers, and on Syria and Lebanon, which were crucial to the TAPLINE, a US planned pipeline that would move oil from Saudi Arabia to Europe without transiting either the British-controlled emirates of the Persian Gulf or the British-controlled Suez Canal. In Saudi Arabia, the US oil consortium ARAMCO paved the way to push out British influence. In 1942-43, ARAMCO convinced the US government to send Lend Lease aid to the British client ibn Saud, even though Saudi Arabia faced no military threat from the Axis powers. This aid included not only military equipment, but 22 million ounces of silver bullion, most of it minted in the US into Saudi riyals, to alleviate a shortage of coins and to prop up ibn Saud’s power. To cement the importance of Saudi Arabia to the US, FDR met ibn Saud on his way back from Yalta in 1945. In Iran, Cordell Hull proposed that the US to take “positive action” in order “to avoid British or Russian hegemony.” During the war, some 30,000 US troops served in Iran, mostly running railroads and ports. Military advisors were also sent to train the Iranian military and its urban police force, including Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf who would be involved in the 1953 coup and whose son would lead US troops in the first Gulf War against Iraq. In the cases of Syria and Lebanon, the United States demanded that France grant the two countries their independence. When the Free French General (and future French president) Charles De Gaulle balked at the US demands, British troops entered Damascus to ensure a French exit.7 At the end of the war, Syria and Lebanon were granted their independence. Britain, facing a serious economic crisis and pressed to repay its war debt to the United States, began extracting itself from Greece and Turkey (whose economic support was turned over to the United States), from India (which was split into two counties) and from the Palestinian Mandate. The British, on the other hand still had troops in Egypt, in Iraq, and in Kuwait and the other emirates of the Persian Gulf, a situation that the US relied on and supported even as it moved to replace the British as the region’s hegemonic power. Lurking in the background was the Soviet Union which posed a political more than a military threat by offering itself as a rival model of independent industrial growth and as a potential source of aid and weapons outside of the UScontrolled western market. In this contest to replace the British and to keep out the Russians, the United States, like the British and French imperialist before it, wielded nationalism as a key tool of the rising imperialist power.

Communism and Nationalism as popular ideologies in the Cold War Middle East: As the United States moved into the Middle East, it had to negotiate its way through a region where anti¬imperialism and nationalism were popular ideologies

12 among both the working class and the ambitious Arab bureaucrats and military officers in the British and French administrations. On the one hand, large communist parties existed in many Middle Eastern countries, especially those which bordered Russia. In 1920-21, workers and peasants in Iran’s northern provinces of Azerbaijan and Gilan had established a Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran. In 1945-46, communists in Iran’s northern provinces of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan established the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, which under the protection of the Soviet army instituted a popular front program that redistributed land, extended the vote to women, established protective labor legislation, and set up health clinics, literacy classes, and schools. This republic was crushed by the Shah of Iran after Soviet troops withdrew from the region, but its legacy continued to generate fear among the imperialists.8 At the end of World War II, militant trade unions and communist parties existed in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Iran. In Egypt, communists led trade unions among the nation’s industrial (textile) workers. In Iran, the Tudeh or Masses Party, a pro-Soviet reform party, had a mass base in the working class and among all the different ethnic groups within Iran. In 1951, when the local bourgeois forces nationalized the British oil concession, the Tudeh mobilized workers and students in strikes and mass protests against imperialism and in favor of nationalization. In 1953 and 1956, the poor, mostly Shiite workers of Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil fields held general strikes against ARAMCO and the Saudi ruling class. Let by a coalition of communist and nationalist groups, the oil workers protested low pay, layoffs, discrimination, lack of political suffrage, and US imperialism. In 1958, the Communist Party of Iraq held a May Day demonstration of a million people in the streets of Baghdad. These parties, though large, shared a common flaw. Following the lead of the Soviet Union and most communists of that period, they saw the path to communism as consisting of stages, the first of which would be national liberation from imperialism. So in country after country, the communists supported bourgeois nationalists, including the Zionists who founded Israel, because they believed these forces were most able to expel the British.9 As we will see, this belief would lead to their downfall. The bourgeois nationalist movements were led by intellectuals, many of whom had studied in Europe, and army officers who had been tutored in nationalist ideologies in the barracks. Though these men had served in the administrations of the Ottoman, French and British empires, they wanted to rule on their own. The leading theorist of Arab nationalism, Sati al-Husri, had served as an Ottoman education official, and then became a close adviser to and educational administrator

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under Faisal, the British-installed King of Iraq. Al-Husri and his disciple, Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Arab Ba’ath movement and an admirer of European fascism, were inspired by the German philosophers Herder and Fichte who stressed the idea of an organic nation-¬state grounded in the culture and language of a people. This movement was secular, anti-¬imperialist (i.e. antiBritish), and anti-communist, calling on workers and peasants to adopt patriotism, accept their proper place and status within the nation, and reject proletarian internationalism.10 During World War II, many antiBritish nationalists advocated an alliance with Germany and Italy, even staging a short-lived coup in Iraq, an effort quashed by the actions of British and Russian troops in the region.

National Liberation and the Rise of US Dominance In the 1950s, when nationalist politicians and parties challenged British and French power in the region, the United States provided them key support, sometimes publicly, more often secretly. Just as the British had used Arab nationalism against the Ottomans, the United States used nationalism against the British and the French. The United States positioned itself as an anti-colonial friend of any and all who sought to expel its imperialist rivals and of all who aided the US in smashing the growth of pro-communist movements. Where the British military had garrisoned troops in the regions since World War I and had placed British officers such as John Glubb as commanders of national armies, the US offered the new nationalists economic and military aid, often in the form of cash that they could dispense on their own. Where the British had owned and managed the oil fields, factories, and transportation networks (including, of course, the Suez Canal), the United States negotiated private contracts with each nation’s elite on more generous terms than had existed before. These contracts and the “free market” relationship they entailed was, the US asserted, the essence of “liberty” and national independence. Always painting a stark contrast with the British colonial, occupying presence, the United States insisted to itself and others that it exercised a “benevolent” not an imperial presence. Benevolence, however, was a tactic that extended only to so far. Those that did as the US wished were favored with money, with arms, and with programs training their police to put down communists and other domestic opponents. Those that acted against US policy might find themselves the targets of coups to install the next guy willing to do US bidding. The relationships between the United States and the nations of the Middle East in the 1950s are complicated, and their history is often obscured by those who stand to benefit from the outcome. But a look at the particulars provides essential

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ammunition for understanding the current war against Iraq and, more generally of the necessity for the working class to reject all forms of nationalism and those that claim to lead in its name and to embrace proletarian internationalism.

were, like all other capitalists, both potential allies and actual competitors in for control of labor and resources. The complex unity between imperialism and nationalism is illuminated by the relationship between the United States and Gamal Abdul Nasser.

The Iran Coup

The US Dance with Nasser

Iran provides the classic example of US action against a nationalist regime which resulted in both the diminution of British influence and the defeat of a working class communist threat. Iran had long been part of the British sphere of influence, and had granted oil concessions to British oil companies as early as 1909. During the 1940s, the US defined Iran, with its long border with the Soviet Union, as a strategic region, and by 1947 the US had a large CIA mission there doing intelligence and propaganda work and organizing cross-border raids into the USSR.

Nasser is often portrayed as the heroic figure of Arab nationalism. He nationalized the Suez Canal, withstood imperialist attack by the British, French and Israelis, stood up for the Palestinians, and joined the Non-Aligned Movement in defiance of the United States. However these actions need to be more carefully examined. Despite his often public opposition to US initiatives, Nasser’s rise to power was assisted by the US, and he continued to consult with the United States before making many of what appeared to be his most independent, pan-Arabic actions. What brought the United States and Nasser together were their anti-British sentiments and their fear of pro-communist sentiments of the Arab working class.

In 1951, mass protest against British influence resulted in the nationalization of the British oil concession under Premier Mossadegh. Initially, the United States ignored British calls to boycott Iran and cooperated with the Mossadegh government. US policy makers hoped that his brand of pro-capitalist nationalism might be an effective antidote to the radical working class Tudeh. But in 1953, as the Tudeh continued to grow and became more critical of Mossadegh, and as the British threatened to invade Iran, the CIA staged a coup that expelled Mossadegh, put a formerly pro-Nazi general into the premiership, and gave new oil concessions to US companies.11 From 1953 to 1979, Iran, under Shah Reza Pahlavi, was a key recipient of US military aid, serving as a military pillar of the United States in the Middle East, and as a key participant in US anti-communist actions around the world. The coup in Iran is sharply etched into the history of the Middle East, and is often told as a story illustrating a necessary contradiction between US imperialism and third-world nationalism. This interpretation gets power from two other events of 1954: the CIA overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the reformist president of Guatemala who had tried to nationalize some of the massive landholdings of the United Fruit Company, and the US’s creation of the government of “South” Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem after the French withdrawal of forces from its former colony of Vietnam. However there is more to the Iran story. The history of the Iran coup is also a story of interimperialist rivalries in which the United States, though ruthless, balanced the actual benefits of protecting British claims to oil against the potential benefits of supporting a particular nationalist politician. In this period US imperialists treated the Middle East’s bourgeois nationalists with tactical flexibility, as a contingent and useful tools in their competition with their powerful imperialist rival. Third-world nationalists

The British had occupied Egypt since the 1880s. Though Egypt had been granted a nominal independence in 1922, British troops continued to occupy parts of the country (particularly the critical Suez Canal zone) into the 1950s as Great Britain strove to keep Egypt in its sphere of influence. However, by 1951, as Egypt’s pro-British elites fought with each other over development contracts, the British confronted a rising nationalist movement that included strikes in the British-dominated textile factories and guerilla actions against British military outposts in the Suez Canal zone. In 1952, Nasser and other military men (the “Free Officers”) seized power, eventually deposing the King and forcing British troops out of Cairo. Though some of the details of Nasser’s relationship with the US are in dispute, Nasser and the Free Officers met with the CIA (including super agent Kermit Roosevelt, who orchestrated the 1953 Iranian coup) and with US ambassador Jefferson Caffrey before seizing power. To Caffrey, who had been the ambassador to France during the earlier crisis over Syria, Nasser’s military rule could be a key force in opening the Egyptian economy to new (i.e. US) investors and in controlling the militant working class. On taking power, Nasser quickly moved to suppress working-class movements just as Caffrey had hoped. One of Nasser’s first actions was to send troops to smash a sit¬down strike of textile workers at Misr Fine Spinning and Weaving. Over 500 workers were arrested, and two were executed after military trials.12 In 1953, following meetings with CIA operative Roosevelt and US envoy John Foster Dulles, Nasser stepped up his arrests of communists, using lists provided by the United States embassy. US advisers were brought in to train Egyptian intelligence forces. In fact, at each stage in the initial development of his program, from abrogating the Egyptian constitution

14 to instituting land reform, Nasser consulted with and notified the US embassy ahead of time, sometimes even following US advice on whom to appoint to office. In the case of land reform, the US provided advisers and money in hopes that redistributing some land would prevent peasant uprising and increase incomes and thus the market for domestic and foreign industrial goods. The land seizures conveniently targeted only those large landholders (for example the Egyptian royal family) who had been most closely tied to the British.13 US policy makers hoped to use Nasser’s anti-colonial stance not merely inside Egypt but in the broader Middle East where the US was engaged a quiet competition with the British. By 1953, the US had pushed the British out of Saudi Arabia and Iran, two of the most important oilproducing countries. But the British still controlled Iraq and some of the oil-rich emirates along the Persian Gulf and the British had thousands of troops in the region. The US expected British troops to protect US investments, even as it wanted to restrict the independent actions of the British and to cement its position as the senior, controlling partner in their Cold War alliance.

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and their ally Israel attacked Egypt in an attempt to get back the Suez Canal. Here despite Nasser’s defiance and as the USSR denounced France and Britain, the United States refused to support its traditional European allies. Though generally unhappy with the actions of the Egyptians, Eisenhower was particularly determined to show Britain and France who was the boss on the international scene and to cement its claim that it was a reliable anti¬-colonial ally of the nations of the Middle East. As Britain, France and Israel launched air and land invasions of Egypt, Eisenhower threatened to cut off their oil supplies, forcing Britain and its allies to withdraw within a few weeks of invading. In 1957, the United States promulgated a new policy for the Middle East. According to the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” the US would now enter into bilateral agreements with any individual Middle Eastern country faced with a “threat from communism.” Neither the French nor the British would be looked to as middle men. By 1958, the Baghdad Pact, the last British attempt to define policy in the Middle East, had collapsed.

Thus in 1954-55, when the British initiated an antiSoviet military alliance with Turkey and Iraq and Pakistan, two of its former colonies, John Foster Dulles dismissed the pact as a mere “instrument of UK-Arab politics” and the US refused to join.14 Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt denounced the Baghdad Pact as an attempt to re-impose colonialism. Saudi Arabia (and ARAMCO) was also upset with British for recently seizing control of an oasis that both it and the British protectorate of Abu Dhabi claimed. In response, Saudi Arabia increased its funding of anti-British nationalists in the region; and the Egyptians began broadcasting radio propaganda into Iraq, denouncing Iraq’s pro-British premier Nuri al Sa’id, and urging the Kurds to demand their independence.15

One factor in the US’s successful use of Nasser against its imperialist rivals was the way the left’s line on national liberation gave nationalists like Nasser crucial, if unintended, cover. From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, communists had struggled with how to interpret nationalism in the colonial world. While international unity of all workers was the general line of the movement, when it came to the particular instance of national liberation in the colonial world, even national liberation movement led by bourgeois forces were seen as essentially progressive. This idea was probably most strongly expressed in Mao’s “On New Democracy,” where Mao argued that since imperialists depended on their colonies for profits, the loss of any colony was a blow to imperialism and a move on the road toward socialism.

As Nasser rejected joining the British-led Baghdad Pact, he anticipated a $256 million aid package from the US and the US-controlled World Bank to build the Aswan Dam. The Aswan Dam project, which provoked intense rivalries among Egyptian elites, was designed to control the flooding of the Nile and to provide electricity for industrial development. But after Nasser attended the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations, and announced plans both to sell Egyptian cotton to China (in competition with US cotton growers and in defiance of the then US policy of isolating China) and to buy weapons from Czechoslovakia, US aid was cut off. Close on the heels of the CIA-sponsored coup in Iran, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles thought he could push Nasser into a more open alliance with the United States. Attuned to US-British-USSR rivalries, Nasser was not easily bullied. Instead of falling into line, he nationalized the Frenchand British-controlled Suez Canal in order to finance the dam project locally. In the fall of 1956, Britain, France,

In Egypt and other countries of the Middle East, this line often led communist parties to refuse to oppose nationalists like Nasser even as communists were being jailed and in some cases executed. When Nasser first seized power, many workers and the largest of Egypt’s communist parties supported the coup. Then Nasser’s repression of strikes and the arrests of radicals caused some communists to change their views and denounce Nasser as an agent of the United States. But after Nasser attended the Bandung Conference and nationalized the Suez Canal, leftists again gave Nasser their support. Believing that nationalism would lead to power for the working class, many Egyptian communists endorsed Nasser, this time from the prison cells in which he had placed them. Yet despite his appearance as an opponent of imperialism, Nasser continued to cooperate with the US. As we will see in the story of Syria, Nasser became a secret but willing player in a US policy of promoting regional rivals and rival nationalists, a policy the US

THEcommunist hoped would allow it to fend off both the USSR and the British and to dominate the region’s oil without the investment of US troops.

Competing Nationalisms in Syria and Iraq: In Syria and Iraq, the Cold War rivalry between the US and Great Britain initially took the form of nationalist coups—some stressing Arab nationalism, others Syrian or Iraqi nationalism—during the 1950s. Syria, which has no oil, was a key route for a planned pipeline from the Saudi oil fields. Syria had been occupied by British troops in 1945 as the US and the British forced the French to grant it independence. Then between 1948 and 1958, the British repeatedly used appeals to pan-Arab nationalism in efforts to merge Syria with Iraq under the leadership of Iraq’s pro-British Hashemite monarchy. In this the British had the support of many old Iraqi elites whose economic ties had been disrupted when the imperialists carved the Ottoman Empire into separate countries. The United States, on the other hand, wanted to keep Syria “independent,” by promoting Syrian nationalism and elevating army officers beholden to the United States. In 1949, as the TAPLINE neared completion, Syria was rocked by a series of military coups. While the British and US press used racism to explain this instability as the product of Arab inability to deal with modernity, the coups were the product of inter-imperialist rivalries. In March, 1949, the CIA installed Husni Zaid in power; in October, after a failed Iraqi-¬British organized assassination attempt, the British sponsored a coup that placed Col. Sami Hinnawi, a supporter of the merger of Syria and Iraq, in power. Then in December 1949, Hinnawi was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup that placed Adib Shaishakly in office. Shaishakly instituted land reform and imported arms from the US in an effort to cement support for his rule. Shaishukly himself was deposed in 1954, and in 1957, after discovering another US-sponsored plot the Syrian government signed an economic and military aid deal with the USSR.16 At this point, the United States used anti-communism in an effort to get Saudi Arabia to intervene in Syria (so that “the atheistic creed of communism not become entrenched in the Moslem world”). When Saudi Arabia failed to act, the US accepted an offer of aid from Nasser, who was worried about the growth of domestic radicalism in Syria and once again in Egypt. At the request of Syrian anti-communists, Nasser merged Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic, a move justified by Nasser in the name of pan-Arab nationalism, and by John Foster Dulles as a means to “impede communist penetration of Syria.” The formation of the UAR upset both Saudi Arabia and Iraq, whose local elites saw Nasser (and each other) as a rival for regional influence. The union of Syria and Egypt was short-lived, and in 1961, the UAR was disbanded. But during the period of the UAR’s existence, Nasser

15 continued to consult with the US ambassador about his actions and began an active correspondence with US President Kennedy. As when he came to power in Egypt, in Syria Nasser proceeded to shut down all political parties, especially targeting the Syrian Communist Party. Denouncing communists as “foreign inspired opponents of Arab nationalism,” Nasser shut down their newspapers, and with the aid of US-furnished intelligence lists, jailed 1000s more Syrian and Egyptian communists.17 When Nasser founded the UAR, the British, fearing the impact of Arab nationalism on their hold over Kuwait and other Gulf states, announced the formation of a rival Arab Union, a merger of Jordan and Iraq (with an invitation to Kuwait to join later).18 The Arab Union was likewise short lived. But in Iraq this British-sponsored pan-Arab scheme had unintended consequences: it provoked an Iraqinationalist military coup that deposed pro-British premier Nuri al Sa’id and King Faisal II, both of whom were killed by the rebels. The leader of the new government, General Abdel al Karim Qasim immediately withdrew from the Baghdad Pact, reestablished diplomatic relations with the USSR, demanded a bigger share of oil revenues from the British-dominated Iraq Petroleum Company19 and implemented a limited land reform program targeting landlords who had supported the king and the British. Though an anti-communist, Qasim initially sought the support of the Iraqi Communist Party, which it was willing to give since the ICP (like the communist parties in Egypt) saw bourgeois nationalist coups as part of the march toward national liberation. Qasim’s solicitation of communist support, however, was merely tactical. With a large base among workers, urban intellectuals, and peasants, the ICP was the only political party that could mobilize people in all parts of the country. But as Qasim consolidated his power and as communist-led peasants began to occupy the property of absentee landlords, Qasim moved against the communists, removing them from the leadership of trade unions and peasant association, closing down their mass organizations and press, and arresting some of the most militant.20 Neither Great Britain nor the US was happy with Qasim. The British, who had the most to lose, began negotiations to protect their oil investments from nationalization, reinforced their troops in Kuwait (to which Qasim asserted a claim), and increased funding to Kurdish nationalist groups in an effort to destabilize Qasim’s regime. The United States, which in 1958 had much less invested in Iraq, both considered Qasim as a counterweight to Nasser’s ambitions and also encouraged Nasser to build an opposition to Qasim within the Iraqi military on the basis of pan-Arabism and anti-communism. When Syria and Egypt disbanded the UAR, the United States moved against Qasim. The tool in this action was the Iraqi Ba’ath Party, whose links with the CIA had been forged in Egypt with the assistance of the US-trained Egyptian intelligence organization. In

16 1963, Iraq’s nationalist Ba’ath Party came to power “on a CIA train.” It quickly moved to round up and execute thousands of Iraqi communists, using lists provided by the US, and to suppress the Kurdish insurrection that the British and the US had sponsored against Qasim, here with the assistance of US weapons. Yet the Ba’ath Party was unable to fully consolidate its hold on the Iraqi government, which in 1966 began to negotiate with the French and the Russians for the more rapid development of its vast oil reserves. In 1968, as the US worried about losing control over Iraq’s resources, the CIA sponsored another coup that strengthened Ba’athist rule and ultimately brought Saddam Hussein, a key CIA contact since 1959, to power.21 Thus as it consolidated its control over oil and oil transport routes, the United States had repeatedly encouraged local nationalists—using them to push the British out and to crush working-class rebellions—all the while hoping to increase US power by playing one country off another. Yet even at the height of US power, the reliance on local nationalists set limits on US action. Any action favoring a potential ally might meet with disfavor from an actual ally. This was most evident in its dance with Nasser, who as a populist figure posed a constant challenge to the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the oil companies connected with them. The power of oil, the goal of US involvement in the region, repeatedly restrained US efforts to build links with countries like Egypt or Syria which were rich in people not petroleum.22 At the same time, the events of the period expose the violent core underlying the American claim that its market-based approach made it a more benevolent power than the British. The violence underlying the imperialist’s promotion of nationalism to “divide and conquer” was sharply etched in the 1980s, when the United States encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran and then armed both sides. During this eight-year war, tens of thousands of Iraqi and Iranian workers and peasants died defending not their class but the warring elites of their nations.

Divide and Conquer US style: the case of Israel and Islamic fundamentalism In 1969, the last British troops left the Middle East, signaling Great Britain’s acknowledgement that the United States was the dominant imperial power in the region. At this point the US saw only the USSR as a similar rival, and it expected to be able to marshal anti-communist fears to keep the capitalists of Europe and Asia in its pocket. But this analysis was internally flawed. By 1969, European and Japanese manufacturers were increasingly winning market share from the US; European bankers had forced the US off the gold standard by 1971, beginning a challenge to US financial hegemony that continues to this day. The competition from these imperialist rivals (which now include Russia

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and China) negated the contingent unities of the early Cold War. As more players had the money to enter the market-oriented game the US had set up at the end of World War II, oil producing countries felt able to defy US policies as well. At the same time, the US ruling class faced real internal limits. When the British troops left the Middle East, the US military was bogged down in an unpopular war in Vietnam. Faced with massive GI rebellions, the United States had begun withdrawing ground troops from Vietnam and was politically unable to deploy a large military force in the Middle East to fill the vacuum left by the British. Yet as the United States increased the air war on Vietnam, the massive amounts of jet fuel these raids required made the United States even more dependent on Middle Eastern oil. Since the 1970s, US imperialists have needed Middle Eastern oil for their own domestic and military consumption not just as a tool for dominating its economic rivals. Given this, the US ruling class intensified its policy of relying on local nationalists. Hoping to transcend the limits set by GI rebellion, the US looked to regional surrogates for the military force necessary to keep its control of the region. This policy (known as the Nixon Doctrine) meant an increasing reliance on the Shah of Iran and the Saudi royal family and a changing relationship with Israel. More importantly for the study of nationalism in the Middle East, the United States intensified its use of religion, especially Islamic fundamentalism, to enhance its power over what were seen as increasingly unreliable secular nationalists. The promotion of local nationalisms (including the Taliban in Afghanistan and Khomeini in Iran) that continued after the negation of British power created new contradictions for US imperialist power. Brought into power by US money, these local nationalists have been willing to ally themselves with new powers against the US, a contradiction forced the United States into a series of ground wars that began with the first Gulf war and continue with the current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The case of Israel: The US relationship with Israel needs to be understood in this context of the sponsoring of rival nationalisms. The US and Israel did not become allies as a result of some mystical “natural affinity,” but rather when the United States decided that aiding Israel was in its interest. The US and the USSR had both been quick to recognize Israel when it declared its independence in 1948. The USSR at that time promoted Israel as a force against British imperialism, a line that led many pro-Soviet communist and socialist parties to both accept Israel and push for an independent Arab Palestine according to the borders drawn by the UN in 1948. The US recognized Israel for

THEcommunist the same reason. But while the CIA used the Israeli Mossad as a subcontractor,23 throughout the 1950s US relations with Israel did not go much beyond that. Rather, as has been described earlier, the US focused on Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries and on winning over Arab nationalists. In this period, Israel was most closely allied with the British and the French, with whom it joined in the 1956 Suez War. The eastern bloc also sold arms to Israel, and Germany was a key source of financial aid. Israeli nationalism, relying on the Zionist notion of ethnic affinity mentioned earlier, was built through racist violence against the Arab residents of Palestine. In 1947-48 as Britain prepared to withdraw, and as the UN decided to split the Palestinian Mandate in two, the Zionist leadership moved to cement their power by taking over British institutions and expelling Palestinians from the land. Zionist paramilitary forces were given lists of villages deemed economically or politically important. Villages were surrounded, residents driven out or killed, and homes bulldozed. Urban neighborhoods were similarly purged. Villages left standing, now empty of residents, had their names changed in an effort to wipe out the earlier history of the region. As a result of the “Nakbah” (the catastrophe) of 1948 some 750,000 people became refugees, living in UN tent cities along the borders of Israel and their former farmlands. In 1967 a new wave of expulsions began, and by 1972, the UN had registered some 1.5 million refugees. The Palestinians had become a landless proletariat, working (if at all) at low wages in Israel and in other countries throughout the region. US ties with Israel deepened in this period as the politics of oil undercut the US relationship with Nasser. In 1962, Nasser agreed to assist anti-monarchist rebels in Yemen, eventually sending troops to fight in Yemen’s civil war against monarchist forces armed and funded by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and American oil companies demanded that the US force Nasser to withdraw; Kermit Roosevelt, the former CIA operative then an executive of Gulf Oil, traveled to Washington to persuade the National Security Council that Nasser could not be worked with. Unable to control Nasser, whose prestige as a pan-Arab populist was on the line, the US increased military aid to Saudi Arabia; it also approved the sale of Hawk missiles to Israel, a sale the US government had vetoed two years before. In 1966, the US began giving Israel tanks, aircraft and other heavy assault weapons. The growing, but generally secret, relationship between the US and Israel paid off in the June 1967 War (also known as the Six Day War). Having pre-approved Israel’s attack on Egypt as a mechanism of disciplining Nasser, the US provided Israel with crucial military intelligence. US surveillance planes were used to guide Israeli troops in locating and destroying Arab airfield and troops, (a success that was publicly explained as a result of superior Israeli bravery,

17 training and weapons over primitive Arabs using inferior Russian weapons).24 Israel’s quick victory produced a number of changes. On the one hand, Israel found expanded popular support for its actions among new constituents in the US. Religious Jews, who had earlier ignored the Zionist project, saw the quick victory and capture of Jerusalem as a message that God favored Israel. A similar religious approach was adopted by Christian evangelicals, such as Billy Graham and the young Jerry Falwell, who took to the airways to argue that the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians was the fulfillment of Biblical prophesy that foretold the Jewish retaking of Jerusalem as part of the trajectory of Christ’s return, the truth of which, they argued, was demonstrated by the very military success of the Israelis.25 On the other hand, the 1967 War cemented the military relationship between the US, Israel, and Iran. The United States increased its sales of sophisticated weapons to Israel; Iran became Israel’s principle source of oil; and Israel became the principle agent for the constructing military and oil facilities in Iran. In addition, both Israel and Iran cooperated with the United States in supporting seemingly pro-US nationalisms aimed at destabilizing the influence of the USSR and other rivals of the US. This included arming and fueling the Kurds in their rebellions in Iraq, sponsoring Islamic fundamentalist incursions into Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, and supporting pro-US authoritarian regimes in Africa and Latin America. The fall of the Shah in 1979 further cemented the US relationship with Israel, and presidents Carter and Reagan each declared Israel to be a “strategic asset” of the United States whose military superiority would be maintained. The amount of military and economic aid increased, most of it in the form of grants not loans, and Israeli weapons purchases became a key source of profits for the US defense industry. As the US searched for a new client to replace the Shah, it increased its funding of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the Egypt. At the same time, Israel continued to develop a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, providing it military funding in the war with Iraq and serving as a conduit for US aid to Iran and other fundamentalist Islamic groups that worked in the anti-communist crusades of the 1980s.26

Inventing Islamic fundamentalism: The United States first began funding Islamic fundamentalist in the 1950s. U.S. capitalists and policy makers viewed religion as an antidote to communism. In the United States, the ruling class subsidized evangelicals like Billy Graham and sent mass subscriptions of his publications to factories with radical trade unions. In post-war Europe, the CIA fed funds into conservative Christian parties in Germany, France, and Italy. In the

18 Middle East, Kermit Roosevelt, a key CIA operative, hoped to find “a Moslem Billy Graham” to mobilize religious fervor against Communism in that region. The idea that Islam was an antidote to radicalism was nurtured by leading scholars such as HAR Gibbs (of Oxford and Harvard) and Bernard Lewis (of Oxford and Princeton), whose books still line the shelves of US bookstores. To these scholars, Islam was a monolithic religion that could be manipulated to shape the politics of the Middle East: neither sectarian divisions such as those between Sunni and Shia that date back to the 7th century nor the rival empires that had variously ruled the region nor social class mattered, since in this view religious faith was “the essential defining characteristic of Muslims.” The rebellions that rocked the region were not the result of exploitation, but rather the outgrowth of the West’s disruption of the natural, religious nature of Arab people. Pious Muslims would reject Communism, and thus the promotion of Islam would protect US interests. In the mid-50s, the Eisenhower administration sponsored a conference that brought together these scholars and staffers from the National Security Council, where Bernard Lewis suggested that Islamic groups could be used as a “Fifth Column” within the Soviet Union. The NSC set up a working committee on Islamic organizations and began to compile lists of groups to target for propaganda.27 Efforts to find this “Moslem Billy Graham” focused initially on ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud, who had come to power in the 1920s with the aid of the Ikhwan, a militarized Wahhabi Muslim group, had taken control of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina and assumed the title of protector of Islam. As radicalism emerged within the Saudi working class and Arab nationalism among middle class forces in Egypt and Syria, the US emphasized ibn Saud’s role as a religious leader, funded the building of railroads to transport pilgrims to the Islamic holy cities of Medina and Mecca, and supported the growth of the Wahhabi version of Islam (which, of course, is the version of Islam espoused by Osama bin Laden in his challenge to the power of the Saudi ruling family and their ties to the US). Repeatedly, ibn Saud had the Wahhabi religious leaders who supported his regimen denounce strikes, domestic communists, and efforts of rival regimes to set up trade and foreign aid deals with the USSR. The US flirtation with Islam intensified in the 1960s. The United States began to funnel covert (though modest) aid to the Muslim Brotherhoods of Egypt, who later became key recruiters of Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia’s King Faysal began to experiment with a pan-Islamic ideology meant to block the spread of the radical pan-Arab and Marxist movements among the workers in Saudi oil fields. Claiming that “principles of Islamic solidarity superceded foreign ideologies,” the Saudi regime (in alliance with the Shah of Iran) set up

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the World Muslim League in 1962 and established new Islamic universities, which became havens for Muslim fundamentalists clerics expelled from Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. With the blessing and aid of the CIA, Saudi Arabia provided the clerics with teaching positions and with television and radio transmitters to broadcast their message throughout the region.28 In the 1970s, the US began to act on Bernard Lewis’s idea that Islam could be used to bring down its Soviet rival. The initial focus was on Afghanistan, where a CIA front group called the Asia Foundation had been promoting Islamist cells since the 1950s. In 1973 when Prince Muhammad Daoud took power in alliance with pro-communist groups, the CIA increased its aid to the Islamists. Then in March 1978, when pro-Soviet reformers deposed Daoud and implemented land reform, the US dispatched increasing numbers of anti-communist Islamic partisans into Afghanistan. These men had been recruited through the Muslim brotherhoods with the aid of the “Safari Club,” a group of pro-US monarchs and intelligence operatives that included the Shah of Iran, King Hassan II of Morocco, Kamal Adhan, head of intelligence in Saudi Arabia, and Anwar Sadat of Egypt.29 The National Security Council, under Zbigniew Brzezinski, wanted to provoke a Soviet invasion and a Soviet “Vietnam”30 that might bring down what was by then its most powerful imperialist rival. Six months later when the USSR sent in its army, the US further intensified its funding of the mujahidin. Egypt became a center for training fighters in US special-forces techniques, including the use of car bombs and other remote control devices; British, Saudi, and Israeli intelligence forces provided weapons that the US could not directly supply; and funds flowed in from the United States and Saudi Arabia, often delivered through nongovernmental agents such as Osama bin Laden. By 1984, US was encouraging border raids into the Soviet Union, which the CIA hoped would provoke a Muslim uprising there. When Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and Afghanistan descended into civil war, US funding continued. The Taliban (targeted in the current US occupation of Afghanistan) became special favorites because they promised to bring the order and an oil pipeline that US investors wanted.31 As the US was sponsoring rebellion in Afghanistan, its erstwhile ally the Shah of Iran was forced into exile. Although the hostage crisis that followed changed the form of US relations with Iran, the success of the Islamists there initially encouraged US sponsorship of Islamic fundamentalism. The 1978-79 Iranian revolution against the Shah had actually begun with strikes of oil, steel, and transportation workers, who espoused the kind of class-based radicalism the US ruling class most feared. It became an Islamic Revolution only after the return of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, the CIA and British Intelligence had worked with Iran’s Islamic

THEcommunist groups in the 1950s; and the Shah had continued to work with them throughout his reign, giving religious leaders easy access to the court.32 In exile, Khomeini received monetary supported from French intelligence and the CIA.33 Certainly, the Khomeini regime cooperated with the US effort against the USSR, building a training camp for Afghani rebels and distributing Korans printed by the CIA into Central Asia. Likewise Israel continued its special relationship with Iran, serving as the conduit for US weapons to Iran during the Iraq-Iran War, a portion of which were funneled to the rebels in Afghanistan.34 Beginning in 1986, Israel would assist in the formation of its own Islamist Palestinian group, Hamas, which it hoped to use against the growing resistance to its occupation of Palestine. In the 1990s the United States took a new step, using Islam to invent a new nationalism and a new country, Bosnia, as it fought with its European allies over control of Yugoslavia. Here, after the Germans encouraged the secession of Croatia from Yugoslavia, the US and international agencies associated with it began to foster Islamic and Albanian separatist movements in the Bosnian region. The US effort was part of a move to create an arc of pro-US Muslim countries from Central Asia, through the Caspian region and into Europe, a region that included both oil reserves and crucial transportation routes. In 1992, as Madeleine Albright denounced those favoring a united Yugoslavia as “extreme” nationalists interfering with the growth of “democracy,” the US, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait recruited fighters from the Afghan war to assist Bosnia’s “independence” movement, and the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy and the Soros Foundation subsidized a separatist press in Kosovo.35 Just as had happened after World War I and World War II, rival imperialists continue to invent new countries and manufacture new nationalisms to serve imperialist interests. Yet the world has changed. The rise of the British Empire negated the Ottoman Empire, and US imperialism negated the power of the British Empire. Now the US is the empire on the defensive, challenged by a multitude of rivals, from the Europeans to Russia to the most serious threat China. Since 1989, the policy of buying allegiance and sponsoring rival nationalism has increasingly been a tool of its rivals. Though the US had cemented its ties with Egypt and Israel, other countries, including Iraq, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia seemed to be slipping away. Saddam Hussein had begun to offer oil contracts to French, Russian and Chinese companies, and former agents of the United States such as Osama bin Laden were challenging the reign of the pro-US Saudi monarchs. In order to maintain its hegemony over oil, a cornerstone of its imperialist power, the United States found it could not maintain the façade of being the “benevolent” power. No longer able to command through money and manipulation, it had to send in troops and

19 begin to impose fascism at home. In Yugoslavia (under the guise of UN peacekeeping), the US military occupies the region it “liberated,” and Camp Bonsteel, the US’s Halliburton-constructed military base, sits astride the crucial transport corridor of the region.36 And in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US sent in occupying armies. Now US politicians whine about US military failures in these countries, while pledging to maintain the occupying force and preparing to invade more countries in the region. Imperialism is the breeding ground of war. In the face of the war in Iraq and the increasing threat of world war, workers, students, and soldiers in the Middle East, in Asia, in Europe and in the Americas must consider how to respond. The most typical options we are offered are nationalistic ones. Some people lament the passing of those they claim were honest (genuine) nationalists—Nasser of Egypt or Qasim of Iraq—as opposed to those openly tied to the imperialist powers such as the monarchs of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran. If only there was another honest nationalist, they cry, he would stand up against US imperialism. Some look to France or other European countries to propose a solution (maybe the old imperialist would be better than the current one). In the US, the Democrats purport to be honest patriots as opposed to the corrupt Bush who failed in properly planning the current war. But all nationalist politicians have worked with the imperialists (who come in both liberal and conservative costumes) time and time again when they need to smash working class movements. Nationalism cannot end imperialism. Nationalism is an ideology of capitalism, and necessarily an ideology of imperialism. The only solution for workers is to organize on the basis of proletarian unity. The divisions between Jews and Arabs, between Sunni and Shia, between Christian, Druze and Muslim, between Iraqi and Irani, between Arab and American—all the nationalist divisions that are created and recreated again and again—are dead ends for worker. As the US wages war in Iraq, working people need to stand up and turn the war on its head. We must turn this inter-imperialist war about who will exploit the Middle East into an anti-capitalist war, a revolution to build communism. The working class of the world can no longer afford to be fooled by liberal solutions, by proposals to ally with the lesser of two evils, by the incorrect theory of national liberation as a stage toward communism. This is the road to yet one more empire, a road on which too many working-class lives have already been lost over more than a century of warfare. We must remember what the capitalists know and fear: Imperialist war itself creates the possibility of revolution. We must turn this war into its opposite, a revolution to destroy capitalism, to build a society with no borders and no wages, a society in which the unity of our lives as workers, as the creators of life and goods, is the foundation of life without exploitation.

20 Christina Asquith, “Righting Iraq’s Universities,” New York Times, 3 August 2003, sec. 4A (Education Life), 18-19, 34-35. At least one member of the US team supervising this reform of Iraqi history and education went to Iraq from an appointment on the team creating the test measuring compliance with California’s state history standards.

1

For a description of the British treatment of these rebellions, including its use of poison gas, see Ben Macintyre, “Invasion, Bombs, Gas-We’ve Been Here Before,” The Times (London), 15 February 2003.

2

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the other Palestinian. However, the reactionary reality of nationalism split and destroyed these parties as viable internationalist movements. In some cases the parties split into Arab and Jewish organizations, later to reform, and split again. The same thing happened to the communist parties of neighboring nations like Egypt and Syria. For a detailed account of these events see Joel Beinin, Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the ArabIsraeli Conflict in Egypt and Israel, 1948-1965 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). It is relevant to note here that this formulation did not focus on religion. Many of these leading nationalists, including Michel Aflaq, were Christians, and had been first educated in the French and American missionary schools of Lebanon and Syria. Islam was not part of Arab nationalism in this period, and was seen as a force hostile to the kind of nationalism that as-Husri and Aflaq promoted since not all Arabs were Muslims and not all Muslims were Arab. Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry 2d ed., trans. by Marion Farouk Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

10

Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005) pp. 75-76.

3

Joseph Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

4

On this see Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One land, Two Peoples (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

5

Mark Gasiorowski, “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Iran during the Mussadig Era,” in David Lesch, ed., The Middle East and The United States (2d ed) Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 51-77; Ervand Abrahamian, “The 1953 Coup in Iran,” Science & Society 65 (2001): 182-215.

11

Nathan J. Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa’ud, and the Making of U.S.¬Saudi Relations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 121. Key policy makers on Middle Eastern affairs in the 1940s and 1950s included Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles who headed the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs and then became the head of the CIA; Teddy Roosevelt’s grandsons Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt, who was a key CIA operative in the Middle East and Archie Roosevelt who worked with the CIA and then became the head of Chase National Bank; Robert Anderson, Treasure Secretary for Eisenhower, and Eisenhower himself. 6

Thomas A. Bryson, Seeds of Mideast Crisis: The United States Diplomatic Role in the Middle East During World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1981).

7

On these republics see Cosroe Chaqueri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920-21 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995; Ervand Abrahamiam, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); and John Foran, ed., A Century of Revolution: Social Movements in Iran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

8

In the case of Palestine/Israel both communist and socialist supporters of the Soviet Union endorsed Zionism over the rule of various British clients. Communists and Socialists served in the various Israeli armies involved in the creation of Israel, and the Soviet Union was the first nation to recognize Israel. These parties at the time included both Jewish and Arab members. Some hoped for a new nation that granted equal rights to both Arab and Jewish residents of Palestine. Others, especially after the division of the region by the United Nations, hoped for the creation of two independent states, one Israeli and

9

Joel Beinin and Zchary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 18821954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 422-24; Selma Botman, The rise of Egyptian Communism, 19391970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 119-31. 12

Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 166-68. 13

The Baghdad Pact is often treated by writers on the Middle East as a creation of the United States as acting under cover and through the British. This view is based on assumptions more than evidence and reflects the notion that the West was united against the rest of the world. More recent scholarship indicates that the British acted independently after being dissatisfied with the progress in its negotiations with the United States on Middle East defense. In the earliest discussions within the United States, the military proposed joining the Baghdad Pact. John Foster Dulles and others long associated with the Council on Foreign Relations and long-term US strategies for the Middle East opposed joining the alliance, opting instead to recruit friendly nations into an independent alliance with the US. See Citino, 119-120.

14

Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC, 76-84; James Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2002), 69-75.

15

THEcommunist Said K. Aburish, Brutal Friendship: the West and the Arab Elite (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 114, 12328.

16

James Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (Boulder: Lynne Reinner Pub, 2002),93, 98, 117-118. 17

Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 2d ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 145. 18

An international agreement negotiated in the late 1920s divided the rights to Iraq’s oil. Under this agreement, 23.75% belonged to Royal Dutch/Shell; 23.75% to Anglo Persian (now BP); 23.75% a consortium of French companies; 23.75% to a consortium of American companies; and 5% to Calouste Gulbankian, an Armenian entrepreneur who had negotiated some of the first concessions from the then Ottoman empire for the original European interests. In 1946, Exxon, which was the leading American company in IPC, received only a 9,300 barrels of oil a day from Iraq. See Yergin, The Prize, pp.

19

Qasim even appointed a member of the ICP, Dr. Naziha al-Dulaimi, to his cabinet; she was not only the first communist, but the first women to serve in an Iraqi cabinet. Tripp, pp. 153-61. On the class nature of Iraq, see Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

20

Tripp; Aburish, 141; NYT, “A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making, 3/14/2003.

21 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 165-72. This position would be most popularly presented in the book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which was made into a film narrated by Orson Welles in 1977. In 1979, Israel gave Jerry Falwell a medal of honor.

25

Miglietta, American Alliance Policy, 143-47; Lance Selfa, “Israel: The U.S. Watchdog,” International Socialist Review; Stephen Zunes, “The Strategic Functions of U.S. Aid to Israel” at www.mideastfacts.com/zunes.html.

26

27

Citino, From Arab Nationalism to OPEC, 95-96.

Mordechai Abir, Saudi Arabia: Government, Society and the Gulf crisis (London: Routledge, 1993), 41-43; Nayef H. Samat, “Middle Powers and American Foreign Relations: Lessons from lrano-U.S. Relations, 1962-77,” Policy Studies Journal 28 (2000); John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 1999). 28

Robert Drefuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), 257-61;Cooley, Unholy Wars, ix.

29

Selig Harrison, “The Shah not the Kremlin Touched off Afghan Coup,” Washington Post, 13 May 1979. For more on Brzezinski and the other architects of this strategy, see, Drefuss, Devil’s Game.

30

21

For an account of this from a ruling-class perspective, see Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the US-Israel Alliance (A CFR Book) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Timothy Mitchell, “McJihad: Islam in the U.S. World Order,” Social Text 20.4 (2002), 1-18; Cooley, 83.

31

22

Abrahamian, “The 1953 Coup,” 198-203: Abrahamian, Iran, 421-24; Gasiorowski, 72-74.

32

Hafizulla Emadi. Politics of the Dispossessed: Superpowers and Developments in the Middle East (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2001), 66-67; Ron Jacobs, “A Matter of Perspective: The United States and Iran,” Counterpunch, 18 February 2002.

33

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2002),.241. At the same time, the European Zionists also discriminated against the Arabic-speaking Jews of the Middle East itself. On this see, Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine. 23

Nitzan and Bichler, Global Political Economy, pp. 243-44; John P. Milietta, American Alliance Policy in the Middle East, 1945-19.92 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 134-48.

24

34

Cooley, Unholy Wars, 83-84.

Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).

35

36

Johnstone, 233.

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A Class Analysis of the Israel-Palestine Conflict “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This is a brilliant insight, a wonderful analytic tool – yet it is seldom used in analyses of what is commonly referred to as the Israel-Palestine conflict. This conflict is continually discussed within a nationalist framework that hides the class forces behind Israeli and Palestinian nationalism. Ironically, there is plenty of historical evidence regarding the class basis of these competing nationalisms. Examination of the origins and development of this nationalistic conflict indicates that it is based in the upper classes, has anti-working class politics, and relies on imperialism for support. Palestine before World War I was part of the Ottoman Empire. Its population consisted mainly of Arabs but also included Jews, Ottoman officials and soldiers, European and American merchants, entrepreneurs, missionaries and educators. There was at the time no Israeli-Palestinian conflict because there were no groups with those national identities; before the 1880s there was no Zionist-Palestinian conflict for the same reason. The ethnic groups that did exist, Arabs and Jews, were not in conflict. The late 1800s and early 1900s, however, saw the emergence of nationalist movements among European Jews and Palestinian Arabs. These movements embraced a central concept of the dominant ideology in the capitalist societies of Western Europe: this is the idea that States are (or should be) composed of ethnic (or “national”) groups each of which has an (alleged) historic claim to some piece of land on the planet. Because this idea linked ethnicity to territory, those people who did not belong to the ethnic or national group claiming a particular piece of land did not really belong there; they belonged in “their own” territory. In other words, the logic of nationalism is one of ethnic exclusion or, at the very least, ethnic domination. Another salient feature of nationalist ideology is that it downplays the central characteristic of modern capitalist societies: the division of the economy into two major groups - a class of families controlling economic production (through ownership of investment capital, factories, farms, resources) and a class of families toiling under the direction of the owners for low wages. Many in this latter class, the working class, were and are aware of the basic fact that they do almost all of the productive work and receive very little in return in the form of wages, benefits and basic economic security. They

are aware that production is for profit rather than human need and that they have no control over the wealth they create through their work. They labor and they lose. Among ethnic groups that had been dominated by others, nationalism was often proposed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a solution to the problem of subjugation. Those who embraced this thinking created movements of “national liberation”. It was not unusual for people to embrace this position in light of the cultural dominance of nationalism as a modern ideology. Thus, some Jews experiencing anti-Semitism in Europe and some Palestinians experiencing colonial domination under British rule opted for movements of national liberation. Although these movements adopted the fiery language and slogans of “national liberation”, they were not really revolutionary for they embraced the class division and inequality of modern capitalism, enforced ethnic and national separatism among workers, and were generally led and funded by bourgeois elements. When successful in achieving “national liberation”, these movements simply changed the ethnic identity of the class controlling economic production and exploiting workers and peasants. Much of what passes for the Israel-Palestine conflict has its roots in economic changes affecting the regions of the former Ottoman Empire. The integration of the area into the capitalist world market transformed the forces and relations of production altering the lives of millions as • fellahin (peasants) were driven into debt, dispossessed of their lands, and transformed into proletarians, • new ruling classes emerged as landowners, merchants, and bankers in new nations constructed by European imperialists, • local economies now suffered through the “boom and bust” cycles of capitalism’s alternating periods of prosperity and depression, • lands were plunged into wars arising out of interimperialist rivalries or the competitions of local nationalist rulers for greater power. To properly understand the Israel-Palestine conflict it is necessary to comprehend the effects of the transition to a modern capitalist economy, the rise of nationalist movements as political forces, and the role of outside imperialist powers, each of which has had their own agenda. This essay opens with a look at the post-WWI politics of three forces: Jewish nationalism, Palestinian

THEcommunist nationalism, and British imperialism, as well as the unification of these forces against the peasant rebellion of the late 1930s. Following this, it considers a forgotten history of Arab-Jewish cooperation during the period of the British Mandate. The essay concludes with comments about nationalism and class struggle in today’s conflict.

PART ONE: JEWISH AND PALESTINIAN NATIONALISMS Nationalism in Palestine: The Zionists during the British Mandate Immigration to Palestine for the purpose of creating a Jewish home came in periodic waves and involved different conceptions of what that home should be. The first wave or aliya (a Hebrew word meaning “ascent,” thus implying betterment through immigration to Palestine) is dated from 1882 to 1903; the second aliya was from 1904 to 1914. Politically, the immigrants were divided into different factions depending on the goals and methods regarding national liberation: “cultural Zionists” and “Labor Zionists,” who were primarily concerned with establishing Jewish-controlled economic and political institutions that would eventually facilitate the creation of a Jewish state. It was the Labor Zionism of the second aliya that played a major role in establishing the parameters of the subsequent conflict between Arabs and Jews. Labor Zionism was not only a national liberation movement but, because the national people were not to be liberated where they resided (i.e. Russia, Eastern Europe), it became a colonial movement of settlers. Because it saw anti-Semitism as something that could not be eradicated, the only solution to the problem of anti-Jewish racism was the establishment of a state where Jews would hold power within defensible borders. This line of reasoning led to a colonial project in Palestine. The Zionist movement was not a revolutionary movement against capitalism although initially the movement was filled with a variety of groups espousing ideas of utopian socialism and attempting, in some cases, to combine Marxist ideas with the nationalist project. The leadership and policies, however, of the Zionist movement were thoroughly bourgeois: By developing a colonial settler economy in which land and jobs would be for Jews only, by creating ethnically-based political institutions, and by placing itself under the patronage and protection of an imperialist power (Great Britain), the Zionist movement placed itself squarely within capitalist theory and practice. In the 1930s the Zionists clearly demonstrated their counterrevolutionary politics in three dramatic ways: (1)

23 they assisted British imperialism in its repression of the revolt of landless Arab peasants, (2) they effectively broke the Jewish-instigated economic boycott of Nazi Germany, and (3) they began to advocate the transfer of the Arab population out of Palestine. Counter-insurgency against anti-imperialist rebels: During the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 against British imperialism – a revolt arising mainly from the immiseration of Palestinian peasants and workers – the Zionist leadership, through the Histadrut, worked with the British to sabotage the Arabs’ General Strike of 1936; it then aided the British military in its subsequent brutal counterinsurgency operations by supplying the Special Night Squads. A deal with the Nazis: In April 1933, less than four months after Hitler assumed power, Zionists began exploring methods of securing Jewish immigrants and capital from Germany. At the time Germany’s exports were down ten percent because of an international economic boycott organized by Rabbi Stephen Wise (president of the American Jewish Congress) and Jewish War Veterans. In August 1933 a further meeting of Zionists with a German official in the Economic Ministry in Berlin led to the now infamous Transfer Agreement issued as Decree 54/33 by the Reich Economics Ministry on August 10, 1933: “The Transfer Agreement permitted Jews to leave Germany and take some of their assets in the form of new German goods, which the Zionist movement would then sell in Palestine and eventually throughout much of the world. The German goods were purchased with frozen Jewish assets held in Germany… Transfer helped Germany defeat the boycott, create jobs at home, and convert Jewish assets into Reich economic recovery. It helped the Zionists overcome a major obstacle to continued Jewish immigration and expansion in Palestine” (Black, 1999). In a further irony of history, the SS officer who was responsible for assisting the emigration of German Jews was Adolf Eichmann who “dealt cordially and cooperatively with Zionist representatives from Palestine” (Sachar, 2006: 197). Preference for ethnic cleansing: Another indication of the thoroughly anti-revolutionary character of the Zionist movement was its growing embrace of the nationalist idea of the ethnic “transfer” of all or most of the Arab population from the future Jewish homeland - preferably voluntary but forced if need be. This has been discussed thoroughly by Israeli (and pro-Zionist) historian, Benny Morris, in his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004: 39-64). As Morris points out, the idea that different ethnic or “national” groups should live apart was part and parcel of nationalist ideology in the twentieth century. Although talk of the desirability of the transfer of Arabs remained private among Zionist leaders (so as not to alarm the British and the Palestinians) until the outbreak of the Arab revolt in 1936, Morris observes that “To be sure, to some degree the praxis of Zionism,

24 from the first, had been characterized by a succession of microcosmic transfers; the purchase of land and the establishment of almost every settlement (moshava, literally colony) had been accompanied by the (legal and usually compensated) displacement or transfer of an original beduin or settled agricultural community.” (Morris, 2004: 42) When Britain’s Peel Commission in 1937 recommended a partition of Palestine, it gave the notion of transfer “an international moral imprimatur” and set off a debate among the Zionist leadership. But the thinking of the mainstream was expressed by David Ben-Gurion’s argument: “We must look carefully at the question of whether transfer is possible, necessary, moral and useful. We do not want to dispossess… In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab peasantry… It is important that this plan comes from the Commission and not from us… Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive settlement programme… You must remember, that this system embodies an important humane and Zionist idea, to transfer parts of a people [i.e. Palestine’s Arabs] to their country [i.e. Transjordan and Iraq] and to settle empty lands…” (Morris, 2004:48). This quote from BenGurion illustrates the logic of nationalism: nations should be ethnically homogenous (Arabs and Jews should live apart), the Arabs have a homeland (Transjordan and Iraq), transfer will help the Arabs by forcing them into their home where they can “settle empty lands” and it will help the Jews by ridding Palestine of a people whose presence would interfere with the establishment of a Jewish state. Although Morris does not believe that the extensive talk of transfer among political leaders and other functionaries in the Yishuv constituted pre-planning for a forced expulsion of Arabs in the 1948 war, he does claim that it conditioned the Jewish population to see it as “inevitable and natural” when approximately 700,000 Arabs became refugees in 1948. Another Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, contests Morris’ claim about actual plans for the forced removal of Arabs in his recent book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Nationalism in Palestine: The Arabs Like Jewish nationalism, Arab and Palestinian nationalisms are modern phenomena scarcely one hundred years old. The very words Arab and Palestinian today have nationalist connotations that they did not have 150 years ago. Consider the word arab: “Before the nineteenth century, the word ‘arab’ did not have the same meaning among Arabic speakers it has today. Instead, the word was commonly used as a term of contempt by town-dwellers when referring to ‘savage’ Bedouin. Only in the nineteenth century did intellectuals begin using the term to refer to their linguistic and cultural community.

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Their nationalist descendents then appropriated the term and used it for their own purposes.” (Gelvin, Oxford 2005:202). Similarly, the use of the word ‘Palestinian’ in a nationalist sense did not emerge until 1908 after the Young Turks revolt against Ottoman rulers (Kimmerling and Migdal, 2003: 78). Palestinian and Arab nationalism arose from exposure to the ideology of nationalism in Western missionary schools, the advocacy of nationalism by British imperialists to stimulate Arab revolts against the Ottoman Empire, the postwar creation of nation-states by the British and the French, and the confrontation with Zionism. The Palestinian national movement was based among the traditional notable families such as the Husseinis, Nashashibis, and Khalidis whose sons learned the ideology of nationalism in the Christian missionary schools operated and staffed by Westerners such as the British, the French, and the Americans. In Jerusalem, for example, these included the Roman Catholic College des Freres established in 1875 and operated by French Jesuits. Arab nationalism was encouraged by British imperialism during WWI. The British promised Arabs (through the Husayn-McMahon correspondence) support for nationhood in return for their military rebellion against Ottoman power; less well known perhaps is the fact that the British army also actively promoted nationalism in the area: “As the British army moved north from Egypt to Damascus, political officers assigned to the army organized nationalist clubs to enlist the support of local leaders for the Arab Revolt and, more broadly, the entente campaign against the Ottomans. In the immediate aftermath of the war, these clubs acted as local branches of the Damascus-based Arab Club…” (Gelvin, Cambridge 2005: 97; emphasis mine). The destruction of the empire created a greater opportunity for political initiative on the part of local elites and the educated classes. The British and the French created new countries from former Ottoman provinces: Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and occupied them while promising eventual independence. The very creation of these political units set in motion a variety of mechanisms to build Arab nationalism: the cultivation by the British rulers of loyal subjects from the indigenous upper class which would eventually administer these quasi-colonial states on a nationalist basis, the creation of a school system to teach patriotism, support for newspapers and preachers who encouraged nationalist thought and punishment for those who did not, and the establishment of borders with control over entry and exit based on a national passport system.

Class Politics and Intra-Class Rivalries The class basis of the Palestinian national leadership was thoroughly elite with no representation from the

THEcommunist urban workers or from the majority of the population, the peasantry or fellahin. The elite consisted of dozens of families based in Palestine’s towns: Jerusalem, Hebron, Jaffa, Gaza, Ramle, Nablus, Jenin, Haifa, Acre, Nazareth, Tiberias, and Safad. Like the Jewish nationalists, the Palestinian nationalists were characterized by different ideological outlooks, opportunism, and bourgeois politics. Perhaps the two salient features of Palestinian nationalism were its obvious upper class basis and its internal rivalries. The class position of such families as landholders, bankers, government officials, tax collectors, entrepreneurs and merchants led them to the politics of nationalism as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. (The spread of nationalist ideology to the masses of the Palestinian population - mainly peasants - came later in the 1930s.) Internal rivalries evolved out of both British policy and the intra-class antagonisms among the elites themselves. The British ruling class saw Palestine as existing primarily for its imperial benefit and applied its traditional divideand-conquer strategy to the Palestinian leadership class. The British also took advantage of existing intra-class family rivalries. When the British elevated a member of the Husayni family to the leadership of the Supreme Muslim Council, they then turned around and helped a rival family, the Nashashibis, in forming, “as part of a divide and rule policy, an official opposition group, al Mu’arada” (Pappe, 2006: 82). It was the Husayni family that provided one of the preeminent nationalist leaders: Amin al-Husayni. Although this landholding family produced a nationalist, it was the British who provided him with a powerful office from which he could politically organize. He owed much of his initial power to the British who placed him at the head of the Supreme Muslim Council and also made him the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Husayni’s advancement as a nationalist leader from this power base was made possible by British imperialism not simply because the British put him in these offices but also because “Both the council and the position of grand mufti of Jerusalem were British inventions” (Gelvin, 2005 Cambridge: 110; emphasis mine). Neither of them had any historical precedent in Palestine or even the religion of Islam (Khalidi, 2006: 55). As the British saw it, Palestinian Muslims had no leader with whom the British could deal. So they created a “grand mufti” (A mufti is a Muslim ‘priest’ who renders judgments on the basis of religious knowledge. Palestine had a number of muftis but the British wanted a contact point and so they created a “leader”.) The regular British practice of granting various offices to the ayan (“notables”) meant that “official” Palestinian national politics would be defined and controlled by the Palestinian upper class. The real political role of the ayan as ostensible representatives of the all Palestinians was to keep the laboring classes in line. “The British in Palestine depended in particular on erstwhile ‘radical’ Amin al-Husayni to act as such a

25 mediator. The Mufti worked hard to prevent outbursts and to pacify the Muslim community, channeling nationalist energies… into legal activities” (Swedenburg in Pappe, 1999: 142; emphasis mine). The mufti was so valuable to the British that they covertly financed his activities when the need arose. By using the Mufti, the British were able to channel anti-imperialist politics into a conservative direction that was explicitly anti-communist and which blended nationalism with religion. Today’s blend of religion, nationalism, and anti-communism by Hamas has its precedent in the British empowerment of the Mufti. The policies pursued by the Palestinian leadership reflected their elite status and bourgeois position. Whatever criticisms the Palestinian nationalists made of the Zionist project and/or the British Mandate, at no time did they criticize the private property economy and its existing class structure.

Imperialism in Palestine: Great Britain After WWI the British and French imperialists carved up the eastern part of the former Ottoman Empire creating nation states where none had previously existed. The French created modern Syria and Lebanon while the British established Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine. This colonialism was hidden behind the League of Nations mandate system. The British wanted control of Palestine for a number of strategic reasons. First, it would serve as a buffer state against any attacks against Egypt’s northeastern flank that might threaten loss of the Suez Canal which was a main shipping artery for British capitalism. Second, it would allow the British a secure territory to build an oil pipeline from Iraq across Transjordan and Palestine to Haifa. Third, it would allow Britain to control air routes from the Middle East to India. Consequently, the genesis of the Balfour Declaration reflected the political exigencies and imperialist ambitions of World War I - it was very much a wartime declaration. Zionists, it was assumed, would also provide a more reliable political base with a loyalty to Western imperialism: “Britain’s Palestine expert, Sir Mark Sykes, saw in Zionism a vehicle for extending British influence in the Middle East” (Quigley, 2005: 8). Sir Ronald Storrs, Britain’s military governor of Jerusalem, and later of Palestine, wrote that Zionism would create “for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism” (8; see also Storrs, 1939). Another consideration for the British was that the Balfour Declaration would hopefully encourage nationalism among the Jews of Europe as alternative to Bolshevism (Allain). The British were aware that Jews were active as both leaders and rank and file cadre in the Russian Communist Party, the Bolsheviks, as well as other European communist parties, and that many other East European and Russian Jews were members

26 of the socialist Bund. The Balfour Declaration was issued November 2, 1917 just days before the November 7 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia. The declaration was then used as wartime propaganda encouraging German and Austrian Jews to support the British imperialists: “Leaflets were dropped over German and Austrian troops, urging the Jews to look to the Entente powers because they supported Jewish self-determination” (Smith 2004: 73). The imperialist opportunism of the British ruling class during WWI produced a messy postwar situation. The problem was that the British made three sets of promises that contradicted each other: the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration. The British imperialists, with their Eurocentric colonial mentality, initially hoped that their support of European settlers (i.e. the Zionists) who were superior to the indigenous people in education, technological expertise, and capital would create an economic expansion providing job opportunities for the Palestinians and a subsequent improvement of their living standards. Thus, from the beginning of the British Mandate in Palestine (September 29, 1923) Britain committed itself to three broad pro-Zionist policies regarding immigration, land, and economic development: the expansion of Zionist immigration, facilitation of land acquisition by settlers, and promotion of Zionist economic development through the award of “monopolistic concessions to exploit natural resources and operate public services and utilities in Palestine” (Smith, 1993: 117). Because British rule more tightly integrated the Palestinian economy into the world market, the approximately 70 percent of the indigenous Arab population involved in agriculture as small landholders and sharecroppers found themselves unable to compete with the lower prices. When the worldwide Great Depression hit in 1929 and farm prices crashed, peasant agriculture “was consequently thrown into acute crisis” (Smith, 1993: 15). The onset of this economic crisis in 1929 provided the context for the Wailing Wall riots of the same year. The ultimate results of the Mandate government’s institutionalization of economic inequality between Zionists and Arabs were the creation of a separate Zionist political-economic enclave within Palestine, the immiseration of the fellahin, the transformation of a part of the peasantry into proletarians and semi-proletarians, increasing national antagonisms, and a growing hatred for British imperialism. These factors combined to create the “Great Revolt” of 1936 -39.

Conclusions The evolution of British imperial policy in Palestine resulted in a situation that favored the Zionists and the Palestinian upper class nationalists but exacerbated the exploitation of the Palestinian fellahin transforming

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thousands of them into a landless proletariat. It also weakened the working class because of the policy of separatism and a policy of repression against the communists. The pattern of nationalists collaborating against workers and peasants continued after the establishment of the state of Israel. Fearing the joint Jewish-Arab Israeli Communist Party (Maki), “the [Israeli] state sponsored public figures such as Archbishop George Hakim as anticommunist leaders. Another sponsored anti-communist was Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari, founder before 1948 of the al-Najjada paramilitary brigades… [which] participated in the fighting against the Zionist militias… Admiring his charisma, Israeli intelligence decided to allow his return to Israel in 1950 as an alternative anticommunist leader. The idea was that Hawari would establish a new Arab popular party.” (Yoav Di-Capua, “The Intimate History of Collaboration: Arab Citizens and the State of Israel”, MERIP Online, May 2007; see also Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948). This review of the historical record from the beginnings of Palestinian and Jewish nationalism up to the outbreak of the Second World War establishes the following points about both Palestinian and Jewish nationalists: • Their “national liberation” movements were thoroughly against liberation from capitalist exploitation either because of their economic positions as landowners and commercial agents (the Palestinians) or their dependence upon capitalist investment and imperialist patronage and protection (the Zionists). • They were anti-working class and sought to weaken the working class at every opportunity through ethno-national division. • They blended religion with nationalism: the Zionists by redefining believers in Judaism as a national group and the Palestinians by organizing nationalism through mosques controlled by the Grand Mufti or through activist preachers such as al-Qassam. • They collaborated with fascist Germany: the Zionists through the Transfer Agreement and the Palestinians through the Mufti’s wartime services to the Nazis. • They both actively sought the protection and patronage of an outside imperialist power (Great Britain) thus furthering imperial domination of the labor and resources of the local area. • They were both anti-communist.

THEcommunist

PART TWO: A FORGOTTEN HISTORY: ARAB-JEWISH COOPERATION DURING THE BRITISH MANDATE When the British replaced the Ottomans as rulers of Palestine in the years 1920 to 1947, both Jewish and Palestinian nationalists intensified their competition with each other to see which movement would be the dominant power in the creation of a future independent state. The intensification of this competition for power, together with other factors such as the increase of indebtedness and land dispossession among the Arab peasants (stemming from the destruction of pre-capitalist agriculture) and the creation of ethnically-based labor markets, led to the violent conflicts between Arabs and Jews for which the period 1920-1947 is well known. Yet, as the basis for the future Israeli-Palestinian conflict evolved through a process of “cyclical escalation” (Shafir, 1996: 199), another and opposite trend developed: the practice of interethnic cooperation, of bi-national solidarity, and even the advocacy of a-national consciousness.

The Period of the British Mandate (1920-1947) After World War I, with the establishment of the British Mandate, the Jewish and Palestinian nationalist movements grew into powerful political forces confronting three enemies: each other, British imperialism, and antiracist interethnic solidarity. This third nationalist enemy sprang “from below” (to use Ilan Pappe’s phrase). It came from workers, farmers, intellectuals, and consumers who resisted the segregationist politics of the nationalists. According to Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, “The entire history of Mandate Palestine is dotted with instances of cooperation between workers… it was there during the bloodiest years of the intra-communal strife towards the end of the Mandate. At every escalation of violence - 1920, 1929, 1936, or 1948 - I can find a case study of economic or social cooperation that was strongly opposed and destroyed by the national leaderships, especially the Zionist one” (Pappe, 2006: 110, 111). As an example of this point, Pappe discusses the case of Haifa. The city of Haifa was the center of working class unity and a-national cooperation in 1920. It had Jewish, Christian, and Muslim populations of similar size. Many of the Jews and Arabs were immigrants; there were also thousands of immigrants from Syria and Egypt. Although these workers were in the most prosperous city of Palestine with its factories, oil refineries, and harbor, they labored long hours at underpaid jobs and lived in destitute conditions. As a consequence, “In 1920, the Palestinians, Jews, and Arabs from Syria and Egypt established the first trade union in Palestine in the

27 yards and workshops of the railway, telegraphic, and postal services” (Pappe, 2006: 111). The Jewish workers who joined the union were severely criticized by the Histadrut (the Zionist labor organization). Its local chief, David Hacohen, stated, “The railway workers forget that the mission of the Hebrew workers who are part of the movement for settling Palestine, is not to be bothered by mutual assistance to Arab workers, but to assist in the fortification of the Zionist project on the land” (Pappe, 2006: 111). After almost ten years (by 1929), the Histadrut managed to get “most of the Jewish workers in the union to put national interest above class solidarity” (Pappe, 2006: 112). The Histadrut created a Jewish-only labor union and coerced the Jewish workers into joining it. The response of the Arabs was to create their own nationalist union in 1930.

Working Class Opposition to Nationalism and Ethnic Separation Many Arab workers in the Haifa railway workshops opposed the creation of separate national unions or even national sections within one union and called upon Jewish workers to reject the separatist Histadrut. The appeal of Ilyas Asad, an Arab worker, presented to Jewish co-workers at a meeting of the Railway Workers’ Association council in March 1924 is striking for its class consciousness: “I am striving to establish ties between the Jewish and Arab workers because I am certain that if we are connected we will help one another, without regard to religion or nationality. Many Arab workers do not wish to join nationalist organizations because they understand their purpose and do not wish to abet a lie. They saw on the membership card [of the railway workers’ union] the words Federation of Jewish Workers [i.e., the Histadrut] and they cannot understand what purpose this serves. I ask all the comrades to remove the word Jewish, and I am sure that if they agree there will be a strong bond between us and all the Arabs will join. I would be the first who would not want to join a nationalist labor organization. There are many Arab nationalist organizations, and we do not want to join them, and they will say we have joined a Jewish nationalist organization.” (Ted Swedenburg, “The role of the Palestinian peasantry in the Great Revolt (1936-39)”, in Ilan Pappe, ed., The Israel/Palestine Question, 1999: 110; emphasis mine.)

Three years later in July, 1927, at the third congress of the Histadrut which discussed the matter of joint organization among Arab and Jewish laborers, an Arab worker, Ahmad Hamdi, (whose presence was probably sponsored by the left-wing Jewish group, Po’alei Tziyon Smol) made the following point about nationalist separation: “Such separate organizations are dangerous. Let not [distinctions between] East and West, Zionism, and Arabism, Torah and Qur’an, cause divisions among us. When the Arab workers approach the Jewish workers, their enemies

28

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say to them, “You are Zionists!’ And others say, ‘You are communists!’ And so the Arab worker is confused. We must unite and present common demands to the government, which ignores its obligations to the worker and instead sends in the police and puts him in jail.” (Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 1996: 105).

The response of David Ben-Gurion and other Labor Zionists who dominated the Histadrut was to argue that Jewish workers were (or should be) Zionists and that the development of a separate Zionist economy would eventually lead to the rise of Arab living standards. Arab appeals for worker unity were perceived by Labor Zionists as part of a strategy created by outside agitators – the effendis (wealthy Arab landholders) – who sought to destroy the Zionist movement in Palestine. By the late 1920s the Histadrut had committed itself firmly to separate ethnic unions in those workplaces where Jews and Arabs labored together. And, among the various socialist factions present within the Jewish immigration, the commitment to national liberation led them to put nationalist politics ahead of class politics, thus subverting any unity with the Arab workers. The few anti-Zionist Jewish communists who led the demand for working class unity had been expelled from the Histadrut in 1923 and were, by the mid-1920s, politically outmaneuvered by the Labor Zionists and later repressed by the British authorities (Lockman, 1996: 58-147). Nevertheless, efforts at worker solidarity persisted. In November, 1931, Palestinian and Jewish truck drivers together organized a strike that lasted eight days, “paralyzed the country”, and forced the government to lower the taxes on truck drivers. Although the Histadrut endorsed the strike at first, its support declined when the strikers proposed expanding it to include other groups of workers. On the Palestinian side, “The nationalist notables used the local press to condemn Palestinians collaborating with their Jewish comrades… Both political leaderships, realizing the importance of traffic and roads, over the next few years forced drivers from their communities to take a national rather than a professional position. The result was that, in 1936, the truck drivers stood in the forefront of the clashes between the Zionists and Palestinians” (Pappe, 2006: 113). Palestinian nationalists confronted an Arab population that saw British imperialism as a primary problem and that was able in a number of cases to distinguish between Zionism as a political force and Jews as coinhabitants of the land. An example of this consciousness occurred during the Arab “general strikes, political demonstrations, and violent exchanges with the police” against British rule in 1931-32. The Arab organizers of these actions made it clear that “the British, not the Jews, should be the primary targets of action - in some cases, Palestinians even organized contingents of guards to protect Jews and their property during demonstrations. In fact, during this period, while the British were firing at

Arab demonstrators… not a single Jew was attacked in urban protests” (Kimmerling and Migdal, 2003: 106, 107; emphasis mine). It was this more sophisticated political consciousness, interethnic solidarity, and human decency that had to be destroyed by the nationalists. To intimidate antiracists both Palestinian and Jewish nationalists resorted to murder: “When persons such as Fawzi al-Husayni or Fakhri alNashashibi joined Arab-Jewish organizations advocating a bi-national political structure, they paid with their lives. In 1937, a leader of the Palestinian labour union was assassinated. In 1947, another union leader named Sami Taha was murdered. Both were killed for subordinating national solidarity to class awareness. Like other workers, they regarded the national cause as a limited venture run by and for the nationalist notables. The hand of Amin al-Husayni [Mufti of Palestine] was visible in both assassinations” (Pappe:, 2006: 113, 114; emphasis mine).

And Jewish nationalists, particularly those of Menachem Begin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi and Yitzhak Shamir’s Stern Gang, murdered Jews who stood against nationalism or at least their fascist version of it. According to a letter written and signed by several anti-fascist Jews including Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and Sidney Hook, and published in the New York Times on December 4, 1948: “During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL [the Irgun] and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.” (Shatz, 2004: 66; emphasis mine).

Although the nationalist leaderships systematically attacked interethnic solidarity, it kept recurring during the era of the British Mandate. Jews and Arabs worked together in the citrus industry and jointly operated the salt plant of Atlit. Working class Palestinians and Jews also carried out labor strikes together in the following industries and occupations: oil and petroleum, cigarette factories, bakeries, trucking, railways, and government offices (i.e. office clerks). Ilan Pappe notes: “The pattern of [joint] strikes increased after 1936 [i.e. during and after the Arab Revolt!]. Between 1938 and 1943 there was an average of two joint strikes a year, mainly in the railway system, the municipalities and the British army camps. Action peaked in 1943… One year later, in February 1944, the Histadrut did not even try to intervene in a joint strike in the railway workshops, where the main strikers were Jews, encouraged by a show of solidarity from Palestinian colleagues, who demonstrated, gave food and provided coats for the cold night spent in the plant” (Pappe, 2006: 114, 115; emphasis mine).

This strike has been described by Israeli historian Deborah Bernstein: When an Arab worker was severely hurt at work on February 2 and no appropriate medical help was available, the workers in the railway workshops

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halted work. “A strike committee of three Arab and two Jewish workers was set up. The workers staged a sitin and refused to leave the work site… all the workers attended a meeting in the large halls of the mechanical workshops. Workers spoke out in Hebrew and Arabic and others translated… They decided that they would not leave the place until their demands were met” (Bernstein, 2000: 199, 200). She then quotes a labor publication of the period which depicts the anti-racism and unity of the workers:

First, in spite of recurring interethnic clashes, there were workers who actively sought solidarity. They did not passively wait to be told what to do; they tried to make their own antiracist history. Second, they sought this unification as workers, not as Jews or Arabs or Muslims or Christians; their class consciousness in several cases was quite outstanding. They saw nationalism as politically suicidal for the working class. They understood that interethnic and inter-religious solidarity was necessary for their collective advancement as workers.

“The Arab workers treated the Jewish workers with fraternity and solidarity. The PAWS [Palestine Arab Workers Society] sent pitot and olives, and these were distributed among all the workers. Many of the Arab workers approached each and every Jewish worker to ask if he had had enough to eat… Jewish and Arab workers sat around the bonfires and warmed themselves together singing songs and telling tales…” (Bernstein, 2000: 200).

Third, it was rank-and-file workers who took the lead in advocating an anti-racist position. “…[interethnic] cooperation was desired, initiated, and/or advanced to a far greater extent at the rank-and-file level… than at the level of labor leadership… [For example] The initiative to recruit Arab workers into the organization of railway workers came from the Jewish workers, and not from the full-time functionaries” (Bernstein, 2000: 212, 213). The policies of the Jewish and Arab nationalist labor organizations (i.e. the Histadrut, the Arab Union of Workers) were to create ethnically exclusivist unions. In those sectors where the separatists could not establish effective political control, the rank-and-file workers attempted and several times succeeded in forming interethnic unions.

Ephraim Krisher, who was a secretary of the local guild of the Railway, Post and Telegraph Workers’ Organization and also a member of the Shomer Hatza’ir (Hashomer Hatzair), wrote in a report about the strike: “… it was a moving experience for the workers. They feel that they have done a great thing. There was complete unity and joint action between the workers of both nationalities… The slogan ‘long live Arab-Jewish unity’ was enthusiastically received…” (Bernstein, 2000: 200, 201; emphasis mine).

In April 1946 a joint strike stopped postal services and grew into a general strike involving 22,000 Arab and Jewish employees of the Mandate government. In May 1947 telegraph service was disrupted by a strike of Palestinian and Jewish workers. In the same year a joint labor walkout by government clerks disrupted official government work for two weeks: “Their success was so overwhelming that the two segregated national unions, the Histadrut and the Arab Union of Workers, were obliged to join in” (Pappe, 2006: 114). The interethnic solidarity of workers in the cities and towns was also reflected in the countryside. “As the Mandate drew to its end, Jewish settlements provided more organized and structured aid to Palestinian villages, unprecedented joint agricultural cooperatives sprang up in the Marg Ibn ‘Amr in the 1940s between kibbutzim and villages, and in the city new joint commercial boards were established” (Pappe, 2006: 115). A sense of internationalism and class solidarity arose out of the class struggles and inequality faced by both Jewish and Palestinian workers. It was this solidarity, the potential for more revolutionary and communist growth, that the nationalist ruling classes on all sides organized to destroy.

Conclusions This review of several of the highlights of interethnic and inter-religious unity during the Mandate indicates a number of points worthy of reflection:

Fourth, until they were politically marginalized by the Labor Zionists of the Histadrut in the mid-1920s, it was the anti-Zionist Jewish communists who took the lead in advocating Arab-Jewish working class unity. Fifth, the attempt to be both nationalist and anticapitalist led several leftist Zionist groups and factions to advocate separatism as the best strategy for both Jews and Arabs. Class politics were subordinated to national separatist politics. Sixth, nationalist politics among the Zionists were co-mingled with a colonial mentality of cultural superiority. The idea was that the presence of the Europeans (in this case, Jews) would contribute to the cultural uplifting of the Arabs. This ideology mixed nationalism with a paternalist perspective that saw the European immigrant has having a civilizing effect on the less cultured indigenous people (Lockman, 1996). Finally, the workers’ antiracist solidarity was constantly attacked by the Palestinian and Zionist nationalists who preferred separation and conflict to unity and peace. The seeds of today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict were planted by the nationalist leaderships who sabotaged the repeated efforts at unity. The contemporary conflict does not extend back into “time immemorial”; it has specific roots in the nationalist movements, in the class interests of nationalist leaders, and in the policies of outside imperial powers. Cooperative antiracist actions were undercut by the strategies and tactics of the nationalist elites to divide Arabs and Jews. The anti-racism of workers, farmers, consumers, and others was continually assaulted ideologically, politically, physically. The anti-racists

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were battered with nationalist arguments. They also suffered beatings and assassinations at the hands of the nationalists. Their attempts to create bi-national or interethnic unions were countered by the nationalists’ creation of ethnically separate unions. Even the Palestine Communist Party succumbed to this nationalist influence and divided itself into separate Jewish and Arab sections by 1943. But the biggest blow to solidarity was perhaps the 1948 war because the triumph of nationalist forces resulted in the flight of a large part of the Palestinian population and the creation of a State which then had the power to institutionalize ethnic separation.

Part Three: The Contemporary Consequences of “National Liberation” The bourgeois basis of Zionist and Palestinian politics was consolidated after World War II to the advantage of the Jewish and Palestinian upper classes. The capitalists have prospered while the working classes – kept separate by nationalist and pro-imperialist politics – have only suffered. Consider first the Palestinians, second the Israelis.

The Palestinians When approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1948 war, the peasants and proletariat wound up destitute in refugee camps without land for the peasants or jobs for the wage laborers. The story was different for the commercial and landowning class, which during the Mandate had accumulated considerable wealth through land sales, export of crops, and contractual deals with the British government in Palestine. Much of this wealth was held “in the form of stocks and shares, bank deposits, cash, and financial investments abroad”; indeed, “about 16 percent of the total capital owned in the country [Palestine], was held by the non-Jewish population in the form of assets that could be transferred abroad” (Smith cited Berberoglu, 2004: 49, 50). Many of the Palestinian bourgeoisie fled to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and reacquired their wealth from formerly blocked accounts in Barclay’s Bank and the Ottoman Bank in the early 1950s. About ten million Palestinian pounds “was estimated to have been transferred to Jordan in the form of bank deposits and cash… The magnitude of such a sum can be gauged by the fact that this figure equaled the total amount of money in circulation in the Hashemite Kingdom at the time” (Smith cited in Berberoglu, 2004: 50). With this reacquisition of capital, the Palestinian upper class rebuilt their businesses or invested in new commercial ventures. They became involved in the oil economies

of the Gulf region thus linking themselves to the royal families of various oil producing countries such as Kuwait and Qatar. In Jordan, a group of Palestinian merchant families achieved financial success through loyalty to King Hussein: “This elite, termed the ‘king’s Palestinians’ or the ‘Palestinian G7’, included… the Masri, Nuqul and Salfiti families and the owners of the Arab Bank, the Shouman family” (Bouillion, 2004: 38). A number of upper class families also prospered through business ventures in Europe and the United States. The reconstituted Palestinian capitalist class used their money to dominate the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which was initially created in 1964 by Egypt’s ruler Gamal al-Nasser in an effort to control the direction of Palestinian diaspora politics (Gelvin, Cambridge 2005: 198, 199). The PLO was an umbrella organization for various political groups; it came to be dominated by El Fatah which had been founded by a member of the old Husayni family, Yasir Arafat, who himself “had been personal secretary to Abd-al-Qadir al-Husayni (one of the members of the Husayni family who was killed fighting the Israelis in April 1948)”. The internal organization that decided El-Fatah’s policies, the Gehaza, was composed of Husaynis or men connected to Husaynis through marriage (Divine in Migdal, 1980: 228). Fatah also relied on other families from the Palestinian establishment such as the Ghosseins, Kaddoumis, and the Abu So’uds (Aburish, 1997: 167). The donations of the elite allowed them to contain the agenda of the PLO within acceptable nationalist and private enterprise boundaries. “Most important among them were the Palestinian G7 from Jordan and the Shouman-run Arab Bank…The biggest conduit for private aid was the Geneva-based Welfare Association, sponsored by more than 100 of the richest Diaspora Palestinian businessmen” (Bouillion, 2004: 48). After the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993, the PLO elites set up the Palestinian Authority (PA) to establish a quasi-state in the West Bank and Gaza. The main function of the PA - dominated by the old PLO elite (the “Tunisians”) who, after decades abroad, returned to the Occupied Territories only in 1994 - was to generate profits for the capitalist class. The capitalists established a few “core conglomerates,” which concentrated capital. “The largest of those companies was the Palestine Development and Investment Company (PADICO), set up in 1993 by the Palestinian G7 from Jordan. With a working capital of $1.5 billion, it engaged in industrial projects, tourism, and developed telecommunications through its subsidiary, the Palestine Telecommunications Co (Paltel), as well as industrial parks in the Palestinian Territories through another daughter, the Palestine Industrial Estates Development Co. (PIEDCO). PADICO also owned the Palestine Securities Exchange…” (Bouillion, 2004: 45, 46). Another conglomerate, the Arab Palestinian Investment Company (APIC) was established

THEcommunist by investors from the Saudi royal family and most of the Palestinian G7 to create industrial and trade enterprises. The PA was used to take market share away from small business by establishing monopolies; no less than thirteen monopolies were created and put under the control of five members of the PA’s inner circle. As economic power became concentrated in the hands of Palestinian big business, small and medium size business decreased. The political economy of contemporary Palestinian secular nationalism has been summarized by Markus Bouillion in his book, The Peace Business: Money and Power in the Palestine-Israel Conflict: “The PA increasingly transformed itself into a rentier quasi-state. The political-economic elites used ‘the resources of the state to allow for the primitive accumulation of capital’ and distributed ‘these “privileges” tactically in ways that allow the regime to hold its power.’ […] As in Israel and Jordan, therefore, power in the Palestinian economy came to be centralized in the core elites, which pursued highly personalized interest politics and marginalized most ordinary Palestinians.” (50). An example of the disparity between the PA and the Palestinian working class is the comparison of the monthly PA subsidy to Yasir Arafat’s wife with the daily income of 50 percent of the Palestinians: she lived in Paris on a monthly (!) subsidy of $100,000 while half the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, according to the World Bank, lived on less than two dollars a day in 2004 (Gelvin, Cambridge 2005: 239). It should be noted that the Palestinian nationalists in their quest for power and wealth subordinated themselves to greater powers: Israel, the United States and Europe. For example, “[b]etween 1995 and 2000, 60 percent of total PA revenue came from indirect taxes collected by the Israeli government on goods imported from abroad and destined for the Occupied Territories… if the Israeli government chooses to withhold payment of this money – as it has since December 2000 – then the PA faces a major fiscal crisis… The other major source of PA income is foreign disbursements from the United States, Europe, and Arab governments. In 2001, these funds covered about 75 percent of the PA’s salary budget,” paying 122,000 public sector workers (Hanieh, 2002: 36). In this way nationalist politics came under the influence of outside imperial powers each seeking to advance their own agendas. The Israelis kept a hold on the land, resources and security of the territories while the U.S. and the Arab governments guaranteed that no radical politics would emerge in an autonomous Palestine.

Hamas The transparent corruption of the PA and its failure to counteract effectively Israeli policies of closure and sanctions amid the growing impoverishment of the Palestinian working class has led to the emergence of the

31 Islamic Resistance Movement (better known as “Hamas”) as a competitor for power. Hamas, which many view as a predominantly religious organization, is essentially a nationalist organization with no revolutionary pretensions. Its primary goal is the national liberation of Palestine. Article 12 of its charter makes this clear: “According to the Islamic Resistance Movement, nationalism is part and parcel of its religious creed…Whereas other nationalisms consist of material, human, or territorial considerations, the Islamic Resistance Movement’s nationalism carries all of that plus all the more important divine factors…” (Mishal and Sela, 2006: 182). And, according to Article 25 of its charter, Hamas is also anti-communist: “It respects them [other nationalist movements] as long as they do not give their allegiance to the Communist East…” (Mishal and Sela, 2006: 191). As an anti-revolutionary nationalist movement, Hamas emerged with the economic and political support of the area’s ruling classes: Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Israeli. After the oil boom of the 1970s, the upper classes of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait increased their contributions to Islamic charities and social welfare organizations in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, “financing a host of Islamic foundations and mosques from which those foundations distributed largesse. In 1967, there were 77 mosques in Gaza; by the outbreak of the intifada [1987], there were 150. Many of these mosques… acted as incubators for Islamic political organizations”. Funding from Persian Gulf states for Hamas increased after 1990 as they transferred their prior support from the PLO because it sided with Iraq in the crisis over Kuwait. The Muslim charities were quite extensive and produced strong linkages with the local populations through organization of “daycare, kindergartens, primary schools, vocational training centers, blood banks, medical clinics, libraries, youth and sporting clubs, and soup kitchens”. The spread of the Islamic charities was also implicitly supported by Israel, which not only hoped that such aid would keep the Palestinians pacified but also thought that an emphasis on religious renewal and piety might undercut the political influence of the secular PLO (Gelvin, Cambridge, 2005: 222, 223). One of the political forces the Israeli rulers sought to counteract in the 1980s was not simply the PLO whose leader, Arafat, increasingly appeared to Palestinians as a “bourgeois fraud” but the new trade union and community activists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These activists had organized about 20 percent of the Palestinian workers into unions. Furthermore, they put forth the view that the Palestinians should not waste time trying to establish a separate nation-state. Rather they should attempt to integrate themselves into the prevailing system and, sooner or later, the demographic weight of a larger Arab population would turn Israel into a “de facto binational state” (Sachar, 1996: 962). Fearful of this nonviolent strategy and what it meant

32 for the ethnocratic character of Israel, the National Unity government under Peres and Shamir “authorized a certain limited enlargement of Moslem fundamentalist activities in Palestine. The fundamentalists’ program and institutions were directed principally by Hamas, an indigenous, Gaza-based movement…With unofficial Israeli approval now, these right-wing religionists were authorized to build new mosques, Islamic schools and colleges, clinics and infirmaries, and thus presumably to function as a more ‘spiritual’ alternative to Fatah and other PLO factions in Palestine” (Sachar, 1996: 963). This line of thinking on the part of the Israeli authorities had a historical precedent: The Zionists spent “substantial sums” to set up the National Muslim societies in 1922 and 1923 as an alternative to the Arab Executive (Lesch, 1979: 51). Another precedent, of which Israeli rulers were likely aware, was found across the border in Jordan. When the West Bank was under the control of Jordan in the 1950s and 1960s, “Amman’s official policy had been marked by a tacit alliance with the Muslim Brothers against both pan-Arab movements and communism” (Mishal and Sela, 2006: 155). The old British colonial policy of supporting Islamic groups and their networks of mosques and charities to contain political thought and activism within acceptable limits has found its contemporary counterpart in the support of local ruling classes for Hamas. The Israeli, Saudi, and Kuwaiti ruling classes would not support Hamas if it was a revolutionary organization seeking to overthrow the existing class structure. The Israeli, Saudi, and Kuwaiti ruling classes would not support Hamas if it was trying to organize Arab and Jewish workers into a revolutionary force. If these reactionary powers support it, how “progressive” can it be? A similar point can be made about the nationalist Lebanese political party, Hizbullah. For Hizbullah the achievement of social justice does not involve creating social equality. Private property is accepted thus giving owners of the means of production the power to exploit the labor power of the workers. For Hizbullah, alms-giving, tithing, and appropriate state policy will create a social order that “transcends” class differences. The struggle for social justice does not support class conflict. Justice is determined by individual moral behavior. (Hamzeh, 2004: 42, 43).

The Israelis Jewish nationalism was able to create a state apparatus in 1948. With state power, what has the nationalist movement done for the capitalists and workers of Israel? The answer to this question can be divided into three historical periods marking the rise of the capitalists and the decline of the workers. The first period from 1948 to 1973 saw the channeling of almost all capital transfers to Israel (coming from German reparations and foreign Jewish contributions) “to

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favored business groups considered allies in the ‘national project’. These groups eventually developed into the key conglomerates that dominated the Israeli economy in the following years” (Hanieh, 2002: 31). The ranks of the working class grew with tremendous immigration of Arab, African and Asian Jews known collectively as the Mizrahim. These immigrants were relegated to the lower paying jobs as Israeli society developed a pronounced system of inequality Another source of capital was the property abandoned by the Palestinians in the 1948 war as they fled or were forced out. The results were that, of Israel’s total land area, over 60 percent consisted of abandoned Arab property. The new farmland (about 2 million acres) was four times greater than what the Zionists controlled before the war. The total value of this capital has been estimated at 120 million pounds (expressed in 1947 financial values). In addition, the 150,000-200,000 Palestinians within Israel’s borders – under military rule until 1966 – lost almost 40 percent of their land through confiscation by the state; this amounted to 75,000 acres. Within thirty years (1950s – 1980s) the percentage of Palestinians tilling the soil fell from 70 percent to less than 10 percent. Many of them became workers at menial jobs within Israel. After Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the economies of these territories became integrated with Israel’s. Palestinians entered the Israeli economy as a cheap labor force boosting profits; they constituted about seven percent of the workforce. A third of those commuting into Israel for work were “illegals” – they were hired by labor contractors who transported them to sub-minimum wage menial jobs in agriculture, construction, industry, and service. The workers had to depart before dawn to reach their jobs and did not return until mid-evening. They began to avoid the commute by not returning home on a daily basis; instead they started sleeping near their job sites - “in basements, huts, abandoned buses, even on open beaches” (Sachar, 1996: 961). Economic penetration of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip allowed the Israeli capitalists to dominate the Occupied Territories and begin a process of “dedevelopment” stifling Palestinian economic independence while Israeli firms and Palestinian compradors profited. About half of the military orders issued in the Occupied Territories between 1967 and 1994 dealt with economic matters. The overall objective was to make the West Bank and Gaza economies colonies of Israel. The workforce was proletarianized through the destruction of agriculture. As the occupation began, about 44 percent of Palestinian workers labored in farming; thirty years later, because of land expropriation and destruction of farmland for “security reasons,” only about 12 percent of the Palestinian workers were in farming. Those driven out of agriculture either became migrant workers to the Arab oil states or low-wage commuters to Israel.

THEcommunist Another method used for the political economic domination of the territories involved creating a loyal social base of colonists through a settlement movement subsidized by the state. The settlement movement required land acquisition. Although some land (about 50,000 acres) was purchased between 1979 and 1982, most was seized under security measures and through bureaucratic fiat. By late 1981 Israel “acquired not less than 31 percent of the West Bank’s total land area” (Sachar, 1996: 868). This state supported colonization, beginning in the 1970s, dramatically expanded in the 1980s and 1990s when the state, at Sharon’s behest, began to recruit secular nationalists to move to the West Bank. Because there were not enough religious nationalists to colonize the occupied territory, the state began to offer land and loans on financial terms better than within Israel itself. The ruling class financed colonization through state subsidization of real estate and mortgages, tax exemptions for businesses operating in the West Bank, and the construction of development infrastructure such as water and power lines, sewer systems, roads, bridges, and street lights. The subsequent influx of hundreds of thousands of settlers plus the construction of the “security” wall has made the West Bank a part of Israel. That is, much of the West Bank is not “occupied” – it is conquered. The second period in the development of the Israeli economy was from 1974 to 1985 and saw military production become a central industry. The direction of state military spending to the powerful conglomerates resulted in tremendous profits for these groups. Israel by 1987 exported weapons to 40 countries; at its high point in the 1980s, weapons represented one quarter of exports and use one quarter of the industrial labor force. The Israeli ruling class used this profitable industry to develop political links with other ruling classes in the world including (or especially) those which had not extended diplomatic recognition even in the 1960s, such as Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. Israel provided training for Taiwan’s secret service, trained the private armies of Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, stationed Mossad agents in Jakarta, Indonesia under the anti-communist Suharto regime, sent military advisors to Thailand and Sri Lanka, sold weapons to Zaire’s billionaire kleptocrat, Joseph Mobutu, and to Morocco’s repressive King Hassan II. (Sachar, 1996: 946). The Israeli ruling class made its most impressive alliance with the white supremacist rulers of South Africa. South African Prime Minister John Vorster made an official state visit to Israel in 1976 “at a time when other nations all but quarantined South Africa for its policy of apartheid”. Following this both nations approved bilateral trade agreements for weapons. South Africa provided steel for Israeli tanks and built its latest submarine. Israel traded jets, patrol boats, missiles, howitzers, communications equipment and radar systems. In September 1979 this cooperation reached its fruition in a joint nuclear bomb

33 test 1500 miles southeast of the Cape of Good Hope near the Prince Edwards Islands. As profits fell during a worldwide recession in the mid1980s and local inflation slowed the economy, a third period began with the Economic Stabilization Plan of 1985. This phase, continuing to the present day, has been characterized by neo-liberal reforms more tightly integrating Israel into the global economy by replacing public capital with corporate capital and cutting the living standards of the workers. American investment rose leading to increasing Americanization and the “McDonaldization” of Israeli society and culture. Just as Palestinian capital became highly concentrated in the 1990s, so did Israeli capital: “A survey conducted by the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange revealed that six families controlled 40 percent of the value of the shares traded on the stock exchange […]. These six families control 12 of 17 economic conglomerates in Israel, and their total sales amount to 10 percent of Israel’s annual GDP. As a result of their dominant status, the capital groups of these families made some 90 percent of the net profit of these 17 economic conglomerates. […] This control enables them to concentrate far-reaching political power in their hands.” (Gozansky in Leon, 2004: 137). Integration into the global economy has resulted not only in the concentration of capital but also the ownership of a huge percentage of Israeli capital by foreigners.: “foreign corporations and entrepreneurs today own 50 percent of the 20 largest companies in Israel that trade on the stock exchange, including banks, and companies involved in high-tech, chemicals and drugs, insurance and investment” (Gozansky in Leon, 2004: 137). If economic and political power has become concentrated among six Israeli families and a number of foreign investors, what does it mean to say that Israel is a state of all the Jewish people? Nationalism, whether ethnic, racial, or religious, works to hide and mystify economic inequality and class antagonisms, fooling workers into believing in “their own” national leaders. To increase profits Israeli capitalists have employed four strategies. First, they began in 1993 to import foreign workers as cheaper substitutes for the Palestinian laborers they had used since 1967. These new workers, numbering about 300,000 in mid-2003 “were often brought ‘illegally’ (although with full knowledge of the Israeli government). They were brought by labor-hire firms set up in Thailand, the Philippines, and Romania, with employers taking their passports on arrival, employing them in very poor conditions and often withholding pay. They formed an ideal reserve army of labor…” (Hanieh, 2002: 34). They now constitute about 16 percent of the labor force and are tremendously profitable since most earn less than minimum wage and lack benefits like overtime pay and annual vacations. The use of foreign labor has meant a collapse of Palestinian employment within Israel as

34 the number of Palestinian workers in the years 1992 to 1996 declined from 116,000 to 28,100. Whereas formerly 33 percent of Palestinian workers had jobs in Israel, by 1996 only 6 percent did. And, in the West bank and Gaza, as of 2004 the number of unemployed Palestinians was 226,300. In a labor force of 845,000 this constituted an unemployment rate of 26.8 percent! (Farsakh, 2005: 206, 207). Second, the Israeli capitalists supported the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 to get an end to the Arab boycott so that Israeli firms could subcontract low tech industrial production (e.g. textiles) to lower wage industrial zones in Jordan and Egypt; in this they have been successful. Third, after Oslo they partnered with Palestinian capitalists for development projects in the Occupied Territories. The large Israeli firm Koor, for example, formed a partnership with the Palestinian Authority for infrastructure projects. In this light, the Oslo Accords can be viewed as a deal between the Israeli and Palestinian business classes to allow the PLO to consolidate its political grip on the Palestinians under the watchful eye of Israel while both partners in the deal make money. The collapse of Oslo has seemingly negated this strategy. Fourth, the Israeli ruling class assaulted the Israeli workers themselves. This was done not only by pitting them against low wage immigrant labor but also by shifting the terms of employment and curtailing the organizing power of workers. There has been a growth in hiring workers through manpower agencies and contractors which deny workers the rights accorded to those previously hired through trade unions. The result of this is that, according to Israeli government statistics, 32 percent of all families and 36 percent of all children are, on the basis of their incomes alone, living in poverty. By 2003 almost 11 percent of the workforce was unemployed. Clearly, Jewish nationalism has enabled a few to profit from the exploitation of “their own” people. A final observation is in order about Israeli nationalism. In spite of achieving formal national independence in 1948, Israeli rulers, like the Palestinian nationalists, have always sought the patronage and protection of an imperial power. In the 1950s Britain and France were powers with which to align; the Suez Crisis of 1956, however, revealed American dominance over Britain. The 1967 war convinced the Americans to back Israel as a potent military ally in the Middle East. American financial patronage and military protection has meant reducing Israel to the status of a servant power performing useful errands and services for the U.S. ruling class. These errands and services have included aid to apartheid South Africa, training Central American soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics, and providing weapons to Iran during its war with Iraq in the 1980s. In the 1970s and 1980s the U.S. could not openly intervene against peasant rebellions in Central America because of the anti-imperialist politics of the American workers.

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The American anti-war movement – particularly in the military – crippled the U.S. as an openly interventionist power. In this political context, the American ruling class relied on Israel for some important imperialist work. In the 1970s and 1980s Israel provided weapons to the fascist oligarchies of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and to the CIA mercenary army, the Contras. Israeli officers helped train the armies of the oligarchies of Guatemala and El Salvador in counterinsurgency tactics. Israel also sold weapons to the anticommunist Pinochet dictatorship in Chile that killed between 3,000 and 5,000 people upon seizing power and to the military dictatorship in Argentina that waged a “dirty war” against leftists leaving 25,000 to 30,000 disappeared. The Israeli ruling class also acted as a surrogate for the Americans in other areas by supplying military assistance to counterrevolutionary guerrillas such as UNITA in Angola, MNR in Mozambique, Habre in Chad and the Contras against Nicaragua (Sachar, 1996: 947-949). Are these the actions of an independent nation or of a client regime? Whatever answer you choose, the established fact is that the Israeli ruling class has deliberately linked itself at different times to fascist forces around the world in South Africa, Zaire (Congo), Morocco, Chile, Argentina, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Conclusion After a century of nationalism in Palestine and Israel, the Arab and Jewish working classes have received only misery. Nationalist leaders have pushed them into ethnonational conflicts and have continually exploited them for their labor. Attempts at working class and anti-racist unity have been continuously sabotaged by the local and imperialist ruling classes in the Middle East. A century of nationalism and opportunist alliances with imperialist powers have brought neither peace nor prosperity for Arab and Jewish workers. The capitalists are the ones who profit, while the workers suffer. Nationalism holds no revolutionary potential for changing our world for the better. It is a tool of capitalism, used to divide and conquer workers from Palestine and Baghdad to New Orleans and Oaxaca. Only an internationalist and multiracial movement of workers, students, and soldiers organized around communist politics can put an end to the genocidal wars, colonial domination, vicious economic inequality, and racist and sexist brutalities that the capitalist ruling classes of every country create and maintain to stay in power. Despite their fiery rhetoric, all national liberation movements have kept capitalist exploitation, racism, and inequality alive and well after achieving “independence.” The bourgeois leaders of the nationalist movements always put their class interests ahead of the “people,” while misleading workers to see the struggle for justice and freedom in racial or ethnic, rather than class, terms. As

THEcommunist the history of Palestine shows, nationalism is always antiworking class and divides workers through ethnic, racial, and/or religious divisions to weaken their revolutionary potential. Nationalist leaders are opportunist to the core, looking always for the best deal from one or another imperialist ruling class in order to safeguard their local power and profits. The recent dealings between Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution and Russia, China, and the E.U. is one contemporary example. Iran’s growing relationship with Russia and China reveals another. Even groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, seen as possible liberators for Arab and Muslim workers, offer nothing but new nationalist (capitalist) leaders to take over the machinery of oppression, poverty, and misery rooted in the profit and wage-slave system. Revolutionary movements of the past were crippled by nationalism and collaboration with national bourgeois leaders. It is fashionable today within what is called the political “Left” to discuss the merits of a two-state vs. one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Is either “solution” an advance for the working class? What do the Palestinian and Israeli workers gain from national independence? The Israeli workers have had it for well over fifty years. The result is that they have become such a highly exploited labor force that many choose to leave the country in search of better opportunities abroad. More than half of the world’s Jews (the majority of whom are workers, not capitalists) choose not to exercise their national “right of return”. This fact in itself says something about the hollow appeal of nationalism. For Palestinian workers to be told that they will see an end to exploitation and the violation of their rights if they have national independence under

35 either bourgeois forces -Fatah or Hamas – is laughable. For a Leftist or a “progressive” (whatever that means) to claim that national independence is a worthy goal only shows intellectual shallowness and a lack of political courage. It may be objected that there are no other viable alternatives to nationhood. Immediately, and next year, and the year after, this is certainly true. If, however, anti-capitalists refuse to raise the goal of a world without borders, if they refuse to attack nationalism as another form of racism, if they are unwilling to assert that workers must organize across boundaries, they will have even greater difficulties organizing against exploitation and war. The material basis for this working class organizing exists: the tremendous and accelerating international labor migrations of the last twenty to twenty five years have forced workers to leave one nation for another. How deep can national allegiance be when it is changed like an overcoat? How deep can it be when workers see their national bourgeoisie locate factories abroad? Many workers around the world today are bicultural and bilingual. With populations of immigrant workers scattered around the planet, there exists the basis for political organizing across borders. What is desperately needed now is a revival of communist politics across all borders – national, ethnic, racial, and religious – that relies on the politicizing and mobilizing of the international working class (rather than aid from the local bosses and/ or outside imperialists) to take state power from the capitalist rulers, regardless of their race, nationality, or professed religion. The opportunity is there, why not seize it?

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Red-Led GIs Blast Racist Brass Soldiers Rebel During Vietnam Era US imperialists, challenged by their imperialist rivals like Russia, China and the European Union, are expanding their deadly wars in the Middle East and possibly elsewhere. Make no mistake about it, the US bosses will fight to the last drop of the blood of the working class to save their threatened empire—if they can get away with it. This article is directed to all those who aim to end the deadly war in Iraq. Learning from the Vietnam War and past wars, we need to go after the source of wars for profit: capitalism and imperialism. Many active duty personnel today hate the Iraq war and want it to end. Pacifism will not end the rulers’ wars or the profit system that makes them necessary. Such pacifism leaves us to face the next war and the next. Concentrating on those who refuse to serve in the military will not stop imperialist wars. Anti-racist soldiers fighting back in the military and workers fighting back in the factories can lead to rebellions against the war makers. This can lead to the growth of a mass revolutionary communist movement that ends imperialist war and the capitalist system itself, putting the working class in power through communist revolution.

“By God, we’ve licked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” bragged George Bush Sr. after Gulf War I—a bit prematurely. The Iraq War debacle has brought it roaring back. The working class’s continued unwillingness to blindly sacrifice for U.S. imperialism still haunts the bosses. The bosses’ think-tanks offer solutions based on their reading of the Vietnam era. Progressive Labor Party cut its teeth in the Army during this period. We would do well to also study the lessons learned. Our military experiences showed the value of young revolutionaries going into the bosses’ Armed Forces— particularly at a time when the bosses were trying to deal with a losing war. At Ft. Lewis, WA, our class-based, anti-imperialist struggle against racism helped us grow. The Party earned the respect of some of the most militant fighters and leaders—black, Latin and white. Winning GIs to revolutionary communism turned out to be more similar than different from that struggle “back in the world.” Our Ft. Lewis political work was not the most notable fightback during the Vietnam era. It certainly wasn’t the only Party-led struggle worth studying. It was, however, the first time we recruited revolutionary communists from

During the Vietnam War, masses of soldiers and sailors rebelled against the racist, imperialist war makers. The fight back of the Vietnamese coupled with the rebellions in the US military spelled the end of the Vietnam War. Before that, during WWI, Russian soldiers and workers, led by the Soviet Communist Party, rebelled against the war—at the front, in the factories and the cities. These soldiers and workers took power in Russia, ending WWI and showing the workers of the world, for the first time, that the working class could take power and run society in its own interests. But unfortunately these brace soldiers and workers didn’t completely eliminate capitalism. So today face similar challenges. As soldiers and workers and their allies organize around the principles of anti-racism and international workers’ solidarity, especially in the armed forces, the revolutionary movement will grow in numbers and resolve. The examples in this article will be repeated and improved upon. The imperialists will start their wars, but the working class will finish them. The working class will win!

among rebelling active duty troops, putting the potential for a revolutionary armed force squarely on the agenda.

Shelter Half I arrived at the base in 1972, a little after GI rebellion peaked. Nearly half the Army’s active duty soldiers participated in organized resistance or rebellion the year before. By ‘72, the Armed Forces were well into their transition to a volunteer force. The bosses had no other viable option. I soon met two GIs who wanted to organize. John, a white guy, knew the Party in Boston. Michael, a black soldier, I had shown a couple of CHALLENGEs, the Party’s revolutionary communist newspaper. We started our political work out of an off-base coffee house called the Shelter Half. Michael and I became fast friends and later roommates. Ironically, one of the first struggles I remember concerned nothing that was considered “political.” Michael and another friend had been selling pot for some time before I met him. I told Michael I thought drugs promoted escapism and were contradictory to the political fightback we were trying to organize. His pot-selling friend had a

THEcommunist

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fit! He accused me (and the Party) of trying to control Michael’s life. Michael chose politics over drugs. From then on we were inseparable. In fact, it became a big “salt and pepper” joke on base.

out of the movement because “people, particularly white workers and soldiers, weren’t ready for it.” Instead, they would falsely portray support for black, Latin or Native American nationalist movements as anti-racist.

The Shelter Half let us use their meeting room and mimeograph machine (remember, this was before the time of Kinko’s) to promote our newly formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) active-duty chapter. Things were chummy as long as we limited our struggles and literature to the fight for “GI rights.” Everybody was on board when we circulated a petition calling for enlisted men’s councils, grades E-1 to E-6, to decide Article XV punishments instead of the company captain—the military equivalent of a “jury of your peers.” Our new chapter got 150 signatures, while a more established group at Ft. Hood got 800 more. We were dizzy with success.

“This attack on Billy Dean Smith can clearly be seen as racist by comparing his case with Lt. Calley’s,” wrote a multi-racial group of soldiers influenced by our line during Smith’s confinement. “Calley was convicted of murdering 22 Vietnamese people. Billy Smith hasn’t been convicted of anything. Calley has been provided with an apartment where he lives and is able to visit with his girlfriend. Billy Smith is locked up in an isolation cell 23 hours out of every day. Calley is white; Smith is black. Calley killed non-white people, while Billy Smith is accused of killing white officers. Calley acted consistently with a racist and genocidal war while Smith [a U.S. grunt in Vietnam] opposed the war.”

Anti-Racist Struggles Show the Way

“The Army figures it can get away with attacking Billy Smith because of the divisions it has promoted between black and white soldiers… We must overcome all divisions and unite all GIs…to STOP THE RACIST FRAME-UP, FREE BILLY DEAN SMITH!”

As 1972 drew to a close, three historic anti-racist struggles would change the course of our VVAW chapter and the Party’s military work. The fight to Free Billy Dean Smith intensified, while sailors on the USS Kitty Hawk and Constellation mutinied. Billy Dean Smith was a black GI accused of “fragging” (killing with a fragmentation grenade) two officers in Vietnam. He was set free after nearly two years of solitary confinement and a huge campaign among soldiers to stop his “legal lynching.” Revisionists wanted to limit literature and demonstrations to the slogan “Free Billy Dean Smith.” The Party and its base upped the ante, adding the slogan “Stop the Racist Frame-up!” This struggle mirrored the debate in the anti-Vietnam War movement at large. The revisionists wanted to keep anti-racist class struggle

We sent a contingent of Ft. Lewis soldiers to a Free Billy Dean Smith rally sponsored by the Washington state VVAW on Veterans’ Day, October 23rd. Michael gave a speech calling for a class-based anti-racist, antigenocidal war movement within the military and to “Stop the Racist Frame-Up.” Together we sold CHALLENGE to most of the hundreds in attendance. Eleven days earlier the Navy lost control of the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk. Black sailors violently revolted when ordered to return to the Gulf of Tonkin, Vietnam, because two replacements ships had been sabotaged. A month later the U.S.S. Constellation erupted in what the New York Times aptly described as “the first mass mutiny in the U.S. Navy.” On November 2, the ship’s Captain Ward announced that two hundred and fifty sailors would be administratively discharged with “less than honorable” paper. Most sailors assumed these punitive discharges were aimed at activists who were organizing against the racist use of Article XVs, court-martials and deployment to Vietnam. The next day, a multi-racial group of over 100 sailors staged a sit-in on the after mess deck. To avoid imminent mass rebellion, the ship’s brass—in consultation with the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Zumwalt—cut sea operations short. They sent a beach party of 130 sailors ashore at San Diego to cool things down. The sailors refused to return! So great was the brass’s fear of this nascent

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multi-racial, anti-racist, anti-imperialist unity that they gave up and reassigned the sailors to shore duty. On November 21st our new VVAW chapter led 50 GIs and supporters to the office of Congressman Floyd Hicks in Tacoma. Hicks was chairman of the sub-committee charged with investigating the Kitty Hawk and Constellation rebellions. We demanded that “the investigation be fair and not a whitewash” and that it be expanded to “probe racism at Ft. Lewis, [neighboring] McChord AFB and throughout the military.” We made the mistake of leaving the Article XV petition signed by 150 soldiers with his aid Barry Jackson, asking for legislation based on its contents. Under orders from Hicks, Jackson immediately turned the names over to the Commanding General of Ft. Lewis, henceforth known as “Filthy” Fulton. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) investigated, but nobody would rat on the organizers. Most said they “found the petition in the shower” or refused to talk at all. When asked how the person who gave him the petition was dressed, one GI answered, “I think he was wearing a clown suit.” We’d never make the mistake of giving names to elected government representatives again. Even worse, Hicks concluded his hearings stating that “The riot on the Kitty Hawk [was caused] by a very few men, most of whom were of below-average mental capacity…all of whom were black.” We couldn’t let this racist garbage go unanswered! On February 3rd the next year, we led another march of 60 back to his office. This time we hung him in effigy. We built for this march by circulating a “Hicks: Wanted for Racism” poster throughout the base. “HICKS HAS PROVEN HIMSELF TO BE A SERVANT OF THE RULING CLASS: THEREBY MAKING HIM AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE” the poster shouted. Another leaflet urged soldiers to “Ask Hicks why white sailors supported blacks in their action! Racism hurts all GIs for it divides the unity of the movement, and keeps us from fighting the real enemies, the Brass.”

Sharpening the Struggle By December ‘72, these struggles convinced most of the leadership in our small VVAW chapter that emphasizing the Party’s class line against racism would sharpen the struggle and lead to growth. Racism was sparking the most militant fight-backs in the Army, even as the bosses were trying to “manage defeat” in Vietnam. The Shelter Half proprietors and John opposed this shift. They wanted to maintain our emphasis on “GI rights.” Their “answer” to racism was to support nationalist movements within the military, the U.S. at large and the nationalist program of the Vietnamese National

Liberation Front (NLF). Soldiers, they maintained, were not ready for an “advanced” anti-racist class line. Up to now we had built a small organization of mostly white soldiers. They were certain we would lose most of our members. Eventually, this difference developed into a split, more internal development in the Party, and a nation-wide struggle in VVAW. As we predicted, this intense ideological and practical struggle led to growth. It also paved the way for recruitment of rebelling GIs to the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP). From the beginning, our anti-racist program encompassed international unity of the working class and soldiers. Michael and I wrote a widely sold pamphlet entitled “Ft. Lewis VVAW speaks out on RACISM IN THE MILITARY.” The preface began: Just as bringing civilization to America was rationalization for the virtual genocide of the Indian, so did racism begin as the justification of slavery. And now, killing Vietnamese is condoned because they are not people; they are “g**ks.”

The next sentence continued, “We…were ruled by a group of power-crazed, wealth-seeking, inhumane barbarians….” The pamphlet endorsed an 8 point program: international unity, no riot control, no bad discharges, fight the racist Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), ally with other anti-racist groups, any lifer or officer using a racist slur or committing a racist act must be immediately relieved of command, fighting racist and inadequate medical care, and, of course, end the genocidal war in Vietnam. “We should try to remember that the U.S. government does not have a ‘split personality’, having racist policies at home and non-racist abroad, or vice versa,” the pamphlet warned. Rejecting imperialism and patriotism, it listed 35 “criminal invasions.” The last sentence read: “The fight against racism is a fight for the unity of all GIs. It is a life and death struggle.” As we put this program into practice, the Shelter Half

THEcommunist concocted a rationale to kick us out of their facilities. They would no longer aid us if we didn’t support the NLF’s nationalist program, as well as a virtual smorgasbord of “identity politics.” The Party rejected nationalism as proboss and counterrevolutionary. By now, most of our base in VVAW also had been won to this position. We refused. John freaked. He stopped working with us, tried to resurrect another organization with the Shelter Half, the GI Alliance. The new Alliance never got off the ground, while our anti-racist VVAW chapter grew to about 50 members, a slight majority black, leading rebellion and struggle throughout the base involving thousands of soldiers. The new GI Alliance’s only claim to fame was praise for anti-racist actions and company newsletters in David Cortright’s book “Soldiers in Revolt.” In fact, the Partyled VVAW chapter led those struggles and produced those leaflets, not the Alliance. The Alliance was an attempt to subvert the Party-led, class-based, anti-racist struggle. In practice, Ft. Lewis soldiers were not in the least bit fooled. We distributed hundreds of the “Racism in the Military” pamphlets over the course of six months before we were ready to directly lead company rebellions. Our regular CHALLENGE readership approached 50/issue during this period. Many began to debate our anti-racist and revolutionary ideas. Combined with some smaller struggles around this line, we paved the way for the explosions ahead.

Building CHALLENGE Networks Our attempts to increase CHALLENGE sales during this period paid off. We got some help selling the paper to soldiers living in apartments off base, but most of our distribution was done through networks on base. In fact, defending the distribution of our revolutionary communist paper led to some sharp struggles—in and of themselves. At one point, Captain “All-swine” Alwine started a campaign to stop the reading and distribution of CHALLENGE within a particularly rebellious company, the 864th. Every issue, 15 brown envelopes would arrive in the company mail. It didn’t take long for the brass to figure what was up: the company had fifteen CHALLENGE subscribers. He and his lieutenants launched a campaign to crush CHALLENGE distribution by seizing one of these envelopes. They picked the GI they figured was most likely to cave in. The company clerk warned us of the captain’s ploy. We quickly made plans to secure our readership under any circumstances. We alerted the targeted GI. He boldly marched into the Captain’s office and grabbed the CHALLENGE envelope, which the clerk had already

39 told us was sitting on All-swine’s desk. “Give me my mail back!” he shouted and marched out again. He managed to hold it together until he made it back to the room where his compatriots had assembled. All-swine’s campaign never got off the ground. Soon after this the Party decided Ft. Lewis comrades should guarantee an article every issue. Usually there was plenty to report. In between, we ran interviews with soldiers commenting on the political issues of the day. My friend Michael was getting excited about the paper. He reported that a friend in his company always respected the political work we did as individuals. His view of us changed, however, after he read the paper. He realized this was not just a few well intentioned individuals, but a serious Party. “PLP must be a serious organization,” was the way he put it after finishing his third issue of the paper. Eventually the circulation approached 100 with 35 subscriptions. We would turn to this base time and time again as the struggle intensified.

The Not-So-Calm before the Storm During these months of mass agitation, the Army started rap sessions on racism. Unbeknownst to the brass, we sent one of our members to what turned out to be an ideological fight between the enlisted men (EMs) and the officer leading the discussion. The brass began the session by playing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” by Jim Croce. This popular song told the tale of Leroy Brown “from the south side of Chicago,” who was “meaner than a junk yard dog.” The Lieuy then asked the EMs if they thought Leroy was black. Obviously, you were racist if you thought so. Before anybody could answer, our guy, who was himself black, interrupted: “We’re supposed to have a serious discussion on military racism and you are playing these trivial tricks to blame EMs. Racism here is caused by the brass, who use it to divide us and keep us weak and to justify their imperialist war. Stop wasting our time!” The whole room erupted. The lieutenant beat a hasty retreat, cutting the meeting short. Most of our literature from then on would belittle the Army’s racism rap sessions. As our anti-racist reputation grew, a local TV station asked us to send a black representative to a Sunday morning talk show to discuss “the racism issue in the military.” They were expecting a militant black nationalist. They had other official panelists prepared to answer him at the Saturday pre-recording. Instead they got a revolutionary communist class analysis of racism, including a call for all GIs to unite and build for socialist revolution (our line at the time). Our representative outlined, in some detail, how racism

40 hurt all workers and soldiers, black, Asian, Latin, Native American or white: U.S., Vietnamese or any other nationality. The opposition appealed to patriotism and a “better America.” The military’s reforms are meant to pacify the troops so the brass can carry out their racist mission at home and abroad, our VVAW member rebutted. That Sunday morning was the first time I ever saw a blank TV screen in the daytime. Despite repeated calls, the station refused to air the broadcast. We never volunteered to participate in the bosses’ media circus again. We learned we would have to start espousing ideas contrary to our goals to get significant airtime. Either that or they would attack us. We relied on CHALLENGE and our own pamphlets and leaflets to get the word out. Of course, that didn’t stop the bosses’ press from trying to use us for their own imperialist aims. One local Tacoma News-Tribune reporter, Jack Williams, wrote us a long letter swearing that he didn’t “write whitewashes.” He tried to excuse himself and his partner New York Times military reporter Drew Middleton, whom he called “one of the finest and most experienced reporters in the nation.” He admitted they had only interviewed “gung-ho officers and senior NCOs,” in their “pro-army” series on the volunteer services. Trying to get in our good graces, he switched gears, calling Vietnam “a despicable and idiotic adventure.” “I assure you that any feed I get from you people, on the volunteer system or anything else to do with the military, I will regard with respect and objectivity,” the letter continued. We weren’t biting this time. Instead of wasting time (or worse!) with reporters, we built for a big anti-war Inauguration Day demonstration planned for San Francisco on January 20th, 1973. The Party and allied groups held their own rally before, marched to the general demonstration, and held a student conference the next day. We sent a GI van down to participate. On the way down I gave Michael the Party’s Sit Down pamphlet, which described how communists led the sitdown occupation at the General Motors’ Flint, Mich. plant. It had a big effect on him. “I didn’t realize white workers could be so militant,” he commented, further distancing him from his nationalist origins in the Black Panther Party. I spoke at the Party’s demonstration about our antiracist, anti-imperialist program. Michael spoke the next day against black nationalism. We consciously decided to have a white GI talk about the need to fight racism and a black one about the need to combat black nationalism. On the way home, Michael joined the PLP.

PLP

A Company Erupts Even as we engaged in mass agitation, we developed a plan to concentrate our basebuilding efforts in a couple of companies. Our efforts were rewarded with companywide rebellions involving a large number of returning active-duty Vietnam veterans. A Party member remembered the first of a series of rebellions in his unit during the spring of 1973 in the pages of CHALLENGE. My company had been out in the field for three days. The foxholes we had been ordered to lay down in had been turned into swimming pools by the incessant rain. We were all angry as hell. Some of us were trucked back to the barracks. Our Capt. “Allswine” Alwine ordered us to get haircuts before returning to camp. Nobody wanted to do it. Many black soldiers complained that nobody on base knew how to cut their hair. Following their lead, white soldiers also refused. The lifers immediately split us up into two groups, one black and one white. They ordered us into trucks. A few of us organizers scurried between them. Then it happened. My friend [Pete] led all the black soldiers out of their truck. They boarded the truck carrying their white buddies. Hugs and “power” daps [handshakes] were exchanged as well as heartfelt vows to fight the brass together. We commandeered the truck, kicked the lifers off, and sped back to camp. It was night when we arrived back at camp. Our comrades had built small fires to dry themselves as they stood watch on the perimeter. We went from blaze to blaze, picking up soldiers as we went. After circling the camp we headed for the captain’s headquarters. He must have seen us because he sent the chaplain out to run interference. The chaplain told us we were violating God’s word. We told him to go to a place where God is reputed not to be. I don’t know if he took our advice, but he sure left in a hurry! We caught the captain in his tent. More than 50 of us, black, Latin and white, presented our list of anti-racist demands: no bad discharges, no job discrimination, no riot control, no Article XVs, no racist slurs from lifers, no genocidal war and, of course, no haircuts! We retired to the heated officers’ tent—no more wet foxholes for us! The commanding lieutenant of my platoon, a recent ROTC grad, ordered us out to the perimeter. In the pitch black of the tent you could hear one GI, recently returned from Vietnam, ask the officer where he hailed from. ‘Idaho,’ replied the Lieuy. The Vietnam vet shot back, ‘Where I come from we eat people from Idaho!’ The Lieuy left for good. I will never forget the camaraderie of those days. The grandeur of these rank-and file soldiers uniting to fight the racist brass surpasses any Hollywood war epic.

From then on, rebellions were a regular thing in the 864th. Soldiers “accidentally” missed nails while putting up drywall, leaving rooms full of hammer holes. Cement

THEcommunist was left to harden in mounds on the side of the road. All sorts of equipment turned up unusable. One of the more significant of these minor rebellions concerned riot control training. Unrest was spreading from our company to the larger battalion. The battalion leader organized a counterattack. The brass began the battalion-wide class by warning us that students would try to “brainwash” us during riots. All the other rebels, in Detroit for instance, were lumpen “pushers and pimps.” I had recently read an article in Scientific American, of all places, that concluded after extensive research that the rebels where mostly active or laid-off auto workers. I said as much referring to this “prestigious” magazine. A right-winger, who obviously was primed by the brass, stood up. “Why don’t you shut your mouth,” he threatened. Two black soldiers shot back, “Why don’t you try and make him!” You could hear folding chairs tipping over as the room began to split in two. The brass quickly cancelled the class and escorted the warring factions back to the barracks. The next week the brass made the mistake of conducting riot control “field training.” We turned it into practice on how to “turn the guns on the brass.” Needless to say, they never called us up for riot duty! This was not the last time these brave soldiers defended me and the Party. I particularly remember a lifer who was pressured to resign after a number of rebellions against his racist demagoguery. He returned to the barracks with a rifle threatening to kill me. A large group of unarmed Vietnam vets surrounded me, taunting the racist. He sulked off, never to return. Word of these rebellions was spread all over the base though our CHALLENGE networks, leaflets and pamphlets. Armed “Farces” Day marked the broadening of anti-racist fightback to the whole base. The connection between our company struggles and the broader basewide fight—although long distant—was made clear.

Anti-Racist Rebellion Spreads Through Fort The 864th rebellions and those starting in other companies, the increasing CHALLENGE sales and widening distribution of VVAW anti-racist literature gave us the confidence to call for a demonstration on May 19th, Armed Forces Day. Armed “Farces” Day, as it had become known in the GI movement, had been a traditional day of protest for the past few years. We planned a rally at the fort’s entrance followed by a march to a nearby park. We might have been confident, but the brass was taking no chances. The base commander General “Filthy” Fulton devoted his whole speech at a review of Ft. Lewis troops

41 to attacking VVAW and those fighting racism on base. We published, for those who didn’t hear it first hand, how he pleaded with GIs to use proper channels—like the chain of command and the human relations councils—instead of associating with “the few dissidents.” His underlings, such as a North Fort Major, lied about our record. “They are trying to get black and white fighting among each other.” He said this after seeing a big UNITE on dozens of our leaflets. The brass soon realized their ability to persuade or intimidate was waning. They had to do something more drastic. They figured the 864th was the center of rebellion. The base commander ordered the company out of state (to build a Boy Scout camp of all things) during the crucial days before and during the demonstration. This led to the second major rebellion. This rebellion was also triggered by a seemingly nonpolitical issue. The brass ordered us to keep our white T-shirts on while working in the hot sun. This time white soldiers complained first. They demanded to be allowed to take them off. They wanted a tan. A multi-racial group went to confront the captain; black soldiers were used to supporting their white “brothers” and vice versa. The captain ran out the back of his tent when he saw us coming. That was it! We let his underlings know what was really on our minds. They had taken us to a racist hellhole. We wanted to be sent back to the base now! The night before groups had visited the nearby town, Spirit Lake, Idaho. We knew something wasn’t right when saw signs in the local stores saying “We reserve the right to refuse service to anybody.” Pretty soon it became clear: you couldn’t go down the street without you or your friends being called the “n” word. Instead of sending us home, the brass restricted us to camp. That Friday night our camp turned into a drug bazaar. You could find any hard drug you wanted. Since we weren’t allowed out, we knew the brass had brought in the drugs to pacify us. Leaving nothing to chance, the brass organized porn movie showings. You can bet there was a lot of struggle about that. The brass could care less about the Boy Scout camp. Saturday morning our rebellion intensified. By Saturday afternoon, they sent the black GIs home, too late to join the rally and march. Sunday morning, they let the white GIs go, leaving the Boy Scouts with a half-finished mess. Progress reports of our anti-racist rebellion were sent back to the fort. Organizers in other companies redoubled their efforts. Black soldiers took the lead. On the day of the demonstration they led a hundred GIs past the commanders’ phalanx of armed vehicles to join our civilian supporters at the rally. “Filthy” Fulton was left to

42 stare at the proceedings through binoculars behind a wall of MPs. He didn’t need his binoculars to see our slogans. Fight to Win-Fight Racism in the military; on the streets! Indict the US Gov’t for Genocide at home and abroad! By now, the Party’s base was leading fight-backs and rebellions in companies all over the base. Each one we publicized through leaflets and CHALLENGE articles. Political lessons from each struggle were discussed and debated, then written up for circulation to hundreds on base. Thousands eventually got some kind of literature from us. A few of these struggles come to mind. Two VVAW activists, Pvts. Greg Douglas and Jose Fernandez of the 709th Maintenance Co., were threatened with court-martial for leaving the scene of an incredible series of harassments. Both had a history of fighting racist harassment in their company. One racist goon, Sgt. Fields, was particularly incensed because they had been organizing against his harassment and racist comments. After spending all day doing K.P. in the field, they were surrounded by a number of lifers and told to dig foxholes. After awhile they made them do P.T. and then told them to continue digging foxholes. At this, they demanded to see the C.O., to no avail. Finally they walked away. “Defend Fernandez and Douglas! Make the Real Criminals—The Racist Brass—Pay for Their Crimes!” leaflets were circulated throughout the fort. This time it was easy; the brass never pressed charges. Fernandez eventually became my roommate when we were discharged.

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what he thought was a private conversation, that, “With Baldwin gone so is racism in the 411th. Racism was an invention of Baldwin.” CHALLENGE (7/12/73) reported that the confrontation lasted three hours. “In face of the militance and solidarity shown by the GI contingent, Major Ford decided that it would be best if he did not face them down alone…To help bail him out he called upon seven MPs in addition to representatives of the Equal Opportunity Commission [as well as] the brigade and battalion commanders.” Despite the arrest, one brother vowed, “We’re gonna keep on fighting. We’re gonna fight until Baldwin is free and until all of us are free!” All off a sudden Ford’s superiors decided an investigation of Ford’s racist activities was warranted—not that these “investigations” ever made any real difference. When Baldwin eventually got out of the stockade, he continued to bring many to our meetings. CHALLENGE concluded: The struggles in the 2nd/60th and the 411TC, led by minority GIs and communists, aid the plight of all GIs. We will continue to build VVAW and PLP and we will run all the racist bosses and their stooges off this planet. Free Steven Baldwin! Workers of the World, Unite!

Soldiers Answer Red-Baiting; Help Develop Communist Strategy

Another friend, Pvt. Bill Alexander, was targeted by the racist Capt. Adams of the 2nd/60th. Adams vowed to “get Alexander and his n….r friends.” He called Alexander “white trash” for associating and organizing with black GIs. “The brass drummed up a series of charges which, if gone unchecked, would have led to a dishonorable discharge,” reported CHALLENGE (7/12/73).

Ironically, the success of our military work brought the national office of VVAW down on us. They were threatened by our class line. They tried to call us racist for not supporting nationalism. Their anti-communist bait fell flat. They were mostly white revisionists, while our chapter was clearly multi-racial, with plenty of black and Latin leadership that respected the Party’s revolutionary communist politics. In fact, some of these hardened leaders would soon join the PLP.

We started our campaign to “Jail Racist Capt. Adams, Not Alexander” by stickering the fort. Leaflets and CHALLENGE articles followed. “Because of Alexander’s determination to fight back and constant agitation by his friends on the post, all charges against Alexander were dropped and he was given an honorable discharge, not jail,” CHALLENGE was able to report.

The National Office demanded “the expulsion of VVAW members who belong[ed] to Progressive Labor Party” and anyone “who failed to support the [Vietnamese NLF] Seven Point and Nine Point Peace Proposals.” Further, they wanted traveling “range riders” supposedly to help with organizing, but everybody knew these political thugs would force the National Office’s ideology on the regions.

In perhaps the most “serious” of these cases, Sp/4 Steven Baldwin of the 411th Transportation Co. was sentenced to pre-trial confinement. Prior to confinement, he faced a special court-martial for “not trimming his sideburns,” “playing his radio too loud on the bus,” and “bringing one of his friends (ed. a party organizer) into the company area.”

The Party answered with an open letter. In addition, the Washington state leadership wrote their own statement that “[came] from the unanimous consent of the membership present at the last regional meeting [consisting of] representative from Ft. Lewis, Seattle, University of Washington, Longview, Vancouver and Bellingham.” The state leaders sent copies of both to every region in the country.

Baldwin’s real crime was leading 15 black and white GIs to confront their company commander, Major Glaston J. Ford, Jr. One 411TC officer had the racist gall to say, in

The Party letter reviewed our military work, explained why we thought racism was a key class question and

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why every GI had a stake in defeating it. We explained how nationalism always aided and abetted some bosses’ imperialist plans, subverting the interests of the international working class. There was no such thing as progressive nationalism.

made plans to “advance under attack.”

We thought the nationalist politics of the Vietnamese NLF—implicit in the Peace Proposals—were a betrayal of 30 years of armed struggle against imperialism. Besides, the U.S. imperialist invaders didn’t have a right to negotiate a blade of grass in Vietnam. We vowed to continue to build for socialist revolution among soldiers. Our goal, communism, was the only way to end racism and imperialism.

Internal documents showed we reviewed our work over the past nine months for the convention. We had gone from a small, mostly white, VVAW chapter to weekly meetings of a dozen or so GIs, at least 50% minority. We recruited one black GI and had bi-weekly [PLP] study groups. Our CHALLENGE sales had reached 100 with 35 subscriptions. We quickly outlined a few struggles. Then the delegates drew some political lessons:

This was a hard line to take at the time, but couldn’t have proved more correct. One needs only to look at the vicious exploitation at the Vietnam Nike factory to see that we were right. The state letter started “we have had experience with cooptation and can recognize the difference between groups that want to subvert VVAW and those that want to work with us on an up-front basis.” The Student Mobilization Committee, a collection of revisionists and opportunists, were the subject of particularly scathing criticism. The Party, on the other hand, really helped VVAW advance. VVAW in Washington has PLP members… [They have] put their asses on the line to work with servicemen… Although there are certain differences between PL and VVAW, we have resolved conflicts by open discussion. No doubt PL would like to have strong influence on VVAW, but there is a difference between influence and subversion/co-optation… In any event, no one, not the national office, nor in any other region(s) will dictate to this region what the composition of our membership will be. …The proposal that ‘all members of VVAW, after sufficient time for education must support…the seven and nine point (proposals) is elitist bullshit! …Who will do the educating? From what point of view? Is someone going to show us the error of our ways because we do not agree with part or all of the seven or nine points? …We think [the range riders] is a waste of time and a combination power/ego tripping… Money could be better spent… …It is also important that any charges against any group be well founded in fact and not the product of paranoia, misinformation, or rumors.

The letter ended with the “hope that [the National Office] will accept our remarks in the spirit of brotherhood in which they were offered.” They were not. These two letters blunted the National Office’s attack. They were never able to enforce their rotten politics. A black marine veteran in the state chapter followed this struggle closer than we realized. He later joined the Party and played a key role at the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton during one of the larger post-Vietnam military struggles. Meanwhile, the active-duty soldiers

The following summer PLP held its convention. Two Ft. Lewis soldiers were elected delegates. We used this opportunity to take stock of our military work and prepare the advance.

Various objections have been raised by party members and others to making the fight against racism the main focus in the military. [The soldier delegates] feel almost all these objections boil down to the same central issue: can white GI’s be won to fighting racism. Just like all workers and students, GI’s must fight racism if they intend to build an effective struggle and any type of organization that can withstand the ruling class attempts to kill us off in their world-wide search for profits. …Since we have started this anti-racist campaign, the brass have been doing their best to scare white GI’s away from fighting racism…These scare tactics have not worked. We have succeeded in gathering some of the most militant, serious fighters, black, Latin and white by concentrating on the fight against racism. We have had some small success in recruiting where those comrades who continued to concentrate on fighting harassment have not had any to our knowledge.

After calling for a bold approach and flexible tactics the GI delegates got to the heart of the matter. As we grow bigger, the attacks by the brass and the various vultures on the left increase. This is to be expected and shows we must be doing something right. But we cannot advance under this attack unless we recruit [to the Party]. The potential is good. We have a good reputation among scores… There are external factors that hold us up: anticommunism and other groups around. Mainly, it is our own failure to realize how crucial recruiting is that has held us back. Somehow recruiting doesn’t seem as glamorous as building a mass organization. …But just what would the situation at Ft. Lewis be if the Party was not around? …There are a lot of sincere antiracist fighters in and around VVAW, who are not in the Party, but it is only PL’s ideas of class unity, no respect for the bosses’ laws, and eventually revolution put forward in an organized way by PLP members that will advance the struggle. But, most important, how is PL going to lead a revolution unless we recruit working class members like the GIs we know? They have a rich history of class struggle and a tremendous class hatred for the bosses… These guys believe in PL and need PL’s ideas to advance our class.

We ended with a 5 point program that concentrated on basebuilding, individual and collective ideological

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discussion, bi-monthly Party events with Seattle, and new CHALLENGE sellers, subscribers and sustainers. We took this plan seriously, but not seriously enough. As time would tell, we were more than right about the sharpening attacks. We would have been crushed if we hadn’t started to implement this plan for communist recruitment. Even so, we never reached our full potential.

We Accuse! After the convention, we started a campaign against racist medical care at Ft. Lewis Madigan Hospital. One of our Party members at the hospital had been recently discharged, but another Latin medical corpsman took up the slack. “Discrimination begins the moment a patient is admitted to the ward,” he testified. “If he’s an officer he automatically gets the best place. When the doctors finally arrive, they start with the officers. [Enlisted men and their families wait] hours and hours…missing lunch [or] entire days.” A black GI mother and a black GI wife backed him up with personal horror stories. We printed these 3 testimonials in a “Fight Racist Medical Care” leaflet. “As more and more minorities are forced into the Armed Forces, racism will be used to justify worsening medical care for all GIs and their families,” we concluded, inviting soldiers to a joint demonstration with civilian hospital workers in Seattle. “This is not meant as an attack on all doctors or staff, but rather on a system that allows understaffing and long lines of patients.” “Racism will take many forms as the brass prepares to cut medical services to release funds for ‘essential’ projects like imperialist [war and] weaponry,” CHALLENGE added (9/6/73). All our charges were verified in a congressional hearing the next year, not that it mattered! On July 28th, three of us were arrested for distributing this leaflet on base. CHALLENGE (9/6/73) describes the scene: “Hurry up and get those guys out of here!” This was the panicked response of an MP Sergeant as he saw residents of the Ft. Lewis housing project raising clenched fist and peace signs in solidarity with 3 GIs accused of passing out a leaflet entitled “Fight Racist Medical Care.” But even hustling the GIs off to the MP station didn’t stop the flow of support as lower ranking MPs gave clenched fist salutes after reading the leaflet. Really incensed by this time, the brass spent the rest of the night trying to coerce the housing project residents to give up their leaflets for “evidence.” Only three surrendered their leaflets out of over 200 families in the project.

The Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) interrogated us separately. They wanted information about the Party. They showed each of us a pile of about 100 pictures taken at the Armed “Farces” Day rally. “We know so-and-so is the PLP Minister of Propaganda,” an interrogator would shout, pointing to a picture of a GI

at the rally. “This guy is the Minister of Defense. Tell us what position these others hold.” We answered with our name, rank and serial number. We were well trained. A few months later I made fun of the CID operatives at a Party meeting. “They didn’t even know the difference between PLP and Black Panther Party,” I said with a sneer. Our party would never use such pompous titles. The Party chairperson was not amused. “He could have been the Minister of Propaganda and the other could have been the Minister of Defense,” he told me. We could have recruited more Party members than we did. One small thing exemplifies our weakness. We didn’t distribute a single PLP leaflet explaining how our revolutionary communist politics related to the trial. Despite all our class struggle and CHALLENGE sales, we hesitated to put communist (or then, socialist) revolution front and center. We did manage to recruit the Latin corpsman and began to issue our first leaflets in Spanish. The corpsman hailed from Puerto Rico, where U.S. imperialism had plans for a huge oil super-port, surrounded by petrochemical plants. No other state in the U.S. would okay such a dangerous plan. The Puget Sound communities near Ft. Lewis were adamant in their opposition. In the midst of the courtmartial proceedings, he wrote our first bi-lingual leaflet calling for “International Solidarity,” urging GIs to “Fight the super-ports, Fight racism, Fight imperialism, and Fight for socialism!” The brass waited nearly a month before pressing charges, hoping the uproar over the arrests would settle down. By now, the brass were determined to make an example out of us and we were determined to indict them for racism in their own courtroom. Nonetheless, we did not want to turn into a “Defense Organization.” We continued our campaign against racist medical care at Madigan, forcing the hospital to publicly acknowledge that patient lines were indeed too long. Calls for anti-racist, international solidarity, like the super-port campaign, continued. Our CHALLENGE sales increased where the struggle was hottest. We asked GIs to donate $ 5.00 every payday to support our fightback. They responded with over $200, a tidy sum in those days. “Many GIs who have never been involved in anything boldly stepped forward to fight back and assume leadership.” (CHALLENGE, 12/13/73) After three weeks of threats, the brass managed to intimidate one of the leafleters. He turned. They also launched an anti-communist campaign in the 411th TC, the company of one of the other remaining defendants. CHALLENGE reported: The well known racist and lunatic Major Ford [ed. the very same racist goon who attacked Baldwin] has directed his lackeys to spread out-and-out lies…His subordinates told the company 1) it is illegal to read “that communist paper”

THEcommunist being circulated in the company; 2) it is illegal to go to VVAW meetings or have VVAW leaflets; 3) if you know any members of VVAW or PLP you had to turn them in; and 4) it is illegal to associate with communists.

As it turned out, this anti-communist campaign never found traction. A friend told the tale in a letter to CHALLENGE (10/4/73). The brass are being handed defeats on many fronts….In [one defendant’s] company, the statements made by Major Ford forbidding…dissent…were exposed for the lies they are…This pig was forced to apologize to the assembled company. The militant history of GIs uniting—black, white and Latin—to fight the 411th brass and the potential for future rebellion, led by VVAW and PLP, caused this quick retreat. GIs are responding to anti-racist and communist ideas and will send the brass scum back into the sewers that they came from.

They must have been responding because CHALLENGE sales doubled in the 411th TC. It wasn’t until October that the brass actually felt ready to get on with the court-martial. It turned out they were overly optimistic. Over fifty soldiers volunteered to be our character witnesses. Every one of them showed at the trial, plus some comrades who had already been discharged. This multi-racial group of rank-and-file soldiers and veterans freaked the prosecutor out. He started arguing with the defense attorney. He wanted most sent back to their duty stations. Our supporters surrounded the lawyers. One guy shouted that anybody over rank of E5 [a lifer or officer] should get the hell out of there. The prosecutor looked up at this angry “mob” and caved in. “The military judge threatened several times to clear the courtroom because of noise from the gallery.” (Tacoma News-Tribune 9/14/73) Then things really got going! Spec. 5 Wesley Brim, the only witness in the whole housing project they could get to testify against us, “identified one [leafleter] as white and the other as a ‘colored boy.’” The galley erupted! “Your Honor, I object!” shouted a black man form the gallery. “You have two defendants here fighting racism, and you have a witness here pushing it!” (Tacoma News-Tribune) The judge threw our comrade out. Some followed in disgust, but most remained standing and shouting. When the judge managed to get things calmed down, the prosecution went to get their only collaborating witness, the turncoat. The prosecutor returned, shrugged and said, “We can’t find him.” Pandemonium ensued! As we later learned, every black soldier in the turncoat’s company had surrounded him in the barracks some days before. The turncoat, who was black, was told that things

45 would go badly for him if he dared testify against the two white anti-racists and communists on trial. So he fled! The Army and FBI started a nation-wide man hunt, while the judge issued an indefinite continuance. A few weeks later, they dragged him back into the courtroom. Fifty more GIs came to support us. We were convicted, but given short sentences. Even as we were led off to the stockade accompanied by raised fists, others were already printing and distributing leaflets demanding our freedom and jail for “the racistfascist brass.” There was no shortage of venom: The racist ass-kissing brass have once again shown themselves to be the real pigs that they are. Gen. Filthy (Fulton) that low-down dirty rotten illegitimate son of Adolf Hitler and chief hog of the Gestapo intervened personally to insure that [the defendants] would be place in confinement. These [jailings] are just another indication of whose interests these two-faced war-mongering bastards really represent.

To tell the truth, the stockade wasn’t so bad. Our reputations, not to mention CHALLENGE and our leaflets, had preceded us. One of our “rioting” buddies from the 864th greeted us at the gate, introducing us to the fellas. He had been incarcerated a few weeks earlier for cold-cocking a lifer. We gathered the prisoners’ stories for publication after we got out. A day or two after I got out, I was due to be discharged. The First Sergeant at the separation center noticed I had a couple of weeks stockade time. This “bad” time was supposed to be added to my active-duty schedule. He told me I’d have to wait 2 weeks for my discharge. I told him he’d better call General Fulton. He was so shocked that a private would even suggest such a thing that he brought the “request” to his Lieutenant. The Lieuy called post headquarters. After a while, he returned to the room. “Don’t ask any questions. Just get him out of here!” he ordered.

There Can Be No Revolution without Revolutionary Communist Soldiers In January 2007, Iraq veterans spoke at a panel in Tacoma, WA, near Ft. Lewis. One vet told of his orientation in Kuwait by the brass before “going in country.” The officer in charge asked the assembled grunts what they would do if their convoy saw an Iraqi kid in the middle of the road. “We’d stop,” answered one soldier. “You never stop for a fucking hajji kid,” the officer yelled back. “We’d go down another road,” offered another troop. “You never veer from your path for a fucking hajji kid. You run the fucking hajji kid over!”

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“Racial dehumanizing,” the Iraq vet emphasized, “doesn’t originate with the grunts.” It is the conscious strategy of the officer corps, meant to justify U.S. imperialism’s brutal atrocities. To make sure we got the point, he related another example that took place during a division briefing in front of a commanding general. Divisional briefings, he noted, were the second highest briefings in Iraq. The day before, an 18-year-old, only in the army a few months, panicked. He shot at a car rapidly approaching a check point. These check points were randomly established throughout the city. You never knew where one would pop-up. He then saw the results of his work. An Iraqi mother and her children were dead. A full-bird colonel, kissing-up in hopes of getting his General star, turned to face the room. “None of this would happen if these fucking hajjis learn to drive,” he said, dismissing the atrocity. After these vets gave their testimony, the so-called “distinguished” panel of professors, clergy and liberals asked questions. Nobody from the audience was allowed to speak. The panel head asked the last two (leading) questions. Do you thing the U.S. is committing war crimes in Iraq? No vet had trouble answering, “Yes!” The last question showed where the panel organizers where heading. “Would you advise somebody thinking of going into the Armed Forces not to join because they could become part of the war crimes?” Afterwards, the Iraq vet talked with a Vietnam era Ft. Lewis VVAW organizer. The Vietnam vet told the young soldier how he had joined the army to organize against racism and imperialist war. Soldiers could do more than just individually disobey “illegal” orders. They could organize their fellow “grunts” to lead the anti-imperialist struggle. He clearly stated that his was a different strategic outlook than just passively warning young people to stay out of the military. This excited the Iraq veteran, despite having been backed into the limited strategy advocated by the panel a few moments before. He had just begun to read about the GI movement during Vietnam. He asked for more information on the subject. Both danger and opportunity present themselves in today’s military work. Our Ft. Lewis experiences speak to the need for more comrades to join the bosses’ Armed Forces—and to the political possibilities. Their outlook must go beyond warning young workers and students away from the military lest they “become part of the war crimes.” Our job is to end war crimes! We have to smash capitalism and its lethal offspring, racism and imperialism, to end these brutal atrocities. Communist revolution is the only way to defeat

capitalism. There can be no talk of revolution without winning significant numbers of soldiers to revolutionary communist politics. As in the civilian world, winning young soldiers to our politics is a multi-faceted process. CHALLENGE networks were essential to our work at Ft. Lewis. We learned never to rely on the bosses’ media. They would first ignore us. When that failed they tried to co-opt us. Finally, they just attacked us. Timely VVAW leaflets, clearly influenced by CHALLENGE and our Party’s class line against racism, helped fill the gap between issues of our paper. We could have used Party leaflets as well. Bi-weekly communist study groups allowed us to discuss individual questions in depth. Constant ideological struggle, both oral and written, were invaluable. The key organizers and eventual recruits were our fast friends, on and off the base. Many were our roommates at one time or another. We learned to trust each other. Like they say, “Without trust you ain’t got much.” The truth of the Party’s line was proved to many through class struggle. Our class line against racism distinguished us from the various fakers on the left. Black and Latin soldiers were harmed most by racism, but racism hurt all GIs. International class solidarity stood in stark contrast to the bosses’ racism. The fight against racism proved in practice to strengthen our ability to fight back as a class. The potential for working class revolution became more real. In order to fight the racist brass we had to defeat the bosses’ ideas within our own ranks. There was no natural or spontaneous progression from the identity politics and opportunism of the Shelter Half or the VVAW national office to our anti-racist rebellions. We had to fight against their rotten politics if we wanted to sharpen the struggle. We tried not to make secondary things primary, but this struggle was unavoidable if the Party and VVAW was to advance politically and grow. As we fought for and eventually led mass rebellion, many—black, Latin and white—saw the value of our anti-racist class line. “Struggle with, struggle against” was our guiding motto. Our Party had earned the respect of hundreds, if not thousands of GIs. We were in a position to recruit many to our Party. We recruited a few: more that the comrades that preceded us, but not nearly as many as we could. There were objective limits to our ability to recruit soldiers then—as there are now. We concluded that we had not reached those limits at Ft. Lewis because we had not appreciated how crucial was the recruiting of revolutionary communist soldiers. Although our mass anti-racist struggle was essential, it was not enough. Building for communist revolution must always be primary. At that same panel in Tacoma another Iraq vet told how he led a rebellion against a “suicide mission.” He

THEcommunist knew the real battle was about which class you sided with. Good for him! Some said the bosses left Vietnam because they were afraid they would lose the Army. Too bad they didn’t. Look where we are now. We had allowed the beast to survive, so now we have to deal with even more dangerous racism and imperialism. The patriotic surge after September 11—although not unprecedented in the annals of U.S. or world history— made it easier for the bosses to politically prepare for the imperialist invasion of Iraq. The demise of the old international communist movement left the ruling class without a mortal enemy. Even so, the stakes for the bosses are, in some ways, even higher than Vietnam. We are talking about Mid East oil—the key to the bosses’ empire. The chaos that threatens the Mid East would trigger massive bloody attacks on the world’s workers. The imperialists are even today jockeying for position in the imperialist bloodbath that eventually lies ahead. This period presents formidable political obstacles to building GI resistance and rebellion. The bosses and their agents are working overtime to win anti-war soldiers to pacifism and patriotism— vital to the ruler’s plans for future bigger wars. We have to prepare to work under all kinds of political circumstances. The Party’s strategy of appealing to the anti-racist, anti-imperialist class interests of soldiers excites many anti-war soldiers and Iraq veterans. We must join with these angry soldiers and vets to sharpen the struggle, once again exposing the bosses’ ideas within our ranks. “Struggle with, struggle against” should remain our motto. The threat of wider war makes our revolutionary communist outlook even more essential. History has taught us there is no halfway house to workers’ power. We fight directly for communism. Our line has advanced; so must our practice. Our job remains to win soldiers to smash the bosses’ racist Armed Forces and with their class brothers and sisters forge an invincible Red Army to do away with capitalism’s horrors once and for all. Learning from our strengths and weaknesses during Vietnam can help prepare future soldiers for the only war worth fighting— the class war for communism.

Post Script: Lifelong Brothers in Struggle Soldiers I fought back with during the Vietnam era have revisited my life over the 30-plus years since I was discharged. Their early exposure to revolutionary communist politics in the military still reverberates through their lives. I never fail to be amazed and inspired. A few incidents come to mind. About 25 years after I left the army, I got involved with an opposition caucus in my union. Caucus members from

47 various cities gathered for a strategy meeting at a central location. I didn’t know most of the workers from far away, but one of these guys remembered me from Ft. Lewis. I had spent sometime on his living room couch during the court-martial. The FBI had visited him after I was discharged, trying to get information on my activities. He refused to talk to them. He wasn’t about to forget me! He quickly gathered up his friends for a “side meeting.” He bragged about our struggle at Ft. Lewis and then asked if I could get him and his friends CHALLENGE. Not only had he remembered our Party’s revolutionary communist newspaper 25 years later, but he assumed Party comrades were in the struggle for the long haul. “These people really know how to fight,” he said, recommending us to his friends. Black marines rebelled against the Klan at Camp Pendleton, CA in the fall of 1976. Marine Klansmen had been “openly distributing Klan literature on base, posting K.K.K. stickers on barracks doors and hiding illicit weapons in their quarters.” Two black soldiers had already been “beaten by marines wearing K.K.K. insignia outside the enlisted men’s club on base.” Klansmen “swaggered about the base in armed groups harassing blacks and ‘tried to get them to fight’” according to courtmartial testimony (New York Times, 1/8/73). On December 6th, the marines held a pre-trial hearing to present charges against 14 black marines. The Camp Pendleton 14, as they became know, had responded to the K.K.K. in the only language the Klan understood— violently. The black marine vet, who had followed our struggles against the VVAW national office three years before, took vacation from his industrial job and flew to the camp to help our Party mount an anti-racist defense. He had recently joined the party. Talk about a baptism of fire! PL-led anti-racists—black, Latin and white—beat David Duke, National Grand Dragon of the KKK, and his supporters when they showed up for the pre-trial hearing. A battle with the camp’s MPs ensued. Black and Latin comrades took the lead. Our militant anti-racism freaked the liberals and led to sharp ideological struggle and political advances within our organization. Jesse Jackson came down to the camp to talk with the base commander. He and the ruling class forces behind him wanted a show against the Klan. He reasoned this would better prepare the marines to fight for the national (read: bosses’) interests abroad. We, on the other hand, revealed the links between racism in the states and racist imperialism. Our new recruit made it clear during meetings that he had come to build for communist revolution—the only way to finally smash racism and imperialism. Some told him that was not he what he was supposed to do. He was to limit his activities to “Freeing the Camp Pendleton 14.”

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“That’s what you’re down here for,” they ordered. As it turned out, the Party continued to bring the red flag to events—figuratively and literally. The defendants were more than open to our revolutionary politics. Our new recruit learned a lot from this struggle and gave speeches at meetings and demonstrations when he returned to his home city. The court-martial dragged on for almost a year. The harshest sentence included 2 years jail time. Others got months of hard labor, fines and reduction in rank. The Klansmen were transferred to other basses and to other parts of Camp Pendleton to “defuse the situation.”(New York Times, 1/8/73) Membership in the Klan was legal according to the Marines and didn’t interfere with their mission. Our Party and base advanced through this sharp struggle. Some in our organization, unfortunately, caved in to the demands of the liberals. They wanted to be “big” and if that meant hiding revolutionary communist politics so be it, they reasoned. The Party’s national leadership called a general meeting to settle this question. Still in his work clothes after a hard day’s work, our new recruit jumped back on a plane to defend the party at that meeting. Introduced to our politics during the Ft. Lewis rebellions, he played an important role defending communist politics. It was hard to say he was a “rookie” anymore.

Somewhere between these two incidents, I met my rioting buddy, Pete, from the 864th as I was entering the gate to work. We hadn’t seen each other for more than 15 years. He asked how I was doing. “Oh, the same old thing,” I answered, noncommittally. “That’s good because this place is the most racist worksite I’ve ever seen!” Apparently he remembered. So we started an anti-racist fight-back at work. A few weeks later, he invited me over to his house. The living room was filled with relatives and friends. My wife and I sat down and the whole crowd began reminiscing about Ft. Lewis and all sorts of personal details of my life. Now I was confused. Did I know these people? Had I forgotten that I had met them? I might forget a name, but never a face. Then they all started laughing. It seems my rioting buddy had been entertaining his relatives and friends with stories of our anti-racist rebellion in the Army for fifteen years. They knew the stories by heart and more than most people about me personally. You never know how far our modest efforts will go. Soldiers respond to revolutionary communist politics. It opens the door to a lifetime of struggle. Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

THEcommunist The Massive GI Fight-Back Against the Vietnam War In 1971, Col. Robert D. Heinl wrote: “The morale, discipline, and battle worthiness of the US Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.” He continued, “By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers, drugridden and dispirited where not mutinous.” And to emphasize how quickly things can change, he said that only a few short years before they had been “the best army the United States had ever put into the field. The Overseas Weekly ran a revealing article in the same year (1971) titled, “GI’s declare War on the Army.” There were at least two soldier rebellions every week during the summer of 1971, according to official army reports. Soldiers, sailors and even airmen revolted in the States, overseas, and at the front in Southeast Asia. “Fragging”—blowing up officers and lifers with fragmentation grenades detonated by mutinous soldiers—became common. Every base had its groups of rebels. Hundreds of resistance newspapers were published. There were rebellions in every stockade in the military and the military prison in Vietnam, Long Binh Jail, was burnt to the ground twice. The most militant fight-backs outside of Vietnam were in Germany. The summer of 1970 at Nellingen was one of the most violent. Tensions reached a climax on September 21, following a week of racist harassment, black and white GI’s broke a 7:30pm curfew, marching through the base chanting “join us.” The brass tried to paint this as a “racial incident” but as one black GI told Overseas Weekly, “There is no racial problem among E-5’s and below…that’s one thing our demonstration proved.” A letter CHALLENGE from a GI in Germany reflects this unity against the racist brass. It said: Recently, much publicity was given to the burning of a cross, KKK-style, at the post here. It seems there was such an organization of racist lifers. But the publicity tried to shift the blame on to white troops in general.… The magazines make this out to be a racial clash when it’s really a class struggle of working class black GI’s, often with white GI’s alongside them, against the brass and their cops.

As the government was forced to withdraw ground forces, it relied more on the Navy and Air Force. Shore leaves were repeatedly canceled. Angry disgruntled sailors sabotaged many ships, leading to strict schedules. Resistance mushroomed. The first major rebellion took place on the carrier Kitty Hawk, October 12-13, 1972.

49 Black sailors led the multi-racial revolt when they were force to return to the Gulf of Tonkin because two other ships had been sabotaged. The largest rebellion of sailors occurred the next month on the carrier Constellation. Aptly described ass the “first mass mutiny in the history of the US Navy,” the Constellation revolt was anti-racist. Two hundred and fifty sailors were to be administratively discharged with “less than honorable” papers. Fearing these punitive discharges would go to anti-racist activists on board, a multi-racial group of over 100 sailors started a sit-in in the after mess deck. Capt. Ward, in consultation with the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Zumwalt, allowed some 130 sailors to go ashore as a beach party to cool things off. They refused to go! So great was the brass’ fear of multi-racial rebellion that they gave up and reassigned the sailors to shore duty. These valuable experiences merit our attention today, as the war in Iraq is costing more and more lives of US GI’s and of Iraqis. The Progressive Labor Party has confidence that rank-and-file GI’s, workers and students who hate the war will again unite to fight back. Antiwar youth in the military have a crucial role to play in that fight. We must learn from history. We need to see that our main enemy is the class of bosses with their politicians who put us in harms’ way for their oil profits and empire. Our enemy is the capitalist system of exploitation, racism and wars for profits. With this insight, over time, we will build an anti-racist, antiimperialist internationalist movement capable of leading the working class to get rid of the racist profit system that perpetuates wars and exploitation for profit. Then the working class will run society to produce and to share and to meet the needs of the international working class, not for the bosses bloody profits. Join us!

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Stalin and HG Wells Debate Marxism vs. Liberalism On July 23, 1934 author HG Wells visited the USSR to meet with Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) leader Joseph Stalin for an interview. At the time Wells belonged to a group of intellectuals termed Fabian Socialists who believed that through voting you could reform capitalism and build socialism. This group represented a pacifist viewpoint that not all elements of the ruling class were “bad” or anti-working class and that the ruling class could therefore be won to pursuing socialism. The Fabian Socialist sought to ally themselves with the ruling class rather than organize the working class for revolution. The CPSU as represented at this debate by Stalin obviously disagreed with this viewpoint. The CPSU instead believed that the contradiction between the working class and the ruling class could only be resolved with the triumph of the working class over the ruling class in a violent revolution and with the creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is one of the fundamental tenants of Marxism-Leninism, the philosophy that the PLP was formed around. At the time of this meeting inter-imperialist contradictions were sharpening and pushing the world towards war. This sharpening contradiction led to economic instability around the world, with the exception of the USSR, that in turn sharpened the contradiction between the needs of the working class and the needs of the ruling class. In order to defend itself the capitalist class in the US under the leadership of President Roosevelt issued a

EXHIBIT No. 44 [New York, New Century Publishers, September 1937; reprinted October 1950. Joseph Stalin and H. G. Wells, Marxism VS. Liberalism: An Interview.] WELLS: I try to see the world through the eyes of the common man, and not as a party politician or a responsible administrator. My visit to the United States excited my mind. The old financial world is collapsing; the economic life of the country is being reorganized on new lines. Lenin said: “We must learn to do business,” learn this from the capitalists. Today the capitalists have to learn from you, to grasp the spirit of socialism. It seems to me that what is taking place in the United States is a profound reorganization, the creation of planned, that is, socialist, economy. You and Roosevelt begin from two different starting points. But is there not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas, between Washington and

number of reforms to win workers away from communism and prepare the United States for war. This same process was going on in other capitalist states and represents the rise of fascism, capitalisms way of fighting to save itself by brutalizing the working class. HG Wells represents those who would urge workers’ to side with reformist elements, specifically Roosevelt. His support of reformism also leads him to praise the biggest imperialists of the U.S. ruling class. Stalin and the CPSU represent those who would argue for workers’ power through communist revolution. We are including this debate in The COMMUNIST because today we face a similar situation. The contradiction of inter-imperialist rivalry once again is sharpening and pushing the world’s capitalist nations towards war. Once again candidates are springing up trying to win the working class to fight and die for this war. Once again they put forward with reforms, trying to convince us that we need to sacrifice for the nation, that place the burden of war preparation squarely on the shoulders of the working class, especially black and immigrant workers. As we near the 2008 election and as Obama and Clinton try to distinguish themselves as modern FDR’s we can look back to this debate and try to pull away some important lessons. The particulars are different, but the generalities are the same. Many of us will doubtless be having this same debate with members of our base very soon.

Moscow? In Washington I was struck by the same thing I see going on here; they are building offices, they are creating a number of new state regulation bodies, they are organizing a long-needed Civil Service. Their need, like yours, is directive ability. STALIN: The United States is pursuing a different aim from that which we are pursuing in the U.S.S.R. The aim which the Americans are pursuing arose out of the economic troubles, out of the economic crisis. The Americans want to rid themselves of the crisis on the basis of private capitalist activity without changing the economic basis. They are trying to reduce to a minimum the ruin, the losses caused by the existing economic system. Here, however, as you know, in place of the old destroyed economic basis an entirely different, a new economic basis has been created. Even if the Americans you mention partly achieve their aim, i.e., reduce these losses to a minimum, they will not destroy the roots of

THEcommunist the anarchy which is inherent in the existing capitalist system. They are preserving the economic system which must inevitably lead, and cannot but lead, to anarchy in production. Thus, at best, it will be a matter, not of the reorganization of society, not of abolishing the old social system which gives rise to anarchy and crises, but of restricting certain of its bad features, restricting certain of its excesses. Subjectively, perhaps, these Americans think they are reorganizing society; objectively, however, they are preserving the present basis of society. That is why, objectively, there will be no reorganization of society. Nor will there be planned economy. What is planned economy? What are some of its attributes? Planned economy tries to abolish unemployment. Let us suppose it is possible, while preserving the capitalist system, to reduce unemployment to a certain minimum. But surely, no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labor market, to ensure a supply of cheap labor. Here you have one of the rents in the “planned economy” of bourgeois society. Furthermore, planned economy presupposes increased output in those branches of industry which produce goods that the masses of the people need particularly. But you know that the expansion of production under capitalism takes place for entirely different motives, that capital flows into those branches of economy in which the rate of profit is highest. You will never compel a capitalist to incur loss to himself and agree to a lower rate of profit for the sake of satisfying the needs of the people. Without getting rid of the capitalists, without abolishing the principle of private property in the means of production, it is impossible to create planned economy. WELLS: I agree with much of what you have said. But I would like to stress the point that if a country as a whole adopts the principle of planned economy, if the government, gradually, step by step, begins consistently to apply this principle, the financial oligarchy will at last be abolished and socialism, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word, will be brought about. The effect of the ideas of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” is most powerful, and in my opinion they are socialist ideas. It seems to me that instead of stressing the antagonism between the two worlds, we should, in the present circumstances, strive to establish a common tongue for all the constructive forces. STALIN: In speaking of the impossibility of realizing the principles of planned economy while preserving the economic basis of capitalism I do not in the least desire to belittle the outstanding personal qualities of Roosevelt. Undoubtedly Roosevelt stands out as one of the strongest figures among all the captains of the contemporary capitalist world. That is why I would like once again to emphasize the point that my conviction that planned

51 economy is impossible under the conditions of capitalism does not mean that I have any doubts about the personal abilities, talent, and courage of President Roosevelt. But if the circumstances are unfavorable, the most talented captain cannot reach the goal you refer to. Theoretically, of course, the possibility of marching gradually, step by step, under the conditions of capitalism, towards the goal which you call socialism in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word, is not precluded. But what will this “socialism” be? At best, bridling to some extent the most unbridled of individual representatives of capitalist profit, some increase in the application of the principle of regulation in national economy. That is all very well. But as soon as Roosevelt, or any other captain in the contemporary bourgeois world, proceeds to undertake something serious against the foundation of capitalism, he will inevitably suffer utter defeat. The banks, the industries, the large enterprises, the large farms are not in Roosevelt’s hands. All these are private property. The rail¬roads, the mercantile fleet, all these belong to private owners. And finally, the army of skilled workers, the engineers, the technicians, these too are not at Roosevelt’s command, they are at the command of the private owners; they all work for the private owners. We must not forget the functions of the State in the bourgeois world. The State is an institution that organizes the defense of the country, organizes the maintenance of “order”; it is an apparatus for collecting taxes. The capitalist State does not deal much with economy in the strict sense of the word; the latter is not in the hands of the State. On the contrary, the State is in the hands of capitalist economy. That is why I fear that, in spite of all his energy and abilities, Roosevelt will not achieve the goal you mention, if indeed that is his goal. Perhaps, in the course of several generations, it will be possible to approach this goal somewhat; but I personally think that even this is not very probable. . WELLS: Perhaps I believe more strongly in the economic interpretation of politics than you do. Huge forces driving towards better organization, for the better functioning of the community, that is, for socialism, have been brought into action by invention and modern science. Organization, and the regulation of individual action, have become mechanical necessities, irrespective of social theories. If we begin with the State control of the banks and then follow with the control of transport, of the heavy industries, of industry in general, of commerce, etc., such an all-embracing control will be equivalent to the State ownership of all branches of national economy. This will be the process of socialization. Socialism and individualism are not opposites like black and white. There are many intermediate stages between them. There is individualism that borders on brig¬andage, and there

52 is discipline and organization that are the equiva¬lent of socialism. The introduction of planned economy depends, to a large degree, upon the organizers of economy, upon the skilled technical intelligentsia, who, step by step, can be converted to the socialist principles of organization. And this is the most important thing. Because organization comes before socialism. It is the more important fact. Without organization the socialist idea is a mere idea. STALIN: There is no, nor should there be, irreconcilable contrast between the individual and the collective, between the interests of the individual person and the interests of the collective, There should be no such contrast, because collectivism, socialism, does not deny, but combines individual interests with the interests of the collective. Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that; socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between “individualism” and socialism. But can we deny the contrast between classes, between the propertied class, the capitalist class, and the toiling class, the proletarian class? On the one hand we have the propertied class which owns the banks, the factories, the mines, transport, the plantations in colonies. These people see nothing but their own interests, their striving after profits. They do not submit to the will of the collective; they strive to subordinate every collective to their will. On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited Class, which owns neither factories nor works [i.e. an industrial plant], nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labor power to the capitalists and which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements. How can such opposite interests and strivings be reconciled? As far as I know, Roosevelt has not succeeded in finding the path of conciliation between these interests. And it is impossible, as experience has shown. Incidentally, you know the situation in the United States better than I do as I have never been there and I watch American affairs mainly from literature. But I have some experience in fighting for socialism and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another president in his place. The capitalists will say: Presidents come and presidents go, but we go on forever; if this or that president does not protect our interests, we shall find another. What can the president oppose to the will of the capitalist class? WELLS: I object to this simplified classification of mankind into poor and rich. Of course there is a category of people which strives only for profit. But are not these people regarded as nuisances in the West just as much as here? Are there not plenty of people in the West for

PLP

whom profit is not an end, who own a certain amount of wealth, who want to invest and obtain a profit from this investment, but who do not regard this as the main object? They regard invest¬ment as an inconvenient necessity. Are there not plenty of capable and devoted engineers, organizers of industry, whose activities are stimulated by something other than profit? In my opinion there is a numerous class of capable people who admit that the present system is unsatisfactory and who are destined to play a great role in future socialist society. During the past few years I have been much engaged in and have thought of the need for conducting propaganda in favor of socialism and cosmopolitanism among wide circles of engineers, airmen, military-technical people, etc. It is useless approaching these circles with two track class war propaganda. These people understand the condition of the world. They understand that it is a bloody muddle, but they regard your simple class¬ war antagonism as nonsense. STALIN: You object to the simplified classification of mankind into rich and poor. Of course there is a middle stratum, there is the technical intelligentsia that you have mentioned and among which there are very good and very honest people. Among them there are also dishonest and wicked people, there are all sorts of people among them. But first of all mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from the fundamental fact. I do not deny the existence of intermediate, middle strata, which either take the side of one or other of these two conflicting classes, or else take up a neutral or semi-neutral position in this struggle. But, I repeat, to abstract oneself from this fundamental division in society and from the fundamental struggle between the two main classes means ignoring facts. This struggle is going on and will continue. The outcome of the struggle will be determined by the proletarian class, the working class. WELLS: But are there not many people who are not poor, but who work and work productively? STALIN: Of course, there are small landowners, artisans, small traders, but it is not these people who decide the fate of a country, but the toiling masses, who produce all the things society requires. WELLS: But there are very different kinds of capitalists. There are capitalists who only think about profit, about getting rich; but there are also those who are prepared to make sacrifices. Take old Morgan for example. He only thought about profit; he was a parasite on society, simply,

THEcommunist he merely accumulated wealth. But take Rocke¬feller. He is a brilliant organizer; he has set an example of how to organize the delivery of oil that is worthy of emulation. Or take Ford. Of course Ford is selfish. But is he not a passionate organizer of rationalized production from whom you take lessons? I would like to emphasize the fact that recently an important change in opinion towards the U.S.S.R. has taken place in English speaking countries. The reason for this, first of all, is the position of Japan and the events in Germany. But there are other reasons besides those arising from international politics. There is a more profound reason, namely, the recognition by many people of the fact that the system based on private profit is breaking down. Under these circumstances, it seems to me, we must not bring to the forefront the antagonism between the two worlds, but should strive to combine all the constructive movements, all the constructive forces in one line as much as possible. It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr. Stalin; I think the old system is nearer to its end than you think. STALIN: In speaking of the capitalists who strive only for profit, only to get rich, I do not want to say that these are the most worthless people, capable of nothing else. Many of them undoubtedly possess great organizing talent, which I do not dream of denying. We Soviet people learn a great deal from the capitalists. And Morgan, whom you characterize so unfavorably, was undoubtedly a good, capable organizer. But if you mean people who are prepared to reconstruct the world, of course, you will not be able to find them in the ranks of those who faithfully serve the cause of profit. We and they stand at opposite poles. You mentioned Ford. Of course, he is a capable organizer of production. But don’t you know his attitude towards the working class? Don’t you know how many workers he throws on the street? The capitalist is riveted to profit; and no power on earth can tear him away from it. Capitalism will be abolished, not, by “organizers” of production, not by the technical intelligentsia, but by the working class, because the aforementioned strata do not play an independent role. The engineer, the organizer of production, does not work as he would like to, but as he is ordered, in such a way as to serve the interests of his employers. There are exceptions of course; there are people in this stratum who have awakened from the intoxication of capitalism the technical intelligentsia can, under certain conditions, perform miracles and greatly benefit mankind. But it can also cause great harm. We Soviet people have not a little experience of the technical intelligentsia. After the October Revolution, a certain section of the technical intelligentsia refused to take part in the work of constructing the new society; they opposed this work of construction and sabotaged it. We did all we possibly could to bring the technical intelligentsia into this work of construction we tried this way and that. Not a little time passed before our technical intelligentsia

53 agreed actively to assist the new system. Today the best section of this technical intelligentsia are in the front rank of the builders of socialist society. Having this experience, we are far from underestimating the good and the bad sides of the technical intelligentsia and we know that on the one hand it can do harm, and on the other hand, it can perform “miracles.” Of course, things would be different if it were possible, at one stroke, spiritually to tear the technical intelligentsia away from the capitalist world. But that is utopia. Are there many of the technical intelligentsia who would dare break away from the bourgeois world and set to work to reconstruct society? Do you think there are many people of this kind, say, in England or in France? No, there are few who would be willing to break away from their employers and begin reconstructing the world. Besides, can we lose sight of the fact that in order to transform the world it is necessary to have political power? It seems to me, Mr. Wells, that you greatly underestimate the question of political power, that it entirely drops out of your conception. What can those, even with the best intentions in the world, do if they are unable to raise the question of seizing power, and do not possess power? At best they can help the class which takes power, but they cannot change the world themselves. This can only be done by a great class which will take the place of the capitalist class and become the sovereign master as the latter was before. This class is the working class. Of course, the assistance of the technical intelligentsia must be accepted; and the latter, in turn, must be assisted. But it must not be thought that the technical intelligentsia can play an independent historical role. The transformation of the world is a great, complicated and painful process. For this great task a great class is required. Big ships go on long voyages. WELLS: Yes, but for long voyages a captain and a navigator are required. STALIN: That is true; but what is first required for a long voyage is a big ship. What is a navigator without a ship? An idle man. WELLS: The big ship is humanity, not a class. STALIN: You, Mr. Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men. I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie. WELLS: I remember the situation with regard to the technical intelligentsia several decades ago. At that time the technical intelli¬gentsia was numerically small, but there was much to do and every engineer, technician

54 and intellectual found his opportunity. That is why the technical intelligentsia was the least revolutionary class. Now, however, there is a superabundance of technical intellectuals, and their mentality has changed very sharply. The skilled man, who would formerly never listen to revolutionary talk, is now greatly interested in it. Recently I was dining with the Royal Society, our great English scientific society. The President’s speech was a speech for social planning and scientific control. Thirty years ago, they would not have listened to what I say to them now. Today, the man at the head of the Royal Society holds revolutionary views and insists on the scientific reorganization of human society. Mentality changes. Your class-war propaganda has not kept pace with these facts. STALIN: Yes, I know this, and this is to be explained by the fact that capitalist society is now in a cul-de-sac. The capitalists are seeking, but cannot find, a way out of this cul-de-sac that would be compatible with the dignity of this class, compatible with the interests of this class. They could, to some extent, crawl out of the crisis on their hands and knees, but they cannot find an exit that would enable them to walk out of it with head raised high, a way out that would not fundamentally disturb the interests of capitalism. This, of course, is realized by wide circles of the technical intelligentsia. A large section of it is beginning to realize the community of its interests with those of the class which is capable of pointing the way out of the cul-de-sac. WELLS: You of all people know something about revolutions, Mr. Stalin, from the practical side. Do the masses ever rise? Is it not an established truth that all revolutions are made by a minority? STALIN: To bring about a revolution a leading revolutionary minority is required; but the most talented, devoted and energetic minority would be helpless if it did not rely upon the at least passive support of millions. WELLS: I watch communist propaganda in the West and it seems to me that in modern conditions this propaganda sounds very old ¬fashioned, because it is insurrectionary propaganda. Propaganda in favor of the violent overthrow of the social system was all very well when it was directed against tyranny. But under modern conditions, when the system is collapsing anyhow, stress should be laid on efficiency, on competence, on productiveness, and not on insurrection. It seems to me that the insurrectionary note is obsolete. The communist propaganda in the West is a nuisance to constructive minded people.

PLP

STALIN: Of course the old system is breaking down, decaying. That is true. But it is also true that new efforts are being made by other methods, by every means, to protect, to save this dying system. You draw a wrong conclusion from a correct postulate. You rightly state that the old world is breaking down. But you are wrong in thinking that it is breaking down of its own accord. No, the substitution of one social system for another is a complicated and long revolutionary process. It is not simply a spontaneous process, but a struggle, it is a process connected with the clash of classes. Capitalism is decaying, but it must not be compared simply with a tree which has decayed to such an extent that it must fall to the ground of its own accord. No, revolution, the substitution of one social system for another, has always been a struggle, a painful and a cruel struggle, a life and death struggle. And every time the people of the new world came into power, they had to defend themselves against the attempts of the old world to restore the old order by force; these people of the new world always had to be on the alert, always had to be ready to repel the attacks of the old world upon the new system. Yes, you are right when you say that the old social system is breaking down; but it is not breaking down of its own accord. Take Fascism for example. Fascism is a reactionary force which is trying to preserve the old world by means of violence. What will you do with the fascists? Argue with them? Try to convince them? But this will have no effect upon them at all. Communists do not in the least idealize the methods of violence. But they, the Communists, do not want to be taken by surprise, they cannot count on the old world voluntarily departing from the stage, they see that the old system is violently defending itself, and that is why the Communists say to the working class: Answer violence with violence; do all you can to prevent the old dying order from crushing you, do, not permit it to put manacles on your hands, on the hands with which you will overthrow the old system. As you see, the Communists regard the substitution of one social system for another, not simply as a spontaneous and peaceful process, but as a complicated, long and violent process. Communists cannot ignore facts. WELLS: But look at what is now going on in the capitalist world. The collapse is not a simple one: it is the outbreak of reactionary violence which is degenerating to gangsterism. And it seems to me that when it comes to a conflict with reactionary and unintelligent violence, socialists can appeal to the law, and instead of regarding the police as the enemy they should support them in the fight against the reactionaries. I think that it is useless operating with the methods of the old rigid insurrectionary socialism.

THEcommunist STALIN: The Communists base themselves on rich historical experience which teaches that obsolete classes do not voluntarily abandon the stage of history. Recall the history of England in the seventeenth century. Did not many say that the old social system had decayed? But did it not, nevertheless, require a Cromwell to crush it by force? WELLS: Cromwell operated on the basis of the constitution and in the name of constitutional order. STALIN: In the name of the constitution he resorted to violence, beheaded the king, dispersed Parliament, arrested some and beheaded others! Or take an example from our history. Was it not clear for a long time that the tsarist system was decaying, was breaking down? But how much blood had to be shed in order to overthrow it? And what about the October Revolution? Were there not plenty of people who knew that we alone, the Bolsheviks, were indicating the only correct way out? Was it not clear that Russian capitalism had decayed? But you know how great was the resistance, how much blood had to be shed in order to defend the October Revolution from all its enemies, internal and external. Or take France at the end of the eighteenth century. Long before 1789 it was clear to many how rotten the royal power, the feudal system was. But a popular insurrection, a clash of classes was not, could not be avoided. Why? Because the classes which must abandon the stage of history are the last to become convinced that their role is ended. It is impossible to convince them of this. They think that the fissures in the decaying edifice of the old order can be mended, that the tottering edifice of the old order can be repaired and saved. That is why dying classes take to arms and resort to every means to save their existence as a ruling class. The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class. There is no such precedent in world history. The Communists have learned this lesson of history. Communists would welcome the voluntary departure of the bourgeoisie. But such a turn of affairs is improbable: that is what experience teaches. That is why the Communists want to be prepared for the worst and call upon the working class to be vigilant, to be prepared for battle. Who wants a captain who lulls the vigilance of his army, a captain who does not understand that the enemy will not surrender, that he must be crushed? To be such a captain means deceiving, betraying the working class. That is why I think that what seems to you to be old-fashioned is in fact a measure of revolutionary expediency for the working class. WELLS: I do not deny that force has to be used, but I think the forms of the struggle should fit as closely as possible to the opportunities presented by the existing

55 laws, which must be defended against reactionary attacks. There is no need to disorganize the old system because it is’ disorganizing itself enough as it is. That is why it seems to me insurrection against the old order, against the law, is obsolete, old-fashioned. Incidentally, I deliberately exaggerate in order to bring the truth out more clearly. I can formulate my point of view in the following way: first, I am for order; second, I attack the present system in so far as it cannot assure order: third, I think that class war propaganda may detach from socialism just those educated people whom socialism needs. STALIN: Permit me now to reply to, your three points: First, the main thing for the revolution is the existence of a social bulwark. This bulwark of the revolution is the working class. Second, an auxiliary force is required, that which the Communists call a Party. To the Party belong the intelligent workers and those elements of the technical intelligentsia which are closely connected with the working class. The intelligentsia can be strong only if it combines with the working class. If it opposes the working class it becomes a cipher [i.e. something having no value]. Third, political power is required as a lever for change. The new political power creates the new laws, the new order, which is revolutionary order. I do not stand for any kind of order. I stand for order that corresponds to the interests of the working class. If however, any of the laws of the old order can be utilized in the interests of the struggle for the new order, the old laws should be utilized. I cannot object to your postulate that the present system should be attacked in so far as it does not insure the necessary order for the people. And, finally, you are wrong if you think that the Communists are enamored with violence. They would be very pleased to drop violent methods if the ruling class agreed to give way to the working class. But the experience of history speaks against such an assumption. WELLS: There was a case in the history of England, however, of a class voluntarily handing over power to another class. In the period between 1830 and 1870, the aristocracy, whose influence was still very considerable at the end of the eighteenth century, voluntarily, without a severe struggle, surrendered power to the bourgeoisie, which serves as a sentimental support of the monarchy. Subsequently, this transference of power led to the establishment of the rule of the financial oligarchy. STALIN: But you have imperceptibly passed from questions of revolution to questions of reform. This is not the same thing. Don’t you think that the Chartist movement played a great role in the Reforms in England in the nineteenth century?

56 WELLS: The Chartists did little and disappeared without leaving a trace. STALIN: I do not agree with you. The Chartists, and the strike movement which they organized, played a great role; they compelled the ruling classes to make a number of concessions in regard to the franchise, in regard to abolishing the so-called “rotten boroughs,” and in regard to some of the points of the “Charter.” Chartism played a not unimportant historical role and compelled a section of the ruling classes to make certain concessions, reforms, in order to avert great shocks. Generally speaking, it must be said that of all the ruling classes, the ruling classes of England, both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, proved to be the cleverest, most flexible from the point of view of their class interests, from the point of view of maintaining their power. Take as an example, say, from modern history, the general strike in England in 1926. The first thing any other bourgeoisie would have done in the face of such an event, when the General Council of Trade Unions called for a strike, would have been to arrest the trade union leaders. The British bourgeoisie did not do that, and it acted cleverly from the point of view of its own interests. I cannot conceive of such a flexible strategy being employed by the bourgeoisie in the

Wells’ position of reformism and a peaceful road to socialism led him to support positions that pave the way to fascism. He argued that because capitalism was breaking down communists should support the ruling class’ move to centralize banking and industry. This, however, is the hallmark of the bourgeoisie’s move to fascism. He also put the defense of “order” at the top of his agenda without analyzing the class basis of order. While the Party line today has evolved beyond the line developed by Lenin and Stalin in many ways, most notably the decision to fight directly for communism, there are many things that Stalin gets right in this debate. His attack of reformism and his explanation of the essence of class struggle are critical lessons for us to remember as the US continues its march towards full blown fascism and war. Capitalism is rooted in the brutal exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class and no reform can change this. There are no good bosses, a lesson that the CPSU would forget as they developed the Popular Front shortly after this debate. The ruling class will always fight to subjugate the working class. Reforms are simply a way to keep the working class in line. It is a pressure release valve that the capitalists use whenever they feel their control slipping away. The reality of the world is one of class domination and no amount of voting can change that. No dominant class has ever given up power willingly. If we want change, if we want an end to the war, hunger, and misery that is capitalism then the only recourse we have is communist revolution.

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United States, Germany or France. In order to maintain their rule, the ruling classes of Great Britain have never foresworn small concessions, reforms. But it would be a mistake to think that these reforms were revolutionary. WELLS: You have a higher opinion of the ruling classes of my country than I have. But is there a great difference between a small revolution and a great reform? Is not a reform a small revolution? STALIN: Owing to pressure from below, the pressure of the masses, the bourgeoisie may sometimes concede certain partial reforms while remaining on the basis of the existing social-economic system. Acting in this way, it calculates that these concessions are necessary in order to preserve its class rule. This is the essence of reform. Revolution, however, means the transference of power from one class to another. That is why it is impossible to describe any reform as revolution. That is why we cannot count on the change of social systems taking place as an imperceptible transition from one system to another by means, of reforms, by the ruling class making concessions.

THEcommunist

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The Struggle for Revolutionary Dialectics

The Debate in 1960’s China over “One Divides into Two” Versus “Two Combine into One” By fighting for communism, the working class is making a huge change in society, a change we won’t be able to make without understanding a lot about how change takes place. Dialectics is the philosophy of change and development, advanced by Marx and Engels and developed further in the Soviet and Chinese revolutions. To move the fight for communism forward, our party spreads knowledge of dialectics and develops it further, based on the experience of the international working class and developments in science. This article is about a big fight over dialectics that took place in China in the mid-1960s. Studying the history of past struggles over dialectical ideas is a particularly good way to learn about dialectics, since it shows the political results of different lines on dialectics. The debates we review here show clearly why having the right line about dialectics can make a big difference in the fight for communism. They also had an influence on the development of dialectical thinking in our party.

Unity of Opposites, the Basic Law of Dialectics The most fundamental law of dialectics is that the unity and struggle of opposites is the basis of all change and development. A combination of unity and struggle is called a “contradiction.” Every thing or process contains contradictions, that is, two sides that are connected to each other, but also struggle and interfere with each other. There are contradictions in every aspect of the world. The most important one is the contradiction in capitalist society between the working class and the capitalist class, but even a basketball game is a contradiction between two teams that are united in a single game, but play defense and hold each other back. Contradictions occur everywhere in nature, like the forces of attraction and repulsion inside an atom. Even inside the party, there are contradictions between different political ideas, which partly exist in everyone. Contradictions are important because they make things change. The internal back and forth struggle of the two sides of the contradiction causes change, and point that change in a particular direction. As long as capitalism lasts, the contradiction between workers and capitalist pushes capitalist society toward crisis and revolution. The contradiction between two basketball teams drives both teams to play harder. Contradictions don’t last forever, however. Eventually they get resolved, that is, they stop being contradictions.

The buzzer sounds in the basketball game, or communist revolution destroys capitalism. When contradictions are resolved, however, new ones are always created.

How Contradictions are Resolved The biggest issue in dialectics is how contradictions are resolved. Marx said that resolution only happens when the two sides “fight to a decision,” and one wins, for example, the working class overthrows the capitalists [1]. Rightwing philosophers claim that the two sides don’t have to fight until one wins, but could merge into a so-called “synthesis.” A synthesis is supposed to contains both sides in such a way that they no longer interfere with each other. Many union leaders, for example, oppose fighting the bosses, and claim that workers can have a kind of synthesis with bosses “for the common good.” Throughout the history of the communist movement, support for one of these two lines on dialectics --“fighting to a decision” or “synthesis”--has marked the difference between revolutionary communist politics and revisionism, that is, capitalist politics posing as communist.

Soviet Revisionism in Philosophy Because the politics of the fight for communism is closely linked to dialectical philosophy, conflict over dialectics has been a key part of the fight against revisionism. This was true during the so-called “Sino-Soviet Dispute” of the 1960s, which was a fight conducted by the Communist Party of China (CPC) against the revisionism of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Soviet leaders like Khrushchev rejected revolution and substituted for it “peaceful transition to socialism” and “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. To back up these sell out ideas, Soviet philosophers claimed that oppositions can be overcome “by means of combination (merging)” [2] or claimed that “contradictions are transformed into differences, and differences are merged into unity.”[3] In 1963 this idea that contradictions can be resolved by merging opposites was sharply rejected by CPC spokesman Zhou Yang: “The modern [Soviet] revisionists have wantonly distorted and revised the Marxist-Leninist teaching on the laws of contradiction, and spread their views about the merging and reconciliation of contradictions.... Some of their philosophers even claim that the law of the unity and struggle of opposites is outmoded under socialist conditions.”[4]

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Despite this CPC stance against the Soviet distortions of dialectics, we will see that similar ideas were in the CPC itself. In fact, the struggle against Soviet revisionism led directly to a struggle within the CPC against the so-called “capitalist road,” that is, the politics and policies that led the USSR back to capitalism and imperialism. The Left in China fought against taking that road.

“One Divides into Two” Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party until his death in 1976, called the unity-of-opposites law “One divides into two” [5], by which he meant that everything has two sides that struggle with each other. Mao used this “One divides into two” slogan to popularize dialectics and in particular to explain that since contradiction is everywhere, controversy and struggle are normal and unavoidable. To defend a version of the peaceful synthesis line, however, Yang Xianzhen, a philosophical big shot as head of the CPC’s philosophy school, announced the slogan “Two combine into one.” Yang claimed that “Two combine into one” is also a general dialectical law of change which says that all opposites tend to combine into a unified whole, without one side destroying the other. This view of dialectics was directly connected to the “capitalist road” line, which tried to strengthen the capitalist features of socialism in China, instead of making a rapid transition to Mao Zedong, 1935 communism.

Yang Combines Capitalism and Communism Despite the fact that capitalism and communism can no more peacefully coexist than fire and ice, Yang described Chinese society as having a “synthesized economic base,” which combined capitalist and socialist or communist social relations. He said the capitalist side didn’t need to be smashed, but would disappear gradually and peacefully. In essence, this theory was a philosophical excuse for allowing capitalism to continue to exist openly in China after the working class had established political power. Like other “capitalist roaders” in China, Yang said that it was a good thing if some people became rich: “In recent years, there has been a tendency to fear people getting rich, which is extremely dangerous. The tendency

of being afraid of people getting rich comes from the fear of the development of capitalism, from the fear of individuals trying to build up their own family fortune.” [6]

The CPC’s policy of allying with rich peasants and allowing “good capitalists,” to keep running their businesses, called “New Democracy,” strengthened the pro-capitalist forces in China. The pro-capitalist line supported a wage system with a lot of inequality and special privileges for party leaders and government officials. After a long struggle, these pro-capitalist forces eventually won power in China in 1978, led by Deng Xiaoping. Not surprisingly, in 1980 Yang’s concept of “synthesized economic base” became the official description of China’s economic system [7], a cover up for the fact that China had reverted to capitalism by then.

The Fight over “Two Combine into One” In May, 1964, Ai and Lin, two of Yang’s students at the CPC philosophy school, published an article defending his idea that “Two combine into one” was a general law of dialectics [8]. To support Yang’s claim, they gave various examples of things that actually do combine, such as atoms that combine into molecules, and China’s industry and agriculture, which combine into a single economy. They left out the fact that only some atoms can combine and may do so only after a difficult struggle, and the fact that China’s agriculture and industry sometimes strongly interfered with each other. Ai and Lin criticized the view that resolution requires that one side defeat the other. They said that “One divides into two,” is only a method that people use to understand processes in the world, but isn’t a fundamental law of all change. The debate started by this article raged in the press for over a year, and many workers and peasants eventually got in on it, writing hundreds of comments and articles. In August, 1964, Mao weighed in on the debate. Instead of rejecting synthesis outright, he said that what synthesis really means is the stronger side “eating up” the weaker one. When the CPC defeated the capitalist armies of the Guomindang during the revolution, “The synthesis took place like this: their armies came, and we devoured them, we ate them bite by bite. It was not a case of two combining into one as expounded by Yang Xianzhen, it was not the synthesis of two peacefully coexisting opposites. They didn’t want to coexist peacefully, they wanted to devour you.” [9]

What is at stake in Mao’s comments is not just a debate over the word “synthesis,” but about how contradictions are resolved. Yang’s view of change implied that there was no need to defeat the capitalist elements in Chinese society and inside the CPC, while Mao’s view means that one side would win, and take over the losing side. Rather than fighting to a decision, Yang claimed that the two sides of a contradiction are “indivisibly connected” and

THEcommunist that “Dialectics is the teaching that shows how opposites become identical (united). Seek common ground while reserving differences.” [10] In the late 1960s in China there actually was a fight to a decision over the issue of capitalism versus communism, called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). While the GPCR was going on, Yang was thrown into jail until 1975. Convincing workers and peasants to understand that Yang’s view of change was false was a crucial step toward launching the GPCR. You can’t start a revolution if you think that the working class and the bosses are “indivisibly connected” and need to “seek common ground.” The GPCR began soon after the “One divides into two” versus “Two combine into one” debate had run its course.

Ai Siqi’s Contribution In 1965, after a year of sharp struggle against “Two combine into one,” the communist philosopher Ai Siqi, who represented a Left line in the CPC on this issue, summarized the results of the debate [11]: • Opposite sides of things or processes are usually formed by dividing up, and not by combining two already existing things. Capitalism, for example, did not come about by sticking workers and capitalists together. Instead, the class differences between workers and bosses emerged and became more sharply defined through a dialectical process driven by the internal contradictions of capitalism, that is, by the capitalists’ need to exploit workers to make a profit.

59 • When opposites do combine, their conflict continues and can intensify. At any given time, one side will have the upper hand. It is rare, and always temporary, for the two sides to have equal power. The idea of some people in the teachers’ struggle in Oaxaca, for example, that the teachers’ movement and the government can exist in parallel without one defeating the other is a dangerous illusion. • When opposites do combine, it takes struggle to put them together and keep them together. To illustrate peaceful combination, Yang’s students gave the example of atoms’ combining to form molecules. But Beijing University chemistry professor Fu Ying countered that hydrogen and oxygen atoms may have to collide tens of millions of times before they stick together to form water. [12] When atoms do combine — and many cannot — there is always a struggle. Similarly, uniting the working class in the fight for communism can only happen after a long struggle by communists with the most ideologically advanced line. • Opposites are not indivisible, as Yang’s students claimed, but are at best relatively stable and eventually come apart. This was Lenin’s point in his famous statement that “The unity ... of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.”[13] If opposites really were indivisible, how could a revolution ever take place? Ai Siqi concluded that “Unity will exist if maintained through struggle; it will perish if sought through compromise.” This means that unity of the working class can’t be achieved by communists adopting the most popular position--making unprincipled compromises--but by fighting for unity around a more advanced line, even if it means giving up a lower level of agreement with some people, at least for the time being.

Philosophical Mistakes of the Left

“Let new socialistic culture conquer every stage.”

Despite the important correct ideas that the procommunist forces fought for in the “Two combine into one” debate, the good guys also had important ideological weaknesses during these debates. These weaknesses played a role in the eventual reversal of workers’ power in China. While Mao Zedong, Ai Siqi, and others were right in their rejection of Yang’s revisionist philosophy, they unfortunately shared a number of wrong ideas with Yang’s side. These errors weakened their case against “Two combine into one,” and led them to accept policies that helped strengthen the capitalist aspects of socialist China.

60 Since the late 1930s, the CPC had made alliances with the so-called “national bourgeoisie,” the supposedly “good” capitalists willing to work with communists. During the war against Japanese imperialism, the CPC even made alliances with big landlords who were willing to fight against the Japanese invasion. The CPC agreed with the rest of the international communist movement during World War II that it was necessary to build a “united front” with various “lesser” enemies of the working class to oppose fascism. Everywhere it was practiced, this policy proved to strengthen pro-capitalist forces and severely damaged the communist movement. Ai Siqi agreed with the idea of a united front with “good” capitalists, but argued with Yang about how unity with the enemy should be analyzed and carried out. Sticking up for a united front with the enemy was an important concession to Yang’s claim that opposites really could combine into a relatively stable whole.

“Non-Antagonistic” Contradictions Both sides of the debate also said that under socialism, there is a special type of contradiction called “nonantagonistic,” which can be eliminated without becoming more intense and fighting to a decision. This idea, which also proved completely wrong, assumed that workers’ power could be combined with the capitalist features of socialism, like a wage system, without leading to intense conflict. But in the GPCR, the internal conflicts of socialism in China became very intense and eventually broke out into a civil war. These events in China showed that socialism itself is a contradiction, which attempts to combine workers’ power with capitalist inequality, a contradiction which is not “non-antagonistic,” but must be resolved by a fight to the finish. Unfortunately, the workers and peasants lost this fight in the GPCR. The theory of non-antagonistic contradictions seemed plausible partly because it gave a rationale for treating contradictions among friends differently than contradictions between enemies. Its mistake was claiming that the types of contradiction and the course of their development and resolution are different in these two cases. Non-antagonistic theory says that contradictions “among the people” do not tend to become more intense. On the contrary they do tend to be come more intense, but still must be resolved by different methods--different ways of becoming intense--than contradictions with the enemy.

Contradictions Among Friends and Comrades In the party and among friends we should not see fighting to a decision as one group of people defeating another, but one line winning out over another. Fighting for the best line means winning people away

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from mistaken views and actions, which the Chinese communists called “curing the disease to save the patient.” Of course, the struggle to cure the patient might make him worse temporarily. Reaching a “higher unity,” a unity based on more thorough agreement with a more advanced line, can mean giving up a lower unity. This idea also applies to struggling for the party’s line in mass organizations. We aim for a “higher unity” of the working class, which means not only giving up a lower unity with pro-boss liberals, but perhaps also with some workers and their allies who can’t be won over to the higher view at this time. Although the CPC fought against Khrushchev’s line about “peaceful transition to socialism,” Ai Siqi’s comments show that the CPC had adopted part of that line. Ai said that that China had to struggle against imperialists to “preserve peace,” wrongly assuming that the contradiction between workers’ power and imperialism could be kept from intensifying. In fact, the Vietnam War was already heating up. In the early 1970s, the CPC caved in to U.S. imperialism and made a deal with U. S. President Nixon, partly out of fear of Soviet imperialism after the reversal of workers’ power in the Soviet Union. This deal with the U. S. bosses also strengthened the pro-capitalist forces in the CPC and helped pave the way for the defeat of working class power in China in 1978.

Other Philosophical Battles in Pre-GPCR China Although the “Two combine into one” was the biggest and most important, there were a number of other philosophical battles in the late 1950s and 1960s in China that were a significant part of the fight against revisionism. These issues are all connected and people who had the wrong ideas about “Two combine into one” were wrong about these other issues, too. One issue was the question of the main contradiction in Chinese society. Every thing or process has multiple contradictions inside it that effect how it changes. At any one time, one of these contradictions has the biggest influence on the development of that thing. This is called the main contradiction. In 1956, CPC leader Liu Shaoqi, who became the most notorious “capitalist road” politician during the GPCR, claimed that the main contradiction in China was between its “advanced socialist system” and its “backward social productive forces.” This implied that resolving the contradiction between the working class and the capitalist class was not the CPC’s main job. Liu and other “capitalist roaders” wanted the party to concentrate on building up production in ways that strengthened capitalist relations, rather than fighting an anti-capitalist class struggle, which they saw as basically over. [14]

THEcommunist Productive Forces Determinism The “main contradiction” issue is directly connected to a revisionist theory of social development called “productive forces determinism.” This theory says that the development of new social relations--like communism-is mainly driven by the development of society’s forces of production, rather than by politically conscious social movements and political action. It claimed that political movements can accomplish something only when the productive forces have gotten big enough. This meant that communism would only be possible in the far future, when a high level of economic development has been achieved. (For a thorough explanation of what is wrong with productive forces determinism, see the PL Magazine article at http://www.plp.org/pl_magazine/commecon. html). Yang Xianzhen, who supported this reactionary theory, claimed that: “Only with a higher level of productive forces than that of socialist society, namely, the level of communist society, can we practice the principle ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’”[15]

In fact much of the Chinese communist movement had lived for a long time on a very modest need-based system, called the “supply system,” which was dismantled after the 1949 revolution. In the late 1950s, Mao advocated going back to this egalitarian system, which was not based on a high level of development of the forces of production: “Why must we grasp a wages system? .... Our Party is a party which continuously fought a war for more than 20 years. For a long time it has implemented the free supply system. From several tens of thousands of persons it grew to several million, right up to liberation. In the very beginning the collective lived an egalitarian life. In work everyone was industrious and in warfare all were courageous. There was absolutely no reliance on material incentives, but rather a reliance on the drumbeat of revolutionary spirit.” [16]

Mao’s argument here is not only that past experience shows that a high level of development of production is not necessary for equality, but that political commitment and “revolutionary spirit,” rather than wages and inequality, can motivate people to work hard and fight hard. In general, Mao argued that political movements can make enormous changes in the social relations and productive forces of society--that political ideas and actions can change material reality.

The Dialectical Identity of Thought and Being The idea that political consciousness and actions can change reality doesn’t just apply to rejecting wages and inequality. In line with Marx’s statement that “theory itself becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses” [17], Mao made a more general point this way: “Among our comrades there are many who do not yet understand [the dialectical materialist] theory of

61 knowledge.... Nor do they comprehend that matter can be transformed in consciousness and consciousness into matter, although such leaps are phenomena of everyday life.” [18]

Matter is transformed into consciousness everyday because people learn new information by observing and changing the world. On the other hand, transforming consciousness into matter is what workers do when they work. Workers modify parts of the world according to plans they have in advance, changing their goals and ideas into material reality. As Marx wrote in Capital, “At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement.” [19] The communist movement performs a collective labor that changes society according to its plans and makes a new collective, egalitarian society. Like all labor, however, the fight for communism can only succeed if our plans are based on objective knowledge of the world. In dialectical terminology, the fact that matter can be transformed into ideas and ideas into matter is called the “dialectical identity of thought and being.” “Dialectical identity” doesn’t mean that two things are the same, but that they are linked together, and in the right circumstances, one can be transformed into the other. Yang Xianzhen accepted that matter can produce ideas, but he rejected the idea that political consciousness can lead to material changes. He rejected the dialectical identity of thought and being as an idealist principle that leads to “subjectivism.” In particular he called trying to make a rapid transition to communism “subjectivism.” Sticking up for the dialectical identity idea, Ai Siqi pointed out the political consequences of denying it. He wrote that “Those who deny the dialectical identity of thought and existence, who can’t see the subjective dynamism of the people, and that leading thought, while reflecting objective law, can enter into the mass movement and transform into a great material force that can move heaven and earth. Such people make right opportunist mistakes.”[20]

Denying that political consciousness can transform into changes in the world not only denies the power of mass movements, but also rules out social organization based on political “incentives,” rather than wages and inequality, that is, communism.

What We Inherit from Communist Philosophy in China We have only given a short sketch of the many-sided philosophical struggles in the communist movement in China. All of these issues are still directly relevant to the fight for communism, and especially the struggle against revisionism, but the lessons about dialectics are the most important. Although the pro-capitalist wing of the CPC eventually won, let Yang out of jail, and even now praise

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him as a hero [21], correct ideas about dialectics are among the many important political and philosophical lessons that we should learn from the GPCR period. The struggle in China to defeat the philosophy of reconciliation was a big advance in dialectics, despite important mistakes. The rejection of the “Two combine into one” idea is directly relevant to our work in mass organizations, which are often led by agents of the liberal imperialists. It is dead wrong to expect that pro-worker and pro-boss politics can combine peacefully inside mass organizations. Instead, we have to fight to win workers and their allies to our line and defeat the ideas of the enemy. If we don’t sharpen the struggle for our line and against capitalist ideas among the rank and file, these organizations will strengthen the capitalists hold over the working class.

It is also up to us to apply the advanced dialectics developed in China more thoroughly than was done there, and apply the critique of “Two combine into one” to socialism. Socialism tried to combine working class power with wages and inequality, which are fundamentally capitalist relationships. These two sides are incompatible and in all cases, lead to the downfall of socialism and its replacement by capitalism. In the Soviet Union and in China, however, even people who fought against rightwing philosophy and politics considered these incompatible sides to be in a “non-antagonistic” relation. The history of socialism shows, however, that the wage system and workers’ power have to fight to a decision. Unless the wages system is defeated, the inequality that it brings will take us back to capitalism. This is the biggest lesson from “One divides into two.”

“Smash the old world / Establish a new world.”

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[1] K. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” in Marx Engels Collected Works, New York, 1976, vol. 3, p. 89.

[17] K. Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,” Marx Engels Collected Works, New York, 1976, vol. 3, p. 182.

[2] P. N Fedoseev, “The 22nd Congress of the CPSU and the Tasks of Scientific Research Work in the field of Philosophy,” Voprosy Filosofii, 1962, no. 4, pp. 19-20.

[18] Mao Zedong, “Where to Correct Ideas Come from?” in Mao Tse-Tung Four Essays on Philosophy, Beijing: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1968, p. 136.

[3] M. B. Mitin, “The 22nd Congress of the CPSU and the Tasks of Scientific Work in the Field of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, Voprosy Filosofii, 1962, no. 4, p. 137.

[19] K. Marx, Capital, vol. I, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, New York : International Publishers, 1976, vol. 35, p. 188.

[4] Zhou Yang, “The Fighting Task Confronting Workers in Philosophy and the Social Sciences,” Beijing Review, Jan 3, 1964, p. 17.

[20] Ai Siqi, as quoted in C. L. Hamrin, Alternatives within Chinese Marxism 1955-1965: Yang Hsien-Chen’s Theory of Dialectics, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975, p. 275, punctuation modified.

[5] Mao Zedong, Selected Works, Beijing, 1977, vol. 5, p. 516. [6] Yang Xianzhen, “Respect Dialectics (November, 1961),” Chinese Law and Government, vol. 24, nos. 1-2, SpringSummer 1991, p. 108.

[21] “Party Strength,” People’s Daily, Beijing, 7/20/03.

[7] Yao Bomao, “Reevaluating the ‘Theory of an Integrated Economic Base’,” Guangming Ribao, 7/3/80, FBIS 7/24/80. [8] Ai Hengwu and Lin Qingshan, “’Dividing one into two’ and ‘Combining two into one’,” Guangming Ribao, 5/29/64, Current Background, #745. [9] S. Schramm, Mao Tse-Tung Unrehearsed, London, 1974, pp. 224. [10] Yang Xianzhen, “Study and Grasp the Law of the Unity of Opposites ...,” Chinese Law and Government, vol. 24, nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer 1991, p. 113. [11] Ai Siqi, “Surreptitious Substitution of Theory of Reconciliation of Contradictions and Classes for Revolutionary Dialectics Must Not Be Permitted,” People’s Daily, May 20, 1965, SCMP 3475. [12] Gong Yushi, “Some Matters Concerting Professor Fu Ying,” Beijing University Gazette, October 20, 2002, http:// www.pku.edu.cn/news/xiao_kan/newpaper/969/3-1.htm [13] V. I. Lenin, “On the question of dialectics,” in On Dialectical Materialism, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977, p. 382. [14] The Writing Group of the State Planning Commission, “Continuing the Revolution or Restoring Capitalism? Criticizing the ‘theory of productive forces’ of Liu Shao-chi and other political swindlers,” Beijing Review, 9/10/71. [15] Yang Xianzhen, “Uphold the Workstyle of Seeking Truth from Facts ...,” Chinese Law and Government, vol. 24, nos. 1-2, Spring-Summer 1991, p. 73. [16] Mao Zedong, “Opinion on the Free Supply System,” in Miscellany of Mao Tse-Tung Thought (1949-1968), vol. II, Joint Publications Research Service, JPRS 61269-2, 20 Feb. 1974, Page 233, emphasis added.

Comrade Lenin Sweeps the Globe Clean (Caption of 1920 Soviet poster)

64

PLP

SCIENCE:

An Instrument for the Working Class to Liberate Ourselves from Capitalism vs.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN:

An Anti-Working-Class Fundamentalist Christian Plot to Destroy Science WHY IS SCIENCE VITAL TO THE WORKING CLASS? The importance of science to the working class is unlimited. However, the working class needs science first and foremost in order to liberate ourselves from slavery — the slavery of exploitation, racism, sexism, poverty, war, and genocide that are inflicted on us every day by the voracious system of capitalism and its owners, the major bosses. We need a scientific approach to the universe and everything in it, but for now particularly to capitalist society. After the working class seizes political power, through armed revolution, and organizes a new form of state power to prevent the expropriated capitalists from returning to power or a new capitalist class from arising, there will be an unlimited need for a scientific approach to such things as health, environment, food production, economics, and predicting and responding to natural disasters.

Science is a necessary tool for the working class to liberate itself The need for science as a tool for liberation is the most fundamental reason for the working class and our allies to understand that mastering and using science is in our interest. Without a scientific approach to the question of liberation, the working class is doomed to generations more of misery and early death. Indeed until the working class around the world understands the necessity for science, and begins to apply it in a collective manner to our present condition, we and our children and grandchildren and all future descendants are doomed to suffer endlessly — and needlessly. Furthermore the working class needs to understand that religion is the enemy of liberation. Any other argument in favor of science and against religion, its chief competitor, floats in the air and is subject to different matters of opinion – or, as communists would say, is idealist, i.e., not based in reality and in our real needs. As we discuss below, while religion has many aspects, some that appear to be positive for the working class, it is primarily a weapon of the ruling class to throw dust in the eyes of the

working class about science, so that they can maintain their power and profits. The most immediate need for the working class is to apply scientific methods to studying and learning the history of social revolutions. This science was founded in the 1800s by people like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and V. I. Lenin and has been developed further by many millions of others in collective struggle against capitalist oppression. When the capitalist ruling class passively watches or actively encourages its supporters as they deny that there can be such a thing as a scientific approach to history or revolution, they are trying to stave off the inevitable realization by the working class that the opposite is the truth. Among the capitalists’ supporters, certain Christian fundamentalists go even further. They are trying to prevent the working class from understanding and appreciating the necessity for science primarily by removing evolutionary theory, a central aspect of science, from the public schools and replacing it with Creationist “Science” or with the “theory” of Intelligent Design. In particular, they claim 1) that evolution is “only” a theory, 2) that a theory is only a guess and not true, 3) that, rather than through evolution by natural means, nature in all its complexity was intentionally developed by a supreme being, and 4) that the only source of comfort in this world of misery is the embracing of religion. Whether intentionally or not, these fundamentalists are only helping to prolong the existence of the capitalists as a class. So let’s proceed to discuss • the recent history of Creationism and Intelligent Design, • what science really is, • how the ruling class uses it, • what the theory of evolution by natural selection really says, • the ID “arguments” against evolution, • how religion and science are related, • why the working class must defeat this ruling class assault on us, and finally • why armed revolution for communism is the only way this can be finally achieved.

THEcommunist

THE RECENT HISTORY OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN Creationism and Intelligent Design attack our children The publication of this pamphlet is prompted by the ongoing attempts by certain Christian fundamentalists to remove the teaching of biological evolution from the public schools. Such a removal would rob our children of an education in one of the more central aspects of science in the modern world. Even more importantly, it would tend to deceive the working class about the nature of science in general. As a fallback position, if they could not remove evolution altogether, the fundamentalists have demanded that Creationism, or as they have come to call it “Creationist Science,” be taught alongside evolution, so that each of our children would be able to choose which “science” appealed to them more. Creationism is the claim that the universe and all forms of life were created by “God” in one week a few thousand years ago, as the Bible says, and that nothing much has changed since. While not completely preventing children from learning about evolution, the teaching of evolution alongside its denial would introduce further confusion into what is already a very complex set of ideas, woven together into a magnificent and consistent theoretical framework that requires a significant amount of study and effort to understand. Furthermore it would promote the idea that evolution and Creationism are equally valid alternative points of view, implying that science and religion are likewise equally valid. And closely related, it would blur the lines between science and religion by offering a blatant falsehood in the guise of truth, namely that Creationism is scientific. The efforts of the creationists have sometimes been successful, at least temporarily. The battle has been going back and forth in Kansas since 1999 when creationists on the Kansas State Board of Education first voted to remove references to evolution in the schools and were then voted out of office. However, they regained office in 2004, and in late 2005, instead of removing evolution or introducing Creationism as such, they put the teaching of what they called “Intelligent Design” into the curriculum. Intelligent Design (ID) is the claim that life is so complex that it could only have been brought about by an act of intentional intelligence, though its advocates are cagey about who or what possesses that intelligence. Similarly in Dover, Pennsylvania, the school board was voted out of office in late 2005 after having introduced ID into the public schools the year before. A few weeks later, in a court suit brought by the fundamentalists in still another effort to introduce ID into the public schools, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones declared that, even

65 if ID advocates refused to admit that the intelligent designer had to be “God,” ID was religion in thin disguise and therefore violated the clause in the U.S. Constitution calling for the separation of church and state. Indeed much of the opposition to teaching ID in the schools, instead of being based on a rejection of ID itself as just plain false, has been based on a belief in the need for the separation of church and state. Judge Jones, after all, is a Republican churchgoer, but he saw through the creationists’ denial that the supposed intelligent designer had to be “God,” and he specifically called them dishonest in his lengthy written opinion. Even members of the clergy have denounced ID, saying, “To reject this truth [the fact of evolution] or to treat it as ‘one theory among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and to transmit such ignorance to our children (quoted in Carroll — all references at the end).”

Creationism is not new Indeed Creationism was the prevailing view among scientists, let alone religionists, up to the mid 1800s, when Charles Darwin in England published his major book in 1859 called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, known generally simply as The Origin of Species. In fact, Darwin struggled to overcome the bonds that creationist thinking held him in, since he himself was an Anglican minister. And Origin was his answer to the creationists, who were not just the religious fundamentalists but were the majority of biological and geological scientists of his day. Before then the concept that present day nature had evolved from earlier forms was certainly not unknown, but it was merely one idea among others in the scientific literature. With this classic book Darwin not only confirmed with literally mountains of evidence (since much of it came from fossils buried in mountains) that evolution had indeed taken place, and over hundreds of millions of years, but he did so by discovering the primary mechanism by which it took place, namely what he called “natural selection.” Intelligent Design, which is Creationism in its latest guise, starts from a slightly different point of view. Whereas Creationism is simply a statement that stands on its own, ID advocates recognize the formidable power of the science of evolution and they throw down the gauntlet in the form of a question: How can organs that are so tremendously complex as, say, an eye (the usual example) arise without some intelligent designer having produced it? Since they mean this question rhetorically, i.e., they don’t ask it in order to find an answer, their position is primarily one of incredulity, i.e., inability to believe that such a thing could have happened. They are not the first to ask this question. It was earlier

66 posed more than 200 years ago in 1802 by another Anglican clergyman, William Paley, who used the analogy of a pocket watch that he imagined finding on the ground. Anyone finding such a complex mechanism, said Paley, would immediately realize that it hadn’t been created by accident, but rather must have been put together intentionally by a thinking being, in this case, of course, a person. He then likened the watch to the eye, and drew the same conclusion that there must have been an intelligent designer, which he naturally concluded had to be “God.”

Temporary defeats will not stop the creationists The temporary defeats of Creationism/ID in Kansas and Pennsylvania have not ended the efforts to introduce ID into the public schools, with the ultimate goal of expunging evolution from the curriculum completely. But it is not only science that is under attack by the fundamentalists. All other religious outlooks are also under attack by them. The drive to force ID down the throats of school children amounts to religious bigotry. After all, ID is only one of many religious ideologies. Below we discuss who benefits and loses from religion in general. Before we do, we note that there is an interesting parallel between Darwin’s major contribution and that of his strong admirer, Karl Marx, that other earth-shaking scientist of the mid-1800s, whose Communist Manifesto (co-authored by his friend and ally Friedrich Engels) was published in 1848, just 11 years before The Origin of Species. The concept that Darwin discovered and introduced was not evolution, but rather a major mechanism by which it takes place, which also happened to cement the concept of evolution in biological science. Similarly the concept that Marx discovered and introduced was not the struggle between social classes, but rather the ubiquitous nature and the future outcome made possible by that struggle, namely communism — rule of society by the working class. No scientist ever contributes a new idea out of whole cloth, but rather at most simply advances the science another step, often by resolving growing contradictions among the involved concepts. However, while most scientific advances merely add quantitatively to our understanding, there are others that make a qualitative change and completely overturn our previous way of looking at the phenomena. Such qualitative advances dwarf the quantitative ones. The theories of evolution by natural selection and ubiquitous class struggle leading to communism are among those giant steps for humankind — far more significant than Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon in 1969.

PLP

WHAT IS SCIENCE? One comment on this section: Abstractions are always difficult to follow by themselves, but just giving examples without the overview doesn’t lend itself to much understanding either. One has to inevitably precede the other, so don’t be discouraged if this part seems unclear at first. If you reread it after covering other sections of the pamphlet, your understanding will deepen each time you approach it.

Science is a method, not a body of knowledge Science is a method of approaching problems, not a body of knowledge. For its long term survival, the capitalist ruling class promotes science not only as if it were finished knowledge, but as if it were comprised of a divided set of many bodies of knowledge. These include, for example, mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, meteorology and geology. They further divide science into the opposing categories of pure and applied sciences, or physical and life sciences, also called hard and soft sciences. To parallel the categories of science listed above, universities are divided into departments. Other departments in the university, such as languages, art, religion, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics and history, are said by the ruling class and its promoters to be something altogether different from science. They either imply or openly proclaim that to speak of a scientific approach to language or art or history is sheer nonsense. However, if science is a method of approaching problems, rather than a body of knowledge, then there is indeed such a thing as a scientific approach to language, art and history. The scientific method consists essentially of endless cycles of either systematic or insightful/intuitive guesses (hunches, hypotheses) about reality followed by observations or experiments that test how true the hypotheses may be, then, based on the results of observations or experiments (evidence), amended and improved hypotheses and still more observations/experiments that test the truth of the amended hypotheses. In short, science is an organized example of the process of trial and error. Everyone is familiar with that process, since it is something that each of us engages in every day of our lives. As infants, from the day we are born, we all engage in trial and error to learn to distinguish objects in our visual field, to recognize our parents, to use our hands to grasp or move objects within our reach, to realize that when an object disappears from our field of view it may still exist behind another object, how to know when we are at the edge of a surface so that we don’t fall off it, and so on. These are all primitive forms of science, but we generally reserve the term for the organized collective

THEcommunist forms of hypothesis and experimentation or observation. Eventually the process of experiment/observation leads, sooner or later, to results that fail to confirm the hypothesis. Then more and more complex proposals are made to explain the exceptions and to patch up the hypothesis, and often at some point some new insight is needed to improve on, or completely replace, the hypothesis. That insight often comes when someone suddenly recognizes the significance of something that has been staring us in the face, but has gone unnoticed or unquestioned. Often that insight takes one of four forms: 1) recognition that two completely separate things are actually examples of the same thing, even though they had never been thought about at the same time, or 2) recognition that two things assumed to be the same are actually different – the opposite of the first type, or 3) recognition that something that has been assumed to be true and has never been questioned is actually untrue, or 4) recognition of the possibility or actuality of something that had never been considered or thought possible. There may be others that we haven’t thought of, but these give the flavor. Such insights are the key to major advances in science. The working out of the consequences of such an insight, and on that basis the evaluation of whether or not it is true, is what observation and experimentation are all about.

Some examples of scientific insight • Isaac Newton in the 1600s had an insight that the apple falling from the tree on earth was undergoing a motion that was qualitatively the same thing as the moon’s motion around the earth. Having put these two separate things together he was then able to investigate the phenomenon systematically and propose a law of gravity. His law — still useful, for example, for rocket engineering and astronomy — is that the attractive force of gravity between two objects is weaker the farther apart the two objects are, and in particular that the force weakens by a factor of 4 at 2 times the distance, a factor of 9 at 3 times the distance, and so on, the so-called inverse square law. This is an example of the first type of insight. • Albert Einstein in the early 1900s had an insight that light was different from other wave phenomena, such as sound or surfing waves, in that light was able to travel in an empty vacuum without requiring a medium. The medium that was previously thought to carry light was called the ether, but Einstein realized that all of the many experiments that failed to detect it failed because it didn’t exist. Freed from this false idea, he was then able to investigate systematically and propose the special theory of relativity. This is an example of both the second

67 and the third types of insight. • Charles Darwin in the early 1800s had an insight that the fossil pattern in rocks and the side-by-side geographical existence of similar but different living species had similar causes, with one changing over time the other over space. This suggested to him that the various forms of life evolved out of other forms, rather than all having been created at the same time by “God.” He further realized that when plant and animal breeders were able to develop new breeds of dogs, cattle, or other domesticated animals, by selecting them for some desired feature (strength, size or milk yield, for example), they were doing something similar to what nature had done automatically (natural versus artificial selection). He was then able to investigate systematically and propose that automatic selection performed in nature could explain the evolution of different life forms. This is an example of both the first and third types of insight, since Darwin had to put different things together and he had to rid himself of the previously unquestioned assumption of simultaneous creation. • Karl Marx in the mid to late 1800s had an insight that there was a difference between labor time and labor power — the first being the time the worker puts in at the factory each day, and the second being the labor time it takes to produce what the worker and her/his family need to stay alive another day. He was then able to investigate systematically and show that capitalist profit is based on the hidden theft of some of the workers’ labor time, because the bosses pay only for labor power (which is generally less than labor time) but steal the product (whose value is that of the labor time it took to make it). This is an example of the second type of insight. Marx called the difference (between the value of labor time and the value of labor power) “surplus value,” which is the essential core of the capitalists’ profit. He also showed that the workers’ recognition of this exploitation, and of all the horrors inflicted on the workers by the capitalists’ control of that stolen profit and their need to continue to expand their profits or go out of business, could lead the working class to overthrow the capitalists and institute an egalitarian communist system of society. This is an example of the fourth type of insight.

The two sides of progress – planting and weeding Thousands of other examples could be given, but one thing common to all of them is that progress in science is a twosided process. It not only involves the emergence of new truer ideas, but also involves the recognition and rejection

68 of old false ideas. Indeed all learning involves both of these aspects — the gaining of new ideas and the purging of old assumptions or illusions that are false and hinder understanding. The process is somewhat like gardening – planting and weeding. If any progress is to be made, either in organized science or in an individual’s learning, both sides of this process are vital and inseparably linked. And often the weeding takes far more time and effort than the planting — in the classroom, in the laboratory and in life.

The related roles of induction and deduction, another two-sided process Insight into a new hypothesis to explain observed phenomena is called induction, and the hard work of discovering all the consequences of the hypothesis — both those already observed and those yet to be expected — is called deduction. Induction and deduction are both crucial aspects of scientific work, and while they are different from each other they are inseparably linked. Unless induction is followed systematically by deduction of its consequences and then by experiment or observation to confirm or disconfirm these consequences, induction or insight just remains guesswork, faith, or whatever you want to call it, but it certainly isn’t science. It only becomes science when evidence is brought to bear, evidence derived from experiment or observation. Hypotheses, resulting from induction, are generally the product of intuition, but intuition that is nourished by a relatively full knowledge of the phenomena to be explained and that usually results only after a tremendous amount of work thinking about them and discussing them with many others. Because insights don’t arise just because you wish you could have an insight, induction is a relatively rare event. They occur all the time, but not as frequently as deductions, which receive more guidance from already proposed hypotheses. Hypotheses, in fact, generate lots of questions that demand answers, questions that are essentially deductions of the consequences of the hypothesis. There is creativity in both of these opposite processes. Insight into new recognitions is clearly a creative act, but ferreting out questions through the act of deduction is also creative, even if not requiring quite as much concentrated work as induction. Failing to recognize some of the implications of a hypothesis, and therefore failing to test them, can mislead for a time, particularly those implications that would be disconfirmed if subjected to experiment or observation. Failing to evaluate alternative hypotheses can also mislead. These two types of failure are quite common in certain fields of science, as we discuss below under the topic heading “The enemies of science within the fields of science” in the section headed “The ID attack on evolutionary theory.”

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All aspects of the class struggle constitute experiments The concept of experiment is not confined only to manipulations of nature in the laboratory, or to our individual efforts to explore our surroundings. Experiment can be much broader than that. In particular, the working class, in our collective struggles with the capitalist class to survive from day to day, to build unions, to organize revolutions, in short to find collective ways of improving our lives, is continually experimenting in the broadest sense. The Bolshevik revolution that created the Soviet Union in the early 1900s, the Chinese revolution after World War II, the struggles of Native Americans against the genocide committed by the expanding U.S., the struggles of slaves to gain freedom and end chattel slavery, the civil rights movement, all these are not just examples of class struggle. They also constitute experiments from which we have the opportunity to learn strategies and tactics that work and differentiate them from those that are doomed to fail. But, and this is critical, in order for lessons to be extracted, these struggles have to be studied in a systematic way, and the lessons drawn depend critically on the outlook with which the investigation is approached. Thus capitalists will generally draw one lesson, while the working class, using the outlook developed and popularized by Marx and Engels in the mid 1800s, will generally draw the opposite lesson. Marx and Engels were the first to study the history of class struggles over the millennia and to show that by such study, and by applying the lessons from the class struggle in organized practice, the working class around the world is capable of liberating ourselves from all forms of capitalist slavery and oppression once and for all. But again, as with all experiments, trial and error is central to these efforts. Marx and Engels organized the first communist party in Europe in the mid-1800s, precisely to carry out this task of study (to build theory) and practice (to carry out and test its conclusions), and to study again and engage in practice again, in endless cycles. When the Parisian workers seized power in 1871 and organized the Paris commune, Marx drew conclusions about what should be done after the workers control the state by examining what the workers in fact did. The commune was defeated and destroyed soon thereafter by the combined armies of the French and German capitalist ruling classes, who had been at war with each other up to that point. They both found the working class in Paris to be the more critical enemy, rather than each other. From their defeat, Marx drew further conclusions about what it would take for workers not only to seize power but to be able to hold it — namely that the capitalist state had to be completely destroyed and a completely new type of state had to be created that was suitable for the working class to rule. The Soviet and Chinese revolutions constitute evidence

THEcommunist that the working class has the ability to seize power from the capitalists. But both these revolutions have since been defeated by their internal errors, and both societies have again been placed under the hammerlock of capitalism, with untold horrors being committed against the workers, who formerly held political power there. The capitalists and their intellectual defenders gloat over these defeats and claim that they prove that attempts to build communism cannot possibly last, and that the international working class ought to give up on any hope for liberation from capitalism. Since trial and error is known to be a part of all scientific endeavor, the capitalists try to convince us that revolution has nothing to do with science. Otherwise the working class might regard these defeats as part of the lessons to be learned in order to improve our strategies and tactics, until one day we will be able not only to seize power from the capitalists, but to destroy that class and hold power permanently.

Levels of organization and levels of analysis One of the major contributions of Marx and Engels to science has been the explicit consideration of levels of organization of matter and the levels of analysis appropriate to them. Most theories about societies, for example, both before and since Marx, have regarded societies merely as collections of individuals. They have either failed to see, or have tried to hide the fact, that there are laws of operation of societies on the social level that emerge only on that level and are relatively independent of individual desires and actions. So they promote the idea that “human nature” determines how societies function. But capitalism functions differently from feudalism, from communism, from ancient Greek and Roman slave societies and from tribal societies. To acknowledge that different organizations of society function very differently, and at the same time to claim that they depend on an unchanging “human nature,” constitutes a logical inconsistency. Only by studying societies on the social level, as well as on the individual level, and as well as in their relationships with other societies around them both past and present, as well as in their relationships to the changing physical environment in which they develop, can we discover the essential features of the societies. Only then can we understand that what is commonly called “human nature” really is human social nature that differs radically depending on the social context in which people are born and develop, or which we create collectively. Thus the characteristics of societies affects the characteristics of humans within them, just as the nature of humans affects the nature of their societies, but in just what way each level affects the other level requires examination of all relevant levels at the same time. Furthermore one cannot understand a particular individual except in her/his relationship to all other

69 individuals around her/him and to the surrounding social level, again both past and present. Different levels of organization require different levels of analysis. Then, and only then, can the relationships between the various levels be understood. Nor are the laws governing development on different levels simply reducible to those on lower levels, and vice versa. This is no less true in physics, astronomy, chemistry or biology. In biology, for example, we have to study biomolecules, cells, organs, organisms, species, to name a few levels of organization of living matter, and none of these levels can be understood in isolation from the rest. In physics, to take another example, the temperature of a system of matter has an understandable meaning at the level of the system but also can be understood at the next lower level as the collection of motions of all the atoms and molecules that make up the system—but only when the system is in so-called equilibrium (otherwise the system has no temperature). This was a discovery that was not immediately self-evident. In fact, nothing is selfevident until it is recognized. Only by studying each level as a separate level and in its relationship to all the other levels can we come to understand them.

Marx and Engels first gave practical meaning to dialectical and materialist thinking As we said above, scientific insights are relatively rare events in the development of human knowledge and understanding. However, insights were given a more systematic foundation and a greater likelihood of arising through Marx and Engels’ approach of “dialectical materialism.” While Marx didn’t invent either dialectics or materialism as a way of understanding the world around us and within us, he and Engels introduced these approaches into the popular mainstream and wedded them together as both necessary for scientific thinking to reflect reality. Many readers are familiar to one degree or another with the terms “dialectics” or “materialism” or with “dialectical materialism,” but understanding what dialectics really means is a long and difficult struggle throughout life in trying to understand what it means in each context we study. Similarly, understanding how to keep in sight a materialist approach to analyzing everything in the world takes a lifetime of practice in doing so. Much of the difficulty is caused by the way capitalist education teaches us to think in ways specifically designed to blunt curiosity and to foster superficial rote answers rather than profound thoughtful questions. In a world run by the working class in its own interests, dialectical and materialist thinking will become second nature. Let’s take materialism first, since it may be the easier to understand of the two. The terms “materialism” and “materialist” are not used here in the narrow capitalist

70 sense of greed for material things. Rather the terms are used in Marx’s sense of being rooted in material reality. Materialism, as a philosophical approach to the world, stands opposed to idealism. Again, not “idealism” in the narrow capitalist sense of hoping against hope for the betterment of humanity, but in the philosophical sense that ideas are more important than, and stand apart from, material reality — regardless of where the ideas come from and regardless of how well they correspond to reality. The chief example of idealism in this sense is religion. The term “dialectics” comes from dialog between two parties representing ideas that contradict each other. The German philosopher Hegel developed dialectics as a conflict between opposing ideas, or more precisely as a conflict between people holding opposing ideas. Marx and Engels broadened that context and developed dialectics as an investigation of conflicts within and between all things, not just two parties arguing different points of view. They developed dialectics primarily as a guide to what questions to ask of things around us in order to understand their inner workings, how they relate to other things and, most importantly, how they develop and change. Without understanding how something develops and changes we can’t understand what the thing really is and where it stands in relation to other things. Asking the right questions is most of the battle. Answers to these questions come from study, observation and experiment, but without questions, and the right questions at that, there can be no recognition of answers. Dialectics steers us always to seek, among other aspects, the two-way interaction between any two things, whether on the same level of organization or on different levels, and the internal changes that each thing undergoes as a result of the interaction. If we want to understand the development of anything over time, from an infant to a tree to a society to a chemical compound to the universe, we need to examine the things that make it up (its internal structure), as well as the things that surround it and with which it interacts, both directly and indirectly. To the extent that we leave out consideration of one or another important feature, we will fail to understand the thing. Then eventually we learn what we have failed to take into account by seeing how our understanding goes wrong or is in error. The critical relationships, both internal and external to a thing, are characterized by conflict, or what Marx and Engels called contradiction. While the word “contradiction” originally meant the conflict between two statements (literally “contra-“ meaning “against,” and “–diction” meaning “talking”), it has been broadened to mean conflict between any two things or any two aspects of things. Just as the word “dialectics” originally involved conflict between two points of view and was broadened to mean conflict within or between any things. However, the central usefulness of dialectics is the

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understanding that all things are continually changing, even as they retain certain features. Just as materialism stands opposed to idealism, dialectical thinking stands opposed to mechanical thinking. Mechanical thinking is everywhere in capitalist society, in writings about science, history, art, psychology, and so on. It takes the point of view that things can be understood in themselves without necessarily having to take account of their relationships with other things around them, either on the same level of organization or on higher or lower levels, or without necessarily having to take account of their history or development over time. In particular, mechanical thinking neglects the changes that things undergo during their interactions with other things, and often goes so far as to deny that there are any significant changes. Mechanical thinking is generally accurate enough when applied to machines (hence the term), but it is often extremely inaccurate when applied to anything else. For one thing, mechanical thinking often fails to look for qualitative change or for the conflicts that produce such change. It often regards relationships in a one-sided way, seeing only the effect that one thing has on another, completely neglecting the reverse effect. This outlook derives, at least in part, from the social relationships in exploitative class society. For example, in a capitalist business the top boss is the active party, and, to the boss, the workers are essentially nothing more than parts in a machine that follow the orders of the boss. This relationship exists in one of its purest forms in capitalist armies. The fact that workers in a factory, for example, see many ways in which to streamline the work process, or soldiers see many ways in which their lives are wasted in unnecessarily dangerous and unproductive and criminal battles, is completely lost in a mechanical outlook. And of course, a mechanical outlook ignores the possibility of mutiny or revolution. For another example, by bringing up oil from the ground and using it to power industry and transportation, capitalists change our surroundings by causing global warming, pollution, and many other changes in our environment. These changes in the environment, in turn, change us by causing asthma and other lung diseases, or by causing flooding in coastal areas. A mechanical approach leads to denial that human activity in a capitalist society causes these disasters. Therefore the capitalists encourage us to take a mechanical approach. Still another example is the one-sided outlook of many biologists that the genes or DNA in the cells in our body determine how we behave, without recognizing that not only does our environment participate in shaping our behavior but that both our environment and our activities determine how our genes are activated and used by the cells. This erroneous way of thinking mimics the one-sided top-down mechanical view of the relationship between bosses and workers, or officers and soldiers.

THEcommunist Dialectics, on the other hand, encourages us to see the two-way relationships, and to see how each participant in an interaction is affected by that interaction and how each changes in the process. In the daily class struggle, for example, workers don’t just follow orders but also learn how to organize and fight back. By studying history and organizing ourselves, through our communist leadership, to put the lessons into practice, we can vanquish the bosses and their armies and in the process completely change ourselves as a class and as individuals. This also completely changes the nature of what is left of the bosses, if any survive the revolution. Finding the ways in which things change requires investigation, i.e., observation and experiment. It isn’t automatically obvious just because of using a dialectical approach. But because a mechanical outlook doesn’t steer us to look for the ways in which these changes take place, the understanding of these vital issues is often completely missed. There are many exceptions in capitalist writings, but they are not consistent. So dialectical materialism guides the questions, and without the questions the answers are not even sought, let alone found.

Asking the right questions is the key to understanding anything Learning to ask the right questions is the essence of training in any field of specialization. For example, an auto mechanic and a layperson can both face the same car and wonder why it isn’t working properly, but the mechanic is trained through school and practice to ask particular questions and to investigate common causes of the failure. A radiologist and a pediatrician can both look at a chest x-ray, but the radiologist will see things the pediatrician might easily miss because she is trained to ask the right questions of the image and improves with practice. An art historian and a layperson can look at the same painting, but the historian will be able to explain much more about the painting because of her training and practice in the art of that period. Similarly, communists and non-communists are able to look at the same situation in the class struggle, but the communists will be able to see better how to advance the struggle and swing the situation in favor of the working class because of training in the theory and practice of history and revolution. The essence of that training is learning the way that dialectical materialism leads us to ask the right questions. In each of these examples, the answers, and indeed some of the questions, will vary depending on the situation, but the starting questions are learned through training and practice. Examples of “right questions” include such things as “Why did the Soviet and Chinese revolutions ultimately revert to capitalism?” or “How did it come about that a few people are extremely rich while the vast majority of the world’s

71 people are poor and have to survive by selling their labor power to the extremely rich?” or “How is it that despite the fact that the great majority of U.S. citizens oppose the war in Iraq, the politicians keep pouring money and lives into it and the media keep hiding the truth?” One of the major assaults on the working class due to capitalist education is that schoolchildren are trained to provide answers to questions already made up by others, but not to develop questions themselves. Many teachers find out the hard way, when they begin to teach, that they now have to learn for the first time how to develop questions that they have never been trained, or trained very badly, to do. That, in many cases, is when they find that they really begin to understand their subject. Furthermore elementary and secondary school teachers, as well as many college teachers, are discouraged from permitting students to develop and follow the logic of their own questions by curricula that force them to cover a certain amount of predetermined material in a predetermined amount of time. So it is not only that the schools fail to teach working class children to develop their own questions. To a very large degree, students are actively prevented from doing so. It falls to communists to relight that fire, and to lead by example and question everything about capitalism and the world. (For a much fuller discussion of dialectical materialism see the PLP pamphlet “Jailbreak.”)

Quality and quantity All things have both qualitative aspects and quantitative aspects. Without considering quality there can be no consideration of quantity. For example, when we consider the quantity of length of a table, the quality of length has to be understood first as something that can be compared between two things by holding them side by side — one the table and the other some standard such as a ruler. Or the quantity of time between now and when I have to leave for work has to be understood as some quality that can be compared between the process of my getting ready for work and some other process used by everyone as a common standard, such as the movement of a clock. By failing to keep quality in mind, many a professional scientist has arrived at false conclusions by simply manipulating mathematical symbols without keeping in mind to what they refer. And many a student has been left out of the discussion of an equation in physics because the teacher failed to adequately explain the qualitative aspects that underlay the quantitative aspects. It was through a questioning of the qualitative aspects of time and space, for example, that Einstein arrived at the theory of special relativity as a more accurate description of motion than Newton’s theory. Another aspect of the relationship between quality and quantity is that quantitative changes in some aspect of

72 a thing can lead to qualitative changes in the thing. For example, when heating water, the quantity of temperature of the water sooner or later reaches a certain point where the water changes qualitatively from a liquid to a gas (it boils away). Or when the class struggle reaches a certain quantitative level of intensity, the qualitative nature of capitalist society changes from one ruled by the capitalists to one ruled by the workers, such as with the Russian or Chinese revolutions.

What is a theory? When an insight (hypothesis) unites many observed phenomena and the number of confirmed deductions (consequences) from that hypothesis continues to multiply, the collection of hypothesis and consequences becomes a theory. For example, the theories of gravity, of relativity, of evolution, or of communist revolution. One confusing thing is that the everyday usage of the word “theory” is not the same as the scientific usage. The everyday usage just means a guess, as in “I have a theory that the moon landing was faked.” Even within science the word “theory” is sometimes misused to mean a hypothesis (guess) that seems plausible but has not been confirmed with evidence. IDers rely on this street use of the word to confuse the working class about evolutionary theory. Furthermore it’s one thing to have a hypothesis that hasn’t yet been confirmed. It’s quite another thing to have a hypothesis that cannot, even in principle, be confirmed. The latter type does not qualify as science. One example is the claim that there is a supreme being that chooses not to reveal itself directly to anyone. Only guesses that can, at least in principle, be confirmed or disconfirmed qualify as part of science. Practical obstacles to confirming or disconfirming guesses, such as the difficulty in obtaining a piece of the inner core of Jupiter to discover what materials it is made of, do not disqualify the question from being scientific. After all, today’s practical obstacle is often tomorrow’s achievability, and even today the proposal can often be made as to how the hypothesis could be confirmed some time in the future. It is the absence of ways to confirm, and not the technical or practical current inability to confirm, that makes the difference between science and non-science.

True, false and the real world Which brings us to two related questions: Is there such a thing as true and false? Is there a real world apart from our perceptions? These are closely related, because if there is no real world, there can be no true or false. True statements can only be true if they are statements about a relatively stable real world and can be confirmed by anyone with the proper tools. Conversely, false

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statements can only be false if they are statements about a relatively stable real world and can be disconfirmed by everyone as false. It is one of the mainstays of materialist thinking that there is indeed a real world apart from our perceptions and interactions with it. Thus, trees do fall in the middle of forests whether or not there is anyone around to see or hear the event. In everyday life all of us certainly show that we believe there is such a thing as a real world and that there are true and false statements about it. For a trivial example, all of us have taken tests in school including questions as to whether a statement is true or false. However, a philosophical argument sometimes develops when the question of reality, apart from our perception, is approached directly. People who argue that there is no such reality are called “logical positivists,” a confusingly unintuitive phrase. But even logical positivists act in their daily lives as though there is indeed a real world. For example, challenge any of them to step in front of an oncoming locomotive and their inconsistency will be revealed.

What is evidence? Evidence in broad terms is any information that confirms or disconfirms a hypothesis. It is the link between the real world and humans who ask questions about it. Evidence can come from direct observation or experiment, in the broadest sense. It can also come from what others say or write. Evidence can be weaker or stronger. In general, what makes it stronger is the number of independent sources and types of evidence that lead to the same conclusion. Furthermore direct observation or experiment is stronger than what others say or write, though the more trustworthy a speaker or author, the stronger the evidence contained in their statements. However, evidence is subject to perception and interpretation by humans. It is here that we can get it wrong, at least temporarily – and sometimes even for very long periods of time, sometimes millennia. Many textbooks, for example, are simply dead wrong about a lot of things. The worst offenders are history textbooks that are commissioned by the capitalist ruling class specifically to hide from the working class the true history of class struggle and how the working class has won battles against their bosses and/or oppressors in the past. But history of class struggle is not the only topic that is subject to error or falsehood in textbooks. Even physics, which seems to be the most objective of sciences, since its subject matter is the furthest removed from the struggle between classes, suffers from all the weaknesses that scientists have in trying to interpret and understand the real world. For example, there have been almost a hundred years of writing on the science of quantum mechanics, a very

THEcommunist complex branch of physics dealing with microscopic particles such as atoms and molecules, and that is hard to understand (even for physicists). As a central part of the theory, all the text books always have, and still do maintain that there can be no precise reality in the world of microscopic particles. Despite the fact that this has been disproved, by a few physicists who question everything they don’t understand or that seems just plain wrong, all textbooks and most physicists still believe that this view is correct (Bohm, Smolin, Beller).

How are evidence and proof related? Proof can be thought of as the product of enough evidence. However, proof is never absolute, and is only approached closer and closer by more and more evidence. In other words, evidence is to proof as practice is to perfect. There comes a point in a concert pianist’s development when her practice allows her performances, for all practical purposes, to be perfect, at least in hitting the correct notes. There also comes a point in the accumulation of evidence for a theory when, for all practical purposes, the theory is proven, and denying its validity without counterevidence, or without an alternative theory that explains all the evidence even better, is just dishonesty, ignorance, wishful thinking, or some other less than valid approach to the real world. However, even theories for which evidence has mounted for long periods of time (and which for all practical purposes have therefore been proven) can one day be replaced by newer theories that deny their essential features, even while retaining some of their superficial aspects. This can occur when finally some new evidence or a new theory arises that convincingly debunks it, or at least reveals its limits of applicability. For example, Einstein’s special relativity theory replaced the Newtonian view of physics, that had held firm for over 200 years, by revealing its limits of applicability (namely to velocities much less than that of light) even while retaining certain aspects of the Newtonian view to high degrees of approximation. Because proof can never be absolute – whether in science or in any other human endeavor – in criminal trials, for example, the jury is instructed by the judge that the standard of proof of guilt is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” In other words, in that context proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof for all practical purposes. But that’s the best that we can ever do, recognizing that the verdict, like a scientific theory, may later be shown to have been wrong in at least some respects.

Can science ever be completely objective? In particular, is science so objective that everyone ought to be able to come to agreement? The short answer is No. In the practice of science there is much room for insights

73 and intuitions in the formation of guesses, and there is much room for choosing such things as which questions about reality to pursue, what conceptual framework (theory) to use to relate new evidence to already established guesses, and which evidence to accept as relevant and which to reject as irrelevant. But the source of these things is often to be found outside science. It is these things that prevent science from being a predetermined process on which all objective people/ scientists can come to agree. While the real world is the final arbiter of answers to those questions that get asked, it does not determine which questions get asked and which ignored, or how the answers are interpreted and related to other things in the world. The claim that Marx’s theory of revolution cannot be scientific, or more generally that an analysis of history cannot be scientific, is based on a fallacy about science. The fallacy is that science is completely objective while Marx’s theory of revolution is biased toward the interests of the working class and against the interests of the ruling class. However, the bias in Marxist theory is no more nor less than that in any science. Bias simply guides the choice of questions to be asked, how to view evidence, and which evidence is relevant and which irrelevant. These choices are necessarily common to all science. It is still the real world that is the final test. The working classes in Paris in 1870, in Russia in 1917, and in China in 1949 have shown that they are capable of overthrowing capitalism and organizing a new world in their own interests. Since through these revolutions the working class, so far, has only achieved temporary political power, there is clearly much more to learn about how to seize and hold that power. But, as we have said, trial and error is a necessary part of all scientific processes. The capitalists claim that the temporary nature of these revolutions is evidence that communism cannot work and therefore should not be attempted. This is paralleled by the ID claim that the existence of unanswered questions in evolutionary theory is evidence that evolution is only a guess and not a fact. Both of these false claims overlook the fact that all advances in science and society are a result of trial and error and never fall from the sky fully formed and perfected. While bias is unavoidable in science, there is bias that leads away from the real world and bias that steers toward it. The only bias that is harmful is that which prevents a theory from being an accurate reflection of the real world. It is therefore not enough to accuse a scientific opponent of bias, without showing that her/his conclusions are not supported by the real world while yours are. However, this formulation has to be modified. We really mean the only bias that is destructive to science (rather than “harmful”) is that which prevents a theory from being an accurate reflection of the real world. After all, in saying “harmful” rather than “destructive to science”

74 we were implicitly taking the point of view of the working class. But what is harmful to the working class is generally beneficial to the capitalist class, since they are a small class that could not possibly exploit, oppress and rule over the vast majority of humanity without the corruption of science that leads the working class away from reality and the search for liberation.

Pseudoscience and religion To help understand what science is and isn’t, we need, among other things, to understand pseudoscience, i.e., efforts within fields of science that fail to measure up to the requirement for objectively weighing evidence. Pseudoscience engages in only partial application of the scientific method to partially false content. We will say more about pseudoscience below, but suffice it to say here that it is more similar to, than different from, religious thinking (faith without evidence). Pseudoscience acts to oppose science from within various fields of science, while religious thinking acts to oppose science from the outside. Therefore pseudoscience is the more dangerous, since it has the surface appearance of science, like the fabled wolf in sheep’s clothing, harder to detect and therefore harder to defeat. It is like the Democrats or trade union officials who are enemies of the working class from within, pretending to be the allies of the workers but really believing in and carrying out the will of the capitalists. PLP publications, particularly our newspaper CHALLENGE, are brimming with examples of these enemies within.

Science is a cumulative and collective process A central aspect of science is that it is a collective, rather than individual, endeavor of human beings. The main thing that separates humans from other animals is that humans pass on their discoveries about the real world not just to their immediate offspring, but from generation to generation, and in cumulative fashion. Books, pictures, schools, and many other forms of continuity allow humans to build on the achievements of our ancestors so that we are not consigned to continual repetition, generation after generation, of the same questions or even, more importantly, the same oppressive conditions of life. If mistakes are repeated over and over again, it is because the problem is not being approached scientifically. Despite the mythology fostered by the ruling class and most science historians that certain individuals such as Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Leonardo, Aristotle, or even by implication Marx are somehow qualitatively different types of humans (geniuses) from the rest of us, the fact is that none of them achieved anything outside the context of the social relationships of their time or without the help of many other humans with whom they were in direct or

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indirect contact. Their insights were the product of years of intense social exchange of ideas with others, focused concentration, and consistent hard work. And their contributions are just the tip of an iceberg. The submerged part is the millions upon millions of scientific discoveries and inventions by uncelebrated workers and tradespersons over thousands of years. For the most part they were illiterate, and therefore they could not record their inventions in print. So science historians, for the most part, have ignored their contributions. Moreover much of the written European and U.S. history of discoveries and inventions over the millennia overlook the overwhelming contributions from Asian, Middle Eastern, African, “New World” Indian and Latin American peoples (Conner). And finally, the only way that the likes of Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Leonardo, or Aristotle can be (falsely) considered unique and different types of human beings is by considering them not only outside the context of everything else accomplished in science by millions of others, but by considering their scientific contributions outside the context of themselves. That is, Newton, for example, was mainly ignorant when it came to history or biology or poetry or things outside certain fields of physics. It is only by considering the one or, in the case of certain other “geniuses,” the few areas in which they made significant contributions (along with millions of other unsung heroes) that the illusion is created that they are somehow different from the rest of us. Marx is one of a handful of exceptions who excelled in a wide variety of fields. But he didn’t do this because he was somehow differently endowed, but rather because he was motivated to help resolve the injustices he saw all around him and he used the intellectual framework of dialectical materialism to see the interrelationships among all aspects and levels of human endeavor and of the natural world. For example, in order to expose the essential feature of capitalist economics as hidden theft from the working class, he had to study mathematics, history, economics, philosophy, and other branches of science. Meanwhile, in addition to some of these, his friend and colleague Engels studied and wrote about anthropology and natural science. We can all aspire to achieve similar successes if we are motivated and use the scientific tool of dialectical materialism. The best scientists, without even knowing they are doing so, also use either a dialectical or materialist approach, or both, to their respective fields. One linguist, for example, when asked recently if he was a Marxist, responded that he didn’t know, since Marxism deals with so many different aspects of the universe. He simply fell into a dialectical materialist approach to linguistics because it made the most sense to him and allowed him to explain a wide variety of aspects of language acquisition.

THEcommunist Scientific discoveries only take root when the time is right Besides the collective exchange of ideas and hard mental labor over many years, sometimes centuries, the recognition of the law of gravity also required that the social context be such as to permit this discovery to catch on, gain other followers and bear fruit, thus becoming the basis for the development of still further understanding of physics. The necessity of the preparedness of social conditions (that the times be right) finds confirmation in the fact, for example, that more than half the inventions and discoveries attributed to European inventors and scientists had long since been invented or discovered in China, sometimes centuries earlier. They had been brought to Europe by traders and other travelers, but lay dormant until the times called for them. Examples include the printing press, the biology of the silkworm, spinning wheels and other textile-handling machines, mechanical clocks, suspension bridges, oil drilling techniques, steel, gunpowder, iron plows, ship rudders, the compass and multiple masts, to name only a few (Conner).

Summary So in summary, communists and almost all professional scientists start from the point of view that there is indeed a real world apart from our perceptions, and that every single one of us acts in our daily lives as though we are well aware of this fact, regardless of what we claim to believe, or even believe we believe. If there is a real world, then there are indeed true and false statements about it. If there were no real world, truth and falsity would have no foundation. But since there is, they do. The practice and building of theories, which again feed practice that improves theories, in endless cycles, is rooted in the reality of the world around us and outside of us. This merging of theory and practice constitutes a materialist approach to our surroundings and to ourselves. In looking to construct theories, the most successful approach is to consider everything at every level that may impact on the subject at hand, and the interrelationships and interactions among them, which is the essence of a dialectical approach. Theories are less successful to the extent that they neglect either a materialist or dialectical approach. The best science then is a method for separating truth from falsity, about anything, including history, art, or other so-called humanities. Of course, there are additional aspects of human endeavor other than truth and falsity, such as esthetics and taste. But these we will only mention in passing, since the purpose of this essay is to discuss science and the different ways in which it is useful to the ruling class and to the working class. The main embodiment of the idealist approach to the world is religion, which will be discussed later in the pamphlet.

75 HOW IS SCIENCE IMPORTANT TO THE RULING CLASS? We have already discussed why science is important to the working class but discuss here how it is important to the ruling class. We make this distinction because the importance of science to the ruling class is limited, while the importance to the working class is unlimited. For the ruling class, their use of science is essentially limited to two functions: a) the production of their profits and b) the maintenance of their power over the vast majority of humanity. The ruling class is willing to support with jobs, research grants, awards, publishing opportunities and publicity those scientists who develop those aspects of science that result in profit-making or war-making or surveillance technologies. Even the exploration of space, on which the ruling class has spent vast amounts of our money, is fundamentally intended for their military purposes. Research on health and health care also consumes a certain amount of our money, but it is primarily directed at keeping workers and soldiers just healthy enough to be able to produce capitalist profits and fight wars of conquest. On the other hand, the ruling class has little use for that small minority of scientists who think more deeply and broadly and who question the very foundations of accepted theories when, regardless of how successful, they seem flawed. Because of the risks to their own careers, such scientists are few and far between. Since they often cannot get or hold positions in universities, they almost always have to have independent incomes so they can think, write and publish their ideas on their own (Smolin).

Technology explodes under capitalism The current technology explosion had its roots in the European renaissance of the 1400-1500s, which, in turn, borrowed, or more appropriately stole, from other cultures in the Middle and Far East, the Western Hemisphere, and Africa. It was during the renaissance that there was an explosive advance of scientific theories about physics, chemistry and astronomy, encouraged and made necessary by the commercial and economic needs of the rising capitalist class. On the other hand, it was also during that era that this explosion of science was most threatening to the current feudal ruling classes – the landowners, the king and the church. Among many others, Galileo, an Italian physicist, was threatened by the church with burning at the stake if he did not recant his theories. For example, he said that Venus, which he could see through his newly invented telescope, was like Earth and not a heavenly body in a different class from Earth. The church relied, and many

76 churches still do, on the concept of a heaven apart from earth, where those who obey the clergy during life could count on spending eternity after they die in a degree of comfort unknown to them during life. Any statement that tended to dissolve the concept of heaven was a threat to the church’s power. Galileo backed off, but countless other scientists and philosophers were, in fact, burned at the stake. In contrast, the rising capitalist class found science to be useful for the development of the means of production, but only certain scientists were supported and only research into some questions was funded by the capitalists. Through funding, the ruling class could attempt to determine the direction in which scientific progress would be made. But this manipulation, while powerful, has its limits. There was, and there continues to be, an ever-present danger of scientific insights that could threaten their ruling position or their profits. For example, the current U.S. administration, with even less style and finesse than most, co-opts and hires scientists to debunk the scientific discovery that global warming is taking place and is largely due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels (coal and oil). It has taken the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol that most nations (169 of them as of December 2006) have signed and ratified, a treaty designed to decrease these emissions. The U.S. has signed but never ratified the Protocol, which means, according to the Protocol, it is not bound by it. The current U.S. administration would rather spare the short-term expense and protect the current profits of its friends in the oil and manufacturing industries. It refuses to prevent the increase in disastrous floods, fires, erosion and loss of wetlands, and to preserve the environment for future generations. In order to throw pixie dust in our eyes, the hired scientists raise false questions about the scientific conclusions of the vast majority of the world’s investigators in this field — that the continuation of preventable global warming will have devastating consequences for humanity, not to mention the rest of plant and animal life forms. Thus the ruling class misuses and lies about science whenever real scientific conclusions get in the way of its profits and power. As it became clear that the position of the capitalist ruling class could be threatened by everything that Marx researched, wrote about and put into practice in the 1800s, he received little official support. To the extent that he supported the Union side against the southern Confederacy of slave owners during the Civil War in the U.S., he was employed as a correspondent by the antislavery New York Tribune newspaper. On the other hand, he was only able to develop the theory of capitalism, in his earth-shaking book Capital, because his friend and collaborator Engels inherited a factory from his father and used the profits in part to support Marx and his family during those years. Because he was funding the

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beginning of the end of private ownership of factories, the Engelses of the world have been extremely rare. But the rarity of such individual exceptions only highlights the rule that virtually all capitalists will use and misuse science to stay in power, even when that means killing millions in near genocidal wars.

Capitalist class relationships act as a “fetter” on scientific development Because the world’s capitalists rule everywhere, and because their use and financial backing for science is limited to their own class needs (profits and state power), this acts as an obstacle to — or, as Marx put it, a fetter on — the development of science. If investigation of scientific questions is funded by the rulers primarily if it will increase their profits or enhance their war-making ability or other needs related to maintaining their class dominance, the vast majority of questions that arise cannot gain their backing, and few women or men can afford to devote the time and effort to pursue them without such backing. Furthermore, at a deeper and less easily detectable level, even with respect to those investigations that are permitted, most scientists apply an inadequate range of levels of scientific analysis. Without necessarily realizing it, their scientific thinking suffers from a pervasive capitalist outlook on the world that is far too narrow to conquer the problems. This narrowness of outlook pervades virtually all aspects of science in capitalist society and only serves the interests of the ruling class by preventing the more profound questions from being asked, such as “Why are we poor?” or “Why do workers from different countries or religions often hate and try to kill each other?” As an example, most scientific handling of major public health issues — such as AIDS or TB or Mad Cow or other infectious diseases — is confined to looking for the microscopic agent of the disease (a virus or a bacterium or some other agent), the place where it was originally transferred from animals to humans, what causes it to spread and drugs and other methods that can combat the disease. The findings that result from these investigations may be perfectly valid as far as they go, yet, at a social level, scientists fail to recognize that the underlying root of the disease lies in capitalist class relationships and the extreme impoverishment of the vast majority of the world’s population that these relationships require. The scientists are therefore blinded to the reality that until capitalism is “cured,” diseases such as AIDS, TB or parasitic diseases can at best be limited in one location or another but can never be eliminated from the earth. And now let’s proceed to discuss evolutionary theory, a theory that first arose in the younger days of capitalism and continues to be developed, but today is still under attack from fundamentalist religious forces.

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EVOLUTIONARY THEORY The science of evolution is central to science in general, particularly because it is fundamentally about qualitative change. Fundamentalist religious attacks on evolution underscore the central importance of religion as a weapon in the hands of the capitalists, particularly because the last thing the capitalists want is change – i.e., change in the current form of social organization in which they alone rule. And Creationism and Intelligent Design are nothing if they aren’t a statement that once the various species were created they have never changed. We discuss religion more fully below, but here we discuss the essential features of evolutionary theory. We also briefly discuss the evidence that led Darwin to confirm the fact that evolution has taken place, and to discover what he thought to be its primary mechanism, natural selection. There are basically two different levels of evolution: microand macroevolution. Microevolution refers to changes within a species that can happen over time from sheer random effects called drift or from natural selection in the face of changing environments or other forms of selection, such as intentional selection by animal breeders or lab experimenters (more on this below). Macroevolution, on the other hand, refers to the emergence of new species out of old ones — qualitative change. Darwin was particularly concerned with the macro level, though it can only be understood in its relationship to the micro level. There are many excellent and manageable reviews of evolutionary theory — for example, see Eldredge, Arthur, Carroll or Ruse. Of course, Darwin is also an unbeatable source on the original theory, but the more modern works contain information on the progress since Darwin.

Who was Darwin and what was the theory he presented in 1859? Charles Darwin, born in England in 1809, started as a geologist, as well as an Anglican minister, who trained himself to be a naturalist and who observed detailed facts of nature with a keen eye. Everywhere he traveled he kept a notebook in which he recorded thousands of details. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge about the earth and its rocks and mountains, as well as about plants and animals all over the world. In his early twenties he took off on a 6-year voyage on a ship called the Beagle that traveled around the world, spending much time in South America and the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Ecuador. It was only armed with this vast knowledge that he was able to detect patterns to which those with lesser knowledge and experience were completely blind. Such knowledge, gained by long and

77 laborious study, is a prerequisite to insights that chart new pathways in science. Surrounded by predominantly creationist thinking in the first half of the 1800s, Darwin gradually developed the insight that there had to be some natural process that explained many facts that seemed unlikely to be the work of a supernatural creator with a mind and with goals. For example, he wondered why two different species of rheas lived in neighboring parts of southern and western South America. (The South American rhea resembles the African ostrich and the Australian emu, the class of large flightless birds.) He saw in that pattern something similar to the way fossils of long dead creatures were trapped in layer upon layer of earth and rock. Neighboring regions contained different species, with similar species succeeding each other in layers of rock that were more and more superficial and therefore had been laid down more and more recently. His insight led him to suppose that, rather than all these creatures having been created at the same time by “God,” they seem to have been created at different times and in different places, which cried out for an explanation. He didn’t think it likely that “God” would have bothered to lay down such a pattern across neighboring places, and certainly, he thought, “God” wouldn’t have laid successive species across successive portions of time. He also noted that plant and animal breeders were able to select plants or animals for certain desirable features and selectively breed them to develop purer breeds. Of course, in order for breeders to be able to select different features that they desired, there had to be a certain amount of variation among the various cows or crops or dogs to begin with. For example, cows that gave more milk, or crops that yielded more food per acre, or dogs that could herd sheep. After many generations of selective breeding, different varieties of cows or dogs arose. Just think of the many breeds of dogs, all of which belong to the same species and can interbreed, barring such physical difficulties as might be faced by a Great Dane and a Chihuahua. Darwin wondered if an analogy to this selective breeding could happen in nature without anyone’s trying. He found that tremendous variation did indeed exist in nature ready to be selected. He also guessed that if selection could lead to different breeds ultimately becoming so different from one another that they could no longer interbreed. If this occurred then new species would have arisen. The definition of “species,” as with all definitions, has some fuzzy edges (i.e., contains exceptions), because the real world has fuzzy edges. As a rule, for animals at least, species is often defined as a group within which interbreeding can take place between pairs of opposite sex, but outside the group no interbreeding is possible. To sharpen the definition it is often added that in order to be a species the group must share common ancestors. However, there are exceptions to this definition, as is true

78 for all definitions of things in the real world. For example, lions and tigers are different species, but they can mate. Furthermore their offspring are usually not sterile, i.e., they, too, can reproduce. Horses and donkeys, likewise, are different species but, while they can mate, their offspring are usually sterile, though not always. Nature contains exceptions all over the place, but this should not prevent us from using definitions that are good for all practical purposes. We can always examine the exceptions separately and learn even more from them. In that regard, definitions are like proofs. They can be valid for all practical purposes yet always will have limits of applicability. As one philosopher has said, it is impossible to pick the precise moment when day turns into night, or night into day; nevertheless no one has any trouble distinguishing night from day. Indeed they are as different as night and day. Darwin realized, not long after his return from the Beagle voyage, that this could happen through something that he logically termed natural selection, as opposed to deliberate human (artificial) selection. And such change in the appearance, size and behaviors of different varieties would constitute microevolution, i.e., change. Recognizing the reality of evolution itself was not so difficult. It was the problem of how microevolution could lead to new species (macroevolution) that occupied most of Darwin’s mental efforts. Once he came up with an answer he was afraid to publish it, for fear that he would be forever barred from the halls of science, particularly since it not only flew in the face of current scientific thinking, but also in the face of religious teachings. However, about 20 years later in the late 1850s Darwin received a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace proposing the same theory of natural selection. It was then that he decided to write and publish his major book On the Origin of Species, which came out in 1859. But being scrupulously honest, he first jointly published a paper with Wallace the year before, laying out the theory and giving Wallace full credit for his similar discovery. In his book Darwin enlarged on the details and tried to anticipate all the objections he could think of and answer them in detail. As it turned out, over 40 years earlier a U.S. physician, William Charles Wells, had put forward an essentially similar theory of natural selection, but Darwin had not heard of it until he had already published three editions of his book. In the fourth edition he gave Wells credit for the much earlier discovery. This coincidence of independent discovery by more than one person is not at all unusual in science. Rather it is the rule when the times are right for a discovery to take place, and take root. However, in this case Darwin’s book went far beyond both Wells’s and Wallace’s thinking. He even disagreed with Wallace on certain aspects. One important disagreement was whether natural selection was the

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main mechanism of evolution, as Darwin maintained, or the only one, as Wallace claimed (Gould). Unfortunately one of the weaknesses in Darwin’s book lay in his admiration of Thomas Malthus, a political economist and also another Anglican clergyman who was born some 43 years earlier than Darwin. Malthus theorized that since food production increases more slowly than the human population, creating shortages and famines, increasing numbers of people would starve to death. In other words, competition among people for scarce food supplies would play a key role in determining who would survive. His premise was completely false. Among other errors, with advances in the science of food production over 200 years later, increases have not only kept up with population, but can exceed its growth. The only thing that creates starvation among large sections of humanity is capitalist production for profit instead of for need. However, from Malthus’s hypothesis, and from the competition of capitalists that he saw all around him, Darwin drew the false conclusion that all plants and animals are engaged in a competition against each other for survival, with only the conquerors surviving. Following the publication of Darwin’s theory, Herbert Spencer an English philosopher, extended the theory to human society, which later came to be called social Darwinism, in which he justified dog-eat-dog capitalist competition as no more than a reflection of nature. Interpreting natural selection in this way, Spencer coined the term the “survival of the fittest,” which is a completely unnecessary part of the theory of natural selection, but which even Darwin adopted in a later edition of his book. The survival of the “fit” is all that is needed at most, and for animals who help each other, such as humans, the definition even of “fit” has to be expanded greatly. But this type of unscientific thinking led directly to eugenics toward the end of the 1900s and to Nazi genocide half a century later.

What is the proof that biological evolution has taken place? Since then there have been many forms of confirming evidence for evolution and for natural selection as one of its major mechanisms. Aside from the fossil patterns and neighboring regional patterns, other examples of evidence for evolution by natural selection include the following: • Fruit flies, that reproduce new generations in a few days and are therefore useful for laboratory experiments on breeding, have been made to develop increasing levels of alcohol resistance by the deliberate selection of surviving flies in higher and higher concentrations of alcohol to breed the next generation. • Antibiotics are known to drive the creation of new varieties or species of drug-resistant bacteria by

THEcommunist killing all bacteria except for those that somehow become equipped with a change that renders the antibiotic impotent against them. The development of drug resistance is a major medical problem in the world for treatment of often fatal infectious diseases, such as TB or certain forms of staph. • Embryos of vastly different species, such as fish and humans, go through similar stages of development, such as arches on either side of the neck that in fish turn into gills and in humans into the jaws, the small bones of the inner ear, and the bones and cartilages involved in speech. • Limbs and other body parts of various vertebrates (animals with spines) are similar in the numbers and arrangements of bones, such as in fins, arms and legs, and wings (called homology). • DNA is found in the cells of all living (and extinct) creatures from bacteria to roses to palm trees to ants to mice to pigs to lions to humans. • Furthermore the amount of difference between the DNA of two different species parallels the amount of difference in their sizes and shapes — in other words, the more one species has evolved away from another the more the DNA has changed, and conversely the closer two species are to each other in size and shape the closer their DNA structures are. • Successive generations of moths in industrial England, as the soot from factories darkened the trees, turned a darker color for camouflage from birds that eat them, and this change reversed itself in areas where pollution was lessened. (This example actually turns out to be far more complicated than that and has been the subject of a large amount of experimentation, observation and controversy among biologists over many decades. But most, if not all, of them agree that, while there may be more factors involved in the unquestioned evolution of moth coloration over time, nevertheless all these factors illustrate natural selection at work. Reality has unlimited complexity, and the struggle to understand more and more of the involved factors illustrates the ongoing process of science — which, as we said above, is a method rather than a body of knowledge.) This is just a small sampling of the various pieces of evidence that take us beyond a reasonable doubt that evolution really takes place, and that not all species were created at the same time. Indeed, if not all members within a species are created at the same time — for example, your great grandparents were created before you — why should it be that all species were created at the same time? There have been many new discoveries that have revolutionized the science of evolution since Darwin’s

79 time, things about which he knew nothing but in broad outline may have had some suspicions. For example, he knew that there must be something that was passed from generation to generation through impregnation, since he needed to explain why offspring look much more similar to their parents than to other members of the species or to other species. But he didn’t know anything about genes or chromosomes or DNA or the genetic code that translates from DNA to proteins. These were discovered in stages, from the mid 1800s when Darwin wrote to the latter part of the 20th century, a hundred and fifty years later. Because over the last 150 years there have been so many independent types of confirming evidence for evolution, and more continue to be discovered every day, the fact that all forms of life today have arisen out of earlier forms and were not created at the same time has, for all practical purposes, been proven. In this case, we might add, beyond a reasonable doubt.

How does natural selection work? So far we have explained the essential features of evolution, and now we will explain the essential features of natural selection. Examples help to illustrate the process. Sickle cell anemia occurs when one gene that is involved in the construction of hemoglobin undergoes a mutation that changes the DNA and hence the structure of the hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the molecule that occupies our red blood cells and carries oxygen from the lungs to everywhere else in the body. The hemoglobin that results from this particular mutation causes deformity of the red cells into the shape of a sickle (a crescent-shaped instrument used to cut grass and grains) rather than the normal disc shape. The sickle shape hinders the passage of the cells through small blood vessels and causes a painful decrease in oxygen supply to various parts of the body in those people who receive the mutated gene from both parents. Furthermore before treatment was developed, they tended to die young. Those who have the gene from only one parent generally live a full life, and do not sickle to the same degree. They are said to have sickle trait rather than sickle cell disease. This mutated gene was allowed to spread in various populations where malaria exists because a little bit of sickling prevents malaria from making one sick, for reasons we won’t go into here. So people living in areas where malaria is widespread – mainly the eastern Mediterranean, India, and West Africa – and who have one mutated gene from one parent but a healthy one from the other parent will be protected from malaria and will survive long enough to produce children. In areas free of malaria the mutated gene had no chance to spread in the population because non-sicklers would generally survive to adulthood, and they and their children would be a much larger portion of the population than sicklers, who might die young. But in areas with malaria,

80 death of non-sicklers from malaria allowed the protected sicklers to spread throughout the population. So malaria is a selection pressure that favors sickling. Thus that which is a relative advantage in one environment (sickling in the presence of malaria) is a relative disadvantage in another environment (where malaria is absent). This process in no way suggests intelligent design, but rather illustrates natural selection. A second example, which is just a hypothesis (educated guess) at this point, requires further research and evidence before it can be accepted as fact. The proposal is called the Slaveship Hypothesis of hypertension (high blood pressure). Black citizens in the U.S. have higher rates of hypertension than other ethnic groups, in part caused by higher sensitivity to salt intake and retention. To explain this fact it has been suggested that the Middle Passage, in which black African men and women were stolen from their native lands and brought to the Western Hemisphere under unimaginably gruesome conditions in slave ships, constituted selection pressure for those who were able to retain salt and thereby prevent dehydration and death. Those who were less able to retain salt, according to the hypothesis, were much more likely to die on shipboard, leaving those with higher salt retention as survivors who made it to land and into slavery. Their descendants then have, again according to the hypothesis, higher rates of salt retention and consequent hypertension. Whether or not this turns out to be true, only time will tell, but the thinking behind it does illustrate the process of natural selection. It does not take into account much higher levels of stress caused by extreme racism, which also contributes to greater levels of hypertension. In summary, the essence of natural selection is that those members of the population who have forms of genes that are incompatible with the environment tend to die young and fail to produce children, allowing those with forms of genes that are compatible to increase their proportion of the population. It is important to note that natural selection continues to play a role all the time, including the present. Thus any particular body configurations or capabilities that are at least in part based on gene differences and that allow the possessors of those body configurations and capabilities to live long enough to breed, or have more offspring for whatever reason, and to live long enough to raise their offspring to childbearing age so that they too may have offspring, will eventually come to predominate in the species in any particular environment that favors those configurations or capabilities. This, however, is still microevolution.

What causes macroevolution? But what causes new species to arise, macroevolution? Darwin thought, and it is still a widely accepted explanation among biologists, that if a small number of

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members of the species were somehow separated from the main group, and in these new surroundings found sufficiently different environmental features, such as different types of available food, they would be under different pressures to evolve in different directions. He assumed that this was the way the various species of finches, mockingbirds, tortoises and lizards on the various Galapagos Islands (separated by tens of miles) developed differently on these different islands. After enough generations of evolution took place under different environmental conditions, the two groups of what were originally members of the same species would develop enough difference from each other that even if brought back together they could no longer interbreed. Then a new species would have arisen from this small group (so-called founders) that somehow got separated from the main group. Meanwhile the main group, i.e., the ancestral species, might continue to exist even as its descendant species now exists. Thus while hominids (a succession of various forms of human-like species) evolved from chimps hundreds of thousands of years ago, nevertheless chimps continue to exist as an ancestral species alongside of its descendant species, us, while earlier hominids happen to be extinct. So the result of this entirely natural process, without any goal and without any mind or being that can summon up a goal, is the emergence of species and features of species that are said to be adapted to the environment that the species finds itself living in. The great height of the giraffe, for example, may be an adaptation to reaching the high leaves on the trees or to seeing lions at a great distance before they are attacked or to some other advantage, in the sense that it developed in response to one or another advantage, over many generations. Then as a result the height is now a characteristic of each member of the species. What happened to the species as a whole over time became the property of each member of the species. Looked at from the outside, one can easily imagine that this could also have been attained by a supernatural being with a goal in mind of allowing the giraffe to feed off the high leaves or to detect and avoid lions or to accomplish some other goal. The fallacy in ID thinking is the illusion that, just because one can imagine this happening through a supernatural being with a goal in mind, it did in fact happen that way. They, of course, apply it also to much more complex structures than great height, claiming that there are no intermediate steps that they can imagine to account for the final outcome, but the point is the same. But their lack of imagination is not the stuff of which science is made, although it is part of the stuff of which arrogant ignorance is made.

THEcommunist Cleverness in the absence of knowledge leads to dead ends Science is hard work, years and years of persistent investigation and cooperation with many others investigating the same phenomena. But the scientific method is more than just hard work. There used to be, and may still be for all we know, a shelf in the library at the Harvard College Observatory reserved for what was called crank literature. These were self-published essays (no respectable scientific journal or publisher would print them) by very clever people trying to show how, for example, Einstein’s special relativity theory was all wrong. It’s not that these authors weren’t clever and not that they didn’t do a lot of creative thinking, it’s just that they didn’t understand the theory they aimed to debunk. The work they failed to do was to study, and come to understand, special relativity theory. So their arguments were aimed at strawpersons. They were debunking a version of the theory that no one would have defended. This, in effect, is what the ID people do when they debunk a false version of evolutionary theory, though it is difficult, without more investigation than is worth the effort, to know when they themselves are just ignorant of it, or when they are simply lying and relying on the fact that most of their audience will be untrained in the theory. Either way the outcome is the same.

THE ID ATTACK ON EVOLUTIONARY THEORY So what’s the fuss coming from the IDers? As outlined in the second section of this pamphlet on the recent history of ID, in at least a temporary concession to their losses both in court and at the ballot box so far, rather than demand that the teaching of evolutionary theory be removed from the schools altogether, they now demand that ID be taught alongside evolutionary theory as an equally valid approach to biology. The basis of the claim of equal validity is twofold: a) First, IDers claim that evolutionary theory is just that, namely a theory, and not a fact, and b) second, IDers claim that a creationist explanation of how the biological world got to be the way it is today is just as scientific as evolutionary theory. In answering these claims, this section necessarily recaps and summarizes some of the above discussion of evolutionary theory. This may incidentally help the reader to understand it better.

Is it true that evolution is “just” a theory and not a fact? First, on their claim that evolutionary theory is just that, namely a theory, and not a fact. As we have seen, this is absolutely false and relies on a common misunderstanding

81 on the part of the lay public. There is little in the world that is as completely proven fact as evolution, i.e., that all plants, animals (including humans), and fungi have evolved over time out of ancestral forms and are traceable all the way back to bacteria, and even before cells to molecules of varying complexity. The theory behind it –called the “theory of evolution” – is not the statement that all life has evolved from earlier forms, but rather an explanation for how that took place — i.e., the mechanisms of evolution, natural selection along with other processes discovered more recently. Darwin first cemented the fact of evolution and provided the initial form of the theory. Since Darwin, voluminous evidence continues to confirm the fact of evolution more strongly than ever. As to Darwin’s proposed theory, it has undergone tremendous evolution and advancement. This is precisely the way science progresses. Scientific theories are not inert, but rather are continually changing bodies of ideas — changing, of course, through the efforts of scientists working in that particular field, and through new discoveries that these efforts produce. This change usually does not involve complete rejection of prior forms in favor of newer forms, but on rare occasions it can mean just that. The scientific process usually involves refinement, development, clarification, reinterpretation of meaning, and so on. This continual change is a result of the use of scientific methods for attempting to understand the real world. The real world is the final arbiter, and all theories, whether in physics, chemistry, biology, history, or what have you, are constantly undergoing questioning, extension, and, when found to be necessary, revision, either partial or sometimes complete. The continual questioning of everything is central to the scientific process, even though it is not applied consistently by all scientists all the time. Questioning often leads to controversy, out of which progress can be made. Questioning and controversy are major strengths of the scientific process in all areas, but IDers single out evolutionary theory to exploit the questioning and controversy as though they were weaknesses. They dishonestly jump into every controversy, or as yet unanswered question, to claim that this shows the falseness of evolutionary theory. Nor do they hesitate to declare to the unwary listener that even those questions that have been answered with voluminous evidence are still in the jury room. But as we have seen, one of the things that signifies a stronger scientific theory is the degree to which it generates new questions that require new answers.

Is it true that Creationism or ID is just as scientific as evolutionary theory? The IDers claim that their explanation of how the biological world got to be the way it is today is just as

82 scientific as evolutionary theory. Unlike within science, questions and challenges to the creationist or ID position rarely if ever come from within, though there are plenty of challenges to it from those in opposition. The creationists’ defensive answer to any and all challenges, as with all religious outlooks, is generally very flexible. In general, it takes the form that “God” can do anything, and we cannot know what “God” intended. In this fashion no challenge can conceivably succeed in changing or developing the outlook, which fact alone takes Creationism/ID out of the running for a scientific theory. Only when some group within the creationist/ID outlook, often centered around some individual, wants for their own power reasons to branch off and form their own outlook, is there controversy. But this kind of controversy is not subjected to the test of reality. The very lack of questioning or testing from within the outlook leads to a lack of development, refinement, and extension of Creationism and ID. This lack of development is the very antithesis of science. This static position, if nothing else, demonstrates that ID is not, in fact, science and therefore has no place in the science curriculum in the schools. While the concept that “God” created all the creatures, along with the heavens and the earth, in one short period of time, may have resulted from someone’s inductive insight way back when, nevertheless it does not produce deductive predictions that can be investigated experimentally or observationally. For this reason, too, there is no conceivable evidence that could either confirm or disconfirm it. This too keeps the outlook from being subject to modification and therefore from being scientific. Creationism is a dead-end concept that offers no basis for its own further development, let alone the further development of the science of biology. As a result of the emptiness of Creationism and ID, its advocates, rather than advancing their own outlook, spend all their time trying to find fault with evolutionary theory. They are little different from the church during the European renaissance hundreds of years ago whose position of authority was threatened by the discoveries and theories of Galileo and many other scientists and philosophers.

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thousands of makers who developed it piecemeal over many centuries, each with a goal or purpose in mind. But this development was based on a lot of trial and error, with each improvement based on the recognition of a defect in the way it was currently functioning. This trial and error also happens to parallel the way the mechanism of natural selection works — getting rid of less successful stages in favor of more successful stages when they happen to occur and are genetically inheritable. Less or more successful, that is, in whatever environment, or so-called ecological niche, the population happens to find itself. It is a principle of dialectical thinking that success can never be judged independent of context, since something successful in one environment may be unsuccessful in another, and vice versa. In contrast to the watch, the eye did not have a developer, or developers, with any goal in mind. However, it did develop in many stages, though IDers claim that it is so perfect that it could not have happened in stages, since, they argue, intermediate stages would not have survived natural selection. This is the “argument from incredulity” (unwillingness to believe). The “argument” goes: since we can’t imagine this happening, it must not have. Darwin himself anticipated this non-argument and answered it in The Origin of Species. He showed the way the eye might have developed by examining its various rudimentary stages in a variety of still living species of animals. For example, the eye could easily have begun with light sensitive nervous tissue that was then organized into cells arranged to detect the direction from which the light was coming, and then organized into focusing apparatus that functioned to provide clearer images, and then muscles to control the focusing and the movement of the eye toward different directions. The cells covering the light sensitive cells at some point became transparent to visible light, and so on. The fact that Darwin anticipated this objection almost 150 years ago is not because he could see that far into the future. Rather his contemporaries were making the same objection. ID therefore, has made no progress whatsoever in the last century and a half, unlike the science of evolution which has evolved tremendously, as discussed above in the section on evolutionary theory.

What is ID’s major argument against evolution, and what’s wrong with it?

What’s so perfect about the human body?

The basis of ID is the concept that such well adapted biological features as, for example, the eye couldn’t possibly have arisen through accident in a spontaneous way. The eye is too detailed and too perfect for it to have developed without an intentional being with a goal in mind. This was what Reverend Paley (mentioned above) was thinking when in 1802 he likened the eye to a watch. Of course, a watch did develop at the hands of a maker with a goal in mind. Or more precisely, a watch had

An additional point is that the eye is not, in fact, as perfect as all that, in either its structure or function. After all, consider the number of people who have to wear glasses for either close or distant vision, the common eventual clouding in the lens (cataracts), the almost inevitable inability to focus as we get older (presbyopia), macular degeneration, and other disorders. Also consider the lump of jelly behind the lens (vitreous) that can function as a cushion for trauma and protect the light-sensitive cells

THEcommunist in the back (retina), but does so hardly better than the water that fills the anterior part of the eye, and worse yet, the vitreous commonly gives us annoying floaters and eventually detaches from the retina in almost everyone as we age, with the risk of tearing the retina and even pulling it loose (detachment) with consequent blindness. Of course, people have learned to fix much of this surgically, but then there is no dispute that people apply intelligent, or intentional, design. The dispute is over whether there is a non-human intelligent designer. Other problems with the eye are, first, that a huge variety of animals – including horses, giraffes and cattle, for example – have eyes on opposite sides of their heads that see in different directions from each other. This means that, while they can see in all directions at the same time and be warned of possible dangers, they have no stereoscopic vision, i.e., no significant capability of depth perception. Humans and many other animals, on the other hand, have stereoscopic vision, because our eyes are in the front of our heads and both eyes can see the same thing at the same time. But we can’t see behind us to warn us of silent dangers approaching. A more intelligent design would be that both horses and people possess both capabilities, perhaps requiring a third eye in the backs of our heads. But even more fundamentally arbitrary is the assumption by IDers of a particular motivation on the part of the intelligent designer. If giraffes, for example, have eyes on either side of their heads and are tall enough to detect lions before they have a chance to sneak up close enough to capture them, in whose interests did the intelligent designer design? Clearly not the lion’s in this case. If lions have eyes in front of their heads so that they can judge the distance to the giraffe and sneak up close enough to capture them, the designer did not have the giraffe’s interests in mind. Only a natural process in which each of these two species is forced to fend for itself and develop its own characteristics can be part of the development of the giraffe’s ability to detect and outrun and the lion’s ability to sneak up and capture. Of course, the IDers will undoubtedly respond that the intelligent designer decided to let each species fend for itself – an example of the infinite flexibility of the outlook to fit whatever objections arise, but which robs it of any explanatory power whatsoever. It also reminds one of the glee with which the ancient Roman slave-owning ruling class threw gladiators into the arena and watched them fight to the death – the opposite of a working-class outlook. Still other problems with the eye are that human retinas, unlike those of certain other creatures, are sensitive only to a particular range of the electromagnetic spectrum, that portion commonly referred to as “light,” but not to x-rays, radio waves or infra-red, for example. Therefore humans are unable to see much in the dark. In fact, the

83 very definition of “dark” is the relative absence only of visible light, but not necessarily of other ranges of the spectrum. However, humans have been able to develop a fix for that weakness in the form of x-ray detectors, radios, or infra-red goggles (although, as with many capitalist inventions, the latter have been developed primarily for the purpose of killing, i.e., police or military use). Human bodies in general suffer from similar imperfections. Other examples include our immune systems, which help us to fight off bacteria or viruses or other things that make us sick. The immune system is an extremely complex set of cells and cellular products such as antibodies that do a fair to middling job in many cases, but need help in the form of antibiotics in a lot of cases. On the other hand, the immune system can also be our enemy. There are many diseases in which our immune systems attack us instead of the bacteria/viruses. Allergies are the most common example, and they can range from bothersome to extremely serious. There are also autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis that can cripple and cause severe pain and dysfunction. Also the main reason we treat strep throat with antibiotics is to prevent the development of antibodies to the strep that also attack certain cells in our own kidneys. Cancer is yet another example in which our bodies attack us. All cancers have in common that some of our own cells either lose or block those molecular mechanisms that keep their multiplication in check. Instead the cells grow wild, eventually taking over some of our vital organs, preventing them from functioning properly and eventually resulting in our deaths. The heart is subject to arrhythmias, vertebral discs to oozing into the spinal canal and squeezing on nerves with excruciating pain and immobilization, hips and knees to degeneration requiring replacement, and so on. And there are hundreds of other examples that could be given of the imperfections of our bodies.

How intelligent is the supposed “intelligent designer”? Furthermore why is it that an “intelligent designer” didn’t give us natural watches or clocks? We have only the crudest timekeeping response to the 24-hour day, which mainly involves the pineal gland in the back of our brains. Why did we have to fill the need for accurate and precise timekeeping through our own inventions and improvements? It would seem that if there were an intelligent designer of the eye, of the immune system, of the timekeeping organ, either she/he/it would definitely be an underachiever (to borrow from Woody Allen) or she/he/ it has some mischievous goal in mind for us. Either way, this is hardly the work of a benevolent and intelligent creator. The concept of goal or purpose arises from universal

84 human experience, in which all humans, and no doubt certain other animals to some extent (a subject of extensive research), have the experience of deciding we want to bring about some change in our surroundings, or even in ourselves, and then setting out to make it happen. The ability to have a goal or purpose is peculiar to humans (and, again, certain other animals), but not to trees or snails or mountains. Goal/purpose acts in an interesting way, in which, as Marx said, we are capable of erecting a building first in our imaginations and then in fact. In this way our imagining the building is the beginning of the process, while the building that we imagine is at the end of the process toward which we strive. In a sense this reverses the natural order in which things happen, with the final product existing at the beginning of the process (in our imaginations) and the starting (imagined) building existing at the end in reality. In this way, the imagined building is one of the contributing causes of the actual building’s development, as contributing causes always precede their effects. Much of what humans do is based on a decision of what outcome we desire. But extrapolating this ability to some type of non-natural being doesn’t necessarily make it so. There are many ideas we can extend beyond their real limits that are not necessarily possible in fact. We can, after all, imagine that we can fly without airplanes. The attribution of goal or purpose to nature is called teleology. Teleology is the concept that things happen because of some outcome, which reverses cause and effect. The first syllable, “tel-,” means “end” in Greek. IDers advance many other arguments against evolution, but they all amount to the same thing. In particular, they are all based on a profound ignorance of evolutionary theory and the overwhelming observational and experimental evidence for it. Rather than take up more space here, we refer the reader to a book that answers hundreds of such arguments in detail (Isaak).

The enemies of science within the fields of science The erroneous outlook that characterizes ID has its counterparts within the fields called science, particularly in biology. It is not simply ID that attributes goal/purpose to some unnamed being; much science writing suffers from a similar defect. The main difference is that ID looks to an outside source of power (“God”), while certain scientists (lots of them) look to internal sources (DNA). This is particularly true of the field of Sociobiology (SB), which is now called Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a name switch brought about for much the same reason as the switch from Creationism to Intelligent Design – namely, to evade their critics. Advocates of SB and EP maintain that complex behaviors

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have been “programmed” into our genes through natural selection over hundreds of thousands of years. These include, they claim, such complex behaviors as rape, aggression, fear of snakes and aversion to incest. They are sometimes called “nativists” because of their claims for innateness of these behaviors in infants at birth. The essential feature of nativist concepts is that the relationship between genes and the rest of the organism that possesses the genes is a one-way street. That is, the genes direct the rest of the organism’s development and behavior, but, according to them, the organism and its experiences have no effect on the genes—or at least no effect once tens of thousands of years have “programmed” the genes. By adhering to dialectical principles we are reminded to avoid such errors of one-way thinking, and to regard the one-wayness alone as sufficient to render any conclusions derived from it false. As we said above, the concept of a “God” who works in mysterious ways, and whose motivations are hidden from us, is an infinitely flexible way to answer any question as to why such horrors as slavery or genocide occur. The assumption by nativists that natural selection has programmed complex behaviors into our genes is likewise infinitely flexible. It yields plausible sounding answers to questions as to why people do certain things. But the nativists do not regard it as their responsibility to find evidence that these complex behaviors are indeed determined or directed by our genes. Furthermore they use the counter-scientific tool of unconstrained assumption, without searching for, or even granting that there could be, alternative explanations. Thus they get failing grades on both the deduction and induction fronts (Buller, Blumberg). The outlook of these nativists (within science) and that of the creationists/IDers (outside of science) are more alike than different. True, the nativists will ridicule the IDers to demonstrate their intellectual superiority, but they fail to see how similar they are to the targets of their ridicule. Some of them also have a tendency to ridicule their scientific opponents, the scientists who do respect the need to supply evidence and who do respect the need to evaluate alternative explanations before they can settle on one over another. But while nativists have much in common with IDers, since they labor within the field of science they are even more dangerous than the IDers. After all, as we discussed above, millions of voters have thrown the IDers and creationists out of office. But unfortunately most scientists are willing to treat the nativists as though they deserve the time of day. So just as we are forced to debunk the IDers, we cannot ignore the nativists. (See the Summer 2007 issue of PLP’s THE COMMUNIST MAGAZINE for reviews of books by and about nativists.)

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RELIGION AND SCIENCE Scientists and religion Many, though not all, professional scientists are religious. Many believe in a “God.” Many attend church or synagogue or mosque. They, like everyone else who is religious to some degree, look to “God” and to religion for comfort, guidance in their social lives, meaning in their lives, and so on. This is particularly true at times of personal tragedy, such as the loss of a family member or severe illness or danger. All of these are important human needs, and religion sometimes appears to be the best way to satisfy those needs, whether for professional scientists or not. However, religion is not the only way to fill those needs. In particular, communists and many workers and their allies today look to friends, family, and other class allies for comfort and for guidance, rather than to their minister, rabbi, imam, or “God.” Indeed, religionists often look to these sources as well. And to find meaning in one’s life there is nothing more meaningful than devoting one’s life to the liberation of the working class from wage slavery and its attendant atrocities, for the sake of present and future generations. And even more important, religion does not eliminate poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, racism, wars, or prevent levees from breaking or bridges from collapsing. If anything religion only makes these avoidable horrors more acceptable. It is important to distinguish between the concept of “God” and the organized institution of religion. They are separable entities. After all, some religions have no concept of “God,” such as Buddhism, Jainism or Sikhism. Some worship one “God,” such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism. And still others have multiple “Gods,” such as Shintoism and ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman religions. Conversely the concept of “God” arose prior to the organization of religion. Later it was simply adapted by some organizers of religion for their own needs. When early nomadic hunters and gatherers, and later sedentary agriculturalists, sought explanations of patterns they noticed in nature, such as day and night and the seasons, the idea came easily that there was something or someone out there orchestrating these things. After all, they were able to organize things into patterns themselves, so it was not much of an extrapolation. But this concept of an unseen being preceded organized religion. In fact, the hypothesis of a supreme being may be regarded as one of the earliest forms of science. After all, at least they were asking the question, How did this come about? And asking the questions, as we said above, is 90% of the battle in science.

85 Agnosticism versus “atheism” Scientists who believe in “God,” like other people, have various interpretations of what “God” is. But the concept comes down to some non-natural or supernatural entity. When those who practice the scientific method from 9 to 5, so to speak, believe that there is a “God” or at least consider themselves to be agnostic (i.e., don’t know whether there is or not), they are either being inconsistent or they are at least unnecessarily limiting the domain of applicability of the scientific method. Consistency certainly plays a major role in science, as the discovery of inconsistency drives many a questioning and revision in science. Still other scientists and many other people, including many communists, believe in the non-existence of “God” and consider themselves “atheists” (we will explain the reason for these quotation marks momentarily). A common justification for agnosticism, as opposed to “atheism,” is the statement that while there is no scientific proof of “God’s” existence, neither is there proof of “God’s” non-existence. So some scientists, as well as others, believe themselves to be agnostic and don’t take a position, leaving it to others. This only reflects the lack of a thoroughgoing adherence to scientific method. The problem here is not only that there is an absence of proof that “God” exists, but there isn’t any scientific reason to believe in that existence. In other words, the burden of proof, from a scientific point of view, should not be on those who doubt or deny the existence of “God,” but rather on those who believe in “God’s” existence. The reason that the burden is, in fact, placed on “atheists” is that the power of organized religion, backed by the political and economic power of the ruling classes throughout the ages, gives them the ability to decide where that burden is to be placed. This brings us to the reason we put “atheism” in quotes. The very word is forced on us by the power of organized religion (backed by the political and economic power of the ruling class). That is, a-theism, meaning not theism, defines the position that there is no “God” in terms of what it is not, namely not theist, not “God”-believing. It would be more scientifically valid and consistent to term the belief that there is no “God” something like “naturalism” and use the term “a-naturalism” for the belief that there is a “God.” In today’s world that might seem like the tail wagging the dog, but the class power relationships will not always be the way they are today under exploitative class society. And in any case it is scientifically more justifiable terminology.

The Bible and its inconsistencies As to the reasons to doubt the Bible’s account of history, consider how it came to be. The concept that it was through the leaders of organized religion getting a direct communication from “God,” i.e., divine revelation to the

86 self-anointed few, comes from precisely those self-anointed few. Why should anyone believe them? In fact, until the printing press was brought to Europe in the 1400s from China (where it was invented several hundred years earlier), regardless of how the Bible was first written, each time it was copied it was hand written by monks and other clerical personnel. Furthermore it was only translated into English for the first time in the late 1300s. It was previously only in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. Over the next two centuries numerous other versions finally culminated in the still popular King James version in the 1600s. Each time it was copied or translated, as in the game of telephone, it was amended to accord with the biases of the copier, translator, or in the case of the King James Bible the sponsor. As various Protestant groupings split from the Catholic Church and from one another, over and over, these biases reflected the self-interests of new competing sets of self-appointed religious leaders. After countless rounds of such copying and retranslations from the ancient languages, it is no wonder that the various versions contradict each other. Without going into the hundreds of thousands of examples of inconsistencies in one or another version of the Bible (see, for example, Isaak, p. 211), suffice it to say that there is no reason to take anything it says as “gospel.” In fact, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the New Testament, which all purport to describe the crucifixion of Jesus, contradict each other perversely in many details. It is ironic that the word “gospel” therefore has come to stand for “truth.” There can only be one truth, given the existence of a real world, even if there can be as many, and perhaps more, different feelings about or interpretations of events as there are interpreters. From these various interpretations we struggle with each other and with the real world to come closer and closer to the truth about the real world, but only if we have a materialist approach. And the many versions of the Bible represents the JudeoChristian religions but not the huge numbers of religions outside the centers of Europe and the U.S. Religion divides the world into factions that are led by their masters to kill each other for the gain of the masters. “God-JehovahAllah” is on our side, say both the opposite parties to a war. Science, on the other hand, is an international effort, constructed and organized as a way of arriving at internationally accepted theories of everything from atoms to galaxies, from biology to geology. However, science under capitalism suffers from severe and detrimental aspects of competition (consider the Nobel Prize, for example), even if competition sometimes speeds up the process, as well as limitations on what research is promoted, or even allowed. More often than not, competition drives scientists, in their haste to publish or in their need for a job with job security, into blind alleys. In contrast, in science, as in all human endeavors, there are also tremendous elements of cooperation.

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Capitalists, who as a class rule the world today, thrive on domestic and international competition, while the working class, who are about to rule the world tomorrow, thrive on international cooperation. Under communism, science will no longer need to involve competition. Cooperation will then rule the day. This will make possible much greater progress in all areas. Then the pressures driving the process forward will be the needs of humanity yet to be satisfied – the relief from poverty, illness, hunger and danger.

The role of proof in agnosticism Agnostics demand absolute proof that there isn’t a “God” in the real world apart from the concept in the minds of humans. We have discussed the nature of proof above under the topic heading “How are evidence and proof related?” in the section “What is science?” In particular, we pointed out that there is no such thing as absolute proof, but only proof for all practical purposes. There is no absolute proof that ice can never catch fire, or that the sun will not continue to rise tomorrow for at least the next several billion years, but no scientist, and very few others, would claim agnosticism based on that lack of proof. Rather they would firmly deny that it could happen. What then is the source of this sudden invoking of agnosticism when it comes to the non-existence of “God”? It is the overwhelming peer pressure within modern societies around the world and the millennia of organized religion that create the illusion that there may be a reason to believe in the existence of “God.” We have been putting the word “God” in quotes for two reasons: 1) because there are vast numbers of concepts of “God,” and no one single concept to which the word refers, and 2) because the concept of “God” exists without a “God” in the real world. Among the more famous modern scientists who believed in some concept of “God” was Einstein. In objecting to the prevalent interpretation of quantum mechanics, namely that nature is at root probabilistic and has no definite characteristics, he famously retorted, “I don’t believe God plays dice with the universe.” Was he being metaphorical or literal? Apparently literal, since he also said that he believed in some kind of a Supreme Being that created the universe, but that he had no idea what the Supreme Being was like otherwise. Those scientists who maintain that the only really scientific approach to the question of “God” is agnosticism justify that position on the grounds that there is no proof either way. However, they are attributing to the concept of proof in this instance a quality that they never demand of it in other areas of life – absoluteness. As we have discussed, proof is never absolute, but rather it has the quality of being acceptable for all practical purposes.

THEcommunist The comedian George Carlin puts it in a lighter vein. He explains that he was doing a controlled experiment to see if “God” answers prayer. So he first prayed to “God” and then he prayed to Joe Pesci. He found that the results were “about the same.” Even comedians can be scientists, and vice versa. Of course, prayer can give psychological comfort to the one who prays if she/he believes in “God,” but it cannot play a causal role in bringing about a desired outcome, except perhaps through strengthening one’s resolve to act to bring it about. Whenever the desired outcome does in fact arise independent of the actions of the one who prays, the relationship between prayer and outcome is coincidental. Coincidences, after all, are not only all around us, but they are the things that we tend to notice. We often fail to notice those much more common occasions when the desired outcome fails to arise. This common phenomenon is known as selective perception.

The source of a claim and the content of a claim In addition, even before the issue of proof arises, in order to be accepted, a concept must be reasonable. For example, just because someone maintains that a flying saucer landed in her/his cornfield, and she/he can produce several witnesses to confirm it, doesn’t mean we have to believe it. More fundamentally, it doesn’t mean that it is true. The best way to approach reasonableness is from two directions, namely is it a reasonable claim and, if not, can we find a cause for someone to make such a statement? If we feel that the claim is reasonable we might demand evidence, though as we have pointed out, particular pieces of evidence are confirmation but there may not be enough evidence to constitute proof (for all practical purposes). The less reasonable a claim is, the more independent types of evidence we may demand before we consider that there is enough evidence to constitute proof. Conversely, the more reasonable a claim is, the fewer types of evidence we demand as proof. If we feel that a claim is not reasonable, can we provide an explanation of why the claim might have been made in the first place and of why so many witnesses were willing to confirm it? The farmer who saw the flying saucer might have misinterpreted certain natural phenomena, such as the breaking up of light from the setting moon by mountains on the horizon and airwaves that caused flashing in different colors, interpreted as lights on a space ship. This might also explain why so many witnesses confirmed it. Or the farmer may be a liar or a publicity seeker, with the witnesses having been paid off. Either hypothesis, of course, requires evidence. Sufficiently persistent investigation into these speculations should produce a way to tell which is correct.

87 Can “fifty million Frenchpersons” be wrong? There is an expression, “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” that comes from a musical of the 1920s by the songwriter Cole Porter. It means that if a large enough number of people believe something, it must be true. But if they all derive their belief from the same source, and the source is unreliable, they can indeed all be wrong – all fifty million of them. There is a famous fallacy in logic called the fable of the Emperor of China. Could one determine to a high degree of accuracy the height of the Chinese Emperor by asking every one of his millions of subjects how tall he is? This would certainly constitute a tremendous number of pieces of evidence. But the fallacy is that these pieces of evidence are not independent types, or even independent from each other within the type, since an impression of the Emperor’s height would likely be part of the popular culture, even for those who never laid eyes on him. So the number of pieces of evidence is then irrelevant. Besides, there is no necessary connection between how tall people who have never seen him think he is and how tall he actually is. This introduces an error in the estimates that is undeterminable, without comparing them to the Emperor’s actual height. In that case, however, who would need the opinion of the millions of people? An explanation for why so many people believe that an all-powerful, benevolent “God” exists outside of the collective minds can only be found in the study of the history of religions and “God” worship. It is precisely this history that the creationists demand not be questioned or studied. And with good reason, because in that history might be found the explanation of why so many people believe in “God” even if “God” doesn’t exist in the real world. Of course, a concept of a “God” does indeed exist in the minds of millions of people, now and throughout much of history, and as a result in many cultures, but that does not mean that “God” exists outside of those minds and cultures, i.e., in the real world.

The history of religion is the history of a powerful priestly class We have to study the history of religion to learn why it is that so many people believe in a “God” for which there is no evidence outside of the minds of people, and outside the statements that these minds produce. When we do so, we find that religions, including the concept of “God,” are always organized by a class of clerical persons who assert their power over the vast majority of humanity as the main, if not only, links between people and “God.” Indeed the original translators of the Bible into English were opposed and sometimes burned at the stake by kings, queens, and popes, who wanted to keep complete control of the “Word of God” and conceal the hidden reality from

88 the masses of common people (Bobrick). The recent scandals over sexual abuse of children by members of the Catholic clergy reach into various orders, such as the Franciscans, Carmelites, and Jesuits, and are resulting in hundreds of multimillion-dollar out-of-court settlements. It is not just the higher-ups in the various religious hierarchies, or the early creators of the various religious orders, who have been aware of their power over their millions of followers. Even thousands of individual members of the clergy are aware of this power and often bend it to their own use, in what almost everyone would agree are ghastly criminal pursuits. Once we understand that the concept of “God” has always been a tool in the hands of the priestly class that arose when class societies arose, a tool to wield power over the rest of the population and attain great wealth thereby, we realize that, other than millennia of overwhelming peer pressure, there is no reason to believe that there is a “God” outside the mind (Blech). Then the only scientifically consistent position is the belief that there is not a “God” outside the minds of people. That is, the only scientifically consistent position is naturalism (so-called “atheism”), rather than agnosticism. In the battle between science and religion it is important to remember that battles are not fought by ideas, but rather by people holding those ideas, or more accurately in today’s world, by social and economic classes. Behind every great battle of ideas is class interest. The capitalists have a stake in one set of ideas and the working class in another set. Changing the real world from capitalism to communism is in the interest of the working class and against the interest of the ruling class. It may take some searching to find under the table the class whose interests any particular idea serves – in particular, to find the connection between that particular idea and the need to change or keep the world as it is – but with enough effort it can be found. Religion, all religion, and the belief in “God” are ideas pushed by the capitalists to protect their class power by blinding the working class to our need to be strictly scientific in our approach to managing the problems we have as workers and in changing the world to a communist egalitarian society that will serve the interests, for a change, of the working class and not our exploitative and oppressive enemies, the capitalists.

Within religion there are some progressive aspects, but not enough to count An apparent exception can be found, for example, in liberation theology. Liberation theology is a development in the Catholic church in Latin America, involving priests who side with the working class against the capitalists, but at the same time do so to counter the influence of Marxist revolutionaries. Two famous 20th

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century examples, out of many, are Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador, and Dom Helder Camara, a Bishop in Brazil. Archbishop Romero was assassinated in 1980 by the Salvadoran ruling class for his advocacy on behalf of the poor working class. Bishop Camara is noted for having said, “When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are poor, they called me a communist.” Coming from the Brazilian ruling class, this was not, of course, intended as a compliment, nor did Bishop Camara consider it as a compliment, though we would regard it as one. However, it was an undeserved compliment. This illustrates the constraints inherent in religion, since Bishop Camara, as admirable as his advocacy for the poor working class may have seemed, not only had no solution within the confines of religion for our oppression as a class but actually stood opposed to any revolutionary attempts to organize the working class to solve our own problems. The only possible solution is the transference of political and economic power from the oppressive capitalists to the liberated working class. And the only possible agency of that transference is the working class itself, led and organized by communists to see the need for communism and motivated with the readiness to fight a collective armed struggle to bring it about. The ideological bonds of religion and the illusion that, under such clergymen as Archbishop Romero and Bishop Camara, the church can alleviate the suffering of the working class, both serve as major obstacles to liberation from that suffering. Unless a well-meaning clergyman/woman leaves the church, denounces its harmful restraining effects and joins the working class in organizing and carrying out a revolution for communism, that clergyman/woman, in fact though not necessarily in intent, is an enemy of the working class. Indeed, many PLP comrades work in church groups on reform issues that other members of the congregation, and occasionally the clergyman/woman, are willing to struggle around, such as the fight against racism or to end the U.S. terrorist war on Iraq. But in so doing the comrades always strive to win the others to see the need to join PLP and fight for communist revolution, as the only way that can succeed in winning and holding even the reforms that they all want to bring about.

To change the world the working class needs science, not religion As to the relative validity of science and religion for understanding the real world and how to change it, religion consists of a body of ideas, while science consists of a body of ideas along with a method of confirming their truth, and changing those ideas when necessary. The one that will serve better to change the world and help us to escape poverty, war, racism, sexism and genocide is

THEcommunist science. The one that will serve better to handicap us in changing the world and to tie us to the present state of affairs is religion. Communists strive to convince the working class of the enslaving quality of religion and to overthrow its ideological hold, as it hampers the development of the revolutionary movement. However, understanding that ideas that have been systematically instilled for millennia will not disappear in hours, communists also struggle patiently first to win workers to join in building a revolutionary movement, maintaining their religious ideas if they must, but attempting to show each step of the way how battles with the ruling class might have been strengthened were it not for the chains of religion. Communists strive to persuade workers that religion is our enemy, not to outlaw religion. The capitalists lie when they claim that the Soviet Union, where the working class had seized political power, outlawed religious ideas. Once a revolution for communism has succeeded in breaking the iron grip of the capitalists on the world, it will certainly come to pass that those attempting to regain power will again try to push religion as one of their weapons. That organized attempt will most certainly be outlawed, but this does not mean that religious ideas will, or even could, be outlawed.

THE WORKING CLASS MUST DEFEAT THIS ATTACK ON SCIENCE As we said in the opening sentences of this pamphlet, the most important function of science for the international working class is that, without understanding and grasping science, we cannot hope to achieve our liberation from the atrocities of capitalism. This pamphlet was written therefore not just to answer questions about ID and about science, though we have tried to do that in brief outline as best we can in such a limited space. It was mainly written as part of the struggle by PLP to convince members of the working class, students and soldiers of the need to destroy capitalism with armed revolution and to institute the egalitarian system of communism in its place, and, to begin with, to convince workers, students and soldiers of the need to join the PLP to help lead that revolution. We hope we have begun to convince the reader that science is a tool that can be seized by the working class for the making of this revolution, and for making and keeping the world livable once the revolution has put the workers and our allies in the driver’s seat. The capitalist class and other exploiting classes before them have appropriated the means and ideas of science for the purpose of extending their profits and for the purpose of maintaining their violent control over the rest of humanity. But then the capitalists appropriate (steal) everything that workers produce.

89 Creationism, Intelligent Design and all religion, fundamentalist or not, is a tool in the hands of the capitalists for our continued exploitation and oppression. Because of this, the working class has an absolute need to resoundingly defeat them and their ideological hold over us. This means, in the first instance, that each of us needs to come to understand at least the elements of science and how it works, and to begin to put it to conscious and collective use for the purpose of organizing the revolution. We have a responsibility to our families, friends and class to master the elements of science, even if at first we don’t need to understand relativity theory or quantum mechanics in all their gory details, or even all the ins and outs of evolutionary theory. However, it is more important for us to understand evolutionary theory than to understand relativity theory or quantum mechanics, because evolution is about change, and change is about revolution. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics can wait awhile. Some day, after the working class controls the schools and every institution in the world, the understanding of relativity theory and quantum mechanics can also become the property of everyone. This will, incidentally, bring that much closer the day that these theories will be replaced with even more accurate theories. Once the mental chains of capitalist ideology begin to wash away, we will all be able to achieve the understanding of any complex theoretical material with fewer and fewer of the burdens produced by false assumptions that creep into everything we try to learn. Then there will be many more of us to investigate how nature and society work, and to develop more and more accurate theories to explain them, as well as to change them. There is no short cut to liberation. To paraphrase Mao Zedong, a past leader of the Chinese Communist Party, revolution is no tea party. Neither is the struggle to understand what science is and how it works. But all it needs is the motivation provided by a vision of a new world, one free of racism, sexism, exploitation, war and genocide. It is the striving for such a world that can give life meaning, without the need for religion to supply an imagined satisfaction of that very human need. The only way to defeat ID and all other enslaving capitalist ideology is in the course of the struggle for communist revolution, and in its ultimate achievement all around the world. Join us in this monumental effort now. We have a world to win, and to understand.

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References For a more in-depth explanation of dialectical materialism, see http://www.plp.org/pamphlets/ jailbreak.html.

Buller, David, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

For a more thorough discussion of religion from the communist point of view, see http://www.plp.org/ pamphlets/religion.html.

Carroll, Sean, The Making of the Fittest, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2006.

For reviews of books by and about nativists, see THE COMMUNIST MAGAZINE, http://www.plp.org/thecomm/ summer07.pdf. Arthur, Wallace, Creatures of Accident: The Rise of the Animal Kingdom, Hill and Wang, New York, 2006. Beller, Mara, Quantum Dialog, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London, 1999.

Conner, Clifford D., A People’s History of Science, Nation Books, New York, 2005. Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species, originally published in London in 1859, but many versions published more recently. Eldredge, Niles, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life, W. W. Norton & Company, New York/London, 2005.

Blech, Arthur, The Causes of Anti-Semitism: A Critique of the Bible, Select Books, Inc., New York, 2005.

Gould, Stephen Jay, “Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace,” in The Panda’s Thumb, W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 1982.

Blumberg, Mark, Basic Instinct: The Genesis of Behavior, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2005.

Isaak, Mark, The Counter-Creationism Handbook, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 2005.

Bobrick, Benson, Wide as the Waters; The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired, Penguin Books, New York, 2001.

Ruse, Michael, Darwinism and its Discontents, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006.

Bohm, David, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1957.

Smolin, Lee, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston/New York, 2006.

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a progressive labor party periodical • Summer 2008

R E W O P G N I K R O W the ! S S CLA

to

table of contents Work In Basic Industry Key To Fight For Communism

1

China Bashing Simply a Smokescreen for US Bosses’ Weakness

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A History Of The Work At DC Metro

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Workers Sold Out by Union Hacks . . .Need Red Leadership

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CHALLENGE Networks: Source Of Pro-Communist Organizers Our Class Needs

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My New Factory Job

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Building Worker-Student Alliances Key To Fight For Communism

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Operation Dixie

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1968: How 10 Million Workers Shut Down France

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Use The Power Of The Working Class To Fight For Communism

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“Internal Contradictions Are Primary” A Key To Revolutionary Dialectics

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Bosses’ Will Need More Soldiers for Imperialists Wars

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published by CHALLENGE PERIODICALS, GPO 808, BROOKLYN, NY 11202

online version available at WWW.PLP.ORG

what we fight for J PLP fights to smash capitalism–wage slavery. While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim”communism is dead,’ capitalism is the real failure for billions all over the world. The Soviet Union and China returned to capitalism because socialism maintained too many aspects of the profit system, like wages and divisions of labor. J Capitalism inevitably leads to wars. PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers to turn these wars into a revolution for communism. This fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat requires a mass Red Army led by the communist PLP. J Communism means working collectively to build a society where sharing is based on need. We will abolish work for wages, money and profit. Everyone will share society’s benefits and burdens. J Communism means the party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers – eventually everyone – must become communist organizers. J Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of race. J Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women workers. J Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one party.

JOIN US!

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PLP

Work In Basic Industry Key to Fight for Communism Recently, young PLP members began work in nonunion subcontracting factories. Being new to the industry and these particular factories, they had to learn their jobs and make friends among their coworkers. As they gained confidence and valuable experience, mainly from the insights and help of their coworkers, they were in a better position to begin to think more seriously about building the Party in their shops. What does it mean to do revolutionary communist work in the factories? For one thing, it means building a secure network for CHALLENGE, Progressive Labor Party’s revolutionary communist paper. These CHALLENGE networks of readers and distributors, particularly among young black, Latin, immigrant and women workers, can lay the basis for recruiting new members and developing new communist leaders in basic industry. These networks can also have a profound influence on the future direction of the class struggle. Revolutionary yardsticks, like expanded CHALLENGE networks and recruitment of young leaders in industry, will tell the tale. We are in a difficult period. The collapse of the old communist movement has left our class without the revolutionary leadership needed to steer the class struggle toward revolution. Recruiting and training new communist workers to organize their shop mates to respond to every attack, will prepare our class to break the chains that bind us to this murderous racist system. A difficult period does not mean we can’t do useful political work, even work that will eventually be decisive. The young comrades, with help from their coworkers and Party collectives, modestly increased their networks of CHALLENGE readers and sellers in the plants. At the same time, thousands of CHALLENGES were sold and distributed outside the plants and in working class neighborhoods. They began to engage their fellow workers in more frequent political discussion around local and global issues. They wrote up some of these discussions for the paper. Social events with coworkers became more frequent. Study groups were started and class struggle initiated. They collected money to support striking union workers and built anti-racist support for the Jena 6. There are two trends among the workers. One was seen in the major U.S. auto contracts last September. The UAW staged a series of short “Hollywood” strikes, as in “just for show.” Contracts passed that cut starting wages by twothirds and more than 100,000 jobs and dozens of factories

were sacrificed. At the same time, in the past year workers struck a Northrop Grumman ship yard that supplies the U.S. Navy, Navistar workers struck who build engines for the armored Humvees in Iraq, and 3,600 American Axle workers struck for three months against wage cuts that halved their wages and eliminated 1,000 jobs. In all three strikes, workers were open to PLP’s revolutionary communist outlook. In no small part, the fate of revolution relies on our ability to understand these seemingly contradictory trends. Revolution is impossible if PLP is not anchored in industries like these. The U.S. industrial working class is more non-union than at any time in recent history, plagued by cynicism and passivity, but where PLP is able to have an effect there are workers who are receptive.

The General Climate In Which We Must Forge A Winning Strategy We must prepare for a long struggle with escalating attacks caused by sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry. More and larger wars loom on the horizon. The demise of the old communist movement and the relative decline in U.S. political, military and economic strength adds fuel to the fire. Millions of lives depend on building the Party, its press and our revolutionary communist movement. U.S. imperialism must insure this march to broader war regardless of who wins in November. Their world dominance is being challenged from all quarters. The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Brookings Institute, the main ruling class think tanks, “are undertaking an ambitious initiative to develop a nonpartisan blueprint for the next U.S. president, one which can be used as a foundation for the new

THEcommunist

administration’s Middle-East policy.” (CFR web site) The CFR team has representation from each of the three leading camps: Sandy Berger (Clinton), Zbigniew Brzezinski (Obama), and Brent Scowcroft (McCain). Both electoral parties and all the presidential candidates plan to win us to broader war—perhaps with Iran next. These broader wars, and eventually world war, require sharpening racist attacks on the working class even as we build their weapons and staff their army. No candidate opposes these attacks. U.S. bosses are forced to move towards fascist oppression—even as they bray about fighting for “democracy.” Limits, dangers and opportunities present themselves. Cynicism and passivity, though far from absolute, still dominate the workers’ outlook. Dead-end voting has replaced class struggle for all the union mis-leaders, spreading to many of the rank-and-file. At the same time, sharpening conditions have pushed big sections of the industrial working class to reconsider their options. The reaction of union strikers to our revolutionary line and the recruitment and expansion of CHALLENGE networks in the non-union aerospace shops show revolutionary leadership can be built in this period. Progressive Labor Party’s valuable experience building a revolutionary communist base in industry, sharpening class struggle and recruiting new communists over the last 30 years can continue during this period of low class struggle.

Racist Attacks: Non-Union Subcontractors, Assembly Plants Trigger Harsher Working Conditions “Toyota has only one unionized assembly plant in the United States. All the same Toyota is going to set the pattern for the entire industry—wages, benefits pensions—you name it.”—David Sedgwick, editor of Automotive News. Until recently, ruling class strategists pointed to the financial assets of U.S. banks and investment houses to predict economic dominance for the foreseeable future. Indeed, “profits from the financial sector now account for 31 percent of total corporate earnings—up from 20 percent in 1990 and 8 percent in 1950. Profits from financial engineers now far exceed those generated by mechanical engineers.” (New York Times, 11/11/2007) Today, more of these financial profits come from hedge fund speculation. The recent credit crisis makes it painfully clear this speculation can’t be sustained without creation of large amounts of surplus value. Workers create all value, not speculators. The value of an automobile or airplane is greater than the sum of the parts that make it up. The amount of labor in production determines the increase in value. The boss can’t appropriate this extra value until he sells the product. Marx called this, “Exchange.” Exchange itself

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doesn’t create any value. As exchange becomes less connected to value creation, it turns into speculation. One boss can make money at the expense of another, but no value is created in the exchange. That’s what hedge funds are all about. Eventually the house of cards collapses if no extra value is created to back up these financial “tools.” Compare this to China—an emerging imperialist competitor. Until recently, U.S. “experts” questioned China’s economic viability. They warned Chinese banks carried too many “non-performing” loans. China Investment Corporation, the state-run investment fund, will spend two thirds of its $200 billion assisting Chinese banks. The percentage of “bad” loans has already dropped by half. Chinese imperialists got this capital from exploiting workers in their vast, rapidly expanding manufacturing sector. They can get away with it because capitalist leaders long ago hijacked the communist revolution, turning it into another exploitative capitalist nightmare. U.S. bosses have responded by trying to rebuild their industrial might on the backs of super-exploited black, Latin, immigrant and women workers. They’ve shifted production from union plants to non-union subcontractors, which employ disproportionately large numbers of these super-exploited workers. Today, the overwhelming majority of industrial workers slave under harsh conditions in non-union plants. Moving up the “food chain,” corporations set up nonunion assembly plants. While union auto plants in the Mid-West are being scrapped, non-union foreignowned transplants are opening throughout the South and Southwest. The much-discussed Air Force tanker contract paves the way for the first non-union aerospace assembly factory—the Northrop Grumman plant in lowwage Mobile, Ala. If approved the average Alabaman machinist makes about half that of senior Boeing machinists in the Northwest. Northrop will subcontract to 40 plants in southern California representing 7,500 jobs at lower wages still (see chart). To add insult to injury, the bosses are proposing a low-wage, non-union southern aerospace corridor through Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. Lowering the cost of weapons by attacking industrial workers has been a long-held goal of the Pentagon. The southern U.S., all the way from the Southeast to the West Coast, has become a vast region of superexploitation. The long history of racism dating back to slavery led to a non-union, lower-wage Southeast. Add to this, the expansion of immigrant labor all the way to Southern California. We’d be fools if we allowed the bosses’ to divide us—black from Latin, from immigrant, from white. Racist super-exploitation is the wedge the bosses have

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used to drive down the wages and working conditions of all industrial workers. Chrysler just announced it will “replace [10.000 additional] workers with new hires earning about half the salary of their predecessors.” (New York Times, 1/29) General Motors is following suit. New hires at Boeing’s union plants average $12.72 per hour, less than half that of their more senior coworkers. Rather than mounting an anti-racist fight-back, union mis-leaders have helped the bosses drive unionized workers conditions down to the level of non-union workers, all in the name of “beating the competition.” Last year, Ford eliminated 32,000 higher paying jobs. Now the company is pushing “buyouts” on its remaining 54,000 hourly workers to “pave the way for new hires at $14 an hour—roughly half that of current pay.” (New York Times, 2/26) The UAW VP for Ford, former “radical” Bob King wrote the introduction to Ford’s brochure, “Fresh Opportunities,” pushing the buyouts saying, “There just aren’t enough jobs for everyone.” The 8-week Navistar strike last winter further exposed these social-fascist union leaders. Unionized workers no longer make up the majority of Navistar’s workforce. The UAW contract ended on October 1. The union leadership waited until the 23rd to call a strike, giving the company time to shift crucial war production to non-union plants in Texas, Mississippi, and Mexico. Without unity between union and non-union workers, the strike was doomed from the get go. Industrial unions are more closely tied to the imperialists’ interests than ever. The IAM and the United Steel Workers brought the biggest bosses, their strategists and union leaders together in “Surge Roundtables” to map out plans for a war economy. The nationalist, patriotic pro-capitalist union leadership is trying to save their masters and stay in business. Mainly they are trying to secure industrial workers’ loyalty. The IAM organizing logo features an American flag and an armed soldier declaring “Machinists: Defending Our Freedoms – Defending Our Jobs.” Every shop steward’s jacket features a flag shoulder patch. Not that bowing before the altar of capitalism has worked all that successfully to date. The industrial unions are but a shadow of their former selves. Even as the absolute number of industrial workers has remained relatively stable, union membership has plummeted. United Auto Workers union (UAW) membership has slipped below 500,000. The IAM is trying to railroad through a dues increase because it has only 420,000 dues-paying members. The United Steelworkers union (USWA) is smaller still. Each of these unions had well over a million—some approaching 2 million—members at one time. In 1976, truckers were 60 percent unionized. In 2005, the figure stood at 25 percent. Overall, only 7.5% of the private sector is now unionized. These numbers could get worse as recession takes hold.

PLP

The attacks on the U.S. working class are brutally racist, severe and mounting. Even so, these attacks cannot alone maintain the U.S. imperialist’s top-dog status. Toyota is now the number 1 auto producer, not GM. U.S. industry is being challenged and often beaten in one category after another. Russia has rebuilt its war industry, while becoming an energy juggernaut. Most agree China is now the biggest manufacturer, while Germany holds the title of biggest exporter of machine goods. The U.S. bosses have reached the point were they must reign in their international competitors. Bigger, bloodier oil wars are in the cards. U.S. bosses must secure Mid East oil if they hope to blunt the advance of emerging imperialists like Russia and China. Imperialism’s contradictions cannot be resolved peacefully. The illusion that we can elect someone who can peacefully resolve imperialism’s contradictions disarms us. War, eventually world war, will determine which imperialist rules the roost.

Fight Racism, To Build A Communist Base Among Industrial Workers The collapse of the old communist movement was a terrible blow to the working class, but not a fatal one. The greater attacks and inter-imperialist conflict is not only creating many casualties, but also the possibility of winning larger numbers of workers to the conclusion that this system must be smashed with communist revolution. With the critical ingredient of revolutionary leadership, Russian workers seized power during WWI and the Chinese working class did the same after WWII. Inter-imperialist rivalry has accelerated the emergence of a largely non-union industrial workforce. Many Latin immigrants in these shops come from a left-wing tradition, while black workers there have historically led some of the most militant fights against the bosses. We can’t advance without rejecting the bosses’ racist propaganda that blames immigrant workers in non-union subcontractors for the lowering of wages. It is the bosses’ racist system of wage slavery that must be destroyed. We have to bring our revolutionary communist politics to both union and non-union settings. The Russian revolution and the resulting international communist movement inspired mass class-consciousness among workers that advanced anti-racist unity and class struggle. However, the fight for socialism and its many concessions to capitalism undermined this international movement. Rebuilding a revolutionary movement based on fighting directly for communism requires anti-racist unity between union and non-union workers to rebuild this class-consciousness. Fighting racism is key to building a serious revolutionary force among industrial workers.

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CHALLENGE networks expand the potential for leading class struggle as our political and personal relations with the workers deepen. Anti-imperialist activity at the point of [war] production will up the ante. Super-exploited union and non-union workers can sharpen the struggle in the mass organizations that claim to fight racism and the war. The millions of immigrant workers in industrial sweatshops can help expand our international revolutionary work. The effect of Red-led workers on everything from shop fight-backs to political marches, from anti-immigrant racism to racist police terror, can help put revolution on the agenda. Tactics may differ somewhat in union shops, but success should be measured in a similar way. Communists must ask themselves how many more readers and sellers of CHALLENGE came out of strike activity? Did the union election bring more workers closer to our revolutionary communist line or into the Party? How much time do we spend with workers off the job—particularly with younger black and Latin workers whose working conditions resemble those of their non-union brethren? Did solidarity resolutions and anti-racist Jena 6 proposals spread antiracist class consciousness and communist ideas among our fellow workers? Communists should fully expect the bosses to attack even modest efforts to bring revolutionary communist politics to industrial workers. In large part, U.S. imperialisms’ survival depends on hoodwinking the industrial working class and our sons and daughters in the armed forces. On the other hand, red-led industrial workers and soldiers mark the beginning of the end for the bosses. We can’t rely on spontaneity to defeat these inevitable attacks on our Party. We will need workers to step up in the face of these assaults. Where will these new revolutionary forces come from? Those workers involved in our CHALLENGE networks will be the most likely to see the political stakes and follow the Party’s lead. Selling CHALLENGE regularly in our plants, building unbreakable personal ties and being involved in the class struggle, will prepare new workers to step up. These networks are central to the long-term approach necessary to make a revolution.

Steeling the Working Class For The Future PLP can’t predict exactly what U. S. industry will look like in 10-20 years. The trend to non-union facilities may

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continue, or the big bosses may again promote unions to better control class struggle. Either way, we have to invigorate our political work now in both union and non-union factories, mines and mills. The present day weakness of unions is not the determining factor for our revolutionary work. Union or non-union, conditions will worsen because of the increasing challenges to US imperialism. Traditional union plants will look more like non-union subcontractors as younger workers in both kinds of factories make similar wages and face similar conditions. PLP’s industrial work has shown that we can initiate class struggle, start study groups, find new readers, sellers and members among this super-exploited workforce. Building on the Party’s experience organizing in the garment industry and with migrant farm workers, these young comrades have shown that they can turn the bosses’ racist super-exploitation into an opportunity to build a mass communist movement. But the working class is still in a difficult period. Hard work yields modest results. Not much can be accomplished anywhere without close personal and political friendships built over time. Sharp struggle against racism, imperialism and, bringing the fight of non-union workers to the shop floor and union hall at the heritage plants will expose the social fascist union mis-leaders. A persistent focus on base building, CHALLENGE networks and recruitment are the order of the day in both union and non-union plants. The same yardsticks mark the path to revolution in both kinds of factories. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of our class depends on recruiting and training new young industrial workers in the art of revolutionary communist organizing. We must anchor our Party in these industrial plants—particularly among the young super-exploited black, Latin, immigrants and women that make up an increasingly large number of these workers. With our feet on the ground and our eyes on the prize – build a base among the working class, sharpen class struggle, recruit to the Party -- the working class can produce the leaders necessary to win a communist future.

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China Bashing Simply a Smokescreen for US Bosses’ Weakness In the summer of 2007, as the current election cycle began, politicians and trade union sellouts began pointing fingers at China. Bush accused China of illegally subsidizing its exports to the US. The AFL-CIO demanded even more action against China to undo the loss of unionized manufacturing jobs in the United States. And Democratic politicians at the August 2007 AFL-CIO candidate forum repeatedly denounced China for manipulating (“undervaluing”) its currency and its holdings of US debt in order to hurt the US economy and thus American workers. Joe Biden denounced China as holding “the mortgage to our house,” a clear allusion to the foreclosure crisis that was hitting many American workers. But the problems of American workers are not the fault of China. Rather they are caused by the US bosses obeying the general laws of capitalism as a whole. The attacks on China must be seen for what they really are—part of the current competition between inter-imperialist rivals and an attempt to win US workers to support their bosses in a future war with China. Myth 1: The loss of jobs to China and elsewhere is the result of a Bush agenda. Much of current anti-China rhetoric implies that the loss of unionized jobs and the rise of China as a rival is a product of the Bush administration and its links to “corporate interests.” Certainly Bush is tied to US corporate interests, but so are the Democrats. The growth of imports from China and elsewhere is the joint product of Democratic and Republican programs over the last forty years, including the tariff reductions and the Border Industrialization Program of the Kennedy administration, NAFTA and the granting of permanent normal trade relations to China under Clinton, and China’s admission to the WTO under Bush. Politicians fromboth parties are the tools of the capitalist class. Just look at their cabinets. Financiers from the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which is a key proponent of the free trade agenda, have played important roles in both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Stephen Friedman, chairman of Bush’s National Economic Council, and Henry Paulson, Bush’s current Treasury Secretary, all came into government from Goldman Sachs. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the

Democratic frontrunner, and Republican John McCain are supported by Goldman Sachs, and other large banks. To evaluate the loss of unionized jobs, one must go back to the 1950s. The loss of jobs is part of the on-going effort of capitalists to increase their profits by lowering wages and by speeding up and intensifying work. This includes moving within the United States as well as overseas, pitting native-born, immigrant, and overseas workers against each other, always with the aid of Democratic and Republican politicians and pro-business laws promoted by both parties. In the immediate post-World War II era, auto bosses and others began to move outside of the cities that had been unionized in the struggles of the 1930s. By moving into more isolated suburbs they hoped to contain struggle, and even to build allegiance to US capitalism by providing for home “ownership.” In the 1970s and 1980s, meatpacking companies which were confronted by militant, unionized black workers in Chicago, began shutting down production there to reopen in places like rural Iowa that had been hit by agricultural crisis. There they got tax breaks for creating “new jobs” and hired native-born American workers at minimum wage. As the meatpackers expanded production in these rural areas, they eventually faced labor shortages that they solved by recruiting immigrants, including refugees from US imperialist wars in Southeast Asia and Central America.

1, At the same time RCA began to speed up and intensify production in Indiana. In 1956, the value added per worker per hour of work was $5.65, in 1967 it had risen to $8.61, and then it soared to $27.71 in 1977 (all figures in real terms). In 1977, wages accounted for only 6.4 percent of the price of an RCA television. Indiana RCA workers produced 4.83 TVs per worker per day in 1986, and 9.72 TVs per worker per day in 1992. The plant was closed in 1998. See Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves. 2.The New York Times, July 26, 2007.

THEcommunist General Electric began moving production from the northeast in the 1960s, first to the US South and then to factories elsewhere. RCA, after facing strikes in the 1960s, moved some production to Tennessee and even more to Mexico where it could take advantage of Kennedy’s Border Industrialization Program. In 1998, RCA (by then owned by GE) shut down all production in Indiana, despite the profitability of the line.1 Makers of computer chips, of clothing, of toys and other products have all done the same, moving factories from the US to Mexico and then to China. In the 1970s, Mattel (which originally manufactured “Barbie” in Japan) opened factories in Mexico and Haiti and then became the frontrunner in the move to China. Now Mattel makes 65 percent of its toys in China, over half in factories that it owns and manages.2 Despite all this movement of factories, US manufacturing production increased in the 1990s, including growth in industries such as electronics, chemicals, steel, auto and textiles. The number of manufacturing workers remained relatively constant: In 2000, the number of manufacturing workers in the US (17.3 million) was somewhat higher than in 1965 (16.6 million) though lower than the peak year of 1979 (19.4 million).3 US capitalists and their policy makers were determined to keep important manufacturing jobs at home to protect military production. But workers’ lives suffered as bosses moved to increase profits by intensifying the exploitation of the working class. The location of jobs changed, which decimated working-class life in many Midwestern cities, and the nature of the jobs has changed, especially as unionized jobs have been replaced by non-union jobs in low-wage subcontracting shops. Conditions for the working class have worsened since 2000 because of the laws of capitalist competition. Although in 2007 the US was still the world’s largest manufacturer, US capitalists face increasing challenges from their rivals.4 In auto, for example, as each company attempted to grab a larger share of the market, the capacity to produce cars soared. By 2003 world auto capacity hit 77 million cars and light trucks a year. But they could only sell 56 million vehicles.5 In the face of this competition, US auto companies lost market share. As a result they have cut wages and increased layoffs. Wages are falling, unemployment is increasing, and those unemployed are without jobs for increasingly long periods. Despite the lies in the press about job creation, 3. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Real Gross Domestic Product by Industry in Chained (1996) Dollars,” http://www.bea.doc/bea/dn2/gpox.htm; Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Historical Employment: Employees on nonfarm payrolls by major industry section,” ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb1.txt. While the number of manufacturing workers has remained steady, the percentage of all US workers who work in manufacturing has fallen because of the soaring growth of the “service” sector. The growth of the service sector is not uniquely American, but is occurring in all advanced industrial/imperialist countries as every aspect of daily life is brought into the wage labor/profit system. 4. In 2007, the US produced $1,738 billion in manufactured goods. Japan was #2 with $952 billion and China was #3 with $760 billion. But the US was only the third largest exporter of goods, producing around 9% of all exported goods (down from 50% right after World War II). The Euro area and Germany took first and second places, with China and Japan coming in at fourth and fifth. The Economist, Pocket World in Figures, 2008 Edition 5. Bruce Stokes, “A Potholed Path for US Auto Industry,” Council of Foreign Relations, 8 March 2003; “Extinction of the Predator,” The Economist, 6 February 2005.

6 unemployment hovered near 14% and the official number of people employed in manufacturing declined to between 14.3 million and 15.3 million workers. 6 By February, 2008, the number working in manufacturing had fallen even further 7 as US bosses continue to lay off workers. As unemployment and foreclosures continue, US bosses and their politicians will intensify the blame game—claiming that Bush or the Democrats or China created the distress workers are feeling—to distract workers from looking at the real enemy capitalism itself. Myth 2: China is stealing jobs by unfairly manipulating its currency and the US debt The argument that China is deliberately undervaluing its currency to keep up exports (and indirectly undercut American production) came from a 2003 paper by three Deutsche Bank economists. It has been picked up by the AFL-CIO and some in Congress, who have been calling for the imposition of tariffs on Chinese-made goods However, other banks and think tanks like the Institute for International Economics have rejected this argument as false. The values of modern currencies, including the dollar, have been set by governments and by the market since the 1970s when the US went off the gold standard. There is no clear way to determine the “fair” value of any currency. IMF economists, for example, have estimated that the undervaluation of the yuan could range from 0 to 50% depending on whose method of calculation is chosen. The American bank Morgan Stanley uses 15 different models to value currency, 4 of them on the yuan, and finds that the yuan is at most 1% undervalued.8 [for more on value of money see box below] In fact, China has been allowing its currency to increase in value over recent years, and has increased its exports to Europe more than to the United States, both facts that belie the claims of the China bashers. The other part of this argument points to the growth of Chinese holdings of United States national and private debt and suggests that such holdings are a potential political threat to the US economy. From 1997 to 2006, China’s holdings of US debt grew by $140 billion. In that same period, the US debt grew by $720 billion, and by far the largest holders of this debt are the oil producing states not China.9 China, in fact, has little choice but to hold on to 6. The larger figure includes estimates for the number of workers hired by temp agencies, and thus counted as “service” not manufacturing workers by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The use of temp workers in manufacturing increased from 34,000 in 1972 to 707,000 in 1997. The number of temps is even larger now, since many auto subcontractors (to use just one example) hire all workers initially as temps. CBO, “What accounts for the Decline in Manufacturing Employment” (February 2004), http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdoc.cfm?index=5078&type=0; “Measuring Temporary Labor Outsourcing in U.S. Manufacturing,” at http://www. epionline.org/study_detail.cfm?sid=47. On unemployment statistics see http:// www.shadow stats.com. 7. According to the BLS, current industrial employment is at 13.7 million, a figure that excludes those industrial workers employed through temp agencies. See http:// www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag31-33.htm. 8. The Economist, May 19, 2007, p. 74; June 23, 2007, p.86. 9. “The New Titans,” The Economist, 16 September 2006. 10. The Economist, 21 October 2006.

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Who Determines the Value of Money? As Marx pointed out in Capital, the value of a commodity comes in two forms, use value and exchange value. Exchange value, the value of a product in relationship to every other product, comes from the socially necessary labor time embodied in it. Yet the essential nature of the commodity as a social relationship often appears as if it were an objective characteristic of the commodity itself. Commodities seem to relate to each other in some fixed way, rather than each as the product of the labor of working people. This is especially true of money, the commodity chosen as the universal measure of value in any given society. Money plays a special role in a capitalist economy. It serves both as a universally accepted measure of value and as a medium of circulation, a tool that allows the easier sale and movement of goods around the world. This creates a contradiction: To represent value, money must truly represent the socially necessary labor time embodied in commodities. But as a “lubricant” of the circulation of commodities, money is expanded to include fictitious forms such as credit and paper money, which may be manipulated and may become detached from the real value created by labor. Until the 1940s, gold served as the basis of most monetary systems and of international trade. After World War II, the US dollar, which initially had a fixed value of $35 to an ounce of gold, replaced gold. During the economic crises of 196873, the US was forced off the gold standard. Detached from gold, the dollar became another commodity whose value is determined on the international market. But unlike gold, which is produced through the labor of mine workers, the paper dollar has no intrinsic value. And thus the separation from gold also allowed US bankers to create new forms of fictitious capital, i.e. credit forms, including derivatives that bore little or no relationship to the value of actual commodities in the world. As with other monies, currency markets now set the value of the dollar (in relation to the Euro, the British pound, the yen, the yuan, the peso, etc) on a trade by trade basis. As such the value of money can fluctuate wildly. Thus from May 2007 to March 2008, the value of one US dollar fell from .75 Euros to .63 Euros, for a loss of 16%, as international banks dumped their dollars. Currency traders can amass (or lose) great wealth through gambling on minor swings in the price of any given currency. But they cannot generate value. Only productive labor can do that. All currency traders are doing is dividing and re-dividing surplus value already created by the working class. Yet at some point the value of money, if it is to function as a universal measure, must return to the value of the socially necessary labor time embodied in real commodities. This may come through government or IMF actions, such as the forced devaluations of the peso in the 1980s or through stock market and banking collapses or other market actions. When such “corrections” occur, the wages of workers are being cut and savings held in that currency (whether by workers in their meager savings accounts or countries storing national wealth) are destroyed.

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dollars and dollar denominated debt. For one reason, as long as there is a trade imbalance, China will receive dollars in payment for these goods. Yet only 25% (down from 34% in 1999) of China’s exports are to the United States, a fact that sets some limits on its desire to hold dollars.10 No matter, China, and all other countries, must hold dollars since the dollar serves as the world’s reserve currency (see box). Many commodities, but most importantly oil, are denominated in dollars. Businesses and nations that want to buy oil on the international marked must have dollars with which to purchase it. In order to earn “interest” on these various holdings, China (as well as Saudi Arabia, and other oil producing countries) must in turn invest in the United States. This puts them in the ironic position of depending on investments in the United States to protect their own national treasuries. A fall in the value of US securities will hurt Chinese capitalists with money stored in the United States just as it does other investors. A falling currency decreases the purchasing power of all savings. It is, in real terms, an imperialist attack on rival capitalists who have been forced to store their wealth in dollars. In fact, the primary manipulator of the value of US currency is not China but the US Federal Reserve, the main governmental organ through which finance capital tries to control the crises of capitalism. With the beginning of the 2007-08 credit crunch, the Fed hoped it could stop the collapse of financial markets by printing more money and lowering the interest rate. As a result of this flood of dollars and the decreasing faith in the value of American corporate securities, international investors are dumping dollars leading to a rapid decline in the value of the dollar in the first months of 2008. The focus on the value of the yuan by the AFL-CIO and by Congress is not about fact but about ideology. The argument that China is the cause of low wages for American workers is a smokescreen hiding the actions of American capitalists who have applied divide and conquer tactics to attacks on workers of all nationalities. More importantly it is part of the effort to build US nationalism in preparation for continuing economic and future military conflict with China. Myth 3: The current crisis in foreclosures is a product of Chinese or other foreign actors withdrawing funds from Americans. In his comments, Joe Biden alluded to the current crisis in foreclosures. Many working class people who bought houses in the last few years were enticed by a variety of offers from mortgage brokers. They were able to borrow with no money down, were given adjustable rate mortgages with payments that are now going up, or sold mortgages set up so that the amount you owe increases even as you make payments. As the interest rates on these mortgages adjust up, many people 11. New York Times, September 2, 2007.

THEcommunist have fallen behind and have begun losing their houses. The New York Times recently reported on the Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights where 10% of homes have been seized by banks in the last 2 years and 30% of sub-prime borrowers are near foreclosure.11 These events are the consequences of efforts to increase the global power of US finance capital by deregulating banks. Deregulation began in the late 1970s during the Carter Administration, and produced the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. The deregulation scheme was completed in 1999 with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which had divided US banks into commercial bank, (which took deposits and gave out loans to businesses and workers) and investment banks (which operated on Wall Street and promoted business deals such as mergers and funding of new corporate stock offerings or IPOs). Since 1999, US finance capital has undergone a wave of mergers and reorganization to make US banks more competitive worldwide. And with these mergers and the influx of capital from countries holding dollars, US finance capital has been increasingly aggressive in seeking ways to loan that money for profit (from fees and interest). Yet with many manufacturers facing overcapacity, finance capital has been less willing to invest in more productive capacity. At the same time, American politicians and capitalists rejected investment in infrastructure as unprofitable, a fact that resulted in the racist destruction of New Orleans and the recent death of commuters on a Minneapolis bridge. Instead money was used in two ways. One was the development of an aggressive corporate merger movement, with banks assisting corporations to borrow money to buy out their rivals. Significantly this included a movement to take corporations “private.” In this instance borrowed money was used by equity firms like Blackstone and Cerebus to buy up existing companies, for example Chrysler. Once taken private, companies like Chrysler are no longer beholden to public stockholders, but only to their bankers, and are free to increase attacks on their workers. The other source of banking profits has been aggressive loans to the working class. For workers, whose real incomes have fallen over the last decade, borrowing, whether through credit cards student loans, second and sub-prime mortgages, and increasingly payday loans, has become an increasingly common technique to buy what they need or want. And banks at the center of finance capital have been behind the proliferation of high interest payday and mortgage companies lurking on every urban and suburban street corner these days. The central internal contradiction of capitalism is that workers aren’t paid the full value of the products they make. This difference is the source of surplus value for the capitalist. But given that workers cannot buy all of what they produce, capitalists must engage in a constant search for markets if they are going to realize this surplus value as profits. One of the techniques modern capitalists have used to create markets is debt. Since World War II, the

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What is a Reserve Currency? A reserve currency is simply a foreign currency held by nations’ central banks for use in international trade and to pay international debts. In the first half of the twentieth century, gold served as the reserve currency. Since the Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of World War II, the dollar has played this role. The decision to use the dollar as a reserve currency was part of a plan by the US ruling class to cement its power as the victor in World War II. Maintaining the role of the dollar as an international reserve currency is a fighting cause for the United States. Among the issues behind both the Clinton bombings and the Bush invasion of Iraq were Saddam Hussein’s efforts to give oil contracts to US rivals and to begin selling Iraqi oil in Euros. If Hussein had succeeded, oil consumers would have needed to hold large quantities of Euros and to invest in Euronot dollar-denominated securities. Such a move would have removed these foreign investments from the US economy and threatened the stock market and US banks. Instead, the fact that the dollar is a reserve currency has led to what one banker at JP Morgan Securities called “a wall of money” coming into the US credit markets (NYT, 31 August 2007). This flow of money has allowed the American government, corporations, and people to increase debt, spending some $857 billion more than they earned in 2006 (The Economist, 17 March 2007). Yet even with this money flowing in, US finance capital is worried about its loss of economic power. In 2006, US officials began to fret that despite the size of the US capital markets, “they were no longer competitive compared with the leading financial centers of Europe and Asia.” Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer of New York published a paper about the need for New York to “learn from London,” which has risen to rival New York as a financial capital. Last year, European stock markets, in total, exceeded the capital value of New York for the first time since World War I, and the value of initial public offerings in both London and Hong Kong exceeded those of New York (The Economist, 26 Nov. 2006; Business Week 3 Sept. 2007). Likewise, for the first time since World War I, the capitalization of Europe’s 24 stock markets exceeded that of the US markets (Financial Times 3 April 2007). In addition, economists reported that Asian consumers had replaced Americans as the growth engine of the global economy, even Goldman Sachs predicts that if China follows current growth policies it will be the world’ largest economy in market exchange rates in 2040 (The Economist, 16 September 2006; 21 October 2006).

US housing market has played a key role, with the federal government creating the modern housing market by insuring and subsidizing mortgages. The goal was both economic—to stimulate consumption—and ideological—to win workers 12. Financial Times, June 19, 2007;

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away from the radicalism of the thirties. In the last decade as Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Goldman Sachs.13 the housing market repeatedly seem to dry up, finance capital But these magical, pyramid schemes eventually ran invented new, more exotic products to continue to stimulate into the real world. No amount of borrowing can solve the demand and increase sales, often to those who had never problem of workers’ low wages and of rising inequality in the before qualified because of low or unstable incomes. This United States and the rest of the world.14 Debt can only latter group of “sub-prime” borrowers was an increasingly create markets for a finite time as the laws of capitalism dominant segment of the mortgage-market over the last five grind on. When sub-prime borrowers began to default on years. their mortgages in late 2006, mortgage brokers who could no As a result of these developments, the debts of US families longer collect payments began to go broke. Shares in hedge grew from 92% of household income in 1994 to 135% in funds that had marketed the debts of these brokers no longer 2005. The indebtedness of the bosses and their government found buyers, and the banks that had given lines of credit increased even more dramatically. Globally, the ratio of to the hedge funds demanded more collateral or payments. financial assets to gross domestic product (GDP) grew from Unable to sell their mortgage-backed securities, the hedge 180% in 1980 to 316% in 2005. In the United States this funds had to sell stock or commodities, including oil futures, ratio jumped from 303% in 1995 to 405% in 2005.12 Here which forced down both the price of oil and the prices on the was the seeming magic of capitalism: the fictional world of New York Stock exchange. Banks in France, Germany, Great money soared well above the value of real goods and labor in Britain, and Asia were forced to shut down hedge funds, and the world. the national banks of Europe, Asia, and the United States The emergence of these fantastical (the Federal Reserve) stepped in levels of debt came from the to provide extra money to buy up And both unemployment and inflation the failing securities. invention of a banking technique called “securitization” which took are increasing. As some bankers fretted Even with these efforts from off in 1999. Securitization allowed capitalist governments the value to reporters that they didn’t understand bankers to perform an “alchemist’s of the stock market fell by $2.2 trick” of turning leaden debts into what was going on, Business Week noted trillion or 10.5% during in August derivatives which could be marketed that these events were the equivalent of 2007. By March, 2008, an oldas if they were gold. Banks fashioned run on Bear Sterns, the the situation in the 1930s.15 employing these techniques sold fifth-largest US investment bank strands of the long-term debts owed and a leader in mortgage-based sethem (on mortgages, credit cards, and student loans) for cash curities, threatened to take down the whole US banking system. on the open market. Then they loaned this cash out again on new long-term debts and sold these again, and again, churning JPMorganChase, after demanding a guarantee from the Federal their deposits ever more frequently. Often these strands of Reserve, agreed to pay $234 million for a bank that only two debt were marketed by “hedge funds,” which used complex days before had been worth nearly $4billion. Some $750 billion mathematical formulas to balance the assets they held, which in adjustable rate mortgages are set to have their rates increased might include stocks and commodities (such as oil or wheat) through June 2008, which suggests that more foreclosures and along with sub-prime mortgages and oddly defined strands of more hedge fund failures are in the offing. And both unemploydebt such as the interest or principle streams of credit card or student loans. These hedge funds, whose numbers have ment and inflation are increasing. As some bankers fretted to regrown from 610 in 1990 to 9,575 in 2007, claimed that their porters that they didn’t understand what was going on, Business complex blend of “assets” made them virtually risk free. Yet Week noted that these events were the equivalent of the situation they themselves operated on lines of credit (borrowed money) in the 1930s.15 provided generally by the most important investment banks Workers need to remember this history. In the 1920s, US in the United States, including Lehman Brothers, Bear bankers had invented credit and investment schemes similar

13. Financial Times, June 19, 2007;Business Week, September 3, 2007; Risk and Reward, The Economist, May 19, 2007. 14. Working people in the United States have lived under worsening condi tions for most of the last 40 years. Though the press repeatedly cites statistics describing the average economic growth in the United States, these very averages are used hide growing inequality. A banker at UBS, for example, has noted that from 1997 to 2001, the top .1 percent of Americans saw their incomes increase almost as much as the total for the bottom 50%. (Financial Times, March 17, 2007). In a recent report on inequality in the Economist, only three countries experienced higher levels of inequality than the United States (The Economist, August 11,

2007). In fact since the start of US economic recovery in 2001, real weekly wages for average American workers fell by 4% (as labor productivity increased by 15%). Top 1% of wage earners earn 16% of all income versus 8% in 1980, and median wages of college graduates have declined 6% since 2000 (“The Titans,” The Economist, September 16, 2006). 15. Business Week, September 3, 2007.

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to those described above, and when they failed in 1929, they revealed the shifting foundation of overproduction and triggered a worldwide depression. No matter how many financial gimmicks bankers invent, capitalism produces more than it can sell even as it impoverishes the world’s working class. Under capitalism this crisis can only be solved through world war between the leading imperialist states. The economic crisis of the 1930’s would eventually lead to World War II just as world economic crises at the turn of the century led to World War I. Imperialist competition and economic crises lead to war. By 1900, the world’s imperialist powers had divided the world between themselves, and ever since they have been fighting to re-divide it over and over again. War is the ultimate tool to capture the markets imperialists need if they are to sell their goods, and it is a tool to destroy the capital and wealth of their rivals before they are destroyed themselves. The US has been fighting in Iraq since 1990-91 to keep Iraq’s oil resources out of the hands of its rivals, at the cost of millions of Iraqi lives. Similar battles are taking place in Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Colombia. Through all of these battles, desperate US imperialists see themselves pitted against a rising China. This competition with China is the key to understanding the China-bashing

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that dominates the rhetoric of politicians talking about job loss. The goal of China bashing is to win workers to a “defend-America” patriotism that will justify imperialist war. The source of workers’ misery—whether in the United States where layoffs and low wages are on the rise at both US and foreign owned plants or in China, Mexico, and El Salvador where workers suffer even lower wages and worse working conditions at the hands of local and international bosses— is capitalism. The only solution to these problems is to smash racist divisions, international borders and the capitalist system that created them. The only solution to capitalist crisis and imperialist war is revolution, and the building of communism, a society with no wages, no money, organized by the international working class. Workers of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains!

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PLP

A History Of The Work At DC Metro of striking on May 1, the union turned to an arbitrator to resolve the issue. As July 1 neared, Metro announced that they were not going to pay the COLA increase due on that date. The workers were angry, but the union wanted to let the arbitrator decide the issue, and the membership went along.

The Metro club is black and white, women and men, and ranges from almost retired to brand new. Our Party club may be small, but it is no small achievement. It is the result of many struggles on and off the job and within the union. It is the result of many study group meetings and much ideological struggle to make fighting for communist revolution the main aspect of our work, and to make PLP the main thing in our lives. We don’t always succeed and we have many weaknesses, but we also have the ability to overcome them. Most of all, our club reflects that the torch will be passed to a new generation of revolutionary communist transit workers who can carry the struggle forward at Metro and beyond. The party’s work in transit began in 1974. Nixon was president, although beleaguered by the Watergate Affair, and the Vietnam War was still raging. As part of building for May Day that year we began selling Challenge at various bus garages in Washington. Coincidently, the union contract was expiring on April 30, 1974. This was the first contract negotiated between the union and Metro since the transit system was converted from a private business to a public governmental agency the previous year. Hundreds of workers had been hired, mostly black, and many of them Vietnam veterans. Metro was demanding a concessionary contract but the workers were in no mood. Negotiations went nowhere and the union walked out. The courts quickly ordered the union back to work. Many workers wanted to continue the strike, but the Davis-Richmond leadership caved in under the threat of fines and ordered the workers back to the job. However, the main point of contention, the full Cost Of Living Allowance (COLA) escalator clause, was preserved for two more years. This was important because it kept real wages up with inflation. This set the stage for the 1976 contract struggle. Again management demanded a reduction in the COLA escalator clause. The union said no. This time, instead

The union leadership said that with the Nixon’s resignation, the end of the Vietnam War and the upcoming elections, the political climate was improving and we could expect a better contract. Jimmy Carter was elected President while the contract was still in arbitration. When the arbitration award was issued in December, it continued the COLA for another two years, but the increase due July 1, 1976 was eliminated. Every worker felt betrayed by the union. The Party was developing a presence in the union, as well as regular CHALLENGE sales outside certain bus garages. We began a two-year organizing effort to strike in the July 1978 contract. We lead a fight in the union to support a coal miners’ strike and we ousted an Assistant Business Agent who had scabbed during the 1974 strike. In the spring of 1978, tensions mounted as the contract expiration date drew near. A wildcat strike started at Southeastern Division following the sexual assault on a woman driver. All the drivers in the system joined in. At Northern, Metro Board member Reverend Jerry Moore saw the rage of the drivers at a mass meeting and promised amnesty for the strikers and improved security for the drivers. That night the drivers met at RFK Parking Lot. A safety committee was elected to follow up on the issues of the wildcat. A vote was taken and the drivers decided to return to work the next day. The one day strike gave workers the confidence that we could shut the system down when needed to accomplish our goals. The stage was now set for July 1978. Preparations had been made for sharpening the class struggle in a mass way. A Metro CAR (Committee Against Racism) newsletter was circulated to hundreds of workers explaining why the fight to protect the COLA was important and the racist nature of the attack on us. The Party’s line on revolution and the role of communists in the class struggle was not widely known. We were distributing a few Challenges and had some one on one meetings with individual workers. Contract negotiations dragged past the deadline. Metro announced that they were not going to pay the COLA on July 1. Strike-talk was everywhere. We advocated a walkout on July 19 if the COLA was not on our checks that day. On July 18, the regular union meeting drew over 500

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workers. Local President George Davis told us to wait for an arbitrator to decide the issue. The workers were in no mood to wait. Davis walked out of the meeting. A PLP member took the podium and called for a motion to strike. The motion was made. Another comrade outlined the reasons that we had to strike and called for a vote. Hundreds of workers shouted, “Yea!” There were no “Nays.” The strike was set for 10:00 a.m. the next morning. The strike began the following morning when the COLA was not on our paychecks. Brentwood Yard and Bladensburg Shop, the two largest maintenance facilities for rail and bus, walked out at 10:00 a.m. The drivers hesitated because they did not want to get the riding public angry by leaving them at work. Management fired every worker (hundreds of people) at Bladensburg Shop. That night, 1,000 workers showed up at the RFK Parking Lot for a meeting. Plans were made to picket every bus and rail facility in the system. By Thursday morning the system was entirely shut down. A strike leadership committee was established with representatives from every garage and work location. Metro went to Federal Court to have the strike declared illegal. For four days the strike kept the system completely shut down. The few drivers who attempted to take buses out were persuaded not to. But the bosses and union leaders used racism, anti-communism and the threat of injunctions to weaken the strike. The Washington Post called the strikers, “Saboteurs.” Today it would be, “Terrorists.” The union leadership blamed the strike on communists who had come to Metro for the sole purpose of shutting down the system. The courts threatened fines and jail terms for the strikers if we did not return to work. The first break in the strikers’ ranks occurred when Bill Scoggins, a driver from Arlington Division, resigned as elected leader of the strike steering committee and urged drivers to return to work. At a mass meeting of the strikers on Sunday evening, Scoggins was shouted down. The strikers voted to continue for one more day. On Monday, the courts ordered Metro to hold an expedited arbitration hearing on the July COLA payment and to quickly process the grievance of anyone disciplined as a result of the strike. The workers felt we had accomplished all that we could hope for, and voted to end the strike at garage meetings Tuesday morning. At a hearing held the next week, the arbitrator ordered Metro to pay the July 1 COLA. After the strike, management fired all of the wildcat strike leaders except for Bill Scoggins, who led the backto-work movement. The fired workers eventually won their jobs back. By this time the role of communists in

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the union had become a mass issue. Challenge was sold outside the garage gates and we started building networks of Challenge readers. The following year, we ran a Metro CAR slate for union office. A dozen or so workers actively participated in the campaign. Although many workers respected our leadership in the strike, we did not have a mass base for communist leadership in the union. An Executive Board member resigned shortly afterwards, and a PLP member was elected to fill the vacancy in a special election. He was an open communist, but he got elected because of his

...management fired every worker (hundreds of people) at bladensburg shop... work in the reform movement. For the next five years, we were involved in many struggles affecting every aspect of the job at Metro. These were some of our most active years. We had several study groups, a Metro CAR caucus and a monthly newsletter. Several workers joined the Party. At the end of this period, the comrade on the Executive Board quit Metro and left the area. He felt that many workers would follow us in the reform struggle, but did not believe that we could win a significant number of them to communist revolution. After he left, the intensity of the reform activity declined. We continued to run in union elections, fight over contract issues, and wage struggles in the garages against the bosses but it did not have the same mass character. The decline in struggle was not solely due to the Party member leaving. It was also a time of major defeats for organized labor. The PATCO strike in 1981, where the union was smashed and thousands of Air Traffic Controllers were fired, sent a chill up the spine of many workers. The defeat of the Greyhound strike was the beginning of a steady decline and set back the struggle of all transit workers. During this period, a worker who had joined the Party began to develop into a mass leader. Another veteran comrade got a job at Metro. The new member had an unrealistic view of how the work would progress. He was more won to militant reform work than to the long-term political struggle for communist revolution. Unless you are increasing the distribution of CHALLENGE and

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recruiting new members, the reform work will eventually wear you down. Before long, he quit Metro and left the area. In the 1990’s, Metro became more insistent in demanding contract concessions. The union’s response was to negotiate contracts which protected the wage and benefit package of the senior workers, but reduced them for new employees. To counter this, we initiated the fight against the racist wage progression system which continues today. In 1993, we changed the tactics of our work in the union. Instead of running an agitation campaign for president as we had done for the previous 15 years, we concentrated our efforts on two shop steward elections. In the election of December 1994, we won the election (i.e. got the most votes) for shop steward at Northern Division. We defeated a long term incumbent who was backed by the union leadership. His campaign was based on anti-communism and nationalism. Our comrade ran as an open communist, but most workers voted for him because of his personal and political ties to them and his leadership in the class struggle over the previous 15 years. Shortly after the election, we led a major campaign against service cuts and layoffs. Twenty people joined our caucus during this struggle. At this point, there was a Party-wide effort to combat reformism in the work (Road to Revolution 4.5), and we began to evaluate our role in the reform movement more closely. It became clear that we were winning workers more to trade union militancy than communist revolution. We put the issue of reform or revolution at the top of the agenda for our caucus meetings. No one objected, but attendance began to decline. This probably would have happened anyway because the layoffs would last only 4-6 months and a new supplemental unemployment benefit was established to cushion the effect of the layoffs. With everyone back to work, Metro was determined to reduce labor costs and working with the local governments, began planning to privatize some bus service. The union made some noise, but their main plan was to save Metro money. In 1999, a new contract was negotiated which extended the wage progression system by two years, lowered the starting pay for new operators and other unskilled workers and reduced our health insurance benefits Once this cost saving contract was signed, all talk of privatization disappeared. As new drivers were hired, their anger mounted when they realized they were working for half the wages of senior operators and that it would take 23 years for them to reach top pay. We engaged in several struggles against sexual harassment by management. These struggles led to several supervisors being disciplined and one being convicted of sexual assault and fired.

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When the 2000 elections came around, we decided to run for a full time union position. We discussed whether this was useful or not. Would being a full time officer bog us down in reform work and conflict with building the Party among the workers? Aware of the dangers, we decided to give it a try. We ran the campaign on fighting racism and anticommunism. The racist wage progression system was making new workers angry and dividing the union. Before 1974, when most drivers were white, it took one year to reach top pay. It had been that way since 1920. The racist nature of the wage progression system was not hard to understand. The fight against anti-communism was more complex. Self-critically, we tried to show workers that as communists we would be better and more honest reform fighters than the current union leaders. Since they were not very good at fighting the bosses this was not very hard to do. We discussed the role of communists in the union organizing drives of the 1930’s, the Scottsboro case, the civil rights movement and the fight against Nazism. But we failed to win workers to revolution and the need for a mass communist party. Challenge distribution increased, but there was not a great deal of struggle over the revolutionary essence of the paper. In the end we won the election because we were viewed as more honest and harder workers than the opposition. A new president was also elected who had also promised to fight wage progression. Contract negotiations began shortly after the election. We managed to negotiate improvements in wages, pensions, and health benefits. Then we came to the issue of wage progression. The PLP member took the position that we could not agree to a new contract unless there was some improvement in the wage progression system. This anti-racist demand had been a central point of our election campaign and it could not be ignored. He was removed from the negotiating committee. The contract that was eventually ratified by the membership contained no changes in the wage progression system, although starting pay for new drivers was raised. But this was done while lowering their pay in the later years of the progression. We decided to run for local President in the 2003 election. From our experience with the previous contract it was clear that only anti-racist forces would not buckle on the issues of wage progression. This campaign was much more intense than the last one. The incumbent president spent thousands of dollars out of the union treasury to finance his campaign. This coupled with the fact that our reform work made him look pretty good in the eyes of many workers, he won reelection. We challenged the election because of his use of the

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union treasury. The International union, fearful of the Department of Labor getting involved in the local’s business, ordered a new election after six months of deliberations. During these six months, all of his weaknesses which we had covered up by being good reformers were exposed. To the Executive Board, we became the lesser of two evils, and most of them supported us in the re-run of the election. This gave us enough votes to win. Over the next two and one half years we negotiated a new contract that took a year off the wage progression system, participated in the anti-war movement, supported the Philadelphia transit strike, held demonstrations at Metro headquarters for a new contract and for worker safety and organized a group of drivers from the DC Connector into the union. At the same time, we maintained a PLP study group that ultimately produced our current club. The issue of worker safety was the most difficult to deal with. Capitalism in general is unsafe for workers. This is particularly true in mass transit. Working on the track bed of a rail system or driving a bus are particularly dangerous jobs. Historically the union has used this fact to negotiate higher wages for these jobs, but of course this does not make the jobs less dangerous. Over the last few years, four workers have been killed on the track bed. Although we protested these conditions both in meetings with management and demonstrations, Metro initiated few changes. We were not willing to take the chance of organizing an illegal strike, knowing that this would probably lead to mass firings. Looking back on it, this was most likely a mistake. We should have had more confidence in the workers. We ran for re-election in 2006. This time we were not strong enough to overcome the forces of nationalism and anti-communism, and we lost the election. The story so far has been a narrative of the Party’s work over the last 30 years. In the course of the narrative, we have pointed out some of the strengths and weaknesses of the work. We will now try to develop some of these points. Over 20 years ago, there was a breakfast meeting with several workers to discuss the Party. At the end of the meeting one of the workers asked why we were so small. He liked our ideas. He appreciated the role we had played in fighting the bosses during our time at Metro. This was the first time he had met with us. He was wondering why workers who had known us for some time did not join. Twenty years later, the answer to this question is still not clear. Our ability to recruit new members is determined by three main factors: our line, our relationships and the past practice of our movement. Fighting for communist revolution is a difficult position to maintain. The collapse of the old communist movement is no help. In the minds of many workers, communism is a system that was tried and failed. We have not won them to an understanding of the long historical process that accompanies the transition from a class society to a

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classless one. Many Metro workers, particularly black workers, have serious concerns about the racist imperialist system they are subjected to. They know the effects of racism in their daily lives. On the other hand, they view their situation relative to workers in other countries and in their own communities. In this context they enjoy a relative prosperity. The political struggle is to convince workers that this situation is temporary, and that regardless of our position relative to other workers, we are part of an international working class with certain duties and responsibilities. Racism is of strategic value to the capitalists. They cannot rule without it. It is at the same time the Achilles’ heal of capitalism. It is the one aspect of capitalist ideology which has created a sub-set of the working class that is politically unreliable and whose practice all workers know is unjust. Maintaining our strategy of fighting racism will help us overcome many of our past mistakes. Religion has a hold on many workers. They see many of the contradictions in a religious world outlook, but they are not yet ready to accept a materialist world view. The next generation of Party members at Metro will need to get more involved in the church based activities of the workers. Over the years at Metro we have created a large base for social and reform activities. We have never been able to transform this base into a vehicle for recruiting significant numbers of workers into the Party. When we were union officers, either shop steward or President, many workers’ lives were dramatically affected by some of the struggles we engaged with management. Jobs were saved, pensions were granted, health benefits achieved, and promotions received which would never have happened except for our leadership of the reform struggle. This did not lead to any dramatic recruitment to the Party. Challenge sales, both outside garages and hand to hand distribution have varied. Some workers have read the paper for years. They are often our strongest defenders in the union, but they have not joined the Party. When a movement that has led billions of people collapses, workers want to know why before they commit themselves to rebuilding that movement. Why will the Progressive Labor Party be more successful than Lenin, Stalin, or Mao in building the communist movement? The answer is as simple as it is complex. We have the benefit of seeing the mistakes of the past and being able to correct them. In Road to Revolution III and IV, we analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the old communist movement. Winning workers to this understanding is crucial for their recruitment.

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Our strategy for doing this must include:

crime and other forms of anti-social behavior.

1. A fuller political education of our base. Most of our base only has a superficial knowledge of the scientific ideas that underlie our politics or the accomplishments of the communist movement. The world as we know it today is the product of tremendous struggles over the last 150 years. Most of those struggles were led by the international communist movement.

We struggle with our base to become leaders of the working class by joining the Party. Most workers are discontent with capitalist society, but they need leadership to point them in a revolutionary direction. The Party represents our collective effort to do this. We are constantly struggling with the ideological obstacles that block workers’ path into the Party.

2. Greater concentration on industrial work. We give lip service to the importance of industrial workers, particularly black workers, but our practice is much different. Every Party collective should have a plan to help with the recruitment of industrial workers. Teachers can teach at schools and community colleges with industrial arts programs, doctors can work at hospitals that serve working class communities, and young people can join the military and learn an industrial skill.

One serious obstacle is individualism. This struggle takes many forms. Workers want to improve their lives. To some this means going into management, to others it means starting your own business and to others it means getting involved in church activities. Despite the fact that few make it into management and most small businesses fail, the ideal of getting out from under the heel of the bosses is a powerful one.

3. Fighting racism must be an unwavering part of our program. The history of the communist movement has not been as consistent as our party’s fight against racism. Only by constantly fighting racism can we overcome the effects of past mistakes. The future of the Party’s work at Metro will be determined by how well we train our members to fight for communist ideas with their coworkers. The discussions we have with our fellow workers are short on ideas about the need for communist revolution. We spend many hours explaining how our pension system works, without getting to the real issue that capitalism is destroying pensions and causing premature deaths. We fight against attacks on drivers, without discussing how capitalism causes

Individualism can take the form of viewing yourself in competition with other workers. The bosses constantly push the notion that some workers are better than others. To them we are all crabs in a barrel fighting with each other. How often have we heard the remark, “I’m willing to fight back, but no one else is.” To build the Party we must defeat these ideas. We struggle for workers to emphasize their similarities not their differences. Only communist revolution will end the twin evils of imperialist war and racism. Building the Progressive Labor Party is the only way to realize this goal. Despite all of our weaknesses, the Party has an organization at Metro, with the ability to recruit new members, expand the distribution of Challenge, mobilize for May Day, lead class struggle and build for revolution.

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Workers Sold Out by Union Hacks . . .

Need Red Leadership It was inevitable that this day would come, given everything that had come before. The UAW signed contracts that cut pay and benefits for new hires at GM, Ford, and Chrysler by two-thirds; agreed to take on retiree health care; managing a VEBA fund worth more than $52 billion financed by the auto bosses; accepted 100,000 buy-outs and “buy-downs” (lump sum payments in return for permanent pay cuts) and dozens of plant closings. The day when the union owns more Ford stock than the Ford family, the day when what took 70 years to win, appeared to be taken away with the flick of a pen, a handshake and a smile. This day was inevitable, a grim reminder of the long, dark night that the working class finds itself in without revolutionary communist leadership. This is the bosses’ greatest weapon in their ability to survive every threat, challenge and crisis. The latest wholesale restructuring of the U.S. auto industry was inevitable due to inter-imperialist rivalry that has seen Asian and European auto billionaires lay claim to the highly profitable U.S. auto market while world auto production shifts to China and India, as well as to non-union factories in the U.S. south, forcing down the wages of auto workers around the world. This imperialist rivalry has already led to growing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and will ultimately lead to world war. This is the price of capitalism. Only communist revolution can end imperialism. It was inevitable because of decades of “outsourcing” union work to mainly non-union parts suppliers for a fraction of the cost. And it was inevitable, in no small part, because of the collapse of the old communist movement decades ago, leaving the working class without revolutionary leadership. As long as the bosses hold power, the only guarantees for the working class are racist terror, poverty and war. The attacks on union wages and jobs is the forefront of the ruling class’ need to move towards fascism in response to the needs of the rulers. The bosses desperately need their homegrown auto industry to become efficient to better compete against the other capitalists and in preparation for war production. There were major tremors leading up to the new auto contracts. The UAW agreed to the elimination of more than 100,000 jobs and 40 plant closings a year before contract talks even started. Chrysler was sold and Delphi, formerly the largest parts supplier in the world went bankrupt. The Ford and GM contracts were re-opened a year before they expired so

Axle workers on strike early this year. the UAW concessions.

could

grant

significant

health

care

Chrysler In 2006, Chrysler lost $1.5 billion and fell behind Toyota to fourth place in the U.S. market. In the summer of that year, there were as many as 100,000 unsold Chryslers sitting in factory and dealership parking lots. DaimlerBenz of Germany had taken over the company in a 1997 “merger.” Now they were ready to sell Chrysler to Cerberus Capital Management for $7.4 billion. Cerberus is a private equity company with no experience building cars, named for a three-headed monster that guards the gates of Hell. The $24 billion investment firm specializes in buying money-losing companies cheap, slashing jobs and benefits and stripping assets, in order to re-sell them at a big profit. Cerberus is headed by former Treasury secretary John Snow. Before the sale, Chrysler said it would cut 13,000 jobs and close four factories. Since the sale, and the new contract, that number has more than doubled.

Delphi The UAW and GM used the torturous Delphi contract to set the stage for the major restructuring of the industry. GM spun off Delphi in 1999 and is its biggest customer. Delphi filed for bankruptcy protection in October 2005, and proceeded to cut the workforce from 33,000 to 20,000, mainly through buyouts and “flowbacks” (former GM workers bumping back into GM plants). In June, 2007, one month before talks with the Detroit 3 were to open, the UAW, GM and Delphi worked out a contract that would cut current pay from $28 to $14 an hour, close or sell 21 of 29 plants, end health care and pensions for retirees hired under the new contract,

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and much more. Tom Walsh of the Detroit Free Press (6/27/07) gushed, “Let’s give a hearty round of applause to [Delphi and the UAW] for doing what needed to be done… to jar what’s left of Detroit’s domestic auto industry into survival mode.” Having negotiated a two-tier wage system in a prior contract, there were only 4,000 workers left making $28. The rest were already making $14 and had no problem voting to cut the pay of those who had previously voted to cut theirs. For GM, this meant a $2 billion a year savings from Delphi while forcing other suppliers to cut their costs as well. Lower labor costs at the suppliers means GM can negotiate lower prices. But it would cost GM about $7 billion to make this happen, covering wages, buy-outs and buy-downs for Delphi workers. Workers taking the pay cuts would get a $35,000 lump sum payment, for three years, to soften the blow. This contract underlined in blood, that the patriotic, pro-capitalist UAW leadership would pick the pockets of any worker, current, future or retired, to help the bosses compete and stay at the top of the heap. For all their problems and challenges, and there are many, the bosses still hold some trump cards. They have a union leadership that is totally committed to the profit system, and a lot of money to throw at a problem.

New Auto Contracts: The Great Leap Backward On October 11, the four-year UAW-GM contract was ratified and a deal was reached at Chrysler. Ford workers joined them about four weeks later. A two-day “strike” at GM and a 6-hour “strike” at Chrysler give new meaning to the term “staging a strike.” More than one-fourth of the workers never struck because their plants were already on temporary shut-down due to a huge backlog of unsold vehicles. These actions were called to rally the membership to support the U.S. ruling class and their union leaders plan for a transformation in auto that is a Great Leap Backward for generations of industrial workers. The media focused almost exclusively on the transfer of health care to a union-run VEBA trust fund that will ultimately lift $100 billion in health care commitments from the auto bosses. But the real news was the permanent rollback of wages and benefits for future workers. Starting pay was slashed to about $14-an-hour, the rate in 1990 when gas was 80 cents a gallon! For the moment, new hires at UAW factories in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio will earn less than new hires at nonunion Honda, Toyota and Daimler plants in Mississippi and Alabama! Healthcare, pensions, work rules and job security will further decay. Creation of new multi-tiered, “non-core” workers will drop wages and benefits even further. At Chrysler, 11,000 of the 45,000 current jobs are

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“non-core.” Wages will sink and many jobs will be farmed out. This is the depths the union leadership will go to bail out their billionaire masters. It is the legacy they will leave for future generations. With all the cards stacked against them, more than onethird of GM workers rejected the contract. At Chrysler, the UAW leadership had to fight plant by plant to barely get the contract passed by a narrow margin. With a more militant, anti-racist leadership operating on the shop floor, the contract could have been rejected and a significant wildcat strike action might have been launched. After rank and file workers almost derailed the Chrysler deal, Ford had to agree to delay six of 16 plant closings and offer a complicated way for some new hires to reach current pay. That sent Ford stocks sinking. Wall St. has been pushing the auto bosses to close plants and slash labor costs for decades. With the U.S. auto market at 16 million and falling, an analyst for Morgan Stanley said the two-tier wage system and VEBA will save Ford $1.5 billion to $2 billion in cash by 2011, but complained about the “absence of additional [factory] closures.” (Detroit Free Press 11/7) After the GM contract was ratified, GM announced it was canceling shifts at three assembly plants and wiping out more jobs with another round of buy-outs. Five days after the Chrysler deal was ratified, Chrysler eliminated another 11,000 jobs, on top of the 13,000 previously announced. Similar job cuts have been announced at Ford and all three companies are in a buyout frenzy, trying to eliminate as many current workers as possible to replace them at one-third the pay. UAW VP for Ford, former “radical” Bob King wrote the introduction to Ford’s newsletter pushing the buyouts swaying “There just aren’t enough jobs for everyone.” In a world with food shortages and infrastructure disasters we know there is a lot of work to be done, but under capitalism there is rarely a job available if the bosses can’t make profit off it.

Fighting Racism The nature of the capitalist beast is that every attack hits black and Latin workers first and hardest. The dozens of plant closings have made cities like Detroit, Flint, Chicago, Lansing, Cleveland, Atlanta, St. Louis and others even more depressed. In these and other cities, black unemployment is twice that of white, and even twice as high again among black youth. These wage cuts guarantee more children growing up in poverty, rotten schools and more subject to racist police terror. In July, 2007, PLP celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, one of the most militant antiracist battles in U.S. history. For a week, armed workers took on the Detroit police, the National Guard, and finally elements of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, detoured from Vietnam. Many of the rebels were young

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black auto workers and Vietnam vets. They were rebelling against racist police terror and unemployment, two issues young people today know something about. Detroit Ford and Chrysler workers helped plan and present the event.

How is it then that this same UAW local voted overwhelmingly for the Ford contract that slashes wages and benefits for new hires (They were rewarded by having the second shift eliminated)? The same is true for some of the participants in the Detroit 1967 celebration.

While the auto contracts were playing out, another struggle was taking place in the small town of Jena, LA. Black high school students were taunted by racists when nooses were hung from a tree that white students used for shade. Tensions grew and after a fight between black students and the racists, six black students were arrested and one was jailed, sparking a nation-wide effort to free the “Jena 6.”

The point is, there are not only two trends within the working class, there are two trends within each worker. All of us are full of endless contradictions. On the one hand there is fear, individualism, lack of confidence in our class or in PLP. On the other there is anger, bravery, looking out for coworkers and family, and raising our kids for a better future.

In September, the Chicago Area UAW Civil Rights Council, passed a resolution in support of the Jena 6 and agreed to send members and money to a mass demonstration in Jena on September 20. It took three months (and years of participation on the council) to get the resolution passed. It had originally been tabled and required many discussions with council members and the distribution of many articles about the Jena 6. The resolution passed unanimously and $500 was donated for their legal defense. One of the six UAW locals represented on the Council is the Ford Assembly plant, UAW 551. They took the spirit of the resolution back to their local and raised it at a local membership meeting. There was much discussion, and the workers defeated some racists who said that the union should send money to the white students. While agreeing to send a delegation and a $500 check to Jena, they also agreed to take up a two-day plant gate collection, giving the workers a chance to express their anti-racist sentiments in action. A group from the local and the area Civil Rights Council attended the march in Jena, joining over 50,000 workers and youth from around the U.S., and delivered the two $500 checks to the grandmother of the jailed youth. On the same day, thousands of dollars were collected from the hundreds of Ford workers who donated at the plant gate, a positive and powerful antiracist statement.

Politically, many workers may be unclear on the future, on economics, believe “there’s nothing we can do,” or you have to take the lesser evil. But workers who are clear in their anti-racist outlook and have experience fighting for equality, are workers we should be spending our time with. They are the future of the Party. By organizing more anti-racist actions and fight backs while putting forward our line of communist revolution in discussions and through the distribution of CHALLENGE, we can increase the struggle for our communist outlook and sharpen the struggle inside of them (and us) to overcome our capitalist ideas. Fighting racism while putting forward communism as the only solution is the key to building a mass, international PLP that can ultimately lead the working class to power. Right now, we appear to be a long way from reversing these attacks on the international working class, let alone taking power. Things will get a lot worse before they get better. But things do change, in many cases quicker than we think. The response of workers to our modest efforts in this contract fight, around our anti-racist activities, and our efforts in the current two-month old strike at American Axle against wage and job cuts, shows that in the midst of this long, dark night, we can rebuild the revolutionary communist movement among auto workers.

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CHALLENGE Networks: Source of Pro-Communist Organizers Our Class Needs We can draw many lessons from over 30 years of political work at Boeing. Among the most relevant for today’s work is the necessity to build and use CHALLENGE networks. Developing readers and sellers groups that can mobilize and respond to class struggle with our communist ideas remains a key aspect of our work. The paper must be used to develop active cells of readers, by using the paper to discuss the PLP line with them and most importantly by engaging with readers on a personal level. Our work at Boeing has shown that through strong personal ties CHALLENGE readers can be won to further and more consistent action. CHALLENGE networks are not only the spark that ignites “concrete fight-back,” to be forgotten as we are involved in more “urgent and realistic” struggles for reform, but are a vital tool for bringing communist ideas to our base. The health of our network is always a key indicator of the potential for class struggle and recruitment to our Party. We first got an inkling of the potential of networks when the first Boeing worker to ever read our paper attended his first union meeting. He had read in CHALLENGE about the Party’s efforts to physically stop the Klan and Nazis from organizing in the 1970-80s. He started work when blacks, like him, were not allowed to belong to the union. He broke his vow never to attend a union meeting in order to support our resolution against the KKK and Nazis. He’s long since retired, but still sells a dozen papers to, among others, congregates in an important AfricanAmerican church in the area. In the 1990s, our Party and base helped start the “rolling thunder” tradition in the plants during contract negotiations and strikes. “Rolling thunder” refers to the sound of hammers banging on metal every hour on the hour reverberating through the factory. After weeks of this deafening noise, two black women readers—and later sellers—led over 400 overwhelmingly white, male chanting marches through neighboring buildings. The next day thousands emptied the complex and the strike was on. One of these march leaders joined the Party soon after. Some family members, who also worked at Boeing, followed. Another contract expired shortly after 9/11. The union mis-leaders couldn’t win members to carry on the tradition of marching through the plants. Our party, on the other hand, could and did by mobilizing our network. Nobody carried U.S. flags during the march of 150, a rarity at the time. Steady reading of CHALLENGE helped our base develop the political savvy to overcome the reactionary

ideology that flowed through the workplace. The sellers provided the organizing muscle needed to pull this march off. Our coworkers were proud of our efforts; the union hacks nervous. During the strike before last, we waited four weeks before mobilizing our base to meet independently. Although many at these lunchtime meetings had read our paper, we weren’t too clear about how to use this network during the strike. It took us a couple of weekly meetings to hit our stride. The next strike, we mobilized our network from the getgo. A good thing too, because the strike only lasted four weeks after the panicked union leadership engineered a sellout with the help of the former Democratic party majority leader Gephardt. Our sellers guaranteed two breakfast and lunch meetings every week in two different cities to enable us to reach more workers. These meetings grew to include two-dozen Boeing strikers, retirees and guests from the Northwest Airlines strike (which the IAM international was actively trying to isolate from our members). Everyone was a reader and/or a distributor or was invited by one. Organizing for these meetings was a priority. The war, imperialism, Katrina, racism on and off the job, the need for class-consciousness, solidarity, and the prospects for revolution were all hotly debated between mouthfuls. By the third week, these working breakfasts and lunches organized “independent” activities. For instance, one group planned to invite over 400 strikers, families and friends to an anti-racist, pro-working class movie and discussion. This, in fact, did happen, albeit in a much more modest fashion, even after the strike was settled. Over the years, we’ve been involved in a number of union elections. Our readers not only provided a distribution network for campaign literature, but also gave public political testimonials. These precedentsetting endorsements got better each campaign, raising anti-racist, anti-imperialist, class-conscious politics among tens of thousands of Boeing workers in a moving, personal way. These readers and sellers held their ground even when threatened by the union hacks.

The Struggle Becomes More Overtly Political As fascism and wider war become more of a possibility, the struggle between capitalist and communist ideology plays an even more important role in the union and on the shop floor. With many weaknesses, our CHALLENGE

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networks have been instrumental in bringing politics to the fore in three sharp recent struggles. In 2006, we introduced the first May Day resolution in at least 50 years in our union. CHALLENGE reported: For the first time in anybody’s memory, issues of May Day, anti-immigrant racism, how racism hurts all workers, general strikes and the anti-worker role of the systems’ laws have taken center stage at two successive union meetings in this key aerospace local. It is been driven by an increasing widespread debate among the rank and file inside plant gates. The posting and distribution of 150 in-plant flyers and an equal number of CHALLENGES helped spread the word about an unprecedented union resolution to “support workers’ action on May Day,” calling for “unity … [of] all working people.” Veteran CHALLENGE sellers and readers struggled amongst themselves and with their coworkers to endorse the resolution, while some new Machinists distributed pro-worker and communist literature for their first time.

Black CHALLENGE readers stepped up among this mostly older white workforce, being among the first to sign on to the resolution. They fought every day against the anti-immigrant racism that was holding back the union’s endorsement. One of these black readers, a shop steward, took the initiative to circulate this CHALLENGE article

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throughout his shop, defended our Party against the top union leaders, and brought his whole family to the May Day march. He later helped us during an even longer fight around the Jena 6. Fourteen CHALLENGE readers and sellers prepared a resolution to support the Jena 6. The battle around this resolution continued for three months, eventually involving not only the district, but the international as well. Recently, a seller contacted his daughter in another union to draft an anti-racist letter to be submitted to many area union newspapers. We could have expanded this fight in a more timely manner had we more quickly saw the need to rely on our sellers to advance the struggle. Our modest efforts at Boeing to mobilize readers and sellers groups must be intensified and put on a more permanent footing to deal with the increasing attacks our class will face in the near future. We must have faith in the working class and the idea that if the PLP’s politics are boldly put forward workers will respond positively. The work in the factory has shown this to be true and while this is a time of cynicism, there are many opportunities to be seized and acted upon available. This is no small task that can be accomplished overnight. It is, however vital.

My New Factory Job During high school and for a couple of years after, I thought that the best way to change the system was to buy sweatshop-free clothing, not eat meat or dairy, buy organic food, vote for an extreme liberal, play music, make artwork and do random acts of retaliation. One time, though I needed work, I rejected a construction job because I couldn’t afford vegan steel-toed work-boots. I thought that rejecting certain things that where inhumane about the system would change it. The only thing that I wasn’t rejecting was the system that was responsible for it all, capitalism. After six years of these dead-end politics, I began to realize that my supposed political actions weren’t changing anything at all and never could. The only thing my politics were doing was alienating me and making me extremely individualistic. Now I understand that having a job and teaching workers communist politics is the only way to change the world. Only the workers who build all of the houses, make all of the clothing, grow the food, build the tanks, guns, bullets and fight and die in the imperialist wars can stop the wars and change how production is run. As a worker, I know the contradictions of the capitalist system. I joined industry work so I could support my family and teach other workers revolutionary communist politics. I’ve been working in industry for almost a year now and have been making many friends. Since becoming an

industrial worker, I now truly see the power and potential the working class has to change the world. I also see the great amount of work and time that it will take to make communist revolution. Inside the factory you can see the discipline, the collectivity and the knowledge the workers use everyday to run production. Every two weeks our work schedule changes. Two weeks we are on days and then two weeks on nights and so on. Men and women of all ages and races work side by side for 9 to12 hours a shift. Doing this highly repetitious and laborious work at all hours of the day and night takes a great deal of physical and mental discipline. Working for so long and so hard while trying not to hurt yourself and not to mess up what you’re making is exhausting. Nothing I’ve ever done has been so physically demanding. Everyday workers come up with safer and more efficient ways to do their work. But none of the changes are made because it would cut into the bosses’ profits. As long as production keeps going and the bosses keep raking in profits they don’t care whom they lay off, or who gets injured or killed along the way. Since we’re not politically strong enough in the factory to change things yet, one continued on page 46

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Building Worker-Student Alliances Key To Fight for Communism This summer PLP is having two summer projects: one in Seattle from July 4th-17th and one in Los Angeles from July 24th through August 17th. These projects will have students work closely with factory workers to build worker-student alliances. Students and friends of PLP are invited to come to either Seattle, LA, or both. Participants will be selling CHALLENGE, organize and lead study groups, and students with more time will have the opportunity to work in the sub-contracting plants in LA. These summer projects and the alliances they will build are important, because in the coming period students with communist politics need to build class consciousness and the fight for communism. The liberal bosses are using the electoral circus and their now number one candidate Barack Obama to deliver working class youth on a silver platter, by having them believe that they in doing the best for their country. The bosses push the lie that the way to “advance” in society is to go to college and escape the working class. The claim that students will get better paying jobs and thus “escape” is an illusion created by the bosses to create divisions in the working class. Many people with college degrees are likely to stay in jobs that pay horribly, are without health insurance and are either short-term or part-time. In the current period of inter-imperialist rivalry – where the rulers of competing countries are fighting for maximum profits and control of markets -the situation for many working class youth will only get worse. As the U.S. ruling class’ position declines relative to their European and Chinese rivals they will be forced to streamline the domestic economy and force more and more students into more exploitative work. Many youth believe that college can be an out from this work and escaping their class. While students have played an important role in radical change, history shows that the central force for revolutionary change is the industrial working class –– these are workers who can stop production, and cut off the bosses’ profit. After all, workers produce all the goods necessary for survival and, most importantly to the bosses, the weapons and machinery necessary to wage imperialist war. It is, as history (including PLP history) has shown, only when these two forces join together in a worker-student alliance and arm themselves with communist politics that revolution is possible. In order to do this, we need a communist student movement that includes work on the campus and struggle with ourselves and other students to move

into work in the factories or the military.

Fighting Back! Workers and students have always and will always find ways to fight back against the racist capitalist system. • In 1968 in France, the suppression of a university protest outside Paris quickly led to uprisings and strikes. Within days, a workers’ general strike had shut down the country. • In China that same year, students and workers fighting for communism were at the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. • Two years later, under PLP’s leadership, SDS organized more than 1,000 workers and students to march through Detroit and picket the General Motors headquarters to support striking GM workers. • In the past year, when 7,000 workers struck at a Northrup-Grumman shipyard in Pascagoula, MS, shutting down production of U.S. war ships, PL led students and workers to join in strike support. Recently, the fight to free the Jena 6 once again illustrated the potential power of a worker-student alliance. In Jena, LA, over 50,000 workers and students marched against the racist frame-up. In Newark, N.J., a contingent of construction workers joined with over 500 people, including students from Arts High School to march against the racism in Jena. In Chicago, Ford workers passed a resolution to support the anti-racist Jena 6 march, and raise money to send to the people in Jena. In the spring of 2006, thousands of students across the U.S. walked out of school in solidarity with migrant workers against racist anti-immigration policy. They crowed the streets and halted the business of downtown Los Angeles and many other major cities. In fear, administrators locked down schools, imprisoning students. In the following year, many schools built permanent fences to prevent future walkouts. However, if workers and students are united, then fences around schools would never get built in the first place. Further, such an alliance, if armed with communist consciousness, could smash the fences of capitalist ideology. Racism, sexism and nationalism are all ideas that the ruling class invents in order to divide workers and win them to die for U.S. imperialism.

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Students and the Public Schools In public schools, bosses lay the ideological groundwork to separate students from workers. They silence labor history in schools and teach students the ideology of “every man for himself.” Schools are named after “patriotic heroes” that we are taught to idealize (we all remember learning that George Washington never told a lie); while discussions of working-class struggles are completely absent from all textbooks. In fact, students are taught to be ashamed of being a part of the working class and that all workers are(or at least those who hold steady jobs or aspire to an education) part of a “middle class” that benefits from capitalism. Students are taught these lies by the capitalist education system. Further, the bosses’ textbooks never mention the real reasons behind the increasing difficulties and instability faced by most workers. They never discuss the ways in which rivalries with other imperialists create the conditions that lower workers’ wages and reduce their health benefits. In fact, it is these very rivalries that are causing major changes in U.S. public education. These lies are not always straightforward, but are often lies of omission or distortions of the truth. A common capitalist retelling of history was that Columbus “discovered” the Americas, but how can someone discover a land that has been settled for thousands of years. Another particularly insidious distortion is the idea the slaves never fought back, when the opposite is true.1 By omitting stories such as the John Brown and Nat Turner rebellions from textbooks, the ruling class is denying the real power that the working class possesses. Losing ground to imperialist rivals, the U.S. ruling class is trying everything from charter schools, to namebrand schools, to business schools in an attempt to train high school students to be more efficient workers in a more technologically driven world economy. The HartRudman Report2, a blueprint drafted by the liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class, explains that major reforms must occur in public education if the U.S. is going to maintain its supremacy on the global stage. According to the report, for years the public education system was allowed to decay as the students of the wealthy moved to private schools and working-class students wallowed in under-funded, poorly administered public schools. This led to a decrease in performance in the sciences by American students relative to the rest of the world. Fewer students pursue engineering and the hard sciences at the college level, a problem that that Hart-Rudman feared would undermine US supremacy in high-tech weaponry they have relied on since Vietnam.

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In this way, students are seen as a labor investment for the bosses. The same people who own the factories also control the direction of schooling. Corporate institutions such as the Committee for Economic Development and the Business Roundtable, and CEO’s from Lockheed Martin, Citigroup, Boeing, Xerox, IBM, among others were the force behind the high stakes testing now enforced by “No Child Left Behind.” In the last decade, the Gates Foundation has taken command of the ruling class push for school reform, leading the LA Times to pronounce Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates the nation’s “superintendent of schools”. With capitalists directing the schools, students are tracked through the education process to ensure maximum profits and preparation for war. Advanced Placement (AP)_and college prep students are told they will to go on to college and make a real contribution to society by becoming lawyers and other “white-collar” workers. Often these students are physically separated from those on “lower” tracks. AP students are often placed in their own classes, bussed to separate academies where they take “advanced” classes, or walled off in self-contained magnet schools within larger campuses. Others are tracked into the army, hospital and factory work that they are told has less value. The “mental” labor of the white-collar workers is said to be of more value that the “manual” labor of the blue-collar workers. However, it is in these “manual” labor jobs that real power lies. History shows that wars can be ended when workers refuse to manufacture bullets and tanks and when soldiers refuse to shoot. This was seen in both the Russian Revolution and the Vietnam War. Students play an important role by allying with the working class. Revolutionary change is possible when workers and students join working-class soldiers in turning their guns around against their true enemy, the capitalist class.

Role of the Universities and Colleges Under capitalism, the universities serve the bosses’ system, by producing the ideas that justify exploitation and war, the technologies of surveillance and destruction, and the soldiers and agents necessary to maintain capitalist rule. College and Universities produce the racist and sexist ideologies that keep capitalists in power and disseminate it through the “experts” they train. Samuel Huntington, promoter of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant filth, E.O. Wilson, the inventor of “sociobiology” with its racist justification of imperialism and exploitation, and Richard

For more examples of facts omitted from American History see James W. Lowen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me.

The Hart-Rudman Commission was appointed by the Clinton Administration in 1998 to analyze the US position in the world relative to its emerging imperialist rivals in Europe, China, and Russia and offer a plan on how to maintain US dominance in the new century. Their report was divided into three parts and can be found online at http://www.fas.org/man/docs/nwc/.

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Herrnstein, who recycled racist lies about the intelligence of the working class, were all on the faculty of Harvard, and have each at one time or another chaired major programs there. Other key agents of US imperialism circulate through these universities into the government and then back again, all depending on which party and what tactics are in favor. Thus Henry Kissinger went to and from Harvard, Madeleine Albright perches at Georgetown, Zbigniew Brzeninski at Princeton, while Condoleezza Rice emerged from Stanford. With boards of directors tied to the top banks and corporations, universities are very conscious of their role in creating expertise in the service of imperialism. Their undergraduate and graduate programs, led by men and women such as Huntington, Kissinger, and Rice, train intellectuals to spread the racist, imperialist ideas generated by their faculty. And they recruit students from all over the U.S. to become the managers of US imperialism, whether in the State Department, the CIA or Wall Street. Universities are also key to developing the weapons to defend imperialism. Horrific weapons such as the atom bomb and napalm were developed in universities, as are many biological and chemical weapons. The university is also where the ruling class develops new technology such as satellite based weapons systems and radio frequency identification which can be used to track people and their activities by using their driver’s license or passport. Of course the bosses lie, teaching college students to think of themselves as better than workers who have no degree. This ideological training is key role of the universities. Colleges teach the racist, pro-capitalist theories that are invented at the elite institutions. Operating within a system that requires them to get grants and to publish research to keep their jobs, professors are more likely to study methods to enhance policing at home or ways to demonizemanipulate Islam than they are to study the history of fighting imperialism. University classrooms are filled with the latest “postmodern” theories that blame the working class for its own oppression. Stories of working-class struggles and of working-class anti-racism are seldom in the curriculum. Instead students are taught that only the educated elite are open-minded and smart enough to run things. Of course, history shows the opposite. It was not the working class but right-wing intellectuals who first gravitated to Nazism in Germany. University faculties (led in many cases by the leading philosophers of the day) were the first to expel Left students and later Jews from their schools, and university students (not the working class) formed the original core support for the Nazi Party. During the Vietnam War, opinion polls repeatedly showed that students were more hawkish than the working class, despite their domination of the public anti-war marches. Yet college textbooks, sitcoms, and PBS documentaries

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routinely lie claiming that students and “hippies” protested the war, while workers attacked them. These cases show the need for a strong communist student presence on the campus and an even stronger worker-student alliance. Not all German students were fascists, but the Leftists and Communists were purged from the universities very early on in the Nazi regime. Without strong communist politics and strong ties to the working class, students in the US will find themselves in the same position. Bosses go to great lengths to ensure that students follow dead end political movements and never unite with workers. Anti-war misleaders such as Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, internet sites such as MySpace or Facebook, and bourgeois movements such as veganism or environmentalism are just a few of the tricks the bosses utilize to distract students from the struggle against capitalism, the real reason for war, alienation and the degradation of the world around us. The bosses will use anything available to them to drive a wedge between workers and students.

PLP and the Worker-Student Alliance Since its formation, PL has fought to build communist class consciousness among students and workers. Within the student movement, the party has consistently fought for a worker-student alliance. When students understand themselves to be potential members of the working class, understand that they have the same enemy as the working class, and understand the intelligence of the industrial working class with its historic role as the one class with the power to destroy capitalism, they will be able to succeed in their goals of promoting social change. This becomes even more important now, at a time of even more intense inter-imperialist rivalries, economic crisis and expanding warfare throughout the world. The press talks about outsourcing, and suggests that most jobs are going to China or India, but they are lying. The bosses are determined to keep war production at home where it can be controlled. Outsourcing is going on, but it is a movement of jobs from unionized areas into subcontracting plants in other parts of the United States or even inside same plants. (See article in this magazine on p.___ ).. It is to these essential war factories that we want to take our message and thereby gain new experiences, both by leafleting and selling CHALLENGE as well as by taking jobs—for a couple of months, for a year, for a lifetime—in the factories. It is time for all students in and around the party to once again take up this call. Students in the universities and in the high schools who want to end racism, exploitation, war and fascism, who want to build the communist movement, can build the class consciousness this requires through building a worker worker-student alliance wherever they are.

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• Students can support strikes wherever and whenever they occur. • Students can get involved with fights and unite with campus workers to make their struggles into campaigns against racism and wars. • They can take their anti-war, anti-racist, procommunist campaigns to the factory gates with leaflets and CHALLENGE sales. • They can fight to learn the history of the fight-back of the working class and to bring this into all their classes and literature. • They can take jobs in the factories. • And this summer they can come to Los Angeles and Seattle to participate in summer projects aimed at building the communist movement in the war industries.

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sexism. Even in today’s “service-oriented” economy, manufacturing industries are still the arteries of capitalism. If organized around communist politics, they hold the key to workers’ power. If you really want to make a difference, don’t go to the polls, don’t rely on the politicians and the bosses, build a worker-student alliance and fight for communism. This year’s summer projects provide a wonderful opportunity for students to interact with workers and build new ties and experience life in the factories. Join us this July and August, come to study, come to work and help us build a vibrant student movement that includes building work in the factories.

As things get worse for workers in the US and around the world, the bosses tell us that the only way to make a difference is to vote. With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at the top of the bosses’ list, racism and sexism are said to have disappeared. However, voting never has and never will change the fact that bosses still run the show. And as long as capitalism exists so will racism and

China, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, stressed that workers must be students and students must be workers. They believed that worker-student alliances were crucial to the success of communism and the fight against revisionism. PLP also believes that worker-student alliances are necessary to the success of communism. All students must see themselves as a part of the working-class, and all workers must understand that their study is central to the growth and success of communism. As they said during the GPCR, work 50% of the time, study 50% of the time!

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PLP

Operation Dixie In July 1946 as the Truman administration was calling out the army against the post-war strike wave, the CIO launched Operation Dixie. Operation Dixie was an effort to unionize workers in the South in order to raise wages to the levels of those in the North. The CIO leadership proclaimed that this would stop wage cutting and runaway shops. The Southern Organizing Committee (SOC) focused on the textile industry, an industry that had been running south from New England since Reconstruction. But in November, after the Textile Workers Union (a precursor of UNITE) failed to get enough support to hold a union recognition election, the push was virtually shut down, though it would limp along on minimal funds for another six years. The greatest loss for the working class was the CIO’s failure to confront racism, and its willingness to shut down the efforts of those that did. In the 1930s, members of the Communist Party had been leading organizers of CIO unions (for one example see the Great Flint Strike pamphlet). This included organizing in the South. The Communist Party organized sharecroppers in Alabama, a mass movement to save the lives of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine youth falsely accused of rape, and black and white workers in the maritime, tobacco, rubber, and steel industries. The left-led unions encouraged leadership from black workers and fought to win white workers to understand that racism hurt all workers. Operation Dixie, however, worked to marginalize these efforts. The SOC regional directors were white men who had for years opposed the efforts of the leftist unions to challenge racism in practice. The very structure of Operation Dixie reflected racism. While black workers were flocking to join the anti-racist unions (such as the Food, Tobacco, and Agricultural Workers and Mine Mill), these workers were ignored as the SOC focused on the white workers in the textile industry. And when the bosses wielded racism to destroy the textile drive, using antiSemitism to denounce union organizers as “foreigners” and attacking the CIO as imposing race-mixing, the SOC did nothing to confront this racism. Rather than fight back by showing how racism hurt all workers, SOC leaders adopted the bosses’ politics by insisting on segregated union meetings and blaming the communists for the failed textile drive, even though they had not been involved in, in fact had been excluded from, the effort

In 1947, when the Taft-Hartley Act was passed, requiring unions that wanted to receive the assistance of the National Labor Relations Board to sign noncommunist affidavits, mechanism were already in place in the CIO to move against the communist-led unions. In 1949 the CIO expelled 11 unions with some one million members. The expelled unions had been in the forefront of the forefront of the fight against racism in the southern working class. These included anti-racist, left-led unions such as the Mine, Mill which had organized black steel workers in Birmingham, Local 22 of the FTA which had organized 7000 black women workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the National Maritime Union, that had organized black and white workers on the Mississippi River. The South remained predominantly a non-union, low wage haven for US bosses to super-exploit workers.

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1968: How 10 Million Workers Shut Down France Forty years ago this May, a revolt by millions of French workers and students led to a general strike that paralyzed the country for three weeks, caused the government to collapse and electrified the entire world. This struggle’s anniversary is noteworthy because “May 68” still has much to teach us.

Significantly, these strikes were not led by the organized unions, which did everything in their power to contain and reverse the movement. Police terror having failed, the labor “leadership,” including the “Communist” Party, tried bribery, but the workers turned down a significant pay increase and remained on strike.

The upheaval began as a student protest, similar to those occurring on a daily basis during that period throughout Europe and the U.S., although general working-class anger and a 67-day white-collar metal workers’ strike in Saint Nazaire in 1967 provided the tinder for the spark that was about to come. That strike affected all the metal workers and won broad solidarity from all the workers in the city, especially from women’s protest marches of 3,000 and 4,000.

On May 30, nearly a half-million workers and students marched through Paris chanting “Adieu, De Gaulle” (Farewell De Gaulle), to express their hatred for France’s president and his government.

On March 22 in 1968, about 150 students and others invaded an administration building at Nanterre University outside Paris to demand reforms in the university’s budget. The administration called the cops and the students left the building. Protests continued, so on May 2 the administration closed Nanterre. Four days later, 20,000 students and professors marched to the Sorbonne, Paris’s main university. The police rioted, launching tear gas grenades and beating and arresting hundreds of protesters. On May 10, another mass demonstration led to a pitched battle, lasting well into the night. Again, the cops ran amok. Police provocateurs launched Molotov cocktails, providing a convenient excuse for more beatings and arrests. By now, sympathy for the student protesters and revulsion at police brutality was spreading throughout the working class. The French “Communist” Party -having long become a pro-ruling class puppet -- and other fake-left organizations attempted to co-opt the growing movement with a call for a one-day strike on May 13. More than a million people marched through Paris that day. The government made minor concessions, but the protests mounted. Most significantly, they spread throughout the working class. On May 13, workers at the Sud Aviation plant in the western city of Nantes began a sit-down strike. A strike by Renault auto parts workers near the northern city of Rouen spread to the Renault manufacturing complexes in the Seine valley and the Paris suburb of BoulogneBillancourt. By May 16, workers had occupied 50 factories; by May 17, the number of strikers had swelled to 200,000. A day later, two million were on strike; the following week, 10,000,000 workers, roughly two-thirds of France’s work-force, had hit the bricks.

De Gaulle had already flown secretly to Germany to enlist the support of the infamous General Jacques Massu, known for his justification of torture during France’s colonial war in Algeria. De Gaulle had appointed Massu commander of French military forces in Germany, and Massu was preparing to send French regiments home to suppress the revolt. However, the French ruling class didn’t need the army. The revolt quickly subsided because of its own internal flaws. Crucial among these was the absence of leadership from a revolutionary communist party with a mass base within the working class. Only such a party could have given strategic and tactical direction to the longing angrily expressed by French workers and students for fundamental change in society. Only such a party could have raised the question of smashing capitalist state power and replacing it with a working-class dictatorship. This is the key lesson for us today, but not the only one. The revolt occurred at a time when the concept of the working class’s role in society and the revolutionary process had come under assault from a gaggle of fake-left “theorists,” led by a professor named Herbert Marcuse. The millions who struck France’s factories exposed the shallowness of this viewpoint and dramatically showed that the working class alone, which builds and runs everything, has the potential to revolutionize society and bring about meaningful change. This principle is just as valid today. The events of May 68 also clearly demonstrated the key secondary role of students and intellectuals in the revolutionary process. It’s no accident that the struggle began on a college campus before spreading to the factories. Despite several abortive attempts, France’s student strikers failed to make a significant alliance with the millions of working-class strikers, but this failure in no way invalidates the strategic necessity for a workerstudent alliance. More than anything, it highlights the absence of communist leadership. A third key lesson is the absolute bankruptcy of

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reformism. The workers who rejected the salary bribe had an inkling of the right idea here; without a communist party to lead them, they were forced to fight blindfolded, with one hand tied behind their backs. After the strike ended, De Gaulle quit the presidency, replaced by his henchman, Georges Pompidou. A host of reforms ensued. Forty years later, France remains a capitalist dictatorship. Unemployment for younger workers hovers between 20 and 25 percent and is much higher for immigrant workers. Racism, particularly against black workers from Africa and Arab workers is rampant in the land of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” France’s rulers continue to seek status as junior partners in the bloody scramble among U.S. bosses and others for control of Persian Gulf oil. French capitalism is thus helping grease the skids for the next world war. Pro-boss cynics say May 68 justifies the lie that class struggle always leads to disappointment. PLP differs.

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The struggles of workers and students in France two generations ago belong to our class’s living history, if we absorb their lessons and interpret them correctly. In the past four decades, capitalism has solved none of the problems that led to this revolt. If anything, the problems have worsened. Therefore, more revolts are only a matter of time. In fact, now there is speculation about workers’ reaction to this 40th anniversary and whether current student demonstrations and school occupations could spark another strike wave. PLP’s job remains the same everywhere: to spread our revolutionary ideas and build our revolutionary organization under any and all circumstances, so that when struggle of this magnitude once again erupts, its goal will be working-class dictatorship and its outcome will be a massive spurt in the ranks of communist-minded workers and students.

Use The Power Of The Working Class To Fight For Communism The struggles that the workers of Ford went through over many years were sometimes frustrating, but they gave us the opportunity to expose the bosses and their miserable wage “increases”, the continuous robbery of the workers’ benefits and the constant threat of firings and layoffs, and also to expose the crisis of the capitalist system and its incapacity to meet the most basic needs of the workers, not only of Mexico but also of the US. The daily chants of the bosses were: “COMPETITIVELY”, “GLOBALIZATION”, “QUALITY”, and the like—all designed to try to get the workers to see our interests as the same as Ford’s interests. To fight to maintain their market share, the bosses always had the unflinching goal of subjecting us workers to the most brutal exploitation while trying to get us to defend the company, even with our very lives, in the war to the death that these auto bosses have declared for control of the worldwide auto market. This was the strategy of Ford since the decade of the 1990’s with the project called Ford 2000. This project was clearly based on the principal that whoever could produce more cars paying starvation wages and with the fewest workers (supposedly motivated to serve the company) could control the market. This outlook with its resulting war on the workers has been the driving force and has led to the fact that today as Ford continues to compete for market share, there are only 700 workers

out of the almost 7000 who worked at the Ford plant in the 1990’s. The Party led and participated in many struggles at Ford involving hundreds of workers. Hundreds of workers blocked the road in front of the plant several times. Workers attacked union hacks and organized strikes. During this time, we learned from the Party that there is no wage increase, union struggle or reform movement in the world that can resolve the worldwide crisis and contradictions of capitalism. The bosses of Ford, GM, Toyota, and all the other companies will continue cutting jobs, wages, benefits and increasing work loads for those “fortunate” enough to continue working on this speeding car with no brakes for control of the world market. Today the workers who still have the privilege of continuing to work at Ford face even more extreme and critical super exploitation by the bosses. The union has become a department more in favor of the company than of the workers. Some of the union leaders, even though they began with pro-worker intentions, by not seeing and showing workers the need to destroy capitalism, eventually end up turning into allies of the bosses. On the other hand, the militant mobilizations in those years of struggle also have shown that we industrial workers have the potential in our hands to bury the bosses and their system of exploitation and lead the

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building of a communist system without bosses or profits, where the objective won’t be to conquer markets and buy cheap labor, but to provide and satisfy all the needs of the international working class. The party’s work in this plant started around 1990 during a labor battle in which the company, in secret agreement with the union, sent goons to beat up the workers, only for defending their rights as workers. This battle opened the possibility for hundreds of workers to get jobs at Ford, including a member of the Party. In my case, it wasn’t until 1994 that I met a person who invited me to participate in the Party. By then, the number of Party members in the plant had grown to four. At first, my participation with the Party was sporadic since I was more interested in the work of a union caucus which had the support of the auto unions in the US and Canada (UAW and CAW), whose main work was to put out a 4 page newsletter called the PISTON. The goal of this newsletter was to denounce the attacks by the company and the union against the workers. This small newspaper was paid for by some of the workers so we only put out from 300 to 500 copies about every two weeks. Workers would read it and then pass it on, thus guaranteeing that the vast majority of workers knew the contents of the newsletter. We also sent copies of the newsletter and leaflets to a Ford factory in the US and workers there sent us copies of their checks inside boxes of parts so that we could show all the workers how much the racist wage difference was between US and Mexican workers. One topic that was a subject of debate and which helped me to decide to increase my participation with the Party was religion. From the time I was very small I especially questioned the Catholic priests. For me this was a passionate topic. My parents and my wife were extremely religious and I had a sexist way of handling our disagreements. Fortunately, with the help of a comrade from the Party, I changed my sexist attitude. I was eventually able to convince my wife not only to participate in the Party but she’s also now convinced that religion and the Church are an ideological weapon in the arsenal of the ruling class used to keep the workers exploited. Another thing that helped to convince my wife was the constant socializing between the families of the other comrades and friends of the Party. These get-togethers helped a lot since we all enjoyed ourselves and they always ended up discussing some social or political topic. During the following years, and until we were fired, we recruited 16 active members to the Party (at different

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times) and had a considerable number of supporters, achieving a distribution of about 50 Challenges and a few leaflets reflecting the Party’s line. We also achieved a certain influence among the majority of workers who worked in this plant for our analysis of the source of the attacks on the workers’ conditions, wages, etc, and especially for building solidarity with other workers. The company tried to use its goons to intimidate and attack us, but the workers always defended us. Another thing that helped to win this confidence by the workers was constantly exposing the company’s plans, especially all their projects to better compete against other auto bosses. We also made mistakes and had weaknesses that contributed to the fact that this work done over many years and with much effort has not resulted in having continuing work in this factory at this time. There were many waves of mass layoffs and in one it seemed that the bosses had identified this movement and fired the active participants. Thus the advance of the Party was stopped in this factory for the time being. These struggles steeled some of the party members, changing our lives and inspiring us to continue to fight for communism. Our work created an enormous potential for a larger number of workers to regularly receive and distribute CHALLENGE. Also, from all this, those of us who participated learned from these experiences, and have taken to heart the lesson that we have to carry on the work and that building solid and broad networks of regular Challenge readers is key to building and securing the party over the long haul. Today there are many problems in this plant, especially the sharper exploitation faced by the workers and we see the possibility of re-starting the Party’s work through new contacts here. But most importantly, some of these industrial workers who joined the party through these struggles are today giving communist leadership in their communities, others in factories and some to the whole Party. The local and international Party learned from these struggles to have confidence in the workers’ openness to communist politics and to building one international revolutionary communist party of the working class.

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Comparison Of Two Typical Jobs Needed In Boeing And Northrop Grumman Aerospace Factories Machinist Wages hourly rate

annual salary

Boeing*

$31.90

$66,350

Washington**

$20.53

$42,700

National

$17.22

$35,810

Alabama***

$16.01

$33,300

$10.00

$20,800

Maximum Rate Average Average Average

Southern California Subcontractors

Assemblers’ and Fabricators’ Wages hourly rate

annual salary

Boeing*

$28.06

$58,360

Washington**

$15.75

$32,750

National

$14.68

$30,530

Alabama***

$12.24

$25,470

Maximum Rate Average Average Average

* Starting salaries can be as low as $16.72 for machinists and $12.72 for assemblers. Presently, most workers get the maximum rate. ** Location of Boeing assembly plants. *** Location of new Northrop Grumman plant. Sources: U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; Subcontractor worker testimony

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“Internal Contradictions are Primary” A Key to Revolutionary Dialectics “Change” is a word that has been in the air for some time now. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, media pundits, politicians, and conservative as well as liberal intellectuals constantly claim that the world has dramatically changed. The so-called “war on terror” and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have changed the face of global politics. Homeland Security and the growth of policing and intelligence agencies within the United States have ushered in a change in the role and organization of the State. More recently, 2008 presidential hopefuls—from Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton to even John McCain—call for more needed changes in the U.S.: a bigger military, national service, comprehensive immigration reform and a guest worker program, the DREAM Act and a “green-card army,” as well as more sacrifices on the part of workers, students, and soldiers. The working class faces a changing U.S. living standard, with more cuts in education and healthcare, ever-lower wages, disappearing benefits and pension plans, closed hospitals, and the tragedies of collapsing bridges, freeways, and levees. For many working families, these changes seem to have happened overnight. But the truth is that they are part of the long history of capitalism, which inevitably always leads to imperialist wars, racist attacks on workers, and fascism. How are workers, soldiers, and students to understand these recent changes in capitalism and among its competing ruling classes? How should communists understand them? How do they play a role in the struggle for a communist society? Progressive Labor Party (PLP) believes that dialectical materialism—the theory of how things in our world unfold, develop, and undergo change—is the key to understanding the situation in the world today and the changes on the horizon. It is also key to building a movement to make revolutionary change, through class struggle, communist politics, and a strong international mass PLP that will fight for workers’ state power and a communist future. To create a revolutionary communist movement, dialectical materialism must be the weapon of the international working class. It is especially important for industrial workers and soldiers, who have a vital role to play in communist revolution. They need dialectical materialism to understand the broader motives behind the ruling classes’ growing attacks on workers. With a dialectical materialist understanding of the larger crises of capitalism, industrial workers, soldiers, and students can put into practice the potential revolutionary power they hold to smash imperialism and the racist profit system that breeds it. PLP fights to make dialectical materialism as popular as possible among its members and among the international working class as a whole. The following article discusses the dialectical principle of “internal con-

tradictions are primary” (how the internal features of a thing determine its development) and why this principle is important to the building of a mass working-class PLP. It furthers PLP’s struggle to popularize dialectical thinking and practice among members and workers—in order not only to understand the world today, but more importantly, to change it. The history of class society, the Communist Manifesto said, is the “history of class struggle,” the conflict of the social groups inside society that have opposite relationships to production. This means that social change does not come about primarily by factors outside society, like climate or environmental processes, although these things certainly make a difference. Instead, the effect that external factors have on capitalist society is mainly determined by factors internal to capitalism. Although the U. S. empire was riding high after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it now faces a variety of constantly increasing challenges from other capitalist powers, including Europe, Russia, China, India, Venezuela, etc. These problems for the U. S. have emerged because of the inner laws of development of world capitalism.[1] The same is true of other events, like Katrina disaster in New Orleans, which was not primarily caused by the hurricane, but by internal contradictions—physical and social—of New Orleans and of the U. S. capitalist system.

The General Principle

These processes are examples of the one of the main principles of dialectics, the communist philosophy of change and development. This principle, which says that conflicts inside something are the main cause of how it develops, is called “internal contradictions are primary”. We can state that principle more carefully this way: Although external conditions make a difference, what happens to a thing almost always depends mainly on its internal relationships, and how it changes and what it becomes are due primarily to its internal contradictions. This principle applies to phenomena of all kinds in nature, society, politics and thought, and expresses a key idea of dialectics. It is directly opposed to the mechanical materialist idea that change is caused mainly by external factors (see Appendix I for more explanation of mechanical materialism). The fact that internal contradictions are the main cause of change is critical for understanding how the party learns and grows, the role of leadership and struggle in developing the communist movement, and what it takes for communists to advance the struggle for revolution within reform struggles. The role of internal contradictions is particularly important for understanding the growing weaknesses of the capital-

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ist system, and the vital importance of a constant internal struggle against opportunism and other weaknesses inside the party. In fact, this is one of the main applications of the fundamental law of dialectics, that everything contains contradictions that make it change, a law that helps guide us to victory in the long-term fight for communism. It is this understanding that internal contradictions are primary which led our Party to examine deeply the internal contradictions in the old communist movement whichthat led to its collapse, u—unlike revisionists like Michael Parenti who blame the strength of the imperialists for the downfall of the USSR. Before we get to these big topics, however, let’s go through some specific examples.

Getting Sick

Suppose that someone comes down with an infectious disease like tuberculosis (TB). What causes this change from health to disease? Since we are looking for the truth, we are going to answer such questions about what causes change from a materialist viewpoint. Materialism says that causation is an objective relationship that really exists, and that operates whether anyone knows about it or not. Several common theories in capitalist philosophy deny this and introduce a subjective element into causation. They make what causes what depend on what some individual or group of people believe or are interested in. One common capitalist view, called “empiricism,” claims that the difference between accidental relationships and causal ones “consists in our attitude towards them.” [2] Others claim that causal connections only exist because of scientists’ theories: “Causes certainly are connected with effects; but this is because our theories connect them, not because the world is held together by cosmic glue.”[3] A third popular subjectivist theory claims that what causes what depend on the “perspective” of some individual or group: “Causation is not an absolute relation, however, not a relation that holds in metaphysical reality independently of any perspective. For Earthians it may be a discarded cigarette that causes a forest fire, while for Martians it is the presence of oxygen. Strictly speaking ‘X causes Y is true or false not absolutely, but only relative to perspective.”[4] As we will see later, both of these claims about what causes forest fires are objectively wrong, whether you are from Earth or Mars. Materialism rejects all these bogus ideas and says that causes are objective. But what kind of objective cause makes someone come down with an infectious disease? Ever since the late 1800s, it has been known that diseases like TB are transmitted by germs. You can’t get TB without being exposed to a certain kind of bacteria. These germs are necessary to get the disease, but are they the

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main cause of the disease? Mechanical materialism says that the answer is “yes,” and the scientists who first discovered the role of germs in TB thought so, too. We now know, however, that the answer is “no.” One way to see this is to recognize that for many diseases, TB included, only a small percentage of the people who are exposed to the germ that transmits the disease will actually get sick. [5] So getting exposed to the germ is only part of the cause of the disease. The rest of the explanation of how infectious disease develops goes roughly this way: when a germ enters your body, it is attacked by your body’s immune system. That system tries to destroy the germs or neutralize their effects. If the germs win the struggle, you get sick. If the immune system wins, you don’t get sick or your illness is minor. Vaccines can strengthen the immune system. The system can also be weakened by other factors, like the presence of HIV. In any case, the outcome of this internal conflict is the main factor that determines whether you get sick once you are exposed to the germ. Since you can’t get sick without the germ, however, limiting exposure also limits the disease.

Convincing Someone

Supposed you try to convince a co-worker that communism is the right way to organize society and wages aren’t necessary. What does it mean to convince someone? Convincing is a struggle, which takes place within a relationship that has some degree of unity. You can’t just try to make your external influence stronger, by saying the same thing over and over, or yelling real loud, which would be a mechanical approach. You have to figure out what are the contradictions in that person’s thinking, experience, and actions, and show that communism resolves some of them. What those contradictions are depend on who you are talking to. Some people will see the point that communism is the only way to eliminate racism, for example, while others won’t agree with this point or won’t think it is that important. By making an argument, or involving someone in a political activity, you are providing an external influence, one that will only be effective if it modifies a contradiction inside that person in the right way. This point also applies to the working class generally. Since most workers are not communists already, communist ideas come from outside workers’ reform movements and social organizations, and it is the party’s job to provide them. But those ideas will be accepted only if they help resolve contradictions that are already inside, by making those internal contradictions more intense. When this happens, external ideas become internal ones.

Developing a Good Line is a Constant Struggle

Anybody who understands that capitalism has got to go needs to deal with the fact that the old communist movement didn’t get to communism. This means that you

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have to figure out what went wrong with the old movement. PLP concluded, as a recent C/D article put it, that “Revisionism and nationalism killed people’s war in Vietnam, as they destroyed the once-mighty rule of the working class in the Soviet Union and China.”[6] Most leftist groups have been pretty clueless about this, but PLP has been able to make some important advances over the line of the old movement. Why did this happen? Part of the explanation is that external circumstances have changed. Given the failure of socialism in the USSR and China, we have more experience to evaluate than people had in the past. But this is not the main reason for PLP’s advanced line. Although practice is the ultimate basis for all knowledge, people do not automatically draw the right conclusions from practical experience. Beliefs they are already committed to, their determination to get to the bottom of the matter, and other internal factors determine how well they will figure out what previous practice shows. Some of the information that would show that the old movement’s line was wrong has been available for a long time. In 1969, for example, PLP declared that nationalism is a capitalist outlook that workers must reject, just as we reject racism as a capitalist attack on the working class. The pro-capitalist outcome of a series of “national liberation” struggles made it easier to see this point. Sixty years earlier, however, a pamphlet written by Stalin listed a whole series of disastrous results of nationalism in that movement, but didn’t reject nationalism completely. Still today, many revisionist (fake leftist) organizations claim that nationalism can be a progressive thing. The PLP was able to come to the right conclusion not mainly because of new evidence, but because of its commitment to break with all forms of revisionism. This is true as well of PLP’s conclusion that socialism can’t get you to communism. Drawing this conclusion probably did require an external stimulus, from the experience of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) of the 1960s. But almost no one other than the PLP has drawn the right conclusion from this evidence.[7] The party drew the right conclusion mainly because of its line, its leadership, and its internal struggle, although having some of the right kind of historical experience was also necessary. Developing the right line at one time doesn’t mean that the struggle for that line is over, of course. Like racism and sexism, the inner contradictions of capitalism generate nationalism, as a way to make the working class loyal to “its” nation. Rather than giving into the bosses’ nationalist propaganda, communists must constantly fight for an internationalist, anti-racist outlook.

Working Out What Internal Contradictions Mean

That internal contradictions are the main cause of change is an important idea, worth working out in detail. To explain it and understand the mistakes that are made

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when it is ignored, we need to discuss three concepts that are parts of it: (1) what a contradiction is, (2) what we mean by “internal,” and (3) what “primary” means. We start with the concept of “internal.”

Systems and Processes

The kind of thing that something can be internal to is a system, process, object or relationship, something whose various parts or sides are connected to and depend on each other. This kind of thing has to have enough coherence and organization to be able to tell it apart from any bigger system that contains it. We’ll call it “process” or “system.” A system can be an atom, a rock, a person, a family, a mass organization, a political party, a class, an economic mode of production, a planet, a galaxy, etc. For most purposes, we can also include theories, or kinds of thinking as systems. Collections of objects that may have little connection with each other, like the people listed on a random page of the phone book, or the contents of someone’s pocket, don’t count as systems, since these things don’t have enough connection or coherence. I t is important that the systems we are talking about are whole things, not just pieces of things. The changes in your left foot might be mainly due to processes in your whole body, not just your foot. Likewise, the internal contradictions of California’s economy might not be the main factors that determine economic changes in California, since that state’s economy is integrated into the whole U. S. economy. The changes in the whole U. S. economy, however, are mainly due to its internal contradictions, even though the U.S is also contained in the larger world economy, and therefore is affected by the contractionscontradictions inside the capitalist system itself.

What a Contradiction is

Supposing we have a system to consider, we next look at the contradictions inside the relationships that make up that system. We use the term “contradiction” here in the sense of dialectical contradiction. A dialectical contradiction means a system whose different parts or aspects are connected with each other but which conflict or interfere with each other, as a unity and struggle of opposites. The contradiction that is most important in the fight for communism is between the working class and the capitalist class. The working class and capitalist class are connected together and form a system, since you can’t be a capitalist unless you exploit some workers, and you can’t be a member of the working class unless some capitalist exploits you. This systematic connection is not cooperation, however, and capitalists and workers constantly interfere with each other’s aims and plans. The two classes form a unity of opposites, but there is struggle within that unity, a struggle that will eventually break the unity apart and eliminate the capitalist class. Dialectical contradictions are not limited to conflicts between classes, but occur everywhere. Here are some

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other examples: (a) A basketball game: two teams are united in the same game, but they not only try to score more than the other team, they play defense and hold the other team back. (b) An atomic nucleus: the protons and neutrons in a nucleus both repel and attract each other. If repulsion becomes stronger than attraction, then the atom is radioactive and flies apart. (c) Opposite ideas in a party club: Club members are united in the fight for communism, but have conflicting viewpoints and proposals about what the club should do or how to do it. (d) Rival imperialist powers: Imperialists strive for resources, markets, and labor, and try to prevent their rivals from getting these things. (e) Reform versus revolution: Organizing for reforms and for revolution may be united in the same person or organization, but are contradictory efforts, which interfere with each other more than they help each other.

The Dominant Side of a Contradiction

The two sides of a dialectical contradiction are not usually equally powerful, and when they are, their equality does not last long. One side is dominant, and the fact that it is stronger determines the quality of the contradiction that contains it. The capitalist class is dominant as long as capitalism lasts, but the working class can become dominant by revolution. If an atomic nucleus stays together, it is because attraction is dominant. If repulsion becomes the dominant side, it will fly apart. Two basketball teams can be tied, but we don’t let the game end that way. The winner becomes the dominant side of the contradiction, at least for one game. Either reform or revolution can be dominant in a working class movement, and if reform wins, then communism loses.

Contradictions and Change

The most important thing about dialectical contradictions is that they cause change. They do this because the clash of opposites interfering with each other, which every contradiction contains, is a source of activity. The struggle of the conflicting sides of a contradiction is redirected into one or more directions and produces change. In a basketball game, each side needs to adjust its play to its opponent’s game, and when the game is on the line, everyone plays with more intensity. In class struggle under capitalism, the bosses constantly have to come up with new ways to exploit workers and stay on top. On their side, workers are constantly fighting to keep things from getting worse, while more and more are open to learning that we have to get rid of the capitalist system completely. In the nucleus of an atom, the contradiction of the forces of attraction and repulsion also constantly cause change. Even if the nucleus doesn’t fly apart, it still changes shape and particles move around inside it.

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Contradiction is the source of all these changes, but the pattern we see in these cases is completely general. There are contradictions in everything and these contradictions cause change

The Main Contradiction

Any real process or system has lots of contradictions, but some are far more important than others. The main contradiction of a system is the one which—for the time being—has the biggest effect on how that system changes. The main contradiction in the world today is between the U. S. empire and its various imperial rivals. The weaknesses exposed by the U. S. failure in Iraq have encouraged other powers to challenge the U. S.: Russian-U. S. conflicts about Eastern Europe are intensifying, China is competing for oil everywhere, Chavez and other Latin American nationalists are taking advantage of U. S. weakness. Although the main contradiction in the world now is between capitalist rivals, that doesn’t mean that working class resistance or its potential activism is not an important factor. To strengthen its side of this main contradiction, the U.S. capitalists need to win over workers, soldiers, and students to believe that the U. S. empire is a good thing for them. One of the ways capitalists try to promote “loyalty” to the U. S. bosses is by building patriotism in reform movements. From the movement against the Iraq war to the fight to defend a N. Y. city charter school that emphasizes Arabic language and culture, to the fight against the racist Minutemen, the liberal bosses will use the call for multi-racial unity to try to get us to follow their leadership and support bosses’ institutions and policies. Our job in these reform movements is not only to fight against racism and imperialist war, but to get people to see that, like all capitalists, liberal bosses need to promote racism and war. The liberal bosses are the main enemy. This struggle is critical to shifting the main contradiction in the world from inter-imperialist rivalry to the class conflict between the united working class and the capitalists. At that point, the fight for communism will become central.

The Fundamental Law of Dialectics

The most fundamental principle of dialectics is called the law of the unity and struggle of opposites. This principle says that there are dialectical contradictions everywhere. Everything contains a system of relationships in which some parts interfere with others. These relationships are also included in larger systems, which are also contradictory. Since contradictions are everywhere, and they cause change, it follows that there is change and motion everywhere. More important for our topic of the role of internal contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposites law implies that everything has sources of activity inside it, which can make it change itself. It is a key feature of dialectics, as Lenin said, that it “alone furnishes the key to ‘self-movement’ of everything existing.”[8]

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Lenin’s expression, “’self-movement’ of everything existing” goes one step farther than just saying that the internal contradictions in things are sources of activity. It says that these internal contradictions are the main causes of the changes that happen to those things.

System Versus External Conditions

Our previous examples show that the internal contradictions of a thing or process usually need some specific external conditions in order to operate and produce change. To explain how internal contradictions can be primary, therefore, we need to say a few words about how to tell a system or process from its external conditions. Partly this is done by our explanation of what a system is, that is, a set of inter-connected relationships that depend on and influence each other. But there is more to the relationship of a system and its external conditions than that. One thing that distinguishes many conditions from the system that operates in them is that conditions can be passive. In order to live, a human being must breath oxygen--oxygen is a condition for human life. But oxygen does not tend to produce life, human or otherwise. It isn’t a source of that kind of activity.[9]

Active External Conditions

It can happen, however, that an external condition is active and can stimulate internal change, like when you get hit by a car and break a leg. For a human being, being hit by a car is a seriously unfavorable external action, and you are bound to get some damage from it. But the fact that the collision results in injury still depends on the internal make up of the thing that gets hit. If the same car had hit a concrete wall, the damage to the wall would probably be small. External conditions can also limit or prevent internal change. Plants without water cannot grow, and plants with only a little water will only grow a little. When there is racism, cynicism or patriotism among workers, students or soldiers, it will limit the growth of the communist movement, although the growth of the movement can also reduce these limiting factors. It isn’t only external conditions that can limit development, however. Capitalism’s development, for example, is limited by a falling rate of profit, crises of overproduction, and imperialist wars, things that result from the internal contradictions of capitalism. Both internal and external factors can hold back development, but internal contradictions are still the main source of a thing’s development. All processes exist within limits, but limits do not determine the internal contradiction. In fact, it is the internal contradictions of a process that help determine its limits, and by sharpening these contradictions, the limits can and will be changed. In the case of building the Party, what you do counts, that is, what we do, like expanding Challenge networks in a factory, school barracks or neighborhood will expand the limits of the party’s ability to influence events and grow. Such growth (however mod-

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est) in turn lays the basis to expand the limits of our work even more. Not understanding that internal contradictions are primary, that we can change the limits, makes you a slave to spontaneity, that is: either we are critical and self-critical and constantly looking for ways to improve our line and work, or we just hope for big movements to arrive spontaneously.

Control is not the Same as Cause

When an external event triggers a complex process, it is seldom the primary cause of that process, but it can often exert some control. When a human being knows that he or she can control a process with an external stimulus, we often hold him or her responsible for the results, even if that stimulus was not the main cause. A gun won’t usually fire without pulling the trigger. It is the chemical process inside the cartridge that causes the bullet to fly off, but we still hold the person who pulls the trigger responsible when someone gets shot. Being the main cause of some event and being responsible for it are not the same thing. Even when an external condition provides a stimulus for change, it is the internal organization of the system that determines what external conditions count, how much importance they have, and what change will result. In fact, whether something counts as an external condition for a system at all will depend entirely on the internal make up of that system. Oxygen supply is an external condition for human life, but a supply of argon gas is not, although that gas is also found in the air we all breathe. The stuff is there, but it presence makes no difference to our internal processes, so it doesn’t count as an external condition.

What ‘Primary’ Means

Internal contradictions are primary partly because they are the active source of development and change, while external circumstances often produce no particular activity at all. Even when an external stimulus is a source of activity of some kind, the effect that it has is modified by a thing’s internal contradictions, and may be enhanced, redirected or canceled out by those internal contradictions. Mao Zedong put the point this way: “external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change.” The development of imperialist war and fascism are conditions that make communist revolution possible, but the basis of that change is the internal make up of the communist movement, and particularly, of its political line. The way an external condition or event makes a difference is by affecting an internal contradiction. An external influence can strengthen or weaken one side of a contradiction, and even change which side is dominant. You can give a child a booster shot to strengthen his or her immunity to some disease because the shot effects specific internal contradictions. A teacher who thinks the school

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board just doesn’t have enough money to fix the broken toilets at his school may change his mind when he finds out the board just gave itself a big raise. This information makes a difference to him because it contradicts his illusions about the school board. To someone who is already well aware how capitalist institutions work, however, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. The bosses’ patriotic and racist propaganda can provoke hatred and resistance in the working class or it can lead to demoralizatiation and weakness, depending on the working class’s internal contradictions, and particularly the leadership of the party.

Something External Can Become Internal

The distinction between a system or process and its external circumstances is easy to see in many cases, but we need to point out a few complications. One is that what starts out being external can become internal. Having food is an external condition for human life, but when you eat it, some of it becomes part of your body, internal to you. This is also true of other physical and social influences. When you learn something, part of your external environment becomes internal to your thinking. People are strongly influenced by their social circumstances and relationships, by their family and their class, influences that become part of their make up. This only happens, however, because our internal organization makes it happen. Our internal organization makes us mold ourselves according to our experiences and relationships.

Which System are You Talking About?

A second complication is that almost all systems or processes exist inside of larger systems, and those larger systems can provide external circumstances for the smaller ones. This means that when we say internal contradictions are primary, we need to pay attention what system we are talking about. The working class is a system, but it is also part of the capitalist system, which is dominated by the capitalist class. The internal contradictions of the working class are the main influence on its development, but the whole capitalist system—and its sharpening contradictions—not only provides the external conditions for that development but penetrates into the working class. The internal contradictions of the capitalist system are the main influence on the development of that system, but not necessarily the biggest influence on every part of that system, including the working class. Bosses’ attacks against the working class may be effective or not, depending on the internal contradictions of the working class.

Analyzing Revolution with Internal Contradictions.

Keeping your systems straight is crucial for analyzing internal contradictions correctly. How the working class develops—including the communist movement—depends mainly on the internal contradictions of the working class,

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and especially of the party. It is the job of communists to solve many of these internal contradictions, and produce a powerful movement, unified around an advanced line. But accomplishing that is not enough to determine whether the workers win and communism is achieved. In order for the working class to become the dominant side of the worker-capitalist contradiction, it is not enough for the working class to grow stronger. A condition external to the working class must also be present: The capitalist class must get weaker, at least for a certain period of time. In fact the communist movement needs there to be weakness on the capitalist side in order to grow strong in the first place. The communist analysis of the internal contradictions of the capitalist system, developed by Marx, Lenin, and many others, explains why this weakening will actually happen. The internal logic of capitalism leads to ever-larger crises, particularly the crises brought on by the wars that rival capitalists must fight. Imperialist war exhausts capitalist powers, and weakens their hold on the masses, making some powers ripe for revolution and others too weak to intervene to help them, a pattern that was repeated several times in the 20th century. For the capitalist system as a whole, these crises are the product of its internal contradictions. For the revolutionary working class, however, they are external conditions favorable to working-class victory. The internal contradictions of the working class direct its development, and the internal contradictions of the whole capitalist system determine how it changes. These two levels, the working class and the capitalist system are also linked together. As the struggle of the imperialist powers weakens them, the struggle for a revolutionary line inside the working class becomes more important, and the pressure from the bosses to cave in become stronger. Lenin’s party was able to take power at the end of World War I precisely because they did not cave in, but won over a large part of the working class of Tsarist Russia to their revolutionary line.

How New Orleans was Flooded

Several overlapping levels of processes are also needed to understand the disaster in New Orleans. At one level, we have the system of the city itself. Some of New Orleans is below sea level. It has a large lake on one side and a river on the other. To keep the water out, the city has many miles of levies. This means that there is a physical contradiction in the city, with the lake and river trying to flow in and the levies trying to keep the water out. In ordinary weather, the outward push of the levies is the dominant side of the contradiction. When a big storm blows in, however, it can change the water level enough that the tendency of the water to flood the city becomes the dominant side of the contradiction. This is what happened in August, 2005, and it happened where the government had built the weakest levies, next to black working class neighborhoods. The water rose, the levies failed,

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a large part of the city was flooded. If the city had been built somewhere else, or if it had had adequate levies, the storm would have done much less damage. Instead, the storm strengthened one side of New Orleans’ contradiction, shifted the dominant side of that contradiction, and the city was greatly damaged as a result. Once the city began to flood, there was no evacuation and little aid, so many died, not only from the physical contradiction of the levies with the lake and the river, but from the internal social contradictions of the racist, corrupt, and incompetent city and state political system. New Orleans was damaged mainly by its internal contradictions, but most people blamed the federal government. It’s true that they were to blame, but we need to distinguish between what the cause was and who or what was to blame. New Orleans did not have the resources to resist rising water or deal with its consequences. This is a fact about the internal structure of the city, and the main cause of the disaster. The fact that the city had this screwed up internal structure was caused by its being part of a system much bigger than the city, the whole U. S. capitalist system. The fact that the levies were not reinforced, although there were many warnings over a long period of time that the next big storm would flood the city, is mainly due to the policies--especially the racist policies-of the federal government. In most large public construction in the U. S., the federal government pays a big portion of the bill, for the simple reason they have the money that cities and states don’t have. The U. S. government didn’t spend the money to save New Orleans because of the internal contradictions of U. S. capitalism. U.S. capitalism did not even try to save the workers of New Orleans, either before or after the hurricane struck because the U. S. bosses are involved in a constantly sharpening rivalry with the other capitalists on the planet, and have decided to keep spending money on war and war preparations, not on the physical infrastructure of the U. S., trying to keep their dominant position in the world. The result has been unsafe roads, bridges, and dams all over the U.S., health care and education cuts, etc. Add to this is the racism of U. S. capitalist policies on all fronts. Since they knew that the people who would be hurt most by a flooded New Orleans were the city’s black working class, the bosses weren’t about to cut back on tanks and warplanes to save them. To understand Katrina, however, you need to keep track of the several different systems whose internal contradictions ultimately produced the disaster. The most direct and immediate cause of the destruction in New Orleans was the internal contradictions of New Orleans. The state of those contradictions, however, was mainly the result of the contradictions of the U. S. capitalist system as a whole and its inter-imperialist conflict with other capitalist powers.

Which System?

We have already seen that when you have systems inside systems, you have to use the right one, or you will

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not understand how internal contradictions work. Some changes in a thing should really be considered changes in a bigger system that contains it. As an example, consider a worker who is unemployed. Is this due to his or her internal contradictions? This is almost never true. Someone can be trained for a certain kind of job and have a good work record, but still not be able to find that kind of job, just because business is bad and no bosses are hiring, or because of the bosses’ racism. Being employed or unemployed is part of a relationship the worker has to the capitalist system, or at least to the particular industry he or she works in. Whether he or she has a job is caused by the internal contradictions of that larger system much more than it is due to the characteristics of the individual worker.

“Overwhelming Force”

Before we turn to applications to our practical work, we should consider a common objection to “internal contradictions are primary.” This objection says that there are some cases where the external influence is so overwhelming that the cause of a things’ destruction must be mainly external. If someone sets off a nuclear weapon on your front porch, your house is going up in smoke, no matter what its internal structure is. The internal contradictions principle only requires, however, that internal factors are almost always the primary cause of change. There are exceptions, but they are rare. Those are cases where not only the existing internal structure, but any other structure that could have been there instead would have still resulted in destruction. Most cases where people claim that overwhelming force is present just don’t hold up, however. The U. S. government did not organize an evacuation when Katrina struck, and over 1200 people were killed. When faced with hurricane Ivan, a category 5 storm in 2004, the Cuban government was able to organize a huge evacuation that resulted in no one being killed by the storm. The fact that Cuba was able to do this shows that hurricanes are not overwhelming forces, and that internal political structure can allow people to deal effectively with strong external forces, even if they can’t be stopped. Some people claimed that the downfall of the USSR in 1991 was caused mainly by external pressure of U.S. capitalism, and especially by its military spending. Revisionist writer Michael Parenti, for example, claimed that the USSR was “Pressed hard throughout its history by global capitalism’s powerful financial, economic, and military forces,” and was “swept away when the floodgates opened to the West.”[11] This ignores the profound internal contradictions of Soviet state capitalism, which the Soviet rulers tried to resolve by moving to private ownership of capital, rather than controlling it through the party and government. Former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig was right when he said that the end of the Cold War was caused by the internal contradictions of the USSR, and that building enormously expen-

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sive “Star Wars” weapons systems and other U. S. actions were merely “catalysts” to its downfall.[12] Contradictions of U. S. Capitalism and the Iraq War A recent New York Times editorial claimed that the “America lost the [Vietnam] war because a succession of changes in the South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon.”[13] There is a grain of truth in this, since not getting their puppets to do a good job was a big problem for the U.S. capitalists in Vietnam, as it is in Iraq. The Times analysis of failure in Vietnam ignores, however, the more important causes of defeat: the internal contradictions of U. S. capitalism, and the powerful worker-peasant movement of Vietnam. On Iraq, however, the editorial does focus on the internal contradictions within U. S. imperialism, which have been greatly intensified by its failure to dominate Iraq, recommending that the U.S. face up to its failure and get over it. The result, it says, will be rebuilding its “battered armed forces” to achieve a “nation better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership”--that is, the challenges of being the biggest imperialist on the planet. A recent article in Foreign Affairs also focuses on internal sources of U. S. failure in Iraq. It says that the U. S. must face up to its failure and must rebuild its corps of generals, who meekly backed down when the Secretary of Defense refused to allocate sufficient troops to occupy Iraq. It should get rid of the bad political leadership, incompetent political appointees, and reform the press, who “helped sell the war,” the article said, and improve inter-agency cooperation and the U. S. “capacity for nation building and counterinsurgency.”[14] While the U. S. empire will probably learn something from its disaster in Iraq and make some changes, its policies are now driven by contradictions that are even bigger than those it had before the war. It needs to get out of Iraq to rebuild its military, but it can’t leave the Persian Gulf. It has to stay, not only to be able to control the oil its competitors need (especially China and Europe). It must also prevent Iran, which may soon have nuclear weapons, from dominating and perhaps even conquering Saudi Arabia, with her huge oil supplies.

Developing Fascism

It is a fundamental fact about world capitalism that superpowers cannot retire. They fight to stay on top as long as possible, and finally end up as third-rate powers, like Spain, Britain, Turkey, or Portugal. War and fascism are necessary responses to the intensification of external challenges and internal weaknesses of imperial powers, as they attempt to stay on top a little longer. The U. S. now faces challenges from the Chinese economy and military, the threat of a renewed Cold War with Russia, challenges from Latin American nationalists and others who are encourage by the U. S. weaknesses that are re-

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vealed by the war in Iraq. Trying to deal with these external challenges, U. S. fascism is developing in a number of ways. Among the most important features of developing U. S. fascism are the following: I. Winning or trying to win the population to support war, using patriotism, fear, and racism, including anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, etc. II. Misleading and oppressing potential opposition, by elections, prisons, surveillance, wiretapping, immigration raids, torture, etc. III. Lowering the working class’s standard of living to pay for war, cutting wages, welfare, pensions, Social Security, health care reimbursements, etc., and doing this in a way that particularly attacks black and Latin workers. IV. Increased the size and capabilities of the military and building up war production industries. V. Disciplining the capitalist ranks (Enron, SarbanesOxley, Gov. Spitzer, etc.), and direct rule of capitalists over key institutions like schools (Gates and Broad foundations). None of these are optional for the U. S. bosses. All are necessary responses to external threats and internal weaknesses of the U. S. empire. For example, much larger wars will have to be fought. McCain is singing about bombing Iran, Hillary has explicitly threatened to do it, and Obama is talking about intervention in Pakistan. Their problem is that most people are already fed up with the present wars, so patriotism, fear, and racism must be increased to try to gain support or at least tolerance of wider war. Elections are working out to be a good way for them to do this. Since U. S. imperialism needs a bigger military, as all the presidential candidates say, and it can’t produce enough or steal enough even to pay for the military it has, the bosses must drive down the worker’s standard of living. You can fill in the reasons for the other features of U. S. fascism. It seems to have been true during the crises of the 1930s that U. S. capital could afford to make concessions to the working class. They can’t afford it now, so fascism is their answer. Whether the U. S. can develop fascism effectively is the whole ball game for U. S. capitalism. But while the growth of fascism prepares for war, it also intensifies the internal contradictions of the U. S. capitalism, and provides opportunities for the growth of the communist movement.

Internal Contradictions and the Party’s Work

We have mentioned a variety of cases that show how internal contradictions bring about change. Our

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main application of this idea to our political work involves modifying contradictions through struggle. Eventually we have to resolve the worker-boss contradiction with violent revolutionary struggle. We already have some violent struggles with Nazis, cops, scabs, etc. In most of our work now, however, struggle means persistent, skillful efforts to convince people to agree with some ideas and projects, reject others, and involve themselves in struggles with us. Earlier we discussed the dialectical analysis of convincing someone: It means finding the right external influence—that is, making the right argument or finding the right practical actions that can stimulate a change in that person’s thinking, given their internal contradictions. This requires persistence and skill precisely because it comes from outside, which is not the main cause of what someone thinks. We have to learn to understand how our friends and allies see things themselves, how things look to them “from the inside,” to understand how to struggle effectively. Political relationships created by base-building provide key opportunities to do this.

Internal Contradictions and Struggle

The struggle of opposites is constant inside a dialectical contradiction, but many political struggles will only have a significant effect if someone deliberately decides to fight for a particular line. This kind of deliberate struggle aims at intensifying existing contradictions or shifting the balance between the contradictory sides. Because internal contradictions are the main cause of change, this kind of struggle works. We can make a difference by modifying those contradictions through deliberate struggle. This is certainly no surprise. We are used to the idea that struggle is necessary and makes a difference. But the fact that internal contradictions are primary provides a clear explanation of why struggle works, by modifying the internal contradictions of things. It is a key part of the philosophy of struggle.

Internal Contradictions and Leadership

Struggle is inseparable from leadership. When you fight for a line or an action, you a trying to exert leadership. Your leadership will be good or bad, depending on the line you struggle for, and your skill and persistence in fighting for it. Your leadership will have an effect, which can be measured by actions against racism, C/D sales, party growth, and other practical ways. In base-building, in work in reform movements, in discussions inside the party, struggle and leadership are the main things that determine whether we get a good outcome or not because of the effect of this struggle and leadership have on internal contradictions. Exercising leadership includes being willing to fight for unpopular positions. Our party’s experience during the Vietnam War shows how important this is. Our attacks on nationalism, criticism of the Vietnamese leaders as revisionist, condemnation of the Paris peace talks as a sellout, all provoked howls from revisionists in the anti-war movement, but they were nec-

PLP

essary to move forward. “Communists are trail-blazers, not camp-followers.”[15] External conditions can help us advance or they can make it tough, but they are not the main thing that determines whether the work is successful or not. Struggle can shift the dominant side of the contradiction, convince our friends, weaken capitalist ideas in reform movements, and defeat opportunist ideas in the party. This means that it is the responsibility of all comrades to learn to struggle effectively and actually do it. Leading is not just up to people in formal leadership positions. Responsibility to Lead Everywhere that people interact, leadership makes a decisive difference. Our party is trying to become the leader of the working class, uniting it in the fight for communism. As PLP’s program Road to Revolution IV (1982) stated, “The working class requires a general staff that places the victory of communism above all other goals and that fights to make the party the leader of society.” Becoming the leader of the working class will take a long and complex struggle, opposed by the bosses at every step, since the survival of capitalism depends on the capitalists being able to keep their flunkies leading the working class, so it could never win. The victory of communism can only happen if a communist party leads the working class, and does it right. That leadership can only happen if the party is unified around the right line, but that can only be achieved by an effective internal struggle. Let’s consider a few examples of internal struggle from the history of the USSR. The tremendous effort to build a socialist economy in the USSR, which began in 1929, included rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. This was a critical step that allowed the Soviets to survive and defeat the Nazis. To take this step the Soviet communist party (CPSU) needed to conduct an internal struggle lasting a number of years to overcome two wrong lines. One wrong line claimed that socialism could not be constructed in the USSR, and the one other said that building socialism would be a long, gradual process, with development of heavy industry put off for many years. The first line, that socialism in one country was impossible, was defended by Trotsky and his supporters, who claimed that “a genuine upsurge of the socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the proletariat is victorious in the major countries of Europe.”[16] Without a successful revolution in Europe, the Trotskyites claimed, the USSR would be destroyed by growing contradictions between workers and peasants, or by invasion from the outside.[17] This position was finally defeated at the CPSU party conference at the end of 1926. The second wrong line was defended by Bukharin and his supporters. They claimed that industrialization could only take place over a long period of time, during which higher grain prices, lower taxes and more consumer goods would induce peasants, especially peasant capi-

THEcommunist

talists (kulaks) to produce more grain and fund the build up of light industry. Collectivization of agriculture was also to be developed slowly. These positions were finally defeated in 1929.[18] Both the Trotsky and Bukharin groups refused to accept the party’s decisions, and were eventually expelled for forming factions, that is, political groups inside the party that organize against the party’s line.[19] Adopting either of these two wrong lines would have prevented rapid industrialization that the USSR needed to survive. The top leaders of the CPSU, and Stalin in particular, played a decisive role in defeating these two lines. But it isn’t only official leaders whose leadership can make a difference in the development of the line of the party. One example of rank-and-file initiative took place during the big push for industrialization.[20] Many industrial workers pooled their wages into “communes” and “collectives.” Communes distributed wages equally or by family size, while collectives paid skilled workers somewhat more. The top leadership of the party was not happy with these arrangements, because they undermined the Soviet party’s policy of “material incentive” for work. At a Party Conference in June, 1930, party leader Kaganovich attacked the “excesses” of those delegates who wanted “complete collectivization of the shops.” In the following year, the party stopped the communes altogether. Looking back, we can see that the rank-and-file initiative to form communes was a big step toward communism, and it was a mistake to stop them. We know that there was an internal struggle to keep them, and it lost out. Although there isn’t a lot of information available on how this struggle went, it would be wrong to say that it is just the fault of the top leaders that they came up with the wrong line. It is just as important to say that a lot of workers had the correct line, and they didn’t fight hard enough or well enough to get it adopted. Internal struggle is decisive, and we will fail if we don’t understand this.

Don’t Rely on the External Circumstances

Some comrades don’t have this perspective, but rely on external events to push us forward--or hold us back. Because of this they tend to make wrong estimates of the how the party benefits from work in big reform movements. Usually a big reform movement is a favorable condition for communist organizing, but we can’t forget that external conditions are not the main thing. If we don’t struggle for communist politics in the mass movement, or worse, if we have a line which conflicts with revolution, we don’t advance. How many times have we knocked ourselves out in a union or an anti-war group, and come out with nothing, when the favorable circumstance was there, but the struggle for communist politics within the group was not? We also have plenty of experience that shows that being active in mass movements has a tendency to move people to the right, as we work closely with people whose thinking is to the right of us. Although this tendency is

39

unavoidable, giving into it is not. Reformist external influences don’t have to move us to the right, provided we carry out a continuing vigorous internal struggle, in the clubs and in the party press. Instead of being moved to the right, we can move at least some of our friends in the movement to the left if we fight for the line, for the paper, etc.

Struggling Against Our Own Weaknesses

Probably the most important thing to understand about internal contradictions for our work is that our weaknesses hold us back more than external conditions. This means that without a determined struggle to overcome internal weaknesses, we will fail. But you can’t struggle against weaknesses you don’t know about or don’t face up to, so the struggle against them requires being honest and self-critical with our comrades, our base, and the masses we are trying to win. We must not hide difficulties, mistakes and failures, and not exaggerate our victories. We must also make accurate estimates of what is possible in a given period and what is not, given our forces and the external conditions we face. Of course, we must also resist the temptation to minimize or ignore our weaknesses by over-estimating the importance of external difficulties.

Misunderstandings of “Internal Contradictions are Primary”

There are several important ways to misinterpret the ideas that internal contradictions are primary. One misinterpretation is to understand “internal contradictions are primary” subjectively, as saying that we concentrate on internal contradictions only because they are easier to do something about. In fact some external circumstances can be easier to change than internal ones. Our political work can increase the respect and agreement that people outside the party have for it, and as the party grows, it can make can make bigger changes in external circumstances. This can happen even if the party has serious internal contradictions that are hard to eliminate. In any case, it is a general principle about all change that the main cause of change is internal. We do not focus on the internal just because it is easier to work on. Some comrades misinterpret “internal contradictions are primary” as meaning that we can accomplish anything if we just do it right. This is not what the principle means. The extent of change can be limited by external factors. In present conditions, the party can only grow slowly, not matter how good are line is or how hard we work. This is partly a matter of the influence that capitalist ideas have over the working class, especially since the collapse of the old movement has called into question whether the working class can seize and hold power and build communism. But what we do today, including how we answer these doubts in theory as well as in practice, lays the basis for more rapid growth in the future as the objective situation

40

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in the world changes. Growth is also limited by conditions inside the party. Our small size limits our ability to reach people and the influence we can have on events, and it is easier to get people to join a movement that is obviously powerful already than one whose influence is still fairly small. In fact the size of the party constitutes an internal contradiction, since it contradicts the mass party that we aim for and must have to win. Our confidence that the working class can win communism is not based on the idea that we can do anything we want to if we try hard enough, but that we can learn to do the specific things that it takes to win. That confidence must be renewed everyday by fighting for our line in the mass movement and at work, school and in the military. In this way, as we fight for our line, we influence our base and often they influence us, demanding that we do more and explain more to them and their friends. These things can expand the limits in which we operate. The fact that we can sustain ourselves and grow in the face of growing fascism is not just a fact about dialectical logic, but about the strengths of the working class and the weaknesses of capitalism. At the moment, the political cost to the U. S. capitalists of trying to destroy the communist movement is probably too high for the bosses to pay. They have other fish to fry now. As we get to be a bigger threat, however, they will be willing to pay that price. We prepare for that situation by growing in size and influence, especially by building a mass base for the paper. We also need to work skillfully, in a way that minimizes what the bosses know about us. It is not just dealing with the internal contradictions of the party and the working class that makes it possible to win, but also the intensifying internal contradictions of capitalism and growing anger and disillusion of the working class about them. Understanding dialectics is essential for us to understand how capitalism works and how our movement can advance, but you can only get the right answers from applying it if you also get your facts right about specific internal contradictions, both the bosses’ and our own, and about the tremendous potential of the working class to create a communist future. In fact, if PLP hadn’t studied dialectics, we wouldn’t exist today as a revolutionary communist party.

APPENDIX I: What is Mechanical Materialism? Mechanics is a part of physics that deals with how things change when physical forces push or pull on them. One of the basic principles about forces is that if there is no force at all acting on something, that thing doesn’t change speed or direction. In the simplest cases, mechanics does not ask what happens inside something and ignores internal forces. So, in those cases, an object will only change its speed or direction if there is an exter-

Internal contradictions of the Mt. Saint Helens volcaino lead to explosion, May, 1980

nal force on it. This is the kind of case that mechanical materialism takes as a model for its philosophy of change, assuming as a basic principle that all change is caused from the outside. For certain objects and certain kinds of change, this principle works. We may be able to explain the path of a bullet fired from a gun, for example, without knowing what happens inside the bullet. If we want to understand the shape of the bullet, however, internal forces play a decisive role, and cannot be ignored. The mechanical materialist strategy for dealing with things whose internal structure can’t be ignored is to imagine them as broken down into the tiniest possible particles, so that inner structure is completely done away with. Physicist Max Planck explained this strategy this way: “We can however regard each body as composed of very many material points, and the differences in the mechanical properties of bodies can be reduced to the effects of different forces that individual points exert on each other. Thus the question of the laws of movement of material bodies is reduced to the mechanics of systems of material points.“[21]

THEcommunist The price of this reduction of objects and even people to a collection of “material points” is that mechanical materialism must ignore the qualitatively different properties and kinds of causal relationships that occur in the different levels of organization of material reality. This is a hopelessly dead-end approach for most of science, especially the biological and social sciences. Beginning in the 1600s, the successful development of mechanics helped make mechanical materialism an influential point of view. Although not a materialist himself, French philosopher Descartes expressed the mechanical materialist position well when he claimed that it is a law of nature that “each particular thing continues to be in the same state as long as it can, and that it only changes by encountering something else.”[22] In the 1700s, French materialist philosophers extended this idea to people and societies. Baron D’Holbach claimed that people’s choices are determined by causes outside them.[23] Montesquieu claimed that climate and soil largely determine the structure of societies, so that slavery, for example, is more likely to occur in very hot climates.[24] In the 1800s, after the development of thermodynamics, the science of heat, there were many attempts to use it to prove that change must come from the outside. The argument was that every isolated system tends to equilibrium, a state of internal balance, and in that state there is no tendency to change, so any change that happens must come from the outside. Writers like H. Spencer, who were not materialists at all, also defended this idea. One big flaw in this argument is that most real systems, including people and societies, are not isolated, but must exchange matter and energy with their surroundings in order to survive.[25] Instead of using this bogus argument from physics, others, like economists Pareto and Walras, simply constructed their theories to be as similar as possible to mechanical systems. [26] As they developed the ideas of dialectical materialism, Marx and Engels showed the bigger problem with the equilibrium view, the fact that people and social systems are not in internal balance, but are moved by unresolved internal conflicts that tend to become larger (see appendix II). In the 1900s, developments in physics and biology gradually discredited the idea that everything is to be explained by particles exerting forces on each other, so that change would come from the outside. Even so, mechanical materialism continued to be defended by many philosophers and scientists, and by pro-capitalist economists, anthropologists, geographers, etc., who want to try to prove that class struggle does not determine social development. Typical of a large portion of capitalist economic thought, economist Paul Samuelson claimed “Within the framework of any system the relationships between our variables are strictly those of mutual interdependence.... The only sense in which the use of the term causation is admissible is in respect to changes in external data or parameters.”[27] Trying to replace dialectical materialism, anthropologist Marvin Harris’ “cultural materialism” claimed that environmental and biological factors external to human society determine human culture, for example, that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice because there was a shortage of protein in central Mexico.[28]

41 Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, later a PBS TV series, claimed that the most important features of human societies are determined by their physical and biological environment.[29] Thus mechanical materialism remains an important trend in capitalist philosophy and pseudo-science. APPENDIX II: Some History of “Internal Contradictions are Primary” Prior to Marx and Engels, the most important contributions to the development of dialectics came from the German philosopher G. F. W. Hegel. We note here some of Hegel’s comments on the role of internal contradictions. “Negativity,” that is, the struggle of opposites, Hegel wrote, is the “the internal source of all activity, vital and spiritual self-movement, the dialectical soul which all truth has in it and through which it alone is the truth.” In his own notes, Lenin described this passage as “the kernel of dialectics.”[30] Other comments by Hegel express similar ideas: “contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity.”[31] “This inner contradiction of the concrete is itself the driving force of development.”[32] Marx and Engels make many applications of the idea that things develop because of their internal contradictions. Their fundamental principle that class struggle drives the development of class society, that “All history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,”[33] illustrates this idea since classes are the opposing sides of contradictions inside society. Marx’s analysis of commodity production and capitalist society is another clear example of causation by inner contradictions, since he shows how the development of the capitalist system is a result of its internal contradictions, in particular, the contradictory nature of commodities. “The inner opposition of use value and value wrapped up inside commodities,” he wrote, “is thus expressed through an external opposition, that is, through a relation which holds between two commodities, one commodity whose value is to be directly expressed only as use value, and another commodity in which value is directly expressed only as exchange value.”[34] Commodity production eventually becomes transformed into capitalist production, and at that stage “the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their opposite.”[35] More importantly, the fundamental internal contradictions of capitalism tend to become more intense: “This internal contradiction [between capitalists’ drive to expand production and their need to limit workers’ consumption] seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying field of production. But the more the productive power develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest. It is no contradiction at all that on this self-contradictory

THEcommunist

basis, there should be an excess of capital simultaneously with a growing surplus of population. For while a combination of these two would, indeed, increase the mass of produced surplus value, it would at the same time intensify the contradiction between the conditions under which this surplus value is produced and those under which it is realized. ”[36] This intensification sets limits on the future development of capitalism, or as Marx puts it, “The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.”[37] As Engels summed the matter up, “Capitalist production being a transitory economical phase, is full of internal contradictions which develop and become evident in proportion as it develops.”[38] When discussing the development of the party by internal struggle, Engels makes the point that this is a general principle of dialectics: “It seems that any workers’ party of a big country can develop only through internal struggle, as indeed has been generally established in the dialectical laws of development.”[39] Throughout the 1920s, Soviet philosophers struggled against mechanical materialism. By the early 1930s, they had defeated mechanical views and produced a series of party dialectics texts that included emphasis on the primary role of the internal: “[According to the dialectical materialist viewpoint,] the causes of development are not found outside a process but inside it, the main attention is directed at revealing the source of the ‘self-development’ of a process. From this point of view, knowing a process means revealing its contradictory sides, establishing their mutual relations, and tracing the movement of its contradictions. This viewpoint gives the key to ‘jumps,’ shows the transformation of the process into its opposite, and explains the destruction of the old and the origin of the new.... Not only social phenomena, but all phenomena of objective reality develop in an internally contradictory way.” [40] Developing the ideas of the Soviet textbooks further, Mao Zedong gave a classic presentation of the idea that internal contradictions are primary in 1937 in his essay “On Contradiction,” where he wrote: “The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes.”[41]

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In 1938, Stalin wrote that “development takes place by way of the uncovering of inner contradictions,”[42] but he did not explicitly discuss the relative importance of internal contradictions and external circumstances. Later Soviet philosophy often supported the internal contrdictioncontradiction principle explicitly. One influential author from 1952 declared that “In each process, internal and external opposites are interlaced, connected with one another, and interact with each other. But inner contradictions and the struggle to overcome them are basic and decisive. This struggle is the main moving force of all development and all movement.”[43] After the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in the 1960s, when Soviet philosophers began to defend opportunist positions on the resolution of social contradictions, they often continued to defend the primacy of internal contradictions. One text stated, for example, that “it is the internal contradictions that play the decisive part in all development.”[44] In its press and its internal study of dialectics, PLP has taught internal contradictions are primary for many years. For an earlier discussion, see the PLP pamphlet JAILBREAK! An Introduction to Dialectical Materialism.

NOTES 1. Lenin made this point back in World War I: “the strength of these participants in the division [of the world among imperial powers] does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism. ... Is it ‘conceivable’ that in ten or twenty years’ time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? It is out of the question.” Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism, Chapter 9. 2. A. J. Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, p. 180. Lenin gives many examples of views like this in his 1908 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, V. I. Lenin Collected Works, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1962, vol. 14, pp. 158ff. 3. N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958, p. 64. 4. Ernest Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 90, No. 12. (Dec., 1993), p. 607.

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5

About one-third of the world’s population has been infected with TB. “5-10% of people who are infected with TB bacilli (but who are not infected with HIV) become sick or infectious at some time during their life.” World Health Organization website: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs104/en/

‘On the Opposition Bloc in the CPSU(B)’,” October 26 – November 3, 1926, reprinted in Against Trotskyism: The Struggle of Lenin and the CPSU Against Trotskyism. A Collection of Documents, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972, p. 262.

See “Anti-Vietnam War Era Big Leap Forward for PL, Challenge/Desafio, August 1, 2007.

17 On Trotsky’s claims, see M. J. Olgin, Trotskyism: Counter Revolution in Disguise, New York: Workers’ Library Publishers, 1935, reprinted San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, n. d., pp. 50-65.

6

We know that there were revolutionaries in China in the late 1960s who got this right, because their “one revolution” view was attacked in the famous leftist manifesto “Whither China?” written about 1968.

7

V. I. Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics, Collected Works, Moscow, 1961, vol. 38, p. 360.

8

On the claims and the ultimate defeat of Bukharin group, see F. M Vaganov, Pravyi uklon v VKP(B) i ego razgrom (1928-1930), Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 2nd ed., 1977, chaps 5 and 6.

18

See Fifteenth Conference of the CPSU(B), “Resolution ‘On the Opposition Bloc in the CPSU(B)’,” and “Decision ‘On the Expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the CC CPSU(B)’,”, Against Trotskyism, pp. 259-272, and 281-282. On the factionalism of Bukharin and his allies, see the decision of the CPSU Central Committee, November 17, 1929, “O gruppe t. Bukharina,” in V. P. Danilov, et. al., eds., Kak Lomali NEP. Stenogrammy Plenumov TsK VKP(B) 19281929 gg., Moscow: MFD, 2000, vol. 5, pp. 543-4.

19

A famous example from Mao Zedong makes a similar point: a fertilized egg can be turned into a baby chick by its inner contradictions, which are chemical processes in this case. These processes require oxygen and a specific range of temperatures in order to operate. But for the inner contradictions of some other system—a rock for instance-oxygen and temperature may have no effect, and certainly will not help turn the rock into a baby chick. You can try any combination of oxygen and temperature you want, but it won’t produce a chick from a rock, because the right internal contradictions aren’t there.

9

A physical example is a planet orbiting around the Sun. Most of the changes in the planet will be due primarily to its internal contradictions, but changes in its orbit around the Sun may not be. That orbit depends on the relationships between the planet, the Sun, and the other planets, so changes in the orbit can be due to the internal contradictions of the solar system, not just the planet. In both cases, what seemed at first sight to be a characteristic of one thing is actually a characteristic of a larger system that it fits inside of, and the internal contradictions of that system mainly determine its properties.

See “In the 1930’s Soviet Union, Many Workers Organized for Communism Rather than Socialism,” Challenge/Desafio, August 1, 2006. 20

10

M. Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997, p. 75. 11

1999 PBS interview with Alexander Haig, http://www.pbs. org/redfiles/prop/deep/interv/p_int_alexander_haig.htm

12

Max Planck, Einführung in die Allgemeine Mechanik, Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 2nd ed., 1920, p. 105. 21

22 Principles of Philosophy, Part II, Article 37, in Victor Cousin, ed., Oeuvres de Descartes, Paris: F. G. Levrauld Librarie, 1824, vol. III, p. 152. 23 “The will of man is secretly moved or determined by some exterior cause that produces change in him.” P. H. Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, System of Nature, London: T. Davison, 1820, vol. 1, p. 18.

“… the excess of heat enervates the body, and … nothing but the fear of chastisement can oblige them to perform any laborious duty: slavery is there more reconcilable to reason.” Quoted in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu/#4.3

24

See C. E. Russett, The Concept of Equilibrium in American Social Thought, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, chapters 2 and 3.

25

“The Problem Isn’t Mr. Maliki,” New York Times, August 24, 2007.

13

James Dobbins, “Who Lost Iraq? Lessons for the Debacle,” Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2007.

14

See “Anti-Vietnam War Era Big Leap Forward for PL, Challenge/Desafio, August 1, 2007.

B. Ingrao and G. Israel, Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science, Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1990, chapters 4 – 7.

26

15

16

Quoted in Fifteenth Conference of the CPSU(B), “Resolution

Foundations of Economic Analysis, enlarged edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 9. 27

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Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures, New York: Random House, 1977, pp. 164-166. See the critique by P. Diener, K. Moore and R. Mutagh, “Meat, Markets, And Mechanical Materialism: The Great Protein Fiasco In Anthropology,” Dialectical Anthropology 5 (1980) pp. 171-180.

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New York: Norton, 1999. See the critique by James M. Blaut, “Environmentalism and Eurocentrism,” The Geographical Review, July 1999, Vol. 89 (3), pp. 391-408.

29

V. I. Lenin, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic,” Collected Works, Moscow, 1961, vol. 38, p. 229.

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ibid., p. 248.

F. Engels to N. Danielson, September 22, 1892, in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 49, p. 537. 38

F. Engels to E. Bernstein in Zurich, October 20, 1882, in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 46, p. 342, emphasis added. See also F. Engels to P. Lafarge, October 30, 1882, ibid., pp. 350-1.

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30

G. F. W. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, A. V. Miller, trans., Atlantic Highlands, 1969, p. 439.

A. Aisenberg, et. al., eds., Dialekticheskii materializm, Leningrad : OGIZ-Priboi,1931, pp. 161, 164.

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31

G. F. W. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Stutgartt, 1970, vol. 18, p. 44.

Mao Zedong, “On Contradiction,” Selected Works of Mao TseTung, Beijing, 1965, vol. I, p. 313.

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K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx Engels Collected Works, New York, 1976, vol. 6, p. 484.

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J. V. Stalin, “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” Socheneniia, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Pisatel’,” 1997, vol. 14, p. 258.

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M. M. Rosenthal, Marksistiskii Dialeticheskii Metod, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Political Literature, 1952, p. 268.

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K. Marx, Das Kapital, Bd. I, in Marx Engels Werke, Berlin, 1956, vol. 23, p. 75-76; Cf. Capital, vol. I, in Marx Engels Collected Works, New York, 1976, vol. 35, p. 71. 34

A. Spirkin, O. Yaknot, The Basic Principles of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971, p. 63. 44

F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, quoting Marx, in Marx Engels Collected Works, New York, 1976, vol. 25, p. 150. 35

Marx, Capital, vol. III, in Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 37, p. 243.

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MY NEW FACTORY JOB continued from page 20 thing that workers can do to celebrate their collectivity and organization is to organize potluck lunches. All the workers involved bring a dish and we pass around and share everything that’s brought. After we eat I always state how great it was that everyone followed through, how much better the food is, how much easier lunch is and how production could also be better when the workers organize and run things. Over the time I’ve been in the factory I have been learning how to defend myself and other workers as a whole and how to struggle politically with friends. Building a base and solidifying friendships that are political as well as emotional takes a long time. I didn’t quit realize this going into industry, but I realize now how long deep political struggle can take and even how fast sometimes it can even happen. After working multiple jobs but especially from being an industrial worker I now see the political benefit of workers collectively defending themselves for their own interests rather than retaliating individually. In other words I understand the importance of class-consciousness. Now I see the decisions that I make in my life as collective decisions. I think about how my actions and words will affect

other workers, my class, the working class. Your actions either support capitalism and the ruling class or they work to liberate and free the working class. At work if one individual speaks up and rebels against working conditions, it’s a great thing but it’s easy for the bosses to fire and replace that one individual. But if 500 out of 2000 workers in the factory decide to stop production, occupy the factory and demand better conditions, the bosses can’t go on with production. The struggle is a lot stronger even though it could still be better, but collectivity is the formula that workers must use to achieve class power. Class-consciousness brings you to see that class society is a dictatorship. The ruling class oppresses and dictates to the subordinate class, the working class. There can be no harmony between these two classes because the existence of one class means the death and oppression of the other. It is constant class warfare. The only way to resolve this contradiction is to get a job and build a base amongst the working class in order organize workers with revolutionary communist politics. Then the workers can abolish the racist, sexist, exploitative capitalist system. The workers can then put in place communism and can produce for the need and necessity of society rather than for profit.

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Bosses’ Will Need More Soldiers for Imperialists Wars The armed forces are as essential to the bosses as their factories. Soldiers produce nothing themselves, but under capitalism, they are necessary to the ruling class to mine surplus value. Without the millions of workers handed rifles, the bosses could not defend their interest overseas, extract the raw materials to feed their factories, or secure their ability to exploit the working class at home. The only reason the military exists is to help provide for the bosses the framework within which the produced surplus value is guaranteed to come to them. It is a tool of the bosses, used to preserve their system. Any slogan to change its use-without overthrowing the system- such as “Out of Iraq and into Darfur”- will only help this weapon be used to exploit other workers. The military is the trump card for the ruling class. It is used to secure their interest when coercion fails. All their negotiations, both with the workers and other rulers are held under the shadow of their army. They tell the workers “You don’t have to sign the contract, but try to strike and see what happens.” At the same time, the fatal flaw in their set-up is that they must rely on the same workers they exploit to fill the ranks of their armies, and die in their wars.

The Class Structure of the Army The Senior Officer Corp is made up of those most committed to the military and the majority of them have internalized the goals of U.S. imperialism as being good for them, or at a minimum good for their careers. When you do see division in the upper officer corps it usually reflects larger divisions within the ruling class. Such as on Iraq, Abu Grahib, or Iran. These officers are joining with one side or the other in these fights, either as career moves or because they believe in one direction or the other as best for U.S. imperialism. The mid-level officers corps is where the military has been having its most problems recently. The Army has only 80% of the Majors and Lt. Colonels it needs. It used to be selective about promotion of people into this level, but these days, any Captain that re-enlists is assured of promotion, virtually regardless of their performance. Many Lieutenants, fresh out of college have become disillusioned with the military by the time their first six year commitment is up. The reality of the many deployments, corruption in the military, and lack of political commitment to the U.S. ruling class’ goals in Iraq, causes these officers to look elsewhere for their careers. With degrees from top colleges and universities

they have options, and many more than the Army would like are moving to the civilian sector, where they can work less and make more money. Non-commissioned officers ensure the orders from the top are carried out. They are the day to day supervisors of the enlisted men. The senior NCO’s are lifers who have made the military their career. Attitudes among them range from a “hardcore” commitment to the military and it’s missions, to cynical, “cover your ass” types. What they tend to have in common is that they are survivors. They have survived the internal politics of the military and they are looking to retire on an Army pension. For the most part this makes them pretty conservative, and unwilling to rock the boat. Younger NCO’s are a little bit different. They have recently come up through the ranks, and more of them may question what they’re being told to do, or whether or not they want to do this for the rest of their working lives. The heart of the military and also the weakest point for the ruling class are the lower enlisted ranks. These are the men and women who have joined the military most recently. Many of these people were lied to by their recruiters desperate to make quotas. Economic circumstances or illusions about the realities of the war got others to join. The lower enlisted, the grunt, the boots on the ground, the deck hand. They are the frontline in the wars, the people who carry the guns for the bosses. Even when patriotism, nationalism or racism clouds the thinking of some soldiers, few fail to understand who’s in charge. After a few days into basic training every recruit instinctively understands the class nature of the military. A favorite expression is “S--- rolls down hill!” For the privilege of voluntarily entering into an arrangement close to indentured servitude, where soldiers give up the ability to quit, to leave, even to call in sick without command approval, yet they cannot refuse orders or assignments, they become the expendable human fodder of the military. Their only job is to kill and be killed for the greater good of the ruling class. The current war in the middle east has resulted in tremendous casualties, several million Iraqi’s have been killed or wounded, and casualties among U.S. soldiers are now being estimated in the hundreds of thousands if PTSD and other psychological wounds are included. PLP has been doing political work in the active duty military for the last 40 years. This has been an up and

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down process. During the height of the Vietnam war and the anti-imperialist struggle of that period, the U.S. military was in a state of collapse. Fraggings of officers numbered in the hundreds in 1971. Military prisons in Vietnam, Germany, and the U.S. were filled with soldiers who had refused orders, rebelled, or tried to go AWOL. During this time PLP was very active organizing inside the military. We helped lead rebellions against army racism, defended a black soldier, Billy Dean Smith, who had been an anti-racist organizer in his unit and was charged with fragging. On bases around the world we published several GI underground newspapers, participated in the defense of many other soldiers, and built a following for PLP. After the Vietnam War and the advent of the all volunteer army, our members and base left the military and our activity trailed off until the 1980’s when PL made an organizing push to send young members in to the military to once again build the Party among soldiers. While the class struggle was not at the same level as the Vietnam War, we had some small successes organizing against racist cadences in several basic training units, building small PLP groups in Hawaii, Germany and Illinois. We also had two Illinois National Guardsmen in

PLP

uniform leaflet Minnesota National Guardsmen called out during the Hormel Strike in 1986. Then in 1990 on the eve of the invasion of Iraq we organized a public demonstration of GI’s in formation against that war in a Chicago Armory. In addition, during the build up to the invasion and war and for a time the occupation we published the Newsletter REBELLION. This along with Challenge was distributed in several units hand to hand, also door to door in military housing areas, and by mail to many hundreds of soldiers. It’s difficult to know exactly how the war will play out. But the military is severely strained. It has been difficult for the ruling class to get all the soldiers it needs on a voluntary basis. There are more mercenary troops fighting for the U.S. in Iraq than regular Army at this point. This is unsustainable situation because of cost and the low level of commitment on the part of the pay to fight troops. Now Secretary of Defense Gates is calling for an increase in the number of troops, something McCain, Clinton and Obama agree on. Unable to get the Mid-East under control, it is likely the ruling class will look to some kind of National Service façade to make forced enlistment more palatable. This will once again change the nature of the military as a de-facto draft, and escalating war will sweep in more people, communists included.

$15 for a one year subscription send check or money order to: challenge periodicals, po box 808, brooklyn, ny 11202

THEcommunist

a progressive labor party periodical • Winter 2010

R O F T H G M I S F I N U M M O C INSIDE:

Global Warming: CAPITALIST CRISIS

Role of Universities and Colleges UNDER CAPITALISM

Fighting Against FASCISM • Reports on the ECONOMIC CRISIS

what we fight for J PLP fights to smash capitalism–wage slavery. While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim”communism is dead,’ capitalism is the real failure for billions all over the world. The Soviet Union and China returned to capitalism because socialism maintained too many aspects of the profit system, like wages and divisions of labor. J Capitalism inevitably leads to wars. PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers to turn these wars into a revolution for communism. This fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat requires a mass Red Army led by the communist PLP. J Communism means working collectively to build a society where sharing is based on need. We will abolish work for wages, money and profit. Everyone will share society’s benefits and burdens. J Communism means the party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers – eventually everyone – must become communist organizers.

table of contents LETTERS

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The Wars, the Banks, the Prisons: California’s Financial Crisis

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Unemployment Work and the Fight for Communist Politics

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How The Depression Affects New York State

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Getting It: THE 2009 SEATTLE SUMMER PROJECT

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THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES UNDER CAPITALISM

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GLOBAL WARMING DRIVEN BY THE PROFIT SYSTEM – ONLY COMMUNISM CAN CREATE A BETTER, SUSTAINABLE WORLD

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Review of The Green Zone 

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Young People in the Fight against Fascism

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Herr Hitler Goes to Hollywood

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J Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of race. J Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women workers. J Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one party.

JOIN US!

published by CHALLENGE PERIODICALS, GPO 808, BROOKLYN, NY 11202 online version available at WWW.PLP.ORG

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PLP

letters Dear The Communist, I would like to suggest that CHALLENGE/Communist talk more about communism. True, we make it very clear that communism is what we’re fighting for, and revolution is how we’re going to get it. But we don’t have a lot to say about what communism will be like - how people will live and work. This is a big mistake because the current crisis is forcing people to question capitalism and consider alternatives, alternatives they used to dismiss when it seemed like capitalism (at least in the US) seemed capable of putting food on their tables and a roof over their heads. However people understandably worry that the cure might be as bad as the disease. In particular, many workers and students fear that communism will end up being the same old same old: capitalism under new management, with a red flag on the White House. This is understandable given the way capitalism has been restored in Russia and (in all but name) in China. The revolutionaries in these countries believed that there had to be a long period of socialism before society was ready for communism. Socialism, however, ended up being capitalism under new management, and in Russia they even got rid of the red flags. We do make it clear enough that we’ve rejected socialism and move directly to communism, but that just makes it more urgent to explain what we mean by communism. What is it exactly about socialism/capitalism that we reject, and what alternative do we offer? Education is a case in point. The crisis has hit the schools hard, especially in the US. Millions of students face deteriorating conditions. Tuition and other costs are rising to the point that many may be unable to get the credentials needed for the few remaining jobs. Teachers and staff face pay cuts, layoffs, even schools closures. Of course we support and even organize struggles against these attacks. And we link these developments to the decline of the US empire. But if that’s all we do, we become conservatives - trying to restore conditions when the schools did no “fail” students (as we now say they do). We don’t pretend that any mere fight for reforms will bring about this restoration. But without further explanation we’re still misleading people, because they will conclude that under communism schools will be like they were in the allegedly good old days when they didn’t fail their students. In other words, we may lead people to believe that communist schools would be like capitalist schools with all our reform demands met. In other words, nice clean new buildings, small classes, no racist harassment, plenty of books, good food, comfortable chairs, and a red flag over the principal’s office. Do we really believe this? Do we really believe that under communism students will spend a good part of their youth cooped up in classrooms, sitting silent and motionless while teachers ramble on about trigonometry or renaissance poets or spelling or state capitals? Do we really want education to look like a giant game of trivial pursuit? I hope not! The Bolsheviks didn’t think so. In the early 20’s the ideas of the American progressive educators. Students learned by studying the real world around them, solving practical problems and doing real work - under the guidance of teachers, who acted like coaches and mentors (not like preachers and prison guards). Students would learn, for example, reading and writing, but practice it in the context of planning an outing or holding a meeting. Subjects included cooking, cleaning, and performing simple repairs. The system is well described in Scott Nearing’s inspiring book Education in Soviet Russia. Unfortunately this system was terminated in 1931, replaced with the so-called “academic” model. Academic learning chopped knowledge up into the familiar separate, lifeless, abstract subjects, and divided the students into same-age groups. Students were subject to drills, tests, grading, and interminable lectures. This is the same system we’ve had in the US since the Carnegies and Rockefellers imported it from Prussia in the early 1900’s. The academic model was imposed in the Soviet Union at exactly the same time that ranks and decorations were restored in the Red Army, and pay scales and piecework were brought into industry. In other words, the academic model was a vital component of socialism; and socialism turned out to be capitalism with a ‘proletarian’ mask. The experience in China was even more revealing. In the early years the Chinese communists adopted the whole Soviet socialist approach, including the academic model in education. During the Cultural Revolution (against revisionism) the Left put forth the “revolutionary” model for education - basically the model implemented in the Soviet Union in the 20’s. However the revisionists defended the academic model tooth and nail and it was never widely replaced. So why do the socialists/revisionists/capitalists love the academic model so much? This is something we really

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have to understand. The reason (in my opinion) is, first, because it is so pathetically ineffective at teaching anything useful. People learn by doing, not by listening to monologues. True, capitalists need skilled workers, but not that many and not that skilled. Like all exploiters, they prefer their subjects to be as ignorant as possible. Therefore, capitalist society is designed so that most individual workers are educated in depth in only one narrow specialty. Capitalists have no need or desire to give many people a broad education. In other words, capitalist society is constructed like a machine, by assembling large numbers of mass produced, specialized, interchangeable components. Marx in his day said that capitalist education was “mere training to act as a machine”. Today, it has become training to act as just a component of a machine. In the academic model schools and classrooms are the production lines for the bosses’ specialized worker/components. The main thing they learn is to keep quiet and take orders. For most youth, school is a tremendous waste of time. That’s fine for the capitalists, because they don’t have jobs for all these youth, who anyway tend to make trouble in the workplace. The bosses are happy to park young people in schools, killing time until they are ripe for exploitation and/or the military. However, for the bosses (and revisionists) there’s one more huge advantage of the academic model. Mao once complained the schools imposed on students three “separations”: separation from communist ideas, separation from the working class, and separation from work itself. At the time, Mao was talking about schools under socialism, but what he said is just as true of capitalism. Probably the most important role of schools (and colleges) is to enforce these separations. Schools keep youth away from workers, and encourage young people to think of themselves as different and better. I agree that we have to explain how the current crisis is inflicting great hardships on students and teachers. But we should make it clear that there were never any ‘good old days’ for capitalism’s so-called educational system. And we must explain how communism will smash the separation of youth from workers, and give everyone an education worthy of the name.

-Red Professor

H H H H H H H H

Thanks for your reply. We agree that giving examples to our friends about what the future would look like is important. We used to run a column in Challenge-Desafio which highlighted the different ways that past communist movements have dealt with issues like education, health care, etc. This was helpful for many people to see the possibilities of a communist future. There are also other books, like Soviet Power by Hewlett Johnson, as well as other examples that you cite in your letter that can give us some direction. We are still limited, though, in what we know about the future because of the limits of the old movement. Even education under these societies had many contradictions, as a result of fighting for socialism rather than communism (among other things). Ours will too, but through collectivity we will work to struggle through them. At the same time there are many friends who still don’t see where the current capitalist institutions stand in terms of the class struggle. An example of this is the current budget fights happening across the country, particularly in California. There are thousands of students organizing and fighting back against the recent cuts. This shows the potential that we have to build the party. However, many of these students are fighting under the slogan “Save our schools” or “Save our education.” What we are hoping to point out in these articles by criticizing the university and college system is that these still belong to the bosses and play a significant role under capitalism. Those that are around PL may see this, but many still do not. Once again, thank you for your letters. We hope that this motivates others to send letters to The Communist with any comments that they may have about different articles. While we try to be as collective as possible with the development of the magazine, your input is always wanted and needed. You can send any comments to thecommunistmagazine@ yahoo.com.

-TheCommunist Magazine Committee

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PLP

The Wars, the Banks, the Prisons: California’s Financial Crisis Like other states with a large population, California has been hit hard by the economic crisis. The official unemployment rate is 12%, and 6 of the 10 cities with the highest mortgage foreclosure rates are in California. As happens every recession, California government is in financial crisis, but this crisis is far greater than any since the 1930s. After a bitter fight over the state income shortfall of more than $26 billion, the legislature closed the gap with $15 billion in cuts, some money from the federal stimulus program, and a lot of smoke and mirrors. The budget keeps the more than $2 billion per year in tax cuts for corporations that were passed last September and February. Almost all the benefit from these tax breaks goes to 200 or so corporations that gross more than $1 billion a year. The financial situation is almost certain to be worse next year, even if the economy begins to pick up. The California Legislative Analyst recently estimated an additional $21 billion shortfall over the next 18 months Many of the enormous cuts in education and public services that have been made will probably be permanent.

Health Care and Welfare Cuts The 2009-2010 budget that was enacted and then reduced further by Governor Schwarzenegger has large cuts for welfare recipients, child welfare services, Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid), foster parents, community clinics, in-home services for the sick or elderly, supplemental income for the blind and disabled, K-12 schools, public universities, and prisons. There was a huge cut in the Healthy Families program that serves almost a million children from low-income families, which was partially restored by funds from a new tax on Medicaid providers. State workers have been on unpaid furloughs two or three days a month, which represents a 10% to 15% wage cut.

K-12 Cuts To close its budget gap, California is reducing school funding and “borrowing” money from county and city governments. The result has been major cuts in local K-12 education funding. In Los Angeles schools, these cuts resulted in 3500 layoff notices. Teacher layoffs have now been reduced to about 2100, who have had to register as substitute teachers. Class sizes are rising and the norm for high schools is now 42.5 students per class. Teacher layoffs have racist effects, with the biggest impact on schools with black, Latin, and low-income

students, since these schools have more teachers with low seniority. In May, students in a number of Los Angeles schools walked out in protest of the teacher layoffs. The budget crisis has been an opportunity for capitalist policy makers to make some of the changes they have been trying to push through for a while. In L. A., a big increase in charter schools is underway. Under the newest Board of Ed plan, about a quarter of L. A. schools are eligible to become “charter schools,” privately run but funded by public money. The team that heads up this major subcontracting of the schools is paid by capitalists Eli Broad and Carey Wasserman. L. A. mayor Villaraigosa, whose efforts to take over the schools himself failed last year, is also playing a big role in this dismantling of the L. A. public schools. The Charter schools are used as a tool to bring the teacher unions and other school bosses into line with the ruling class’ plans to direct education toward things U. S. capitalism needs for its economic and military struggles with rival capitalists. U. S. bosses want more patriotic students who have the technical skills to produce the machinery for World War III. Privatization will help gut an already bad school system, and leave behind students whose only choice is low-paying jobs or the military. The capitalists don’t need workers or soldiers to know about history or art. Teachers will be pushed to teach patriotism, training students to obey the government and make sacrifices for “their” country.

Theme of Obama’s 9/8/09 speech to school children? Patriotism! “… when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country. The story of America [is] … about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best… What will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?… Don’t let your family down or your country down. Most of all, don’t let yourself down. Make us all proud.”

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Higher Ed Cuts Both California’s public university systems, the University of California (UC) and the California State University (CSU), have been handed severe cuts. Faculty and staff at both schools are forced to take unpaid days off, and part-time instructors have been fired or had their hours reduced. Student admissions have been cut and will be reduced further. About 40,000 qualified students will be denied admission to the CSU this year, and the students who are admitted will pay 32% more in fees than last year. The UC trustees were not deterred by mass protests and recently raised fees by a similar percentage for next year. The higher fees will buy larger classes, and probably faculty who will be taking unpaid days off. CSU administrators have been told that this year’s cutbacks are largely permanent, and that the public universities can expect much less state money than in the past. Adjusted for inflation, California state government support per student for the CSU has been reduced from $11,075 in 1998/9 to $4,669 in 2009/10. UC President Yudof told students that “the state has stopped building the highways to higher education, and they’ve started building toll roads” (Sacramento Bee, 9/17/09). California’s bosses have decided that the universities will be smaller and more expensive and more teaching will be done in community colleges, where it is cheaper.

California’s Financial Crisis California’s current financial crisis is part of the crisis of world capitalism started by the U. S. banks. But this crisis is just the largest in a series of state government crises that have been going on for years, and affect many states. Many government programs, especially welfare and health care programs, are administered by state or local governments but paid for partly by grants from the federal government. The largest of these is Medicaid, (called Medi-Cal in California) which is the main source of health care for low-income people. Need for Medicaid coverage is increasing as workers lose their jobs in the crisis, at the same time as state and federal tax revenues are falling. The federal government pays from 50% to 76% of the cost of Medicaid, but only 50% for California.

Health Care versus War Spending Because the population is growing and getting older, the need for Medicaid and other federally funded social

services has been steadily growing for years. The result, as a January, 2008, U. S. Government Accountability Office report put it, is that “state and local governments will face an increasing gap between receipts and expenditures in the coming years. The projected rise in health-related expenditures is the root of the fiscal difficulties” that will occur. While it is true that the rise in health costs is a key factor in state fiscal crises, the bigger cause is the huge federal spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Since the Iraq war started in 2003, federal grants to the states have fallen steadily (in inflation-adjusted dollars), while money spent on wars has constantly risen. (see graph). This means that the federal government has been sucking money out of the states to pay for its imperialist wars. A number of states would be facing budget crises even if the U.S. economy were not in a big crisis. The federal stimulus package has increased grants to the states in 2009, but not nearly enough to overcome the fall in revenue due to the economic crisis.

The California Twist First the wars and then the financial meltdown have produced crises in many states, but a few peculiarities of California’s politics and economics make it even worse here. In 1978, Proposition 13 was passed, drastically lowering property tax revenue, which was then about 70% of K-12 school funding. The state government made up the lost funds, but in the process essentially took over K-12 education funding in the state. The result has been that California is in the bottom quarter of the 50 states in spending per pupil (2006 figures).

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Because of the Proposition 13 tax cuts, California state and local finance is far more dependent on income tax and far less on property, gas and tobacco taxes than other states. When the economy tanks, income usually goes down faster than property values, so California tax revenue falls quickly, and a fiscal crisis is immediate. Proposition 13 also made it much more difficult to raise taxes by requiring a 2/3rds majority in the legislature.

Prison versus Education Proposition 13 is hardly the only problem that is peculiar to California, however. California’s politicians have made the budget crunch worse by a huge spending on prisons. To enforce its rule over low-income and unemployed workers, especially black and Latin workers, U. S. capitalism has had a policy of mass incarceration for about three decades. California has been a leader in this policy, and the prison system that results from this huge spending is a disaster. It is extremely overcrowded, holding twice the population it was designed for, and makes hardly any attempt at rehabilitation. A higher percentage of released inmates return to prison in California than any other state. California also operates a program of prison labor, paying inmates $.30 to $.95 an hour, before deductions, to work for private companies, competing with the non-prison labor market and holding down wages. The system’s health care is so bad that the federal courts have found that about one prisoner a week dies from inadequate medical care. The courts have ordered release of 40,000 prisoners and the construction of new medical facilities. The legislature has just passed a law requiring some prisoner releases and revamping the parole system, but this is just a Band-Aid. The prison population has increased about 75% since 1990, three times faster than the adult population, and prison funding has increased much faster than higher education. California spends more on prisons than any other state, with $9.9 billion budgeted for 2009/10, compared with $12 billion for higher education, and $7.4 billion is to be spent on new prisons over the next few years to build 40,000 more prison beds. “Three Strikes” legislation has resulted in much longer sentences, costing at least half a billion dollars extra per year. Prison spending cuts that were supposed to take place this year have not happened. If current policies continue, California will soon spend more on prisons than on all higher education.

PLP

Growing Fascism and the Fight Back Against Cuts and Fee Hikes The current huge cuts in California education and public services are not simply the results of bad policies in Sacramento or Washington, D. C., but are part of the continuing crisis of U. S. capitalism. Economic crisis, imperialist war and mass repression are unavoidable features of U. S. capitalism as it tries to remain top dog in the face of growing rivalry from Chinese, Russian, and European capitalism. More racist cuts and more racist prisons are part of the growth of fascism, the capitalists’ ultimate response to a severe crisis. Many mass protests against fee increases and layoffs have already taken place (see pictures) more and larger protests will take place. Students are leading the largest protests, at UC campuses, CSU campuses, community colleges, and K-12 schools. Many teachers are also fighting back, but their unions are not helping develop a militant mass movement. Many teachers want to fight the cuts, too, but the leaders of the teacher unions, K-12 and college, are mainly trying to get people to adjust to the cuts. The September issue of the CTA’s California Educator was full of articles like “Handling crowded classrooms,” “Coping with reassignment, closure and layoffs,” etc. The CSU faculty union (CFA) has had some rallies, but has the same outlook: how to cope with the cuts. It brought the Assembly Majority Leader Torrico to campus events on several campuses, advocating Assembly Bill 656, which would tax oil companies 10% for oil they take out of the ground in California. The $1 billion this would produce would be reserved for higher education, but only 10% would go to community colleges. Torrico and other legislators voted for corporate tax cuts last September

UC Berkeley Protest Against 32% Fee Hike

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and February that would together amount to about $2 billion a year, so they are the cutters, not allies in the fight against cuts. Since this bill is for higher education only, it doesn’t address the even more serious cuts in welfare programs like children’s health care. The bill cuts higher education off from people who are harmed by the cuts even more than students and teachers. The CFA leaders’ have also made an alliance with the CSU administration, the Alliance for the CSU, which unites teachers with the CSU administration and keeps the anti-cutback movement within the limits that CSU administrators will tolerate. We should fight for a state-wide political strike against these cuts, and includes student walkouts and state employee strikes. We should fight for these proposals in teachers unions, but we should expect strong opposition from pro-capitalist union leaders. Several unions have endorsed taking some action on March 4th, a date proposed at a large meeting in Berkeley on October 24, and we should push for larger, more militant actions than just having rallies. Some others are organizing for a one-day strike on April 15th.

Capitalist Universities Serve the Capitalists We must fight the cuts, push the struggle forward, and make the nature of the crisis, as a crisis of U. S. capitalism, clear to the people who participate. The “sanctity of higher education” position that some people are advocating on college campuses misses the point. The California universities are capitalist institutions that aim to provide the skilled workers, soldiers, and ideologists that U. S. capitalism needs in its fight say on top. The

CSU Students Protest Cuts

system provides capitalist education, with its patriotism, racism, war research, officer training, and anti-worker ideas. The education cuts hurt many working class students, but we must never have the illusion that this has ever been anything but the bosses education system. Only a communist revolution will put the education system in the hands of the working class.

Make the Anti-Cutback Movement a School for Revolution The economic crisis, the huge and ever increasing war spending are putting U. S. capitalism on trial, and many can be won to pronounce it guilty, and join the revolutionary movement. To do this we must make a consistent effort to distribute Challenge and other party publications. It is easy to be intimidated by the depth of the crisis and the size of task that stands in front of us, but if we evaluate our efforts by the growth of the fight for communism, the struggle can be a victory for our class no matter what the bosses do.

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Unemployment Work and the Fight for Communist Politics On January 1, 2009 I was laid off from my job in the construction trades joining the over 200,000 unemployed workers in Washington state receiving unemployment benefits.1 Without an unemployment office all initial filing has to be done over the phone. It took three days of constant calling in order to get a line so that I could sit on hold for two hours just to make my initial filing. Since then the situation has only deteriorated as the world (following the lead of the United States) has fallen into an economic depression caused by a worldwide crisis of overproduction. In Washington State there are now over 350,000 people receiving unemployment benefits (as of July 2009) and an official unemployment rate of 9.3% with an estimated broader unemployment rate of 16%.2 For every job opening in King County (the Seattle metroplex) there are three unemployed people.3 What that means in practice is that last February for a single job opening reading meters in Tacoma 1,400 people applied. In August 4,000 people lined up to apply for minimum wage temp jobs at the Puyallup Fair, 3,500 more than they had ever received before. In a recent edition of the Everett Herald (Everett is a northern suburb of Seattle) the classified section, entitled “The Good Life,” had only 11 job postings, but had 44 home foreclosure notices.4 Going through the unemployment wringer is a bureaucratic labyrinth where nobody knows exactly what is going on and every person you talk to gives you a different set of information. This is made all the more complicated by the fact that you can only talk to people over the phone after a long wait on hold (if you can get in at all) and they are basically guaranteed to screw up your paper work at the unemployment office at least once. You are in a constant state of not knowing as the state government lays various traps to kick you off the unemployment rolls.

The Solution to Unemployment Boredom: Fight for Communism Capitalism places the sole value of a worker on his ability to be exploited daily, his employment. Being unemployed under capitalism is incredibly stressful not just because it is hard to pay your bills on the paltry sums dolled out by the unemployment office, but because your individual worth and value is stripped away as well. Under capitalism being unemployed equals inadequate, useless. The struggle for communist

ideas becomes not just a political end during this time, but a method for maintaining one’s sanity, a way to keep from falling into the pit of individualist isolation and depression. I was laid off at the same time that most of my base was. CHALLENGE readers became a support network as we navigated the rocky shores of unemployment together, each of us looking out for pitfalls and helping each other search for job openings and much coveted side work.5 The editorials in CHALLENGE regarding the economic crisis, as well as the stories of struggle at the Republic Windows and Doors plant, the Stella D’Oro factory, and at Boeing also helped to show how unemployment was not a personal defect of individual workers but a crisis caused by the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system. The working class is not the creators of this crisis as some have argued, but the victims of it. The task of maintaining CHALLENGE networks is a difficult one in good times and becomes especially difficult during crises as unemployment has an atomizing effect on the population. As the traditional place for meeting and talking to coworkers, the workplace disappears, thus workers have a tendency to retreat back into their shells. These are the times when the close personal contact you have made with your coworkers really pays off. Not being what you might call a “people person” in the past, I failed to get involved in people’s personal lives, to really get to know them. When layoffs came I was left isolated while all the people I knew on the work site disappeared. Over the last couple of years comrades worked with me to build deeper relationships, or at the very least get people’s phone number. They would joke with me, “What’s the worse that could happen, you make a friend?” Becoming better at this, although far from great, over the last couple of years I was able to build a CHALLENGE network that I could follow from job to job. We met regularly outside of work to talk politics and have barbecues. Once we were all laid off, these get together gained a strategic importance. They became planning sessions, political schools, and cautionary meetings all in one. We discussed where to look for work, how to cheat on resumes, what tricks the unemployment office was using to deny us money, what lies the politicians were feeding us now, all within the context of the current crisis.

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Putting Ideas into Practice It is one thing to discuss politics over fajitas, but quite another to take those ideas past the dinner table and put them into practice. To move people from simple passivity, the bosses’ preferred position for us, to open agitation is not an easy task. Frequently it is difficult to make this transition ourselves, much less promote it in others. As the quantity of political discussion amongst my base began to lead to a qualitative shift in their understanding of the world, their level of tolerance for the false promises of capitalism began to shrink. One of my friends became a regular with me as we went to local Worksource offices.6 These days, the offices are so packed that you have to wait for people to leave just so you can get into the door. To paint a picture, every Worksource office is basically the same, there is a bank of 5-10 computers and about 50-60 people (more on Mondays) milling around waiting to use them. We would go through their crummy binder of out of date job listings (overflowing with ads for the Army) and snoop around for information. These offices are so useless that the old timers there would actually wax nostalgic for the old unemployment offices. While there we would get into debates about whether or not Obama was going to rescue us with my friend frequently taking the lead in refuting this pipe dream. But more often than not we would talk about why we are in the mess that we are in. My friend, who was older and had more connections for side work kept himself busy with various small construction jobs. He frequently worked with Latin day laborers. Conversations that we had when we worked on the same job site regarding the nature of racist exploitation and the particular focus on exploiting Latin workers turned anti-racist politics into a material force. When one employer paid my friend $100/day, my friend demanded equal wages for the day laborers working the site. This apparently shocked the day laborers who had never seen a white worker make such a stand. Despite not being a Spanish speaker my friend began requesting extra copies of the DESAFIO section of the paper. He was giving them out to his coworkers on these various jobs demonstrating an initiative and boldness that we can all learn from. At some point a friend and I decided that we should go back to school for job training which provided another great avenue for agitation. In order to get funding for school you have to go to the school’s Worksource office and wait as the various counselors get your 20 pieces of paperwork in line. These waiting rooms are overflowing with disgruntled workers discussing their situation. After my first meeting with the counselor I came back to the room with a particularly interesting

8

tidbit. I asked her about the education extension that would extend your unemployment three more months if you took job training courses. She informed me that to get it you had to apply within sixty days of going on unemployment, a stipulation that kept everyone in the room from being eligible for the extension. After revealing this information, my friend chimed in arguing that this was done purposely to keep us from getting the extension and that this was just another example of the false help from the capitalist class. With the room all riled up I could hear each and everyone of them go down the hall and ask about that extension. My friend leaned over to me and said that it was too bad I didn’t bring any papers; he was right!

Back to School In the spring, I enrolled in a trades course at the community college learning basic machining. Despite the bosses’ promises, no new funding ever reached the trades programs in King County. Instead the programs were cut back with only one listing for the summer quarter. Classes have been overflowing with people and tuition assistance, which was also short of what was promised, is nearly impossible to get. With the government unable to provide anything, I received funding from some comrades and enrolled in two night classes. Classes designed for ten students now held over twenty. What was a class designed for machinists to improve their skills and maybe move up a pay grade was now a warehouse for unemployed workers from all trades. To their credit the instructors did their best to accommodate the overflow, but class days mainly involved a lot of standing around as you waited for one of the eight machines to become available. Encouraged by my club to not waste a minute of this time, I used it to agitate and talk about our current crisis and the only way out, communist revolution. A young worker from Russia became my shop partner. Initially I was worried as he told me about his family’s stories of religious persecution (he was a devout Christian) under the Soviet Union. But quickly those stories faded as he discussed the joys of full employment, home ownership, and farm life before things “fell apart.” Speaking of the 1996 ruble crash, he said the fact that his family owned their home and could grow their own food helped them get through it. He asked what would happen here if people could not afford food or a place to live. I told him that if you didn’t have family or friends to stay with then you would have to live on the street and if you couldn’t afford food then the bosses’ would let you starve. He was genuinely

9

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shocked by this. Finally I had to tell him that all those horror stories that he had heard in grade school about unemployment, being homeless, and starvation were all true, even in the wealthiest country in the world. From there our friendship grew. I tutored him in shop math and he helped me with the machines. Together we discussed everything from the rise of finance capital to the decay of the union movement with our fellow students. After a month, the shop was a more inviting place to spend your evenings. This was the direct result of the political discussions we had on the shop floor where communist politics elevated class unity. In a nice change of pace an older student fond of making racist/sexist jokes became isolated as people felt bold enough to either walk away or tell him to shut the hell up. I received contact info from my new Russian friend and have been trying to make him a part of our active CHALLENGE base.

The Fight for Communism is Needed Now More Than Ever As crisis becomes “recovery” in the bosses’ press we continue to see unemployment grow7 and King County is no exception. With the purchase of the Vought plant

The U6 unemployment measure puts the total unemployed and underemployed in Washington at over 530,000

1

2

NYT, Broad Unemployment Across the US, 7/15/09

www.indeed.com/jobtrends/unemployment, 7/2009, retrieved 9/5/09

3

AP, 1,400 Apply for Job of Tacoma Meter Reader, 2/12/09; Puget Sound Business Journal, Puyallup Fair Says Job Applicants Overwhelming, 8/12/09; Everett Herald, The Good Life, D6-D12, 9/1/09.

4

5

Side work is work that you do under the table for cash.

in South Carolina, layoffs at Boeing can only speed up as Boeing management continues to squeeze workers with the help of the IAM’s sell-out leadership. The city and state, facing massive budget shortfalls, have continued layoffs that now threaten hundreds of workers in the Seattle schools. Microsoft continues to hemorrhage jobs while the construction trades have been almost completely annihilated. These days the fight for communism moves beyond political debate to a fight for our very survival. Workers, discouraged by unemployment and disenchanted with the “glorious victory of capitalism” of 1991, are looking for alternatives to business as usual. Today they can be receptive to communist ideas, but they won’t receive them in a vacuum; we have to boldly bring these ideas to them. This is no simple task. As the pro-fascist forces of the ruling class gather strength,8 they fight for the political soul of the working class. They try to dazzle us with the false hope of a public option health care system or a “democratizing” of the military through a draft. In response, we have to fight equally hard to win workers to the idea that only they can change this world for the better by turning communist ideas into the material force for communist revolution.

Worksource offices are job centers that were created when they got rid of the unemployment offices. Outside of their free computer banks they are useless. 6

7 The press has been celebrating a much anticipated decline in unemployment numbers caused not by people going back to work, but by people running out of unemployment benefits. Much to their chagrin however, unemployment rolls continue to grow faster than they can kick people off.

“Pro-Fascist” is not to mean that there is a part of the capitalist class that is anti-fascist, rather that there are still some in the ruling class, a dwindling number, who think that they can still do business as usual. The “pro-fascist” forces are those that most actively argue for fascism.

8

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How The Depression Affects New York State The unemployment rate within NYC as a whole nearly doubled between Sept. 08 and 09 as it grew from a rate of 5.9% to 10.2%.1 This rate of growth was actually higher in the Bronx, as it grew from 8.0% to 13.3%, this rate of growth was echoed in Brooklyn that grew from 6.4% to 11.0%. The Bronx was already high, but the devastation done to Brooklyn as jobs dried up is a real attack on the black and latino workers in this area that depended upon sales jobs, office jobs, construction work, and other employment. This rate of unemployment in Brooklyn must also be seen in the context of the gentrification of the area, as large amounts of already employed people have moved into the area. The effect of this doubling rate of unemployment must also be understood within the context of the fact that this is what the state admits to. The real rate of unemployment is actually much higher if you take into account the underemployed, those who work part-time but seek full time and those who have ceased to seek for a job. In New York State, the “Real unemployment rate hits 14.1 percent statewide”2 while the “Real unemployment for Black Men (is) 27 percent”.3 Yet, this rate of unemployment isn’t keeping up with the rate of productivity that the bosses are glowing about – a 6.6 increase in the second quarter of 2009 (Apr. - June)4 This increase mirrors the effects of unemployment on the psychology of the workers as they feel that their job is now precious and that they

1 “Employed, Unemployed, And Rate of Unemployment By Place of Residence for New York State and Major Labor Areas, September 2009”

http://www.labor.state.ny.us/workforceindustrydata/Pressreleases/prtbur.txt

need to do whatever it takes to keep their job. The drive to do more and more with less and less is the necessary speed up that increases the profits of the bosses as they must constantly deal with the falling rate of profit. The crisis is going to help them to pad their pockets, but the inherently unstable production of capitalism will definitely mean more crisis after crisis. Comparing the productivity rate with the fact that “Unit labor costs in nonfarm businesses fell 5.9 percent in the second quarter of 2009, with the decline due entirely to the increase in productivity;”5 clearly illustrates that the bosses are making money hand over fist through the suffering the depression is causing the working class. They are using the terror of their system to help themselves increase the profit that the system gives them. “Productivity increased 6.5 percent in the business sector in the second quarter of 2009.”6 As “Unit labor costs decreased 6.0 percent during the second quarter of 2009” there doesn’t seem to be anything that the bosses want but for the labor costs to hit an even higher decrease in 2010, and even higher for 2011. For the higher the costs decrease, the more profit that they can make. Just because the labor cost decrease is the destruction of lives, families, and communities that are devastated by this economic terrorism enacted upon us by the ruling class, it doesn’t mean that the bosses want it to stop.

4

Ibid.

Bureau of Labor Statistics News Release Sept. 2, 2009 http:// www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/prod2.pdf

5

2

State of Working New York 2009 http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/ SOWNY2009.html

3

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid.

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Getting It: The 2009 Seattle Summer Project

“I don’t get it!” complained a Boeing union activist who hails from Detroit at a post-work meeting with PLP summer project volunteers. “Five hundred stores have been shuttered [in downtown Detroit]. How can they let a whole city collapse?” He’s equally frustrated by the “nostrike regime” the Boeing bosses and the national and state politicians are demanding. “Getting it” requires revolutionary communist politics. The point of “getting it” is to mobilize leaders like him, Boeing workers and our class in general to smash a system that brings the working class more exploitation and oppression now and worse later on. This year’s July project was held in the shadow of last fall’s 8-week strike. A two-day rebellion against the union misleadership (who had to flee the union stage under a hail of water bottles and chicken bones), the Governor, and the company. Unlike previous strikes, which were followed by pious vows to let bygones be bygones, this strike produced a drumbeat of demands to eliminate strikes altogether. Union officials responded with a plea to “change the tone.” They want to go back to the “good old days.” They argue that relying on Puget Sound’s skilled union workforce is the best way for Boeing to make profits. Let bygones be bygones once again. Of course, changing the tone doesn’t mean the union won’t entertain the idea of a no-strike regime. “The union’s ears are always open. Talk to us about it,” said International president Tom Buffenbarger (Seattle Times, 7/8). Going back to the “good old days” is impossible. That’s the first step in “getting it.”

Learning to Struggle Against Fascist Threats This year’s summer project was “right on time.” We not only exposed the union’s passivity in the face of the nostrike demand, but also managed to beat the “news cycle.” Every morning and afternoon our volunteers greeted thousands at the plant gates with our party leaflets, signs and Challenges calling on workers to organize struggle against this latest attack. Often local media would confirm our predictions in the hours that followed. For weeks, the local papers demanded we renounce strikes. Since then, company agents have organized AstroTurf conferences to promote the no-strike deal.

Every evening we dined with CHALLENGE readers from various plants. There we learned how this latest attack sparked sharp political struggle among the rankand-file. We’d try to answer the questions of our friends in daily revised leaflets and dozens of small plant meetings. The union consistently claimed we had nothing to learn from the racist attacks in Auto. Our Party was able to get on top of this issue precisely because we understood that the racist decimation in Detroit was a harbinger of the fascist reorganization of industry. One union official went as far as to claim “auto workers got ‘fat and lazy’ when they were on top.” Our strikes, they claimed, were different because “we only struck because the company was unreasonably greedy.” Nor did the government takeover and trashing of auto workers standard of living have any relevance to us. Tell that to the government officials that are now demanding the no-strikes! Each day we argued that the current capitalist crisis of overproduction has sharpened the inter-imperialist rivalry. U.S. imperialism’s competitors are advancing, meaning no more business as usual. The U.S. ruling class, through its government, must save basic industry for war: increasingly becoming the only option available to save the empire. The good old days are over (not that they were ever so good): fascism to prepare for war is on the horizon. The relative decline of U.S. imperialism not only drove the government takeover in Auto, but also dictated the escalating attack on auto workers. When the government talks about stimulus, they don’t mean stimulating the paychecks of workers, but rather guaranteeing war production on our backs. Boeing CEO McNerney put it candidly. He “see[s] tremendous pressure coming from ” competitors like Airbus and emerging aerospace powers like Russia, Japan, Canada, Brazil and, in particular, China. He then attacked our “track record of repeated [strikes]”, vowing to “change this dynamic.” Although there were some immediate localized struggles against the no-strike threat (walkouts at various crew meetings for example), we have not yet been able to organize mass rebellion. The question of legality still held us back. “As much as I want to, you can’t have rolling thunder, marches or wildcats because that’s illegal,” said one honest

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worker. “Look, that’s how we started these things around contract time,” answered another friend. “It was all illegal when the Party helped organize the first marches in ’95. In fact, they’re still illegal! The company and the union just allow them now because they can control them.” “Whether Republican or Democrat, they all turn against the working class when they get in office,” said another reader and seller at yet another dinner with volunteers. “Maybe, we would stand a chance if we outlawed lobbyists and corporate campaign contributions, while limiting individual contributions to a $1,000.” The very politicians that our union spent millions getting elected are the ones demanding we submit to this “no-strike regime.” “Do you really believe the bosses would ever let the government represent anything but their interests?” asked another Boeing worker. “It’s the bosses’ State; they built it to force their will on us. It must be smashed and replaced with communist workers’ power.”

Industrial Workers Need Allies in the Military As you could well imagine, shop floor discussion were getting pretty heavy by now. An older tool and die maker with lots of experience broke the tension. “Hell, we might as well wildcat. The national guard is busy in Afghanistan,” he half joked, half hoped we would. We rounded out our short summer project by visiting soldiers at nearby Ft. Lewis. When our in-plant readers heard from volunteers about the great reception to our communist literature they were duly impressed. The union activist who had a hard time “getting it” commented that the multi-racial group of young people he meet with

and the soldiers they visited were “the kind of groups we need.” He gets it more than he realizes!

We Don’t Need the Good Old Days; We Need a Plan for Communist Revolution We have to face the world as it is. As fascism solidifies its grip and world war looms closer, our tactics and strategy must answer the burning questions of the day. There is but one answer to this nightmare: communist revolution. Our communist forces are too small to stop the bosses’ fascism and war. They will start their carnage, but we can end it. The political preparation we do today will lay the foundation for the long, hard fight for revolution. We must start by expanding our CHALLENGE networks. Scores of regular readers must turn into hundreds and then thousands over time. Readers must become sellers. We can assure this with regular CHALLENGE readers study/action groups. We need more writers for the paper that will help us “get it.” We are advancing the political struggle with regular “Depression Potlucks” bringing workers together from around the city over good food. Today they are modest events. Each discusses an aspect of the capitalist crisis and our communist solution. A plan is made at each to advance the class struggle in some area of the work. Such work can make these events more significant. Somebody already wrote a letter to CHALLENGE about how the project motivated him or her to join the PLP. “I went to the Seattle project with doubts, but left wanting to join PLP, with no doubt in my mind,” said our new comrade. We can ask more.

Top Union Leaders Become Part Of Bosses’ State Top union mis-leaders are not only increasingly defending the very companies their member’s struggle against, but now are being recruited to defend U.S. imperialism as a whole. The UAW officials on the GM board sit on the board of a company run by the Federal Government. Dennis Rivera was once the head of a union of 300,000 New York health care workers. Now he’s a central player in Obama’s health care drive. Health care “reform” is all about rationing to prepare for war. “The amount we spend on health care is unsustainable,’ he declares, showing he’ll put the needs U.S. imperialism above even the jobs of the workers he once “represented.” If there are still any doubts, Dennis Hughes, president of the New York State AFL-CIO, has been named head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most important of the regional Feds. In this capacity, he’ll be meeting with the head of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, the government dictated winners in the recent financial turmoil. Mussolini’s corporate fascism in Italy during WWII was marked by the presence of union “leaders” in the fascist State. No wonder they called these traitors to our class “social fascists.”

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What is needed now is more militant actions from the workers who are attending these potlucks and study groups. While CHALLENGE distribution and study groups are necessary in fighting the bosses’ ideas, sharpening the class struggle is essential as we work to build the party and move closer to Communist Revolution. In a time where the bosses are giving us more and more opportunities to build the party, the workers are looking for leadership. Trying to push our limits in what we can do in fighting back against the boss is necessary. Through the class struggle, the trust and confidence between the working class and the party will strengthen.

PLP

All this will be used to advance our struggle on the shop floor and in the union. Our political networks will provide the leadership to fight tooth and nail against each and every fascist attack. We will bring everything from wildcats, to marches, to rolling thunder back on the agenda. As the struggle intensifies, all of these ideas that we discuss and write in CHALLENGE will become clearer to these workers. These ideas are but the tip of the iceberg. Marx’s grave bears the inscription “Hitherto; philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.” We get it! Let’s get started!

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The Role of Universities and Colleges Under Capitalism

Forty years ago, Progressive Labor Party pointed out that: “The role of the university in any society is to serve it by providing the technicians, ideologues, bureaucrats, and apologists. In our society these officials are created to serve imperialism (domestic and international). However to advance that the university can be severed from the imperialist state creates the illusion that imperialism has invaded and taken over the educational system, where in fact the two go hand in glove. As long as imperialism runs the show, education will serve it.”1

to teach youth a justification for inequality, oppression, and exploitation. Capitalist schools train and socialize the working class. They exist primarily because the ruling class needs them. The ruling class has a great need to indoctrinate the working class with capitalist ideology. Universities also train engineers, scientists, and political scientists to accept and devise capitalist explanations for the problems of capitalism. The capitalist class cannot maintain class rule and insure the viability of the capitalist system without universities and colleges.

The militarizing of the university in the service of imperialism began between World War I and World War II, and expanded dramatically during the Cold War, especially after the passing in 1958 of the National Defense Education Act. Since WWII, most major American colleges and universities have become linked with the military. The militarizing of universities suffered a setback during the Vietnam War due to student protests, some which were led by Progressive Labor Party. However, today, universities and colleges are being further transformed to serve the interests of U.S. imperialism. As the United States finds itself falling deeper and deeper into economic crisis the university system is being asked to develop the ideology and technical prowess that can turn interimperialist rivalry into World War.

Identity politics, multiculturalism, nationalism and feminism are major ideological problems for building international working class unity as part of a revolutionary communist movement. These ideas are taught openly in classes and make-up a large part of extra-curricular life offered on college campuses. These ideologies lead to the absolute destruction of class-consciousness in students and workers. Many progressive students and student groups accept these ideas as positive and progressive.

Many students are concerned about their university or college’s role in perpetuating suffering and oppression. Together, students, professors, and activists are growing more aware of the intimate relationship between universities and colleges and industry, the military, and intelligence agencies. Students are encouraged to attend colleges and universities in order to learn something new and expand their horizons. They are told colleges and universities are neutral places of higher learning and the free exchange of ideas. However, universities and colleges do not operate in a vacuum, disconnected from capitalism and class society. While some describe the presence of corporations, military recruiters, and government agencies on campus as a “takeover” of the university by forces that naturally belong outside its walls, this “takeover” is anything but recent, and actually reflects a long-standing relationship that has been present since the birth of the research university in the U.S. In fact, the modern American university was the product of a partnership between business and government formed after the Civil War. Under capitalism, the primary purpose of all education (K-College) is to recreate classes in the next generation and

These ideas were pushed vigorously in the late 1960’s partly in response to the anti-imperialist, anti-racist student movement of that time. The core concept to these ideologies is that some defining characteristic (e.g., gender, skin color, ethnic, and sexual orientation) is what students (and workers) should see as primary and be the basis for their social and political ties with other students (and workers). Thus, students are taught to see that race and gender are more important than uniting with all workers and students in the fight against sexism, racism, oppression and exploitation. These liberal ideas are very dangerous because they build the illusion that oppression can be eliminated without the complete destruction of capitalism with communist revolution. Some ideology produced at universities is subtly produced, including individualism and elitism. Other ideology produced at universities is more explicit, such as anti-communism, racism, and sexism. For example, anti-communism is taught openly in most if not all history classes (and in many other classes). A lot of anticommunist scholarship is produced at universities (e.g., Harvard University). Much of the scholarship is nothing more than outright lies: for example, Stalin is a barbaric monster who murdered millions and millions or Cultural Revolution in China in 1960s was about Mao’s plan to destroy all forms of culture (rather than a struggle between those who wanted to return to capitalism and those who wanted to move forward to a communist society). These lies do more than

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Some

PLP

leaders of

academic racism since the

1960s

• Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, creator of the racist “Clash of Civilizations” theory, which claims Muslim and Arab people belong to “alien civilizations”. • Harvard professor Edward Banfield, whose policy recommendations paved the way for the Clinton White House’s welfare reform, known as workfare, a racist, fascistic policy that forces former welfare recipients, disproportionately black and Latin, to work for slave labor wages. • Harvard professor E.O Wilson, whose theories of sociobiology claim that racism, sexism, and war are not inevitable features of capitalism, but universal traits of our genetically-evolved human nature. Wilson’s theories are based on his observance of ant, not human, behavior. • UCLA professor James Q. Wilson, whose argument that crime is genetic reinforces the racist stereotype the black and Latin men are born criminals. • Former Harvard Psychology chair Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray who coauthored The Bell Curve, which argues the racist lie that black people are genetically less intelligent than whites.

simply vilify historical figures they disparage the entire working class and the communist movement as a whole. One of the primary roles of the university is to promote and create racist theories. Academic experts produce the books and articles that proclaim the biological or cultural inferiority of people of color in the U.S. and people living in much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This racism is used to divide the working class and as the U.S. faces further decline and crisis we will see this racism intensify in all levels of education. Since the early 1970s, U.S. capitalism has faced a relative decline in economic and political power, and today U.S. bosses are challenged by rival imperialist powers in every part of the world. Today, the economic crises of capitalism in the U.S. and the world are only sharpening the conflict with imperialist rivals. Imperialist competition for resources and markets is sharpening, and world war looms on the horizon. The U.S. ruling class knows it must prepare for wider wars in order to defend its dwindling empire against challenges from imperialist rivals, particularly China and Russia. The U.S. ruling class needs to dominate the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia, politically and militarily. In 2006, the Association of American Universities (AAU), which includes 62 of the most prominent

research universities in the country, put out a report arguing that universities must do all that they can “to fill security-related positions in the defense industry, the military, the national laboratories, the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, the intelligence agencies, and other federal agencies.”2 The architects of U.S. imperialist policy and strategy all have close ties to the research university system. Some examples are: 1) Henry Kissinger, who was a professor at Harvard University’s Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs; 2) Zbigniew Brzezinski (advisor to President Barack Obama) taught at Harvard, Columbia, and now is at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies; 3) Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State in the Bill Clinton administration) came to politics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service; and 4) Condoleezza Rice (current Secretary of State in George Bush administration) was a Political Science professor and Provost at Stanford University and the list goes on. Harvard, in particular, has a long history of advising both Democratic and Republican presidents and 25% of Presidential Cabinet members over the past three decades have been from Harvard (7). In addition, to Harvard University, Georgetown University trains many who serve U.S. imperialism in the State Department. Members of Harvard’s board of directors are also on the boards of two key U.S. ruling class think tanks: Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution. The U.S. ruling class uses the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the single most influential think-tank, to formulate U.S. foreign policy. Often working jointly with Harvard, the CFR has helped guide U.S. imperialism from World War II to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 300 universities and colleges conduct DODfunded research and development. In 2007, the DOD announced that it was awarding $19.4 million that year and $207 million over the next five years in research funding to 62 universities as part of its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program. In 2005, 57% of university research funded by the federal government was for the DOD (see table for allocation of 2003 DOD research dollars). Now, more than ever the U.S. ruling class needs workers and professionals to sacrifice for the needs of U.S. imperialism and win large sections of the U.S. working class to support imperialism and fascism, including a mass mobilization of the population for future wars. Recruiting working-class and middle-class youth, as well as intellectuals and professionals, in the name of patriotism, public service, and national duty is a precursor to a more wide-ranging National Service program and expanding the military (vigorously supported by President Barack Obama and both Democratic and Republican politicians). The rebuilding of U.S. industry and manufacturing is

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critical for the U.S. ruling class. However, the educational system that will “produce” the wage labor for the factories, the soldiers for imperialist war, and the police agents for fascism is also crucial to U.S. imperialism. “Global competitiveness” against imperialist rivals is what worries the ruling class. This means increasing the quality of education for the average U.S. university student. A study by the government in 2006 called “Mortgaging Our Future: How Financial Barriers to College Undercut America’s Global Competitiveness” pointed out that “1.4 million to 2.4 million bachelor’s degrees will be lost this decade as financial concerns prevent academically qualified students from the lowest income bracket from attending college”. However, the U.S. bosses do not want all—or most, for that matter— working-class youth in universities, although they claim more education for all is the goal. About 1250 community colleges in the U.S. enroll over 12 million working class students each year, including almost half of all undergraduates—the fastest-growing sector of higher education. Racist tuition fee hikes and cuts in financial aid continue to keep working-class students, primarily Black, Latin and immigrant, out of universities. Only about 10% of these students transfer to a four-year university. The remaining 90% of these students are expected to join the military, which the U.S. ruling class plans to expand dramatically in the coming years, or acquire the “basic skills” and vocational training necessary for jobs in the re-emerging U.S. manufacturing industry. Community colleges, which like K-12 education are being reshaped to meet these “basic skills” and training needs, will play an important role in the plans of U.S. imperialism. Community college reform monies are flowing into teaching “fundamentals” or “basic skills.” The most significant component of community college reform is the plan to build more degree and especially certificate programs designed specifically to meet the needs of local industries. The new buzzword in community college education is “Career Technical Education”. These new programs are not only about training the working class to work in industry, but also building patriotism (through so-called “civic engagement”) among the alienated youth of inner city and immigrant communities, by pushing the lie that the bosses’ educational system will bring them the “good life.” In order to wage war, the U.S. ruling class needs fascism at home. Trying to win “hearts and minds” for imperialism, universities and colleges are now working more openly and closely than ever before with intelligence agencies, building patriotism and recruiting for fascism. The President of Penn State Graham B. Spanier, who chairs the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, acknowledged “higher education can play an increasingly prominent role in national priorities.” In

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the name of “national security” and the “war on terror”, the Department of Homeland Security and research universities and colleges across the country are revamping or creating new certificate and degree programs, and, creating centers for learning and research in areas critical to Homeland Security (e.g., improved surveillance). The centers will help federal, state, and local agencies to fulfill homeland security missions (e.g., enhanced policing). The Department of Homeland Security currently manages a $70 million dollar scholarship and research budget. The first Homeland Security Center of Excellence was established at the University of Southern California with a $12 million grant. This new center facilitates research by professors at UC-Berkeley, NYU, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Syracuse University has the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism and Ohio State University offers the International and Homeland Security Program. Also, Ohio State University heads the new National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security, which includes more than 200 universities and colleges. At CSU-Los Angeles, a predominantly Latin and Black campus, a new state-ofthe-art Criminology Laboratory was opened last year. Universities and colleges hide the reality of capitalism: war and fascism. Higher education does its best to make students think they can escape capitalism’s worst effects. Many students attend college to “escape” the drudgery of a life of low wage, working class jobs. For some students, college has helped them escape the worst effects of capitalism. However, fewer people today can escape the brutal reality of capitalism by attending college. Even if they could, we should not turn our backs on the rest of humanity. Capitalism continues to fail for more and more workers. As it lurches from one crisis to the next and leads to more war and fascism, we have an obligation to fight the role our universities and colleges play in supporting fascism and imperialist war. We all must recognize that individualism, elitism, and anti-communism hold back the growth of a militant, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anticapitalist movement among college students. Moreover, a mass movement led by PLP to smash capitalism with communist revolution is not possible without sharpening up class struggle on the campus. In the 1960’s, from France to China to the U.S., students led the way in the fight against academic racism, imperialist war, and even capitalism. Student protests often led to more serious, widespread working class action including general strikes and rebellions. Even since the 1960’s, we can still see how important students are in the fight against oppression and war. In Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, Iran, France, Canada and the U.S., students initiate and often give leadership to, sometimes, sharp struggle against exploitation, racist/ fascist oppression and war. The PLP has a long history of leading militant struggle

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at universities. For example, at Harvard University, in the 1960s, we played a key role in organizing actions and campaigns against aspects of the university’s support for U.S. imperialism’s war in Vietnam. PLP led the 1969 University Hall sitin against Harvard’s racist expansion into Cambridge and support for ROTC, an action that culminated in a campus-wide strike that closed Harvard for the spring term. In the 1970s, PLP members actively organized against Herrnstein and other Harvard academic racists. At several campuses, we also developed militant campaigns to unite students and campus workers. In the 1960s, PLP organized workers and students to protest General Electric’s pro-war policies and attacks on its workers. We organized students to support striking General Motors workers.

2003 Department of defense research and development funding Massachusetts Institute of Technology/John Hopkins $842.4 million Penn State $149 million University of Texas $86.6 million

working class and CHALLENGE can prove to be a valuable organizing tool for doing this. The most important battle for the student movement is the one against their own universities and colleges and the role they play in building racism and imperialist war. The U.S. ruling class wants all colleges and universities to become recruiting grounds for soldiers and centers for fascism and war. As students, we need to drive ROTC and military recruiters off campus, oppose military research on campus and stop academics that develop and propagate racist and fascist ideas.

Students, workers, and soldiers who target the facilities, materials, Carnegie Mellon and institutions used to make war can stop the war machine at the point $59.8 million of production. Ultimately, we cannot permanently stop war and fascism University of Southern The victory of these struggles was until we eliminate capitalism with California in winning students and workers to communist revolution. Capitalism communism and the Party. These $35 million generates racism, poverty and actions demonstrate that even imperialist war. A system that students at elite universities, such murders workers by the millions in University of California as Harvard, can unite with workers Iraq and Afghanistan, but cannot system in opposing the pro-imperialist and feed the hungry, shelter the homeless racist polices of these capitalist run $29.8 million or provide decent jobs for all, does not universities. But without workers and deserve to exist. Equally, institutions soldiers, student anti-war struggles that apologize for and perpetuate can only go so far. A worker/student/ that system do not deserve to exist. The only long-range soldier alliance must be built to fight exploitation, sexism, answer is to build an international communist movement racism, and imperialist war. It is critical that the student of workers, students and soldiers to defeat capitalism movement combat racism and see their connection to the with communist revolution.

1

2

PL Magazine (Progressive Labor Party, Nov-Dec 1967). “National Defense Education and Innovation Initiative:

Meeting America’s Economic and Security Challenges in the 21st Century”, (Association of American Universities (AAU), January 2006), http://www.aau.edu/education/NDEAOP.pdf.

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Global Warming Driven by the Profit System… ONLY COMMUNISM CAN CREATE A SUSTAINABLE WORLD I. Introduction The political context – the state of the world Imperialist war threatens to spread from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan, Iran, and eventually China. This process is leading to World War III, which will most likely involve the use of nuclear weapons, particularly by whichever side is on the brink of defeat, and possibly before that stage. The U.S. capitalists emerged from World War II as the top imperialist power, but their rivals are fast overtaking them economically. Out-of-control U.S. military expenditures since World War II have the goal of preserving past power over imperialist rivals, but they are now an obstacle to spending on infrastructure and industry, thereby contributing to the loss of U.S. economic supremacy. Stepping back a little farther, capitalism has been developing as the world’s economic system over the last several centuries and has gone through different stages. Conquest and slavery built the initial accumulation of fortunes in the hands of a small class of exploiters and murderers, with the rise of racism first in the U.S. to justify slavery and then in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s to justify the slave trade, racism grew to justify the seizure of colonies and the enslavement of people from the Western Hemisphere, India, Asia, Australia, and Africa, and to justify the wanton murder of millions of colonial subjects who refused to submit. Racism is still the chief method through which capitalist ruling classes around the world maintain their power over the much larger working masses. Racism has two major benefits for the capitalists, even as it kills millions of workers – it divides in order to conquer, and it greatly enlarges profits through superexploitation at home and abroad. As the entire world was taken up by colonies in the late 1800s, capitalism reached the age of imperialism, with sometimes local but increasingly world-wide wars to add to colonial holdings at the expense of rival imperialists. World Wars I and II in the twentieth century involved increasing numbers of competing nations, jockeying for alliances and killing tens of millions of workers in the process, with greater and more horrific weaponry. By this time, large accumulations of capital gave rise to concentration in the hands of banks that could lend and thereby shift capital wherever it was most profitable, with the bankers taking their increasingly massive rakeoffs. Big industrialists like J.P. Morgan (railroads and

electrical power) and John D. Rockefeller (oil to run rail and electricity), among many other 19th century robber barons, became the U.S.’s top bankers. In more recent decades the inability of U.S. and other capitalists to find profitable manufacturing outlets for their massive capital has resulted in the financial sector’s current use of more complex and inscrutable forms of speculation to concentrate profits, at the same time producing less and less material wealth. The financialization of capital has led to the current worldwide economic crisis in which millions of workers have lost their jobs and homes, and millions more are starving to death – all because of the irrational inability of capitalism to benefit any but a shrinking minority class of billionaires. It has led to increased fascism in the form of gutting of the working class’ standard of living, nationalizing the U.S. auto and other major industries, and the building of nationalism and racism. Now the U.S. owes much of the rest of the capitalists in the world vast amounts of money, as it has decreased its exports and increased its imports, requiring increasing amounts of borrowing from abroad thereby increasing the U.S. debt. Meanwhile a larger and larger proportion of the spending by the U.S. government is being devoted to the military to maintain the political power of the capitalists over their rivals abroad, even as they lose their economic power. The U.S. has close to 800 military bases spread around the world (Johnson 2000, 2004, 2006 – all references and bibliography at the end). This not only overextends the U.S. empire economically but brings about the intense hatred of the U.S. imperialists by workers all over the globe. Its rival imperialists are waiting in the wings for renewed opportunities to enhance their power as well through such wars, as they have done in the past.

The ecological context – the state of the earth Stepping back still farther, the ecological context of the state of the world is becoming more and more critical. Ecology concerns the many interactions among the millions of plant and animal species on the earth and the rest of the environment, i.e., all of nature. Besides discussing the interaction between classes, we will also look at the interaction between capitalism and the rest of nature (shortened for simplicity to “nature”), an artificial division made only for purposes of analysis. In reality, however, capitalist society is as much a part of nature as

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anything else on earth. This interaction consists of two major categories: 1) that which humans take from nature: natural resources, and 2) that which humans put back into nature: waste products, as well as labor and materials that may be beneficial to nature and humans. (The latter we will leave aside in this statement, but understanding of them could be critical following communist revolution.) The processes that take up resources and put out waste products are similar to our own bodily metabolism, but on a social level. On a personal level, metabolism involves taking in food and water to produce energy, and ejecting the waste products once we have used the energy and converted the intake to forms that are no longer useful to the body. Metabolism on a social level also involves taking in raw materials and ejecting the waste products, but in addition it involves the application of human labor to the production process. Social metabolism is central to economics.

enforced by naked military repression and maintained through racist ideology. Marxists call this global form of bondage wage slavery. On the resource side: capitalists appropriate nature for their own class needs, in effect stealing it from the working class, enforcing their control over us and over the earth through their control of state power. They stripmine and destroy entire mountains, they force overfishing of the oceans in the competitive drive for profits, they clear-cut forests for wood products, they drain wetlands for city development without creating replacements elsewhere. Paraphrasing one author, capitalism turns land into real estate, forests into lumber, and oceans into fisheries (Foster, 2002). And, we would add, turns the world’s working class into profit-producing commodities as appendages to capitalist machines. Under chattel slavery, workers’ bodies and minds were consumed in backbreaking labor with death coming at an early age. Under wage slavery, dehumanizing exploitation grinds down our bodies (if we survive workrelated accidents and illness).

Some, though by no means all, pre-class societies – for example certain groups of North American Indians – had great respect for nature as their source of food, water, shelter, and clothing. They treated it with great care, preserving and taking only what was needed and being careful that waste products did not destroy nature’s bounty. Other pre-class societies unwittingly destroyed forests and drove many species to extinction as they introduced new diseases and cleared land for farming, sometimes resulting in migrations and clashes with neighboring societies.

On the waste product side: capitalists dump toxic or radioactive waste into soil, rivers, oceans, and the atmosphere, with numerous deaths resulting but without our class being able to do much to stop them, since the state protects only capitalist interests. In a few local situations, through long major collective campaigns, workers have forced a few temporary concessions, but the overall destruction of lives and the environment accelerates everywhere else. The capitalists thus literally get away with this type of murder, just as they do through police brutality, poverty, racism, and oil wars.

Capitalism is a form of social organization that systematically destroys nature. It is a system driven not by need, and particularly not by the need to preserve the natural sources of its bounty, but rather by profit. Profitmaking requires efficiency only within the individual business, but the competition inherent in profit-making requires that all businesses maximize profits continually, and particularly over the short term, or go belly up.

In its single-minded drive for profit, world capitalism is fast exhausting the earth’s resources, and what is left is fast being ruined by waste products. The most important resources fast approaching exhaustion are oil (the lifeblood of capitalist economies) and fresh water (the lifeblood of all plants and animals). The primary waste products include toxic and radioactive substances and most important, as we discuss in detail below, so-called greenhouse gases (GHGs). The most important of these include chiefly carbon dioxide (CO2), then water vapor (H2O), nitrous oxide (N2O), and methane (CH4), among many others.

Worst of all, capitalism prevents the world’s working class from acting in accord with our need to preserve nature for ourselves and for future generations. Furthermore capitalism, for all practical purposes, prevents us from obtaining food, water, shelter, clothing, and other needs, unless we work for the capitalists and produce more than we are paid – with the excess taking the form of surplus value, or profit. By withholding our access to the necessities of life, the capitalists force us to do their bidding. The world’s working class today is just as enslaved by capitalism’s withholding these necessities as if we were forced to live and work in collars and chains. Black and Latin workers in the U.S. and superexploited workers throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America are held in particular bondage. The superexploitation is

Preservation of resources for industry and life itself is vital for humanity but simply not profitable in the short term for capitalism, and short term is the only level on which capital can possibly function. A lapse in profitability means the death of a business, just as a lapse in food and water means the death of a living thing. As a consequence of the necessarily short-term outlook (in effect, blindness) of capitalism, we find ourselves in the new millennium nearing the practical exhaustion of resources that until recently have been regarded as effectively infinite. Much has been written recently about so-called peak

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oil, i.e., the stage at which large oil discoveries are coming to an end and the remaining known oil reserves are becoming more and more expensive to extract, leading eventually to unprofitability and therefore to slowing of, and eventually an end to, its extraction. The peak is defined as the point where daily production actually starts to decrease, a point which has already been reached in many oil-producing countries, including the U.S. in 1970. Even before this point there will be a failure of still rising global production to keep up with growing global demand. When these cross, such that daily global demand actually begins to exceed daily global production, prices will skyrocket. Even before this day arrives, in an attempt to keep up their profitability, oil companies will begin to jack up their prices faster and faster in anticipation of its arrival. But the oil companies are not quite down to that yet. Five of the 2009 top seven Fortune 500 companies (in terms of gross income) are either oil companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips) or auto companies (GM, which nevertheless just declared bankruptcy, and Ford), along with GE, that requires oil to run its electrical products. The only other company in the top 7 is WalMart, just displaced by ExxonMobil for first place. Clearly oil profits have not begun to suffer yet, but are on the brink, and the oil companies are fighting a losing battle to maintain their supremacy – both to prevent any competing source of energy, such as nuclear, from displacing oil and to deny that their product is causing global warming. This is similar to the cigarette companies, which for years denied that their product causes lung cancer. Capitalist profit, when it comes into conflict with truth, is the usual winner, at least until truth can no longer plausibly be denied. While the dynamic of interimperialist rivalry causes continual wars, regardless of the remaining abundance of resources, the imminent approach of peak oil, if it has not already arrived, and the approaching end of U.S. economic supremacy only tend to make these wars more desperate and deadly. All imperialists have a life-anddeath need to secure sources of oil for three interrelated reasons: 1) to run their economies and their military machines, 2) for its profitability, and 3) to control their rivals’ access to this vital resource. These clearly feed on each other, with military power necessary to maintain the other two, particularly concentrated today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of the Middle East and Central Asia, with West Africa, the Horn of Africa in the east, Venezuela, Colombia, and other Latin American oil reserves not far behind. This means that as the world’s profitably extractable oil reserves reach their peak and start to run out, each imperialist power will be forced to step up their drive toward war against rivals and to step up fascism at home, first to mobilize their respective sections of the world’s working class into their armies and, second, to override multiple conflicting priorities

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among their various national capitalists. The current world capitalist financial crisis only intensifies the rival imperialists’ desperation, even as it throws obstacles into their paths. Even under the lengthening shadow of impending climate change, war and fascism in the 21st century threaten to dwarf all of the 20th century world wars, resulting in as yet unimaginable levels of working class death and misery. And even as the earth is rapidly being depleted of profitably extractable oil, and sooner or later coal and natural gas, GHGs are being emitted at faster and faster rates from electrical energy generation, industrial, and transportation processes, as capitalist economies expand around the world. The current global financial crisis may be temporarily slowing this process, but the trend continues. GHGs are causing a rapid warming of the atmosphere, glaciers, soil, and oceans that threatens to change the earth’s climate radically and to push that change into an irreversible phase with catastrophic results – irreversible, that is, in less than tens of thousands of years, if not forever. While the depletion of oil will be a major problem for capitalists who depend, either directly or indirectly on oil for their profits, it will also be a disaster for the working class because of the way capitalism has structured our entire way of life. Capitalism has centered its economic activity around the use of fossil fuels for energy for over a century, at the same time preventing the systematic construction of public transportation in favor of the automobile economy, beginning in the U.S., with its roads, service stations, and auto factories, involving as well the entire relationship of cities to suburbs. As oil becomes unprofitable to extract and the cost skyrockets, workers will have great difficulty in most cities and certainly in rural areas getting to our jobs, to buy food, and to access all other necessities of life. The depletion of fresh water will become a catastrophe as well, both directly for personal use and indirectly through the effect on our food supply. There is no lack of water in general on the earth, since almost 70% of the earth’s surface is ocean, but fresh water that is suitable for drinking, hygiene, and agriculture is fast being depleted by conversion to salt water. This depletion is partly due to the way capitalist agriculture is performed, without an eye toward conservation of this vital resource, but the main cause is global warming (explained below). Furthermore wars are being fought over fresh water sources. For example, Israel’s determination to hold on to the West Bank, seized by war from Jordan in 1967, is based on the fact that the Jordan River and the adjacent underground aquifers are a major source of Israel’s fresh water, even though drought is now depleting both sources. Under these conditions all other considerations take a back seat, including the international condemnation (often hypocritically from other capitalist governments) that the Israeli ruling class receives for its brutal suppression of

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its Arabic working class neighbors and inhabitants. But, without trivializing the disastrous effects of oil and water depletion and the coming fascism and wars to secure their control, the impact of their depletion can be repaired once communist-led revolution puts the world under the control of the world’s working class, through clean sources of energy and through desalinization of sea water. What will not be so quickly reparable is the climate.

The purpose of this statement Our statements in this paper are based on very well established science and happen to be in line with the outlook of virtually all climate scientists. The casual observer might not realize that the vast majority of them have proven that global warming is happening and is caused by capitalist (what they call “human” or “anthropogenic”) activity. The confusion on this point is due to past media reports designed to create doubt. PLP does not automatically believe that scientists, even a majority of scientists in any particular field, are necessarily correct, but our in-depth analysis, guided as always by our use of the scientific method of dialectical materialism, tells us that when it comes to the capitalist causes of global warming the majority are indeed correct. Virtually no one in the world doubts that today’s times are desperate because of the current world economic crisis with its devastating effects on hundreds of millions of workers and our class allies, and because of the spreading murderous imperialist oil and mineral wars in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. But not everyone recognizes that the accelerating exhaustion of extractable oil and fresh water and particularly the ongoing global warming threaten future generations of humanity, and will continue to do so for some time even after “the international working class becomes the human race.” All of these problems, both economic (the interaction between social classes, i.e., bosses and workers) and ecological (the interaction between humans and the rest of nature), are interrelated in complex ways and, as we show below, are not the result of the industrial revolution or out-of-control consumerism, as the media, various authors, and even many climate scientists claim, but rather of the inherent laws of development of insatiable capitalism, as imperialist rivals all seek to accumulate infinite capital in a finite world. The capitalists, as we show below, are systemically incapable of seriously addressing the problem. The pitifully ineffective gestures at addressing global warming by the Obama administration suggest that the U.S. ruling class is also using the global warming issue for other purposes than trying to solve the crisis. In particular, they are trying to rally workers and others around the globe to

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attack the rapidly developing rival capitalist powers of India and China, who are increasingly using fossil fuels, particularly coal (the dirtiest fossil fuel of all), to catch up with and surpass the U.S. economic powerhouse.

II. The science of global warming and its impact on the world’s workers Fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, and their harmful effects The main fossil fuels are coal, oil, and natural gas. They are called fossil fuels because they are the result of animal and plant matter that died and decayed thousands to millions of years ago. Fossils are preserved specimens of dead organisms and therefore contain large amounts of carbon, a universal constituent of all living matter, both plant and animal. As a constituent of fuel, when carbon is burned to generate energy it combines with oxygen to form the molecule CO2 (carbon dioxide), and CO2 is one of the socalled “greenhouse gases” (GHGs). GHGs act like the glass panes in a greenhouse to keep things warm. Indeed, next to water vapor, CO2 is the most abundant GHG in the atmosphere and is becoming even more abundant since the onset of capitalism’s industrial revolution 200 years ago.1 GHGs as a whole comprise a growing component of the earth’s atmosphere. They cause warming by allowing sunlight to pass through from outer space to the ground or oceans, thereby warming them. As land and water heat up they radiate this heat away more and more in the form of infrared radiation. Some of the infrared radiation goes back into space, except for that part that is absorbed by the GHGs in the air. So GHGs allow visible light from the sun to pass from outer space to ground level but trap the infrared that is produced by the heating of the ground and oceans. Just think how a car gets hot in the summer when the windows are closed, from sunlight’s entering the car through the windows with the heat being unable to escape because glass, like GHGs, traps infrared radiation. That, after all, is what the glass in a greenhouse is intended to do for the purpose of growing plants. The more GHGs in the atmosphere, the more heat is retained on the surface of the earth and in the air. For hundreds of millions of years this trapped heat was one of the necessary conditions that permitted life to arise. Without the trapping of some heat, the earth would be far too cold for large organic molecules (i.e., ones containing carbon) to form, and without them life could not exist. So GHGs, until recently, have been good for us. But as with virtually all things that are good for us, this is true only in moderate amounts.

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However, in recent decades the GHGs – mostly CO2 and secondarily the increased atmospheric water vapor – have dramatically increased heat trapping, and, as a result, the average temperature of the earth is rising at such a rate that it is about to exceed any previously recorded level. The new feature, in addition to the natural sources of CO2 that have been around for millions of years and the natural places where CO2 is absorbed (mainly oceans, soil, and forests – so called carbon sinks), is the GHG emissions from capitalist use of fossil fuels – what most writers, the media, and the government refer to as human-caused, or anthropogenic, thereby shielding the capitalists from blame and shifting responsibility mainly to the most numerous part of humanity – the world’s working class. While the capitalist sources of CO2 are much smaller than the natural sources, the latter have been balanced by the natural carbon sinks. Now the added CO2 exceeds the capacity of the sinks to take it back out of the atmosphere at the same rate it is being added. Furthermore the sinks are being destroyed so that even the natural sources of CO2 are exceeding the capacity of the sinks to offset them. The result is a steady rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. While oil is the most used fossil fuel in the U.S., the Chinese and Indian ruling classes mainly use coal to fuel their industries and produce electricity. These two countries alone account for more than one third of humanity, and their economies are expanding rapidly, with China about to overtake the U.S. as the largest economy in the world. The coal burning throughout south Asia is producing a brown haze that is causing vast amounts of respiratory illness and is spreading beyond the borders of these two countries. Recall the 2008 summer Olympics, before which Beijing had to clean its air as best it could so that athletes wouldn’t suffocate, an embarrassing situation for the Chinese ruling class.2 Pollution of this extent is not some future disaster, but a real effect even today of burning fossil fuels, and has been for almost two centuries. A visitor to Los Angeles, for example, is struck on many days by the invisibility of the San Gabriel Mountains to the north.

The earth is warming to a degree never previously seen The current average global temperature is already just 3 to 4ºF below the highest temperatures recorded over the last 400,000 years, and has recently been rising at a rate of approximately half a degree over 30 years. This is a rate of rise never before seen except when the earth is coming out of an ice age (more on this below). To begin with, how do we know what the earth’s average temperatures have been over the last several hundred thousand years? A record of past surface temperatures over that span of time is found by drilling miles down into

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deep ice in Greenland or Antarctica or by drilling into ocean or lake beds or into rock and bringing up cores of ice or sediment. The overlying layers are ones that were laid down later than the deeper layers, so the greater the depth the farther back in time we can go to measure such things as the composition and temperature of the atmosphere. There are various indicators of temperature in these layers, including such things as the relative amounts of two isotopes of oxygen (O16 versus O18) trapped in fossil marine animal shells. This permits us to draw a graph of temperatures over hundreds of thousands of years and allows us to see that, while average temperatures have varied significantly, we are soon about to exceed any past temperature for the measured period. And this despite the fact that the earth’s climate has varied over tens to hundreds of thousands of years by significant amounts. It has gone through alternating periods of severe cold and comfortable warmth (comfortable, that is, for life), called ice ages and interglacial or warm periods, respectively. The most recent ice age lasted about 120,000 years and ended about 10,000 years ago. Geologists find evidence in the layers of rock that during this ice age glaciers covered much of the earth, extending down into what are now low-latitude temperate regions, particularly in the northern hemisphere where most of the earth’s land mass is located and where most civilizations have arisen. It was not long before this last ice age began that human beings first arose on the earth more than a hundred thousand years ago. Since the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago, we have been living in a period called the Holocene, more recently dubbed the Anthropocene (“Anthro,” again, refers to human beings) because of capitalism’s effect on climate. Societies in many parts of the world independently developed agriculture during this period of relative warmth. The ice ages and warm periods have switched back and forth with relatively sudden and rapid change from one to the other. This alternating cycle has been found to be synchronized with another set of natural cycles. In the mid-1800s an amateur scientist in Scotland named James Croll discovered that ice ages were correlated with changes in the shape of the earth’s orbit around the sun and the tilt of its axis. Then in 1920 a Serbian scientist named Milutin Milankovitch published extensive mathematical calculations to chart several periodic variations in the shape of the earth’s orbit and hence the distance to the sun, and in the angle that its axis makes with the direction of the sun’s rays. It is the latter that gives rise to the four seasons of the year, which is well known to involve differences in average temperatures over the year in various parts of the world away from the equator. There are three of these cycles, now named after their discoverer, and each of them takes tens of thousands of years — one about 20,000 years (precession, like

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a top whose spin axis describes a cone in space as it is slowing down), the second about 40,000 years (nutation, a variation in the amount of tilt of the earth’s axis to the plane of its orbit around the sun just as a dying top describes wider and wider cones), and the third about 100,000 years (orbital eccentricity, changes in the degree of elongation of the earth’s slightly elliptical orbit). These cycles are caused in part by the gravitational interaction of the earth and other planets in the solar system (the planets surrounding the sun). The timing of the ice ages and warm periods is in near perfect coincidence with the lesser and greater amounts of average heat received by the earth from the sun due to these variations.

highest temperatures recorded during the previous four warm periods. A temperature variation of 20ºF is smaller than that between the time when we leave for work in the morning and we get home in the evening. And yet, for reasons that we discuss below, the effects of such seemingly small temperature variations can be extreme, as indicated by the qualitative difference between ice ages, in which much of the earth has been covered by glaciers, and warm periods such as we’ve enjoyed for the last 10,000 years and in which glaciers are mostly found in regions farther from the equator and at higher altitudes.

Other scientists have noted cycles of sun surface activity involving so-called solar flares, with cycles of approximately 11 years, very much shorter than Milankovitch cycles, and which also cause variations in the amount of light and heat reaching the earth from the sun. But, while solar flare cycles seem to be correlated with a small amount of climate fluctuation over very long time intervals, they do not correlate with the steady warming of the last few decades. Indeed there has been no steady upward trend in solar activity over this recent period.

How current global warming was discovered

Jim Hansen, the Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA, has shown that the greatest change in global average temperature that the solar activity cycle could force is equal to that of about 7 years worth of current CO2 emissions. In other words, over time the effect of CO2 emissions overwhelms the effect of solar activity on global average temperature (Hansen). The recent acceleration of global warming coincides with the onset of the capitalist industrial revolution about two centuries ago, with its machinery that runs mainly on fossil fuels. And in the last 50 or 60 years this warming has accelerated dramatically as industrialization and oilconsuming modes of transportation have rapidly spread over most of the earth since World War II. A graph of average earth temperature over the last many decades, with the recent sudden rise, resembles a hockey stick lying on its back with the part that strikes the puck representing a sudden rise over the rest of the shaft. The graph is even referred to by that name. It demonstrates that whatever natural cycles have caused climate changes in the past, and continue to do so in the present, only the addition of capitalism-caused GHG emissions can explain the recent upward trend in average global temperature. By way of preparing for the section to come on “tipping,” it should be noted that between ice ages and warm periods the overall range of average world temperatures, as opposed to local weather variations, has been only about 20ºF. Furthermore we are in the fifth warm period that has occurred between ice ages during the last 400,000 years, and we are currently experiencing an average world temperature that is only about 3 to 4ºF below the

Over a century ago a Nobel Prize-winning Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius realized that CO2 in the atmosphere, along with other GHGs, trapped heat. But in those days the amount of GHGs was not sufficient to overcome the natural phenomena that affect climate, from forests, soil, and oceans, all of which absorb GHGs, to solar flares and variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, all of which affect the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth and therefore the rate of heat coming from outer space. Only in the last couple of decades has it gradually come to be realized by a growing number of scientists that the magnitude of GHG increase from electrical power generation, industrial, and transportation activity was beginning to shift the balance of all the natural effects. Today the vast majority of climate scientists agree that global warming is happening faster and faster.

How scientists know that the earth’s temperature is currently threatening to rise higher than ever, with predictable catastrophic effects for the world’s working class The temperatures recorded in ice and sediment cores, when compared with recent direct temperature recordings, tell us that this warming is taking place and about to rise above previously recorded levels. Furthermore many of the side effects of global warming in the modern era are observable to virtually everyone in the world, so there is no way to hide them. Consider the following: a) Hurricanes: Increasingly violent and destructive hurricanes are occurring in recent years. The best known of these may be Katrina in August 2005, but in the same season Wilma was the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded, and the total number of hurricanes that year had not been seen for 72 years. In that same year the first hurricane ever to hit Europe landed in Spain, and the first hurricane ever seen in the south Atlantic hit Brazil in 2004. While

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no single weather event can be attributed to global warming with certainty, the increase in frequency of previously unusual events can be.

diseases that spread with the dryness. And in early February, wildfires in Australia were outdoing past years.3

The frequency of more violent hurricanes will continue to increase, because warmer ocean surface temperatures create low pressures that cause such storms in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Like the Bhola cyclone in 1970 that killed 500,000 workers in Bangladesh and India (more than twice the number of Asian workers who were killed by the 2004 tsunami), increasingly violent hurricanes promise to kill or dislocate millions and millions of people.

Of even greater importance is the fact that a long term drought in the vast Sahel region of northern Africa beginning in the late 1960s and lasting into the mid 1970s caused widespread famine. In recent years, however, as part of the general shifting of rainfall from one geographical region to another that is part of the global warming effect (see next paragraph), rain has begun to return to this region that stretches 2400 miles across the continent and extends over 600 miles in the north-south direction.

b) Heat waves: Heat waves are now occurring of a magnitude never before seen in certain places. In 2003 a summer heat wave killed 35,000 Europeans, mainly workers, and many thousands in India. The European death toll alone was 12 times the number of people who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. More and more devastating heat waves will result in tens of thousands of deaths. The dwindling energy sources will make it even harder, without a significant rise in the use of alternative energy sources, to compensate for the heat with fans, coolers, and air conditioning. And those destined to suffer the greatest effects are always the working class. c) Droughts and wildfires: Droughts are regional dry periods lasting months to years, involving less than average rainfall or river flow. Their frequency is increasing and results from the ability of warmer air to retain more moisture, thereby limiting, in regions not too near the poles, the amount of both rain and mountain snow that is now the source of most of the world’s fresh water supply. The lack of rain is already resulting in greater numbers of increasingly destructive wildfires and hastening the drying up of rivers and underground water tables all over the world. Water is one of the most vital components of all life, and its increasing disappearance will not only cause millions and millions of deaths directly from dehydration and lack of sanitation, but agriculture and food supplies will also suffer, with widespread deaths from starvation. Already, as Pakistan’s Indus River, fed by dwindling Himalayan snow melt, dries up and India’s underground water table sinks below the level accessible by wells, agriculture is becoming more and more difficult, promising sooner or later to cause actual famines (Pearce 2006). Within four consecutive days in January 2009 the press reported on drought conditions in Texas causing spreading wildfires in the winter and in Argentina and California’s central valley where farmers are seeing their fields dry up, and the dying off of oldgrowth forests in the western U.S., not only due to a lack of water directly, but also due to insects and

d) Floods: Along with droughts in some areas is an increase in floods in other areas that destroy lives, agriculture, and homes. As the earth warms, the cooler air that is necessary for rain to form is concentrated farther and farther from the equator, leaving more temperate and tropical zones dryer, and causing flooding in more northern regions, and even in southern regions that are not used to such extensive rains. The reason floods occur is that warmer air holds more moisture and saves it up as air masses travel until cooler conditions that cause condensation give rise to rain. Then the rain falls in much greater volumes much quicker, such that the ground is unable to absorb it all and the runoff gathers in lowlying areas, resulting in flooding. Thus the very same phenomenon (i.e., warmer air holds more water) accounts for the increase in frequency of both low and high extremes of rainfall, namely both droughts and floods, and a decrease in moderate rainfalls. The effects of flooding are well known to millions who have experienced it, and to those who have not experienced them if only from watching Katrina’s effect on New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast in the U.S. and Mexico. Other catastrophic floods in Asia have been reported on TV news. These floods will become more frequent and will cause mass migrations of desperate workers away from these areas. And, as usual and because of world-wide racism produced by capitalist ruling classes to divide the working class and make superprofits where possible, the people most severely affected will be the impoverished and superexploited black, latin and Asian workers, whether in the U.S. or abroad. It was black workers who suffered the most by far in New Orleans from Katrina, though white workers suffered extreme losses also, with only the richer ruling sections of the city, with their larger and stronger levees, suffering less devastation. Lesser publicized effects of global warming, however, are even more serious, if that is possible. These include: e) Large rise in sea level: The rise in sea level results from melting glaciers and ice shelves, particularly in

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Greenland and Antarctica that together hold more than 90% of the earth’s ice, with Antarctica holding about 10 times that of Greenland. Evidence strongly suggests that sea levels will rise as much as a few feet in several decades. To get an idea of scale, if all the ice in these two islands were to melt, the rise of sea level would be about 220 feet, which could take more than a century. However, if sea level were to rise just 3 feet, given today’s geographic population distribution over 100 million people would be displaced, the vast majority in Asia (see www.realclimate.org). In addition there are entire island nations in the Pacific that will be forced to move as well. It is estimated that 10% of the world’s 6.8 billion people live in the endangered cities. The hundreds of millions of people who will be displaced by this rise in sea level will have to go somewhere, abandoning their homes. The dislocations that this alone will cause are unimaginable, in addition to the social upheavals that will result, including loss of jobs and income, with lost access to food, shelter and transportation. The capitalist response to mass migrations of workers around the world will be martial law and a further intensification of the growing fascism in the U.S. and globally. The time scale of this sea level rise contains significant uncertainties, mainly because of the uncertainties in how fast the melting of Greenland and Antarctica will proceed. However, there are possibilities of massive acceleration of this melting, which we address in the next section. What is not uncertain is that if things continue as they are today, or change by only token amounts, it is inevitable. f) Interruption of the normal ocean circulation: There has been progressively more extreme melting of the north polar floating ice cap from one year to the next.4 But it is not just killing polar bears. The addition of fresh water to the North Atlantic from the melting sea ice, as well as from the melting Greenland glaciers which are also made of fresh water, threatens to dilute the salt concentration in the ocean and interfere with the normal circulation that depends in part on the salt concentration. This circulation of ocean currents is called the thermohaline (thermo means heat and haline refers to salt) circulation, and keeps the water moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back, over about a 1600-year period (Pearce 2007). The progressive melting of the polar ice cap is bringing the possibility of interruption of the thermohaline circulation closer every year. Already the number of vortices in the waters between Greenland and Europe, that take the colder, saltier surface water down to the bottom of the ocean, as a critical part of the normal circulation, have decreased in recent years from an estimated twelve to two, with one of the remaining

two already losing its force (Pearce 2007). If this circulation is interrupted it will have a direct effect on climate in places such as Europe that depend on the normal circulation, particularly in the form of the warm waters from the equator that ride the Gulf Stream northeastward. It is the Gulf Stream that keeps Europe temperate at relatively high latitudes. If the normal circulation of currents in the North Atlantic were to cease, Europe would be plunged into much colder temperatures, even as the warmer water remaining instead in the Gulf of Mexico would spawn even more violent hurricanes. For this reason, the thermohaline circulation is called the climate’s conveyor belt. g) Dying coral reefs: Coral reefs that support a wide variety of fish are dying, and the dying fish constitute a disappearing supply of food for humans. This is a consequence of the ocean’s absorbing increasing amounts of CO2, which in turn causes acidification of the oceans and acts as an obstacle to the forming of shells and skeletons in the many sea creatures that make up coral reefs. The threat to many fish species, and to an important part of the food supply, is exacerbated by the anarchistic relations of capitalism in which giant fishing corporations use large nets to pick up everything in range. h) Disappearing forests: Destruction of the world’s forests is accelerating through lack of rain and consequent increasing wildfire activity. Forests absorb large amounts of CO2, so greater emissions of GHGs results in less absorption, further increasing the GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Disappearance of forests will accelerate, destroying the shelter for many of the world’s animal species as well as human inhabitants of, for example, the Amazon region in South America. Both dying coral reefs and disappearing forests also mean accelerated extinction of tens to hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals. In fact, as a result of rampant resource depletion and waste product pollution by capitalism, we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction. There have been five such massive extinctions of species over the last 600 million years, with the worst of them – the end-Permian 250 million years ago – causing a loss of 80-95% of all then existing species. All five of these mass extinctions have been traced most likely to major natural events such as super volcanoes, covering vast areas of land or ocean, or meteorite impacts, such as caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (Benton). We are now again encountering a rapid rate of species extinctions, due not to natural events this time, but rather to capitalism’s structural requirement for maximum profits without regard to the consequences.

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i) Melting of permafrost: The permafrost (frozen ground water) in the arctic regions, particularly in Siberia and Alaska, is melting and releasing huge amounts of stored methane (also a fossil product). Methane is an even more effective GHG than CO2 by a factor of 25. However, methane is currently far less abundant in the atmosphere than CO2 by a factor of 200 in terms of concentration. This leaves CO2 as the dominant GHG for the time being. But as the permafrost continues to melt, it can only be a matter of time before methane catches up and starts to cause even faster global warming. Another source of methane lies beneath the ocean floor in the form of so-called clathrates, which are ice particles that will melt as ocean temperatures rise, thus releasing large bubbles of methane into the air. j) Tropical and other diseases: Another likely effect of global warming is the spread of tropical diseases to new geographical locations (Speth). The introduction of new diseases to populations of people or animals that have not seen them before and have not developed immunities can have disastrous effects. Consider, for example, the deliberate use of smallpox by European settlers in the U.S. to decimate the Native American populations and steal their land, or the unintended epidemics of the great influenza of 1918-9 or AIDS, each responsible for an estimated 25 million deaths worldwide, with the AIDS epidemic still decimating the world’s working class. Even the unintentional epidemics caused, or are still causing, far more deaths than they otherwise would have, due to amplification by capitalist-caused poverty and war. (More on amplification in the next section.) Diseases that are on the rise due to a warmer climate include allergies and asthma, both epidemic even in the imperialist nations. The higher temperatures bring earlier and longer pollen seasons, and ragweed is produced in higher quantities and a more potent form due to both higher temperatures and to higher concentrations of CO2 (Scientific American Earth 3.0, June 2009). Diseases and insects that kill trees are spreading farther from the equator in North America due to milder winters – for example, mountain pine beetles are increasing by orders of magnitude, killing millions of very old trees in Wyoming, Colorado, and British Columbia, and threatening to wipe out entire forests. There are other types of natural disasters that do not result from global warming or energy depletion, such as tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes. But even the widespread destruction of human life from these events are not merely a result of nature’s violence, but rather of world capitalism’s disregard for warning systems and safer structures, at root a complete disregard for the wellbeing of the working classes beyond the

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minimum that it takes to maintain an adequate number of workers to produce the capitalists’ profits.

Tipping: How climate can undergo rapid change in extreme ways from one condition to another, lasting for thousands of years Climate differs from local weather by covering much larger areas. It is well known that weather is unstable and can change drastically, violently, and quickly from one condition to another. Ask anyone who has lived through a hurricane (cyclone, typhoon – all names for the same thing in different parts of the world), tornado, flood, ice storm, or heat wave, if you haven’t had the pleasure yourself. What is not well recognized is that climate (as opposed to weather) can change in extreme ways as well, over longer time intervals. People who lived in Oklahoma in the 1930s and saw the central part of the U.S. turn to a dust bowl (described, e.g., in Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath) know this, and dwellers in the Sahel region of northern Africa are experiencing the same thing today. The earth has been enjoying a relatively warm period for the last 10,000 years in much of the world, hospitable for the development of agriculture, animal domestication, and the civilizations that have been built on those foundations. Because of this experience and history, many scientists have taken it for granted that there must always be forces that act to stabilize the climate. There are in fact stabilizing forces, but destabilizing forces exist as well.5 Capitalism has had a profound impact on the planet. One third to one half of the earth’s land surface has been transformed by human action; CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by 30% in the last 200 years of industrial capitalism; more than half of freshwater sources are now in use by human beings; over 20% of ocean fisheries have been depleted or are on the brink of being so; 25% of all bird species have already been driven into extinction by human activity; and the rates of species extinctions are now 100 to 1000 times that of eras prior to human domination of the earth (Foster 2002). It is estimated that 5 to 25 thousand species go extinct each year – that’s about 14 to 70 per day – out of some 20 to 100 million animal species total (Benton). However, the interrelationships among various phenomena involving climate are very complex. For example, air-borne aerosols such as CFCs also have a cooling effect on the earth by reflecting sunlight away. In fact, Crutzen has pointed out that in the complete absence of any aerosols (not just CFCs), global average temperatures would be rising much faster from the increase in GHGs. Indeed there have been suggestions that aerosols might be able to reverse the trend toward runaway global warming, but that will only mask the

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disease by affecting the symptoms and will fail in the long run if GHGs continue to multiply. Besides, precisely because the interrelationships are so complex, the side effects of such a project might be difficult to predict. Contrary to the illusion that climate is always stabilized by natural forces, the very existence of numerous past ice ages lasting tens of thousands of years, suddenly alternating with warm periods lasting thousands of years, is demonstration enough that rapid extreme climate changes have occurred and certainly can and will occur again. We pointed out that the difference between average world temperature during a warm period and during an ice age is only about 20ºF. We further mentioned that we are now within 3 or 4ºF of the highest temperatures recorded during the last 650,000 years. Since the onset of capitalism’s industrial revolution with the accelerating rise in GHG emissions, that difference is rapidly decreasing toward zero and average world temperatures can be expected to go several degrees beyond within 20 to 30 years. Such seemingly small variations in average global temperature can give rise to dramatic changes in climate. Consider for example the freezing/melting point of ice. If the air temperature around a glacier is just below the freezing/melting point, the ice stays frozen, but if it is just above it, the ice melts. This change can happen with only a fraction of a degree of temperature difference. When the average global temperature goes up, say, 1ºF, there will be regions at the edges of glaciers where the temperature is on the borderline between freezing and melting that will now see melting temperatures, causing the glaciers to shrink. These regions continue to move farther away from the equator as the average global temperature continues to rise, so that the glaciers shrink more. The opposite occurs in times of cooling, and the edges of the glaciers move closer to the equator. This example all boils down (to use an inappropriate phrase) to the sudden change between water and ice at a particular critical temperature. So it isn’t the size of the temperature range that matters so much as the place of that range in the overall temperature scale. A range of 20ºF centered around 50ºF, for example, would not make nearly as much difference as a range of 2ºF centered around 32ºF (water’s freezing/melting point). Destabilizing phenomena involve feedback mechanisms that cause a change to accelerate once it starts. When self-reinforcing, or amplifying, feedbacks set in and reach a certain stage, events can become irreversible for long periods of time, in climate phenomena tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This is commonly called a “tipping” point. Tipping is one example of a well-known and quite general phenomenon in Marxist, or dialectical, understanding of all aspects of reality, often referred to as one of the laws of dialectics. This law observes that quality and

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quantity are inseparably linked and in particular that, in all phenomena, sufficient quantitative change leads to qualitative change. This is often referred to simply as “quantity into quality.” However, the prevalence of “quantity into quality” in both nature and human affairs includes both easily reversible and practically irreversible effects. For example, a melting ice cube in your kitchen can be frozen again by putting it back in the freezer, but melting glaciers cannot be so easily refrozen. It seems that those qualitative changes that are practically irreversible are precisely those that involve amplifying feedback. It is such changes that climate scientists refer to as tipping. While both stabilizing and destabilizing forces are all around us, there are different levels at which one or the other type becomes dominant. With regard to global climate, for example, even as the earth has repeatedly tipped back and forth between ice ages and warm periods, it has not gone beyond those limits for billions of years, because, beyond the destabilizing effects, stabilizing forces eventually have kicked in again to limit the range of variation.7 Nevertheless, the current trend toward the highest temperatures ever recorded represents a clear and present danger, particularly for the world’s working class.

Understanding tipping is the key to understanding the climate crisis, as well as communist revolution and countless other phenomena Examples of tipping include the following (some of which have been introduced above in a different context): a) The initial warming of the North Polar region causes melting of the polar floating sea ice, which makes the region darker (ocean is darker than ice) and therefore better able to absorb the sun’s heat and less able to reflect it away, resulting in further warming and further melting and so on. In the past this has also happened in reverse, with initial cooling causing increase in size of the ice cap, in turn increasing the reflection of sunlight with still further cooling. b) The initial warming of the arctic results in melting of the permafrost that has been frozen in the ground for thousands of years, mainly in Siberia and Alaska, releasing tons of trapped methane from decomposing animal and plant matter. Methane is one of the most effective GHGs, leading to further heat trapping and warming, leading to further melting, etc. c) Warming of the air results in less rain, with the dryness giving rise to wildfires that destroy more of the forests, which are then less able to absorb CO2, leading to more CO2 in the air and more heat trapping and less rain, and so on. The edges of the Amazon

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jungle (the largest rainforest in the world) are fast contracting. In the past, initial cooling has increased the rainfall and snowfall, in turn producing growth of the forests which absorb more CO2, giving rise to still further cooling. d) The ice on Greenland and Antarctica is melting faster and faster, which, among other things, causes that portion of the ice that extends out over the edge of the land and rests on either the ocean’s surface or its floor to give way. When this occurs the inland ice sheets, previously retained by the edge ice, slide faster and faster into the ocean. Meanwhile because the land part of Antarctica is partly below sea level, the warming ocean is sliding in under the ice sheet, further hastening this process. While there is compensation by snowfall, it is not enough to keep up with melting in Greenland and it is not clear which will be dominant in Antarctica in coming years. As stated above, the speed with which this melting will proceed is uncertain, but this kind of uncertainty is characteristic of all processes that involve amplifying feedback. It is very difficult to anticipate all sources of such feedback, so that processes can speed up tremendously and make yesterday’s predictions of time scale obsolete. e) Warming soil absorbs less CO2 resulting in more heat trapping and therefore more warming of the soil and still less CO2 absorption. This has also happened in reverse in the past. f) The warming ocean causes the CO2-trapping plankton on the surface to sink to lower depths, becoming less available to trap CO2, etc. The main point is that tipping is everywhere around us and is reaching irreversible levels in all of the above climate examples. Once these processes take off by themselves, human beings may not be able to halt these runaway processes before all their catastrophic results come about – even under communism. Of course, the past history of alternating ice ages and warm periods suggests that eventually a new ice age may well develop, though given the new situation on the earth’s surface with accelerating capitalism-caused emissions of GHGs this is not assured. But in any case, it would be hundreds or thousands of years away. The reason we cannot be assured that a new ice age will develop in the distant future is that current GHG emissions from capitalist electric power plants, industries, and transportation modes, in addition to the ongoing but changing natural processes, could very well introduce a qualitatively new situation on the earth. This new situation could possibly have an effect at the level of alternations between ice ages and warm periods. To understand that this is possible, consider, for example, another irreversible change that occurred

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hundreds of millions of years ago on the earth’s surface. The atmosphere once contained very little oxygen (O2). Only after the development of the earliest life forms that began producing O2 as one of their “waste” products during photosynthesis,8 was it possible for oxygen-requiring species to develop. These include virtually all currently existing plants and animals. The resulting proliferation of self-replicating plants and animals changed the very conditions under which life initially arose out of simple molecules. Conditions on earth are now such that it is no longer possible for new life to arise from anything other than existing life. Thus new qualitative developments can lead to still other developments that prevent a return to former conditions.9 A quite different, but more immediate, example of practically irreversible change was the development of capitalism out of feudalism, a process that took a few hundred years from the 1300-1400s to the 1600-1800s. Once the capitalist market, money, and competitive profitmaking took hold, feudal landowning was irreversibly wiped out, but the struggle required countless political and military battles before that war was finally won. Similarly, the growth of communism out of capitalism will require time and mass violent struggle between the world’s working class and the capitalists, but happen it will. The earliest attempts at organizing communist societies in the Soviet Union and China in the 1900s did not yet reach the stage of irreversibility, and capitalism was eventually restored over several decades in both these countries.

How scientists know that capitalist-produced CO2 is the main cause of the recent warming trend This is the most critical issue in the entire scientific investigation of global warming, because it determines whether or not it is possible for the world’s working class to do anything to prevent, reverse, or at least blunt the predictable catastrophic results. While past warming trends, prior to the development of capitalism a few hundred years ago, were indeed due to natural cycles, if the current global warming is due to natural cycles independent of GHG emissions from capitalist industrial and transportation activity, then there is not likely anything we can do to prevent it. But fortunately the evidence indicates that this is not the case. So let’s look at it. Coinciding with the increase of average earth temperature over the last several decades is a dramatic and steady rise in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. For almost 50 years, from 1958 to 2006, a scientist named Charles Keeling made daily measurements of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere

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from near the top of the world’s largest (in volume, though not in height above sea level) active volcano, Mauna Loa in Hawaii (over 13,000 feet high above sea level, but 56,000 feet high relative to its base below the ocean floor). He found that, in addition to the annual fluctuation due to seasonal effects, consisting mainly of the spring/fall cycle of leaves in forests, there has been a steady rise in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere from around 315 parts per million (ppm) to around 380 ppm in 2006. By 2009 it had risen to 388 ppm (a difference of 73 ppm over 51 years), a very significant and rapid rise of atmospheric concentration of a very effective GHG. In order to compare the measured CO2 concentrations over the last 51 years or so with the concentrations prior to 1958, there has to be a way to measure those earlier concentrations. Just as drilling into ice cores permits scientists to measure global temperatures in the near and distant past, it permits the measurement of atmospheric concentrations of CO2, since small bubbles of air become trapped in the ice and the CO2 concentrations can be measured in them directly. This is how we know that just before the beginning of capitalism’s industrial revolution 200 years ago, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was around 280 ppm, for a rise of 35 ppm from 280 to 315 ppm up to about 51 years ago when Keeling began his measurements. So in the last 51 years or so there has been a rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration more than twice the size of that of the previous 150 years (73 ppm versus 35 ppm), and this rise is continuing to accelerate (a rise of 8 ppm between 2006 and 2009, or 2.67 ppm per year, versus a rise of 65 ppm between 1958 and 2006, or 1.35 ppm per year). One thing that lends particular urgency to the need to end the emissions of CO2 immediately is that today’s emissions stay in the atmosphere for a century or more. This has been likened to a car with an accelerator but no brakes (Kolbert). So in summary, • At least since the work of Arrhenius in the late 1800s, there has been no question that CO2 does indeed cause heat trapping. • There is no proposed mechanism, supported by evidence, for the recent rise in average earth temperature other than the recent rapid rise in CO2 emissions and the accelerating atmospheric concentrations that result. • The rise in CO2 emissions is definitely correlated with the two-century growth of capitalist manufacturing industries and oil-based energy plants and transportation.

III. Past attempts to deny global warming or its capitalist cause, and the more recent emphasis on greenwashing tokenism Who is behind the denials of global warming and its capitalist causes? What are some of their arguments? The Party’s publications have often pointed out the antiworking class nature of the environmental movement – a movement dominated by the petit bourgeois and professional classes and begun in the 1940s with the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation-backed movement to transform agriculture in the superexploited nations (the so-called “third world” or “developing nations” or “lesser developed countries [LDCs]”) toward a U.S. agribusiness model and subsequently developed as a general theoretical ecological movement mainly in the 1960s. The recent climate scientist e-mail battle is part of a larger capitalist dogfight going on in the ruling class. Oklahoma’s Senator James Inhofe, the highest paid U.S. politician by the small oil companies (almost 2/3 of a $1 million this decade), using hacked e-mail messages from a few climatologists in the U.S. and U.K. created a furor by falsely claiming that the climatologists have lied when they state that the earth is warming. Like the inter-imperialist fights, this battle within the U.S. ruling class reflects disputes between different sets of capitalists. Global warming denialists are similar to the tobacco companies, who denied that smoking causes cancer. They represent the smaller capitalists from the south and southwest that are held in check by the main imperialist butchers from Wall Street. Today Al Gore is the main flag bearer of the the ruling class “environmentalists,” whose targets have expanded to include not just their local rivals, but also China, India, Russia, and other rising powers. The big guys Gore represents have killed millions in their wars for oil and their penchant for murder makes Inhofe look like a street punk. That being said, street punks still need to be exposed. A handful of scientists and other writers have been paid handsomely to continue to deny, with no evidence at all or with made-up lies, that neither resource depletion, or global warming is a problem. Still other of these paid scientists or their misled followers admit that global warming is occurring but deny that capitalist activity has any significant effect, maintaining instead that it is part of a natural cycle, nothing can be done to reverse it. Various foundations have been set up and funded to mask the capitalists behind the denial movement, including the Cato Institute, the Marshall Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Tech Central Science Foundation, and the Center for the Study of Carbon

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Dioxide and Global Change (Romm, p. 142). Among these possibly misled writers are columnists George Will and Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post), John Tierney (New York Times), and the late writer Michael Crichton, whose novel State of Fear has perhaps caused more popular confusion than any other piece of writing. It matters little whether the denialists know they are lying or are just misled, since greed and gullibility in this case lead to the same outcome. The denialists have in the past generally been given equal time by the media, which in turn are controlled by the big moneyed interests, including the oil and coal companies and their financial backers. Those media articles or programs that in the past gave sole airing to the fact of global warming, without raising doubts, were in a very small minority. The big capitalists both fight and use the denialists. Even while they hawk for the small time domestic oil bosses, the denialists serve the needs of the Rockefeller capitalists as a useful foil to build fear among people in the environmental movement about demanding too much, and keep the liberals in the picture as the lesser evil. Much the way in which the Tea Party movement was useful in giving Obama an excuse to serve the big bosses needs on health care, the auto industry and everything else. A good illustration of the extent of this control can be found in a comparison survey published in Science about 5 years ago and covering the 10 years from 1993 to 2003. The authors reported how scientific journals have handled the issue of global warming versus the way it is handled in the mass media. Of a total of approximately 10,000 journal articles on global warming in that 10 year period, close to 1,000 articles were randomly chosen, and, of the 700 or so that discussed the cause of global warming, not a single one, without exception, opposed the view that GHG emissions from human (read capitalist) activity were contributing to, if not mainly responsible for, global warming — for a score of ~700 for human (capitalist) causation to 0 against. In other words, climate scientists find no more controversy in the concept that global warming is caused by capitalist activity (though many would hesitate to publicly use that word) than they do that the sun, and not the earth, is the center of the solar system (Kolbert p. 164). Meanwhile over the previous 12 years, out of more than 3500 articles in four of the U.S.’s main newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and Wall Street Journal), only 6% of a large random sample supported this conclusion without equivocation (Gore p. 262, Romm p. 216). Denialists have granted that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures over past millennia are indeed correlated, i.e., when one goes up the other also goes up, and vice versa. But they have argued that the cause and effect is the reverse of that claimed by

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climatologists. That is, they argue that the warming of the earth is in turn causing a rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, rather than the other way around. The evidence they provide for this contention is that comparisons of past temperatures with CO2 concentrations demonstrate that the onset of rises in temperature have preceded rather than followed rises in CO2 concentration. Therefore, they argue, it cannot be true that rising CO2 causes rising temperature. However, initial rises in temperature in the past may indeed have begun before and caused CO2 concentrations to rise, but amplifying feedback of rising CO2 in turn causes a continued rise in temperature. Amplifying feedback has been ignored by the denialists. Furthermore with the onset of capitalism’s industrial revolution, there is now a new and added source of CO2 on the scene that was not present until two centuries ago. It turns out that it is not just denialists who fail to take amplifying feedbacks into account. Many of the climate predictions by scientists fail as well to include the effects of amplifying feedback, which often results in gross understatement of the severity and imminence of the expected catastrophic outcomes – one example of the limitations of capitalist science. Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has rightly been accused of minimizing the effects of global warming in order to achieve consensus, but at the price of sorely underestimating what needs to be done to avert catastrophe and therefore all but guaranteeing that it will come to precisely that. Another of the arguments used by the denialists that the current global warming is not due to GHG emissions since the industrial revolution is that from about 800 to 1300 AD, there was a warm period in Europe called the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). They argue that since this occurred before the industrial revolution, fossil fuel burning could not be the cause of global warming. It is true that the MWP was not caused by the subsequent industrial revolution, but it is not true that this warm period covered the entire earth. Indeed the IPCC has shown that during those centuries the average temperature of the earth was slightly cooler than it is now, even though the local temperatures in Europe were admittedly warmer. Indeed a common distortion by the denialists is to focus on one region of the earth and ignore the earth as a whole, or describe one short period of time and ignore the longer term trends. This lends itself to the willful misuse of the truth to twist the truth, since climates in different parts of the world almost always behave differently from each other and short term changes may not reflect longer term trends. It is only by considering the earth as a whole, and focusing on change over sufficiently long periods of time, that an accurate scientific assessment of climate change can be made. But even if it were true that the MWP involved the entire earth and was due to discoverable

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natural causes, that would not have any bearing on the capitalist causation of the current upsurge in warming. Still another argument has used invalid data to try to show that it is solar cycles rather than GHGs that are causing the current global warming (see Damon and Laut concerning one such attempt by Danish authors). These claims have been picked up by the press and continue to be defended by the authors even after the errors have been exposed in the scientific literature. At one level the denialists have been well aware of the power of doubt. “Conservative” New York Times columnist David Brooks has admitted as much, saying in 2005, “Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this).” According to Joseph Romm (physicist and past Assistant Secretary of Energy under Clinton), Frank Luntz is a corporate and political consultant who makes his living by teaching how to lie in order to create doubt and to cover the lies in minor admissions of truth. He has been extremely active in proposing phrasing for politicians and scientists who choose to deny global warming and its human causes. For example, he has proposed use of the term “climate change” instead of “global warming,” since the former is less frightening, and that denialists use the three words “safer,” “cleaner,” and “healthier” as often as possible to convince the listener that they care about the environment. Luntz’s 2002 memo to Bush, entitled The Environment: A Cleaner Safer, Healthier America, is available in multiple locations on the web since it was leaked, and has been exposed by a number of environmentalists (Romm, Luntz). In summary, denialists have either offered no scientific evidence for any alternative hypothesis and have merely denied and denied, or they have offered “evidence” that, on closer examination, proves to be false. They have also ignored the effects of amplifying feedback and have generally highlighted isolated local events to the exclusion of global phenomena examined over time. Unfortunately the doubt they have planted in the past has, at least until recently, been enough to have a paralyzing effect on public awareness and on the potential insistence that something be done about the emissions, even by environmental groups.

Instead of only denials, the U.S. ruling class has started to use “greenwashing” as pressure against China and India Particularly beginning with the Obama campaign, there has been a shift in the U.S. media and government from denial to “greenwashing” (a play on whitewashing and green, the symbol of nature). Greenwashing involves the admission that the earth is warming but with a distorted anti-working class content that generally lays the blame on an overconsuming and overpopulated working class, without recognition that capitalism determines what

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people consume and overpopulation is a relative term concerning what portion of the working class capitalism can employ. Furthermore greenwashing substitutes proposed solutions that appear effective but are at best mere tokenism for ones that could actually stop global warming. The tokenism includes such things as lowering GHG emissions by such small amounts, and over such long time frames, that they are wholly inadequate and would not be in time to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate change. The U.S. rulers need to guarantee that they don’t have to change the infrastructure of capitalism or end their extremely profitable oil-based industries. Indeed the reasons given publicly for the meagerness of these proposals center around economic feasibility. The underlying motivations for this shift in emphasis from denial to greenwashing involve the attempt to make it look like the politicians are getting serious about the issue, and, even more importantly, to put pressure on the rising economic powers, particularly in India and China. The U.S. rulers have an imperative need to try to slow the rapid economic advance of their imperialist rivals, especially China, whose capitalist ruling class promises to take the title of World’s Largest Economy away from the U.S. in the next decade or two. China’s industries, as well as India’s, thrive on coal more than on any other source of energy. Their pollution of the world’s atmosphere through the burning of coal is well known, as we mentioned above. The U.S. rulers have the illusion that they will be able to force a cap on carbon emissions in both India and China in order to slow their economic growth, and at the very least to isolate their governments from the rest of the world. The U.S. ruling class is aware of the way that Bush’s complete denial of global warming and its fossil fuel basis, along with the major contribution of the U.S. to climate change, helped to isolate the U.S. A trip by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to India in July 2009 ended in her being taken to task by the Indian government for even suggesting that India slow its economic growth in order to slow GHG emissions. They pointed out that the U.S. had been spewing vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere over the entire 20th century and even before, and had no right to point to India as the guilty party. Nevertheless in order to lessen their own isolation and increase that of India and China, and even more importantly to find other ways to attempt to slow the economic growth of these two challengers, the U.S. rulers are now taking steps that appear to address global warming. However, as we show below, these steps, whether by design or by negligence, are wholly inadequate to prevent catastrophic climate change. We also show that world capitalism is incapable of stopping climate change, for structural reasons that go beyond the will of individual capitalists and their politicians.

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Supporting the switch from denial to greenwashing, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” to the U.N.’s IPCC and to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Gore watched industry spew out more and more earthwarming emissions without any effective objection while he was Vice President under Clinton in the 1990s. Later we will return to Gore’s complicity in the Clinton administration’s squelching of a clean form of nuclear energy. Before we leave this subject, a caution is in order concerning the ruling class switch in emphasis from denial to greenwashing: Like the ability of CO2 to remain in the atmosphere for a very long time (a century or more) and continue to heat up the earth, the ability of global warming denials to remain in the political atmosphere for a very long time and continue to confuse should not be underestimated. Indeed there are still significant sources of denial around. For example, there was a full page ad in the Washington Post on 6/18/09 from The Heartland Institute, a rightwing free-market think tank, claiming that politicians and the media are silencing (unnamed) experts who deny that global warming is a crisis. We will still find ourselves having to fight both denials and greenwashing in order to convince millions of workers of the truth of our position. The continuing fountain of global warming denialism serves not only to lessen the pressure on the U.S. capitalists to make any real changes in GHG emissions, but also strengthens the intentional illusion that Obama is the planet’s savior and that his efforts are heroic.

IV. Capitalism’s contribution to global warming As we have tried to make clear above, global warming is not simply “man-made,” as the Nobel committee put it, or “anthropogenic,” the term used most by scientists and meaning simply human-caused, but is in fact capitalistmade. Capitalism, and not humanity, is the cause of global warming, which already suggests that a necessary part of the solution is to destroy capitalism before it destroys the earth. Ever since the industrial revolution began, as capitalism was spreading to incorporate all of humanity, factories and means of transportation, and over the last century electrical power plants, have required ever increasing sources of coal, oil, and gas to run them. To this day, 85% of all energy use in the U.S. comes from coal, oil, and natural gas (Scientific American Earth 3.0, Volume 19,

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Number 2, Summer 2009). Capitalism, with its absolute need to expand continually and with profits as the dominating and often sole motivation, has almost used up all the profitably extractable sources of these fossil fuels. Capitalism is a planless system in which each capitalist corporation acts without regard to cooperation but instead competes with other corporations in order to stay alive and in business. In order to stay alive, each must grow and thus must try to expand its profits without limit, so that further investment can maintain its share of the market. If market share shrinks enough the corporation is doomed. Grow or die is the law of capitalism. Witness all the carmakers that have gone under in the U.S. over the 20th century, leaving not the Big Three, but the Only Three: GM, Ford, and Chrysler, and even their continued existence is in doubt in the face of foreign competition. Yet when corporations go under, they don’t simply disappear from the face of the earth. Rather their assets are acquired for ten cents, or so, on the dollar by surviving corporations that thereby become much bigger in terms of real estate and equipment, even as they make do with fewer workers, throwing large numbers of us out of our jobs. Thus what begins as many smaller corporations ends up as a few much bigger corporations, and monopolies develop that can set their own prices higher, within the limits of supply and demand. The overall effect of this single-minded capitalist focus on profits is continual crisis, war and world war followed by renewed economic expansion. The neglect of the devastation that this vicious business cycle causes in the lives of workers – through layoffs, increasing deaths, recessions, depressions, homelessness, starvation, drugs, filling of prisons, and use of working-class youth as cannon fodder in wars. Additionally the pollution and methods of waste disposal caused by capitalism not only destroy the lives of workers in various localities, especially in black and Latino neighborhoods, but threaten now to ravage the earth and imperil the future existence of humanity. The main way the capitalists get away with this criminal activity is through their control of state power and their ever-present use of racism and nationalism, as well as sexism and sectarian religious wars, intended mainly to divide the working class and render us too weak to fight for political power. The capitalists, of course, would also suffer major destruction in the process of global warming-caused catastrophes, but unwittingly they share at least one characteristic of suicide bombers in taking down as many innocent victims with them as they can, though their own death is unintended. Herman Melville’s popular 19th century novel Moby Dick told how whaling Captain Ahab, in his single-minded determination to seek vengeance against the huge whale who cost him his leg, was willing to take his entire crew down with him. Modern capitalists have become Captain Ahabs, and vengeance against the

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whale has become the single-minded drive for profits. They may not be mentally unbalanced like Ahab, but they are structurally incapable of consistent system-wide actions to save themselves or to save the earth from the GHG-driven consequences of global warming. Many authors, including Al Gore, claim that there are ways to induce capitalism to save itself and the earth, through the profitability of alternative sources of energy that neither pollute nor cause GHG emissions. Note that they all accept the need for profitability, recognizing that this is what motivates capitalism. We discuss below why the internal contradictions of capitalism make it impossible to stop irreversible climate change, including the fact that profitability will accrue at least temporarily only to a small number of old and new corporations but not to the system as a whole. This will make it impossible for capitalism to make all the necessary changes to end GHG emissions. This in turn is one reason why it is an absolute necessity that the world’s working class, led by its communist party PLP, remove the capitalists from their throne as soon as possible, seize political power, and thus rid ourselves of the main obstacle to our attempts to save the planet for our class around the world and for our descendants.

V. Ineffective proposals to stop global warming and why capitalism cannot solve the problem of catastrophic climate change Approaches to stop global warming Various international meetings among capitalist governments have produced schemes to reduce GHG emissions such as “cap and trade” or “carbon tax.” Cap and trade on an international basis means that, according to an agreed on formula, each government would set a limit or cap on the total GHG emissions permitted to its own industries. Within that overall cap then each industry is allotted a certain proportion of allowed GHG emissions. Any corporation that finds it can actually continue to make profit while emitting less than its allotment is permitted to “trade” (or, more appropriately, sell) the unused portion of their allotment to corporations that emit more than their allotment. The latter then buy the right to exceed their allotment from those who can profitably stay under their allotment. Cap and trade has several problems even if it were possible for international agreement to be reached. First, the proposed caps are still much too high to prevent disastrous climate change. Second, the competing ruling classes differ on the method for distributing the GHG allowances. Third, there is no global enforcement for any nation that exceeds even its allotted cap. In the U.S. the rulers have discussed auctioning the allotments or

simply having them given away by the government, with the latter being proposed in the Waxman-Markey bill, but this is still in dispute. Furthermore, the WaxmanMarkey bill allows planting of trees to absorb CO2 instead of cutting GHG emissions without any way to confirm any trees will even be planted in the U.S. Even more significantly, the bill calls for reducing emissions (not atmospheric concentration, which will continue to increase) by a mere 17% below 1990 levels by 2020, during which time the climate change problem will continue to worsen. As of this writing the bill has passed the House. If it also passes the Senate, where further compromise and watering down is likely, Obama will surely sign it. The publicity will largely present it as a major step toward saving the planet. But the working class and the rest of humanity will be left with nothing but a load of greenwash. Even the most ambitious target from the European Union, that calls for a reduction of emissions 80-95% below 2000 levels by 2050, allows continued increase in GHG concentrations. A carbon tax, the main alternative proposal, would be a straightforward tax on all products using carbon inputs. Put aside, for the moment, the incredible difficulty of assessing the carbon content of each product within a country since each capitalist will lobby vigorously for low assessments. Such taxation would have to be international, since otherwise countries that taxed carbon would force up the price of most of their goods and make them uncompetitive internationally. That would not last. But international pricing agreements would also be extraordinarily difficult to enforce in a competitive world given the fact that most products include some level of carbon. Any modest decrease in CO2 emissions, let alone CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, due to the tax would be insufficient to reverse global warming. And whatever taxes are in fact collected will only be passed on to the working class as in increased price, thereby adding further burdens to workers trying to obtain all the many carbon-containing necessities of life.

Alternative sources of energy and problems with most of them Along with such caps, alternative sources of energy have to be found. There are a number of such sources that have been touted, including solar, wind, hydroelectric, wave, tide, agriculture, geothermal, and finally nuclear. Each of these alternatives, with the possible exception of one form of nuclear (more below), has apparently insurmountable problems that prevent them from satisfying any but a token proportion of energy production. Solar cells and wind farms are being set up by various profit-seeking companies, but they are unable

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to replace any but a small amount of capitalism’s energy requirements. For example, in order to have a major impact, enough solar cells would have to be set up to cover much of the U.S. southwest, and delivering it by the construction of vast stretches of new power lines to widespread areas would be prohibitively expensive. In addition, the weather is not always sunny and the cells would have to be freed of desert dust continually. Wind has similar problems of large land requirements and intermittency, though parts of Europe are looking toward locating windmills offshore. Hydroelectric has already been exploited in the U.S. to a very large degree, for example on the Colorado River, but global warming is decreasing the amount of snow melt and consequently of river flows. Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam below the Grand Canyon are drying up. Their current levels are already tens of feet below their past levels. There are other problems with most of these alternative sources. These include the increasing amount of energy and materials that have to be put into them in order to get energy out of them (Heinberg). Aside from the profit considerations that dominate all capitalist decisions, some of these alternative forms of energy may not be practical even after capitalism becomes history. Agriculture offers a source of alternative fuel, such as ethanol, but a move by farmers to switch from growing corn for food to growing it for fuel has resulted in an increasing scarcity of food and rise in food prices internationally, leading to an increase in the already devastating amount of starvation around the world. It is not merely the switch in crop use that causes this devastation but rather the planlessness and competition inherent in capitalism. Moreover, according to some studies, it actually takes more energy – in the form of transportation, fertilizer production, and oil-powered farm equipment – to produce ethanol than it can yield, but at best the gain in energy is minimal, while the loss in food is monumental. This is just one illustration of the way that the capitalist market cannot satisfy the most basic daily needs of the working class over the short or long term.

Why current proposals cannot solve the problem of global warming To the small degree that any capitalist governments are beginning to clean up their industrial pollution, it is because of the immediate effects on water and air which cuts into profits by making it more expensive to obtain these components in usable form for manufacturing purposes. The fact that it is the working class who bears the overwhelming burden of death and disease from this pollution does not motivate the capitalists one bit.

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According to an article in the 8/8/09 issue of the New York Times, another motivating force is now the Pentagon and some U.S. intelligence agencies, who are beginning to realize that the effects of global warming will have an impact on the use of the U.S. military to intervene in social disruptions that threaten capitalist stability in various parts of the world. In addition, they realize that many military installations around the world will be directly threatened by sea level rise and other climate events, as happened in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew destroyed Homestead Air Force Base and in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola, both in Florida. They are already studying ways to protect major naval stations from such events in Norfolk, Va. and in San Diego. As a result, some of the military ideologs are beginning to call for the U.S. to take initiative around cutting GHG emissions. But these military interests are going to come into contradiction with other ruling class interests, as we show below, and will necessarily be downplayed in favor of profit maximization and protection of capital installations. In addition, the Pentagon’s warning that the military might have to intervene to prevent instability is laughable. The military thrives on instability and often provokes it, as they have with the two invasions of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan, the propping up of Israel in the midst of competing Arabic oil nations, the creation of two separate countries out of one in both Korea and Vietnam after World War II, and the list is endless. We interpret what the Pentagon is saying to mean that they only like instabilities that they think they can control, though they are almost always wrong about that. On the level of individual businesses, there are a growing number of new green businesses in the world, particularly in Europe and the U.S. Many of these may be profitable in the short run, but in order to end GHG emissions all other capitalists, including many of the largest corporations, would have to tear down and replace any old equipment that pollutes and emits GHGs, and take tremendous losses in massive long-term investments. Auto companies would have to start producing vehicles that run on a different fuel from gasoline, when it takes years to introduce such minor changes as airbags. Governments at all levels would have to make a general switch from private to public transportation, when it takes years to repave a beltway or build a subway. Cities and suburbs would have to be rearranged to make this possible, when it takes years to build a housing development. Home and building heating and electricity would have to be powered by clean energy. And all the plastics and other materials that rely on oil as a critical ingredient would have to be replaced by other materials either not yet invented or not profitable to produce. Some capitalists pundits use the real dangers of global warming to build support for a more openly fascist ruling

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class. Tom Friedman wrote glowingly about the Chinese ruling class’ efforts to clean up the skies over Bejing for the Olympics by ordering the temporary closing of thousands of factories in the area. The liberal ruling class, who Friedman represents, need more fascism to compete with their Chinese, Russian and many other competitors would love to use global warming as a way to win support for more fascist methods to discipline the various sectors of the ruling class. But more centralized capitalism would never put the needs of the world’s working class first, and any solutions they come up with would be centered on the preservation of their profit making needs. Various capitalist defenders propose technological solutions such as trapping emissions from factory smoke stacks and dumping them into the ocean or putting them back underground after extracting the coal and oil. Aside from the extreme expense of this process, what this would do to the oceans and what leakage from these underground sites would do to the atmosphere and soil are unknown. Ideas such as these are not seriously being investigated but rather are thrown up as a smokescreen to mask the inability of a profit system to reverse the destruction of the environment – a smokescreen that itself adds to global warming both metaphorically and in fact. In addition to technological solutions, there are numerous proposals for increasing energy efficiency, i.e., decreasing the amount of energy used per amount of product or amount of use. But in the 1800s a British economist named William Jevons discovered what was erroneously called a paradox that is named after him, that whenever the amount of energy used per unit of production is decreased and hence the drop in demand for energy lowers its price, then the amount of production, and hence the use of energy, will increase to offset the decrease. In fact, the increase generally overtakes the decrease, resulting in a net increase in energy usage (Monbiot). This has also been seen recently in consumption patterns as well as production patterns, with the rise and fall of oil prices. When gasoline became very expensive in 2008 the amount of driving decreased in the U.S., and when the price of gas dropped again the miles driven increased again, so that there has been a tendency to keep the amount of money spent on gas the same. But this isn’t really a paradox, which means a logical contradiction. Rather it is the normal way that supply and demand works in commodity markets in capitalist economies. And that is part of the way that the structural planlessness of capitalism works to prevent preservation of the environment. Those corporations like ExxonMobil, whose profits are based purely on producing the GHG-causing fossil fuels, are, as we mentioned above, among the largest and most profitable businesses in the world, and they are not about to see their businesses die. Nor are the Wall

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Street financiers, who control these corporations, about to interfere with their primary cut of the take. Through their control of the government by way of bought-andpaid-for politicians and intellectuals they can delay any changes and continue to cause massive confusion about global warming, among other methods. Capitalist corporations, in order to survive competition, resist having a long-range outlook for their return on investment. So do the stockholders, or they will put their money into other corporations that do bring in quick returns. The corporations must make back their initial investment in plant and equipment quickly, so that their future profits become pure gravy. Concern for the environment, on the other hand, is a long term process that requires giving up the concept of profit in favor of satisfying human needs. Capitalism does not operate to satisfy human needs. Competition to create new markets calls for a continual stream of new products that have little to no use value to the consumer. After all, how many different products can we actually need? Up to the time of any new product’s introduction we have always gotten along fine without it. Through massive and inescapable advertising, we are attracted to products like iPods, plasma TVs, cosmetics, clothes fashions, or giant SUVs. The continual introduction of useless or harmful products produces increased useless consumption of resources and increased harmful dumping of waste, with accelerating destruction of the environment at both ends of the process – natural resource inputs and waste product outputs (Foster 2002). As one of the original founders of the PLP once put it, “In order to continue to expand its profits, capitalism creates wants instead of satisfying needs.” Furthermore, on a global scale, because of interimperialist rivalry, the race of each imperialist nation to beat out its competitors results, not only in devastating wars, but also in the overexploitation of natural resources such as oil and important industrial minerals. This race for control takes place in those parts of the world where the resources can be extracted the most cheaply, such as in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and there is no way that the imperialists can develop a stable agreement to share these resources, since competition rather than cooperation is inherent in the profit system. Under these circumstances money, resources, and human labor are exploited to the exclusion of any consideration of the production and dumping of waste. There have been published studies of various business efforts in many countries toward sustainable energy and clean waste management, i.e., toward greening the economy or at least their own businesses. These include both businesses cleaning up their act and others starting up to provide the materials necessary for such clean-up, such as the manufacture of windmills or solar panels. The studies conclude that these moves are necessarily

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extremely limited in scope and grossly inadequate to make any real difference (Speth).

No capitalist government or politician in the world is even mentioning the need to put an immediate and complete stop to CO2 emissions The main discussion at international government meetings about climate change – such as the UNsponsored Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, that produced the Kyoto Protocol – is not about ending GHG emissions but rather is only about decreasing the annual rate of global GHG emissions. Even if the rate of global emissions were to decrease each year, there would still be annual emissions (just less than the year before). A mere decrease in the rate of GHG emissions would still involve a continued increase in the GHG concentration in the atmosphere, as we pointed out above. The only way to prevent a continued increase in GHG concentration is to drop the rate of emissions completely to zero. GHG emissions are not the direct cause of global warming; the direct cause is GHG atmospheric concentrations. The difference between rate of emissions and atmospheric concentration is like the difference between income and wealth. Income is the amount of money you take home each year, while wealth is the amount of money (or assets) you have been able to accumulate over the years. Of course, if you barely scrape through, you are unable to accumulate any wealth, which characterizes the vast majority of our class around the world. Still another way to understand the difference is to think of GHG emissions like the water coming out of the faucet in a bathtub, with the height of the water in the tub like the GHG concentration in the atmosphere, and the drain like the carbon sinks (soil, forests, and oceans). If the drain can’t let out water as fast as the faucet lets it in, the height of the water will rise, until it reaches the analogy to a tipping point and overflows. Of course, like all analogies, these have their limits of applicability. For example, there is no equivalent to the top of a tub with regard to the atmosphere, and the planet can continue to get warmer without practical limit. In other words, in order to halt global warming and stabilize the average temperature around the world, it would require not just a decrease in the amount of GHG emissions per year, but rather a complete cessation of all emissions of CO2 – zero, none, no more use of any fossil fuels at all, or at least the complete capture and successful disposal of the waste products (a technologically difficult and very expensive process at best for stationary industry, and practically unfeasible for vehicles, ships, and planes). Energy production everywhere in the world would have to be mainly through means other than oil, coal, and natural gas.

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Even more importantly, attempts would have to be found to reverse the effects of the CO2 already poured into the atmosphere, since CO2 stays around in the air for a century or more and continues to do its work. Even if all GHG emissions were to cease tomorrow, without ways of reversing its effects, such as through the planting of massive new forests, we would still see a warmer and warmer earth for decades because of self-sustaining processes already set in motion – e.g., melting glaciers and permafrost – and because such methods as new forests would take decades to grow and catch up. To give an idea of the consequences of these completely inadequate targets, the 2007 IPCC report estimates, as their best scenario, that if global GHG emissions were to be lower in 2050 by 50-85% below those of 2000 (rather than 1990), there would still be a rise in global temperature by 2.0-2.4ºC (3.6-4.3ºF), and a rise in sea level by 0.4-1.4 meters (1.3-4.6 feet). But their estimates of the sea level rise take into account only the thermal expansion of the oceans (i.e., the expansion of the volume of sea water in the world due to the higher temperatures – all materials expand with temperature). They take absolutely no account of the contribution from such amplifying feedback mechanisms as the melting of the Greenland and Antarctica ice shelves or any other glaciers in the world, which would make the sea level rise that much greater. In addition to all these obstacles to preventing catastrophic climate change under capitalism, in conditions of world-wide depression it becomes even more unlikely that any significant portion of financial investment will be directed toward ending GHG emissions, particularly since it would require the destruction of trillions of dollars worth of existing plant and equipment, with massive losses to the businesses involved.

Oil, gas, and coal profits stymie the discovery and development of alternative energy sources, particularly nuclear Major capitalist interests hold back any serious competing effort to solve the global warming crisis. Take the case of a method of nuclear energy production called the Experimental Breeder Reactor or the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) (Blees, Koch, Hannum, et al.). The IFR and its breeder reactor10 predecessors were developed beginning during World War II and, in particular, during the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were further developed by scientists at the federal Argonne National Labs, located in Idaho and near Chicago. The Argonne scientists claim to have shown that IFRs can be made safe from accidents, with successive stages of the process using by-products of the previous stage so that by the end of the process almost 100% of the energy inherent in the

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uranium is captured, and safe and easily manageable waste is produced in the process. In current nuclear plants no more than 1% percent of the energy in the uranium is captured, which not only makes them tremendously inefficient but also requires far more uranium as fuel to produce an equivalent amount of electrical energy. Furthermore no weapons-grade material is available in the IFR process, since the plutonium needed for weaponization is both produced and then consumed by IFRs, without its ever being enriched to the level required for bombs. Are IFRs a promising alternative to fossil fuel and other forms of nuclear energy production? Maybe. But we won’t know for certain now, since under the Clinton/Gore administration funding for the project was completely terminated, and the Argonne scientists were warned to be quiet about it. The lame excuse used was that the project would threaten non-proliferation efforts, but that excuse is transparently phony when the U.S. continues to sell all sorts of weaponry to allied governments of the moment, such as Israel and India. No further government funding has been made available, at least in the U.S., but several other countries have built such reactors, including France, Russia, and Japan, so that more information should be forthcoming in the next few years. One problem with any form of nuclear energy is the fear that it engenders in the public, aided by the media that exaggerate the dangers. This fear rose significantly as a result of the publicity surrounding the accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. However, the reactor was soon brought under control, and there were no known deaths or cancers resulting from the accident, a point that would be easy to miss from the media reports. Seven years later a much more serious accident occurred in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, part of the former Soviet Union. While statements vary as to the number of people killed, they range from about 30 to 60, mostly firemen putting out the fire who suffered radiation sickness plus 10 children from thyroid cancer (out of 2000 children who were successfully treated for thyroid cancer and who lived). Other estimates of the number of deaths due to cancer over the next couple of decades (ranging up to as many as 4,000) have an unproven relationship to Chernobyl and are disputed by most scientific studies of the aftermath (Cohen, Morris). But because a third of a million people were relocated to places distant from the remaining radioactive plant, nuclear energy became an even greater source of fear, which has slowed tremendously the development of this alternative source of energy.11 Given capitalism’s disregard for the safety of workers and neighboring inhabitants, this fear seems far from irrational. But a steadfast refusal of many environmental organizations and members even to investigate IFRs is indeed irrational. However, in a communist world

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controlled by, and run for the needs of, the working class rather than for capitalist profits, it should be possible for nuclear energy to be safely developed and used along with other energy technologies such as solar, geothermal, and wind to provide for the needs of the world’s workers.12 Interestingly, a plant that burns coal to produce electrical power creates more radioactive waste products (uranium and thorium) than any nuclear plant, a fact that is kept well hidden by the coal companies and their subservient media. In fact, people living close to coal power plants are exposed to more radiation than those living close to nuclear power plants (MacKay, Blees), but even that amount is far less than the amount of radiation that people receive from natural sources, such as cosmic rays or radon from the ground, plus that from medical applications. China relies almost exclusively on coal for energy, while other countries use varying mixes of coal, natural gas, and oil, as well as nuclear. Nevertheless coal is a very popular source of energy around the world, producing right around 50% of electricity in the U.S. In addition to the radioactive waste produced by coal plants, coal is far more polluting and creates about one third more CO2 per unit of energy produced than power plants that use oil and almost twice that produced per unit of energy by natural gas. It is estimated that pollution from coal plants (including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides) kills 2 million people a year throughout the world and 50,000 a year in the U.S. (Cohen, Morris). The fears of nuclear energy are fanned by the coal and oil companies, for whom nuclear energy represents serious competition. But consider that the 1984 leakage of the chemical methyl isocyanate from Union Carbide’s (now owned by Dow Chemical) plant in Bhopal in central India is conservatively estimated to have killed almost 35,000 workers, including both employees and those who lived in the vicinity of the plant – 10,000 of whom died immediately and up to 25,000 who have died from its long term effects since. (An Indian judge, in response to continuing mass protests by workers, has recently – a quarter century after this mass murder – ordered the arrest of Warren Anderson, who was the CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster.) The Bhopal murder dwarfs the effect of Chernobyl two years later and indicates just how little regard the capitalists have for the lives of workers. It also indicates how successful the oil companies have been in generating fear of nuclear power, when it would make much more sense for people’s fear to be focused on the chemical industry, particularly the oil companies themselves.

Why capitalism will never be able to solve the problem of global warming But the obstacles inherent in capitalism to preventing irreversible climate change are, first, that qualitative issues may influence but never determine the decisions

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that individual capitalists make. Only profit maximization is their goal. Second, even if the dominant wing of any national ruling class seeks to discipline the rest within their nation, the world-wide anarchy and competition prevents such enforcement through any other means than war. Interimperialist rivalry would prevent any national bourgeoisie, whose position in the world economic market is threatened, from complying with any agreement or treaty. Ending GHG emissions, as we pointed out above, would require that each national government and private capitalist interest spend enough to reconstruct all of electrical power generation, industry, and transportation so that they would accept as input alternatives to fossil fuels. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, obstacles to expenditure of this magnitude is the absolute need of each imperialist power, driven by international competition, to maintain and continually enlarge their military. The U.S. military costs almost as much as all the others in the world put together. But equally important, the military essentially runs on oil. According to the Energy Bulletin, the U.S. military is the single largest purchaser of oil in the world. “The Army calculated that it would burn 40 million gallons of fuel in three weeks of combat in Iraq, an amount equivalent to the gasoline consumed by all Allied armies combined during the four years of World War I.” This amounts to about 2 million gallons a day (or 50,000 barrels a day – a barrel is 40 gallons), which amounts to about 13 gallons a day per soldier (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/13199). Retrofitting all the tanks, other land vehicles, ships, and planes to run on alternative fuels is simply prohibitive to the U.S. ruling class. U.S. rulers would force global temperatures through the roof before they would see their empire lost to rival imperialists. And this is just as true of all the other imperialist powers in the world, compounding the obstacle to the point of insurmountability. Worse yet, as profitably extractable oil supplies peak, the use of military force by all competing imperialists to secure their sources of fuel is already increasing dramatically, heading us inexorably toward World War III. So peak oil produces its own amplifying feedback to increase the very use of the oil that is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Meanwhile the atmosphere becomes overwhelmed by GHG emissions, heading us inexorably toward irreversible and devastating climate change. Neither World War III nor climate change can possibly be escaped so long as capitalism rules the world. In addition to continuing GHG emissions with its irreversible climate change and continuing wars for control of oil, so long as capitalism exists the world’s working class will continue to suffer from wars also for control of water and minerals, from exploitation, from racism, from sexism, and from poverty and disease. Misguided attempts to cure one of the symptoms while failing to remove the cause will not bring benefit to our class. So while the vital need by

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the world’s working class for communist revolution is ever present and immediate, the imminence of catastrophic climate change, and its incurability under capitalism, add to that vital need immensely.

VI. Other ineffective proposals to stop global warming A. The role of the state The capitalist class holds state power, and actions that interfere with profits are forbidden by the government, regardless of who is elected. Therefore since a world free of GHGs, with clean and adequate energy sources for the needs of the working class, would interfere with the profits of the vast majority of capitalists, we cannot look to capitalism to solve the problems. Capitalism, after all, is the cause of all these problems, and not because it hasn’t been pointed out or has never occurred to the ruling class. A few non-Marxist writers have pointed out that capitalism, because of its concentration on growth, stands in absolute contradiction to preserving the environment for future generations. But these writers generally believe that growth is merely a “fetish” among capitalists, as though overall economic growth were something over which the capitalists have control and could be convinced to give up (Speth). However, capitalists only have control over their own corporations, and competition drives each to maximize profits and grow, in order to survive. The growth of all is an unintended consequence of the growth of each. So, while it may also be a fetish, there is nothing that capitalism can do about it. Competition, profit maximization, and wage slavery drive economic life under capitalism. Only replacing it with communism will meet our needs around the world and permit us to stop global warming. Many authors argue that green businesses can be profitable. Certainly new installations may very well become profitable, even within a few years after start-up. The problem is the trillions of dollars, euros, yen, rubles, yuan, rupees, etc. worth of existing plants, buildings, houses, mines, and vehicles. A system that runs on exchange value or money will not willingly destroy its own massive investments in these forms of physical capital. Indeed only through wars is capital ever deliberately destroyed, and then it is always that which belongs to rivals – elevated at such times to the status of “enemies” in order to win the working class to fight our class sisters and brothers and die for capitalist profits. Only a system in which use value, rather than exchange value, is the basis of society can even contemplate removing GHG-producing physical capital from its productive base. But a system that the working class controls for its own collective needs (communism), rather than a system that a

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relatively small class controls for its own individual profit (capitalism) can in fact act in this way. The capitalists’ refusal to destroy their own profit-producing capital holds even when that profit is destructive of much of the rest of the world. When environmentally oriented authors call for the government to regulate the capitalists they are merely subscribing to the myth that the government (or in Marxist terms, the state) stands above society and mediates among the various classes. This myth was exploded a century and a half ago by Marx and Engels and elaborated on ever since by Marxists, most famously perhaps by Lenin in his book State and Revolution. The misunderstanding of political power and the nature of the state is the central flaw in all calls for the state to intervene to save the environment. It’s like calling on a tiger’s tail to protect you from its fangs.

Individual actions like conserving electricity are hopelessly inadequate Another form of illusion promoted by these well-meaning authors is that if each of us individually changes our habits we can prevent tipping into irreversible climate change. Suggestions abound, such as switching to hybrid cars, insulating our houses better, getting fluorescent bulbs, and instituting other energy-conserving changes (Gore, Monbiot). All these are things that are good to do for those of us who can afford it, if only to save ourselves money in the long run, but the overall effect, even if all of us who could afford it made these changes, would be like a mosquito on an elephant’s bottom. As one author puts it, “If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little” (MacKay). Indeed the Associated Press just reported (8/5/09) that Obama’s “cash for clunkers” program, which has already spent over $1 billion paying people to trade in their gas guzzlers for newer vehicles with better gas mileage, has saved no more gasoline (or GHG emissions) than would be saved if everyone drove one hour less a year. This is a stunning example of greenwashing tokenism as far as saving GHG emissions is concerned, though clearly the quarter of a million new cars that have already been sold as a result of the program have helped the auto companies through the recession. But this is most likely temporary, since these sales come at the expense of future sales, perhaps leading to a later plunge back into crisis. The amount of governmental hot air, concerning the slowing of global warming, outweighs the reality by such a dazzling amount that despite Obama’s posturing it becomes clear that merely appearing to attack the climate crisis is his underlying motive. Still another example of a particularly misleading movement that is growing (again) among the petit bourgeoisie is the call for people to band together in communes, apart from capitalist society, to grow their own

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food and escape the starvation that threatens to result from global warming. This escapism cannot possibly sustain itself in the midst of drought, wildfires, flooding, peak oil, and fascist martial law, and it is simply a way of opting out of the necessary struggle against capitalism’s GHG emissions. The illusion that individual or small scale actions can solve the crisis, even if many people participate, amounts to blaming the working class along with the capitalists for the destruction of the environment. That is, if any workers refuse to go along with the charade, they can be blamed for hastening the destruction of the earth’s atmosphere. And even if we do go along, the claim that we could save the earth by decreasing our personal use of GHG-producing technology, implies that our personal patterns of consumption and usage are, at least in part, the source of the problem. But the working class does not control the patterns of consumption; the capitalists do. When the capitalists build suburbs and destroy or prevent construction of public transportation, we are forced to buy cars. When they raise rents and lower taxes on mortgage interest and lower the initial interest rates on ARMs (adjustable-rate mortgages), we are pressured to buy houses. Then after a couple of years when the interest rates on the ARMs go up and we are laid off and our homes are foreclosed, the media and politicians add insult to injury by blaming us for our irresponsibility in buying the house in the first place. When they increase the work week and lower real wages to the point that both spouses have to work, thereby decreasing the time available to feed our families, we are pressured to buy fast foods. The working class is not to blame for struggling to survive in the only ways that this system permits – at least the only way for us to survive as individual families. The alternative is to struggle to survive as a united class, about which more below. In the language of dialectical materialism, this illusion – that if enough people act individually we could save the earth from global warming – demonstrates that not all quantitative changes lead to qualitative change. Only when the level of organization is appropriate to the job – in this case at a social level and throughout the world – and the effort is sufficient to reach the boundary of a qualitative transition, does quantitative change give rise to qualitative change.

Why charging capitalists a price for their resource depletion and pollution cannot work A third form of illusion is common among pro-capitalist economists and holds that the only thing needed for capitalism to be able to preserve the environment is for the dual damage, caused by depletion of resources and by pollution from waste products, to be incorporated into the pricing system of the capitalist market economy.

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They claim that if a way can be found to assign a price to the harmful effects on the environment, then if, say, emission of GHGs has the correct price put on it and the government imposes that price on each corporation in the form of a tax, the corporations will then hold down on resource depletion and cut their emissions. There are several things that guarantee that these proposals will fail to preserve the environment for future generations, but the main one concerns the failure of the pro-capitalist economists to understand the difference between exchange value and use value.

takes to produce each one. For example, a pair of shoes is worth less than a car primarily because it takes a lot fewer person-hours to produce a pair of shoes.13

As Marx explains near the beginning of his masterwork Capital, use value is a qualitative, rather than quantitative, concept and varies from one thing to another and from one person to another. For example, the use value of a pair of shoes concerns things such as the way a person uses it and how many shoes the person already has. The exchange value of a pair of shoes, on the other hand, is a quantitative concept and is loosely measured by its price in the market place. Price derives from the process of production, rather than from consumption and use. In particular, price is determined in the first instance by the amount of labor time that goes into producing the product. But this holds only in a capitalist economy where things are produced for the purpose of selling them and making a profit for the owner of the factory, rather than for the purpose of satisfying a need of a consumer, though some products do also satisfy some needs. In this context, a pair of shoes and everything else produced in a capitalist economy become commodities, items to be traded for money.

Indeed, the only reasonable price that we can assign to nature, under circumstances of imminent irreversible destruction and the resulting catastrophic effects on humanity and the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms, is $(infinity). Let the capitalists pay that price for the right to devastate our environment.

In order to prove that the price of a commodity is determined in the first instance by the labor time involved in its production, Marx shows that the classical economists’ claim that price is determined by supply and demand is only a partial answer and not a complete one. He shows that it is true that if supply exceeds demand, i.e., if there is more of a particular product produced than can be sold, its price drops. And that if demand exceeds supply then its price rises. With either shift the amount produced in the next period of time also changes, so that if there is oversupply then less is produced in the next round which causes the price to go back up, and if there is undersupply then more is produced in the next round which causes the price to go back down. Either way the price tends to return to that amount that it would be when supply and demand are in balance. The question left unanswered by many bourgeois economists, then and now, in their zeal to explain price changes, is what determines the price when supply and demand are in balance? And that’s where he shows that only the amount of labor time that goes into the production process can begin to determine that price. Price, after all, is nothing more than the measure of how many of one product are worth how many of another. And this can only be determined by the relative amount of time is

With regard to the environment, things like mountains, oceans, forests, glaciers, fish, wild animals, and air have only use value. They cannot possibly have exchange value, since there has been no human labor time involved in their production. Therefore there is no unambiguous way to determine a price for the various aspects of the environment, and any way that the economists devise to do so is completely arbitrary.

Of course, if the government were to put a sufficiently high price on anything, even short of $(infinity), it could certainly exert some influence in one direction or another, but again, the government belongs to the capitalists and will not harm profits in favor of the needs of the working class. True, on September 2, 2009, the U.S. government slapped a huge $2.3 billion fine on Pfizer, the drug company, for wining and dining doctors in order to get them to prescribe more of its drugs. This is the largest fine against a drug company, and the largest punishment in a criminal case, ever. However, contrary to superficial appearances, this is not a case of the government siding with the working class against a drug company that gouges the public. Rather it is an example of infighting among capitalists, with the drug companies having gained for years at the expense of other major corporations, like the auto companies, who have had to pay toward health care coverage for their workers. Similarly, the government, obeying its influential masters in the fossil fuel and related industries – like ExxonMobil, GM, and Ford – already uses all kinds of direct and hidden subsidies to pump up fossil fuel profits – from using trillions of dollars of our tax money, to build the interstate highway system to accelerated depreciation, to tax write-offs for offshore drilling, to (most important of all) fighting wars for oil in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Meanwhile there are meager, if any, subsidies for alternative energy sources, such as solar, wind, and nuclear plants. How then can we imagine that the government would ever reverse the direction of these subsidies to oppose the interests of the fossil fuel and related industries, which is what it would have to do to reverse the emissions of GHGs?

Capitalism even puts a price on human life The following is an example of the way economists and medical statisticians confound exchange value for use

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value that may help clarify this issue. When calculating whether a particular medical screening study is worth doing – what they call “cost-effective” – the statisticians choose a measure of the value of a human life that might be saved by the screening test. They want to see how much it would cost to do the screening compared to what saving a person’s life is worth, or more precisely to what the added number of years to a person’s life are worth. Leaving out many of the complexities and cutting to the core idea, they assign a value to each added year of a person’s life due to the screening test. They base this value on an estimate of the average expected annual earnings of the person, given their particular line of work. In other words, each added year of a person’s life is worth what she/ he would be expected to be paid. By this measure, each year of a worker’s life is worth only about 1/300 of that of a CEO of some large corporation, and that’s if you are employed. But the use value of a person’s life is not a quantitative item. Rather it is a qualitative thing that is valued differently by each other person with whom the individual comes into contact – spouse, children, parents, siblings, neighbors, fellow workers, and friends. There is no such thing as the exchange value of a person’s life. Not only is this confounding of use value with exchange value a logical error, but in the case of human life it leads to fascist conclusions. The Nazis assigned exchange value to human life and called people with disabilities who were unable to work “useless eaters” and exterminated them to save the Reich money. More recently, a memo along these lines was issued by Larry Summers. Summers is the past chief economist for the World Bank, past Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, and past president of Harvard. He became infamous and was forced to resign as president of Harvard for his moronic and harmful comment that women lack the aptitude for science and math. Summers issued a memo while at the World Bank (printed in the UK magazine The Economist in 1992 and in Foster 2002) that said in part: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (Less Developed Countries)?... The measurement of the costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country of the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. But rather than these expressions of sheer contempt for the well-being of the world’s working class ending his career, Summers is now Obama’s director of the National Economic Council.

Racism is central to capitalism’s handling of the environment Summers’s targeting LDCs, as a dump for toxic waste, is code for workers with darker skin and is an example of the extreme racism that characterizes capitalism – in this case with Obama’s full approval. What has come to be called “environmental racism” is rampant within the U.S., as well. Examples include Hurricane Katrina, which exhibited for all the world to see the genocidal neglect first of the levees in the black working class sections of New Orleans, and after the storm surge broke the levees and flooded those sections of town along with white working class sections as well, the horror stories began in earnest. The superexploited black workers who were unable to afford private transportation were told to fend for themselves, were then accused of thievery when locked stores with spoiling food became their only source of survival, were given toxic trailers to live in by FEMA, and were actually blocked by the sheriff department from taking even the footbridge out of town. Thousands of white workers suffered the same fate as they were trapped along with their black brothers and sisters. Homes and jobs were lost permanently, in most cases. Other examples of environmental racism include the following facts: Three fifths of the largest hazard material landfills in the U.S. are in black or Latin working-class neighborhoods. These represent 40% of the total toxic landfill in the U.S. The percentage of black and Latin workers in communities with toxic waste facilities is twice that percentage in communities without such facilities. Sixty percent of black and Latin workers live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites and 50% of Asian, Pacific Island, and Indian workers live in such communities. Fines paid by polluting companies for cleanup of toxic waste were six times higher in communities with a majority of white workers (Jones). The corridor from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, occupied by a disproportionate number of black working-class families, is known as Louisiana’s Cancer Alley because of all the toxic waste and measurably higher rates of cancer. These few examples can be multiplied many fold in the U.S. alone. But workers with darker skin all over the world are the victims of disproportionate disease, injuries, and deaths from capitalism’s neglect of the environment and the so-called “natural disasters” that result from global warming.

The problem at this time is not overpopulation – it’s capitalism (imperialism) One of the most fascist ideas subscribed to unwittingly by many honest authors and other people, but pushed deliberately by capitalist ideologs, is that overpopulation in the world is the main cause of both global warming and resource depletion. It takes the racist form of blaming all those “poor people” with darker skin, particularly

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in the “lesser developed countries.” Or, as New York Times liberal columnist Thomas Friedman puts it in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the main cause of global warming and resource depletion is the increasing number of “middle class” people who have the money to buy all the junk that capitalism imposes on the world. While he makes some gestures to deny that he is blaming them for wanting what “middle class” Americans have had all along, the effect is still to provoke anger against workers in India, China, and the Middle East oil states (Friedman). Many of these authors claim that the earth’s carrying capacity has been exceeded by the 6.8 billion people. But they cannot identify what that maximum carrying capacity may be. In today’s world the problem is not too many people, but rather capitalism’s enforced poverty, racism, and exploitation and their uncontrolled spread by imperialism. In addition, as we have indicated above, it is the capitalists, in their imperative drive to sell commodities in order to realize profits, who completely determine the consumption practices of the world’s working class, or at least that section who can afford to buy things beyond the basics needed to sustain life. Friedman, however, blames these consumption practices on the workers themselves. Long ago Marx showed how capitalism produces a reserve army of labor, i.e., unemployed workers, no matter how big the population may be. The 6.8 billion people could be reduced by half or more and there would still be unemployment, poverty, disease, and all the other horrors of capitalism. Indeed when the world’s population was half its present size in the early 1960s (less than 50 years ago) these scourges were just as prevalent. There is no solution to resource depletion and global warming – nor to poverty, racism, exploitation, and war – outside of world-wide communism, as we show below.

VII. Communism, and only communism, can solve the problems of resource depletion and global warming The key to solving the climate crisis, and all other crises caused by capitalism, is class struggle rather than competition Communism is the only form of organization in which the world’s working class will be capable of solving all these problems and restoring a sustainable relationship between humanity and the rest of nature. Competitive forms of social organization, such as capitalism, are not capable of taking any actions along these lines, other than token ones. Because of its inherent necessity of expansion, the history of capitalism has gone from primitive forms of accumulation, involving theft on a

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grand scale, enslavement, and genocide, beginning a few centuries ago, to cover the entire world a little over one century ago, such that different nation states could no longer expand without clashing with each other. This began the age of interimperialist war (World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars I and II, Afghanistan, and hundreds of smaller local wars). Through such wars, each imperialist state tries to destroy its competitors’ factories, oil fields, farms, mines, and even entire cities, or to capture and hold them. At the end of World War II, the U.S. was the only advanced capitalist country whose industry remained intact, which made the U.S. ruling class king of the world for more than six decades – a situation that is fast coming to an end. So while imperialist rivals try to destroy each others’ capital, they fight to the death of millions of workers to preserve their own. Yet to lower CO2 emissions to the extent required to save the planet from climate tipping would require destroying much of their own capital, something that will not be done as long as they are in control. As long as capitalism exists, with its expansionist tendencies, we will be incapable of solving the problems of humanity’s interaction with nature, in which nature is used up in the drive for profits and the waste products choke and starve us. Only communism will permit us to halt our accelerating advance toward the edge of a proverbial cliff.

How communism will allow the world’s working class to solve the problems of resource depletion and global warming With an end to the class of competitive profit-seekers, the world’s working class, under the leadership of its communist party (PLP) will be able to make plans and to carry out those plans. In particular, PLP will organize everywhere in the world a process that engages all workers in collective discussions, debates, and planning at every level, from the smallest community and workplace to the largest centers of production and living. Then these ideas will be consolidated into globally unified action to meet the working class’ needs. Examples of this type of detailed planning involving all workers have been demonstrated, for example, in Chinese factories in the early years of the revolution where, with the leadership of communist workers, all the workers took time out every day to meet and discuss the production process. Out of these meetings by those who actually work the means of production came improvements, for example, in industrial production of steel. Another example in China was in the hospitals where, with the leadership of communist hospital workers, doctors met with nurses, orderlies, patients, and their families to plan how to take care of patients’ sicknesses and injuries. And everyone,

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including doctors, shared in the hospital housekeeping tasks. As a result of this collective cooperation on every level, many improvements in surgical techniques and medical treatments were produced, some of them the best in the world. Until their defeat – caused by errors that were perhaps inevitable in the earliest attempts at blazing new social trails – the Soviet and Chinese revolutions showed that coordinated planning by the collective working class under the leadership of its communist parties can achieve monumental and unimagined feats of overcoming poverty, starvation, and disease. The list of “impossible” feats include, among others, • the transformation in 10 short years of primitive Soviet industry into an industrial giant capable of defeating the massive Nazi war machine, • the dismantling of a major portion of this industry and its transportation and reconstruction in a safe position east of the Ural Mountains, safe from Nazi bombs, • the development of the Chinese Communist Party into a force capable of defeating the Japanese imperialist invaders during and after World War II, • the mobilization of the Chinese masses to wipe out diseases such as schistosomiasis and TB that continue to plague workers even in today’s capitalist world. The main cause of the defeat of these working class revolutions was a failure to eradicate all traces of capitalism. In particular, the major errors included retention of a wage system that forced workers to consider their own income before their contribution to the welfare of the entire working class, cooperation with certain capitalists who were erroneously thought to share interests with the working class, retention of a division of labor that kept many workers from being able to contribute to their class’s welfare to the maximum of their commitment, and the lack of one single communist party to lead workers everywhere in the world. These errors played the role of negative feedback that led to the restoration of capitalism. What was lacking in the qualitative changes, brought about by armed communistled working-class revolution, were sufficient forms of amplifying feedback that could have led to consolidation and retention of working-class state power. Such forms of amplifying feedback will, in future communist revolutions, include first and foremost correction of the errors listed in the previous paragraph. These corrections will take the form of abolition of the wage system, destruction of the entire capitalist class and its competitive ideology, sharing of all forms of labor from manufacturing to scrubbing floors to raising children to garbage disposal, and the building of one single mass communist party throughout the world, including billions of workers. Many other forms will certainly emerge as the process of

revolutionary change proceeds. Amplifying feedback will occur as cooperation among workers around the world to satisfy human needs inspires each to contribute to the welfare of our entire class and to do so to the maximum of her/his ability. Furthermore, motivated by the shared struggles to wipe out all vestiges of capitalist ideology and practices and by the visible benefits that our entire class will gain from these struggles, the world’s working class will learn to develop these abilities to heights that are unimaginable today. The hazards of continuing capitalist exploitation of the working class are now clear. In order to save ourselves, our class has to remove this obstacle to cooperative action and establish workers’ power everywhere in the world through communist revolution and reconstruction. Only then will we be able to rebuild the world. This revolution will come by building PLP among millions of workers, soldiers, students and many others to create a communist movement that will turn the bosses crisis and wars into a fight for workers power. When the world’s working class is able to rationally plan the production only of things we really need – whether materially, psychologically, or esthetically – coordinated and cooperative planning by a communist society, without the interference of the profit motive, will permit us to act according to our needs. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters in Haiti are only the latest example of the destitution, danger, devastation, and disease that affects the majority of our class today. Crisis and war are growing every day. Just imagine a world in which no one can escape catastrophes such as that now faced by our Inuit brothers and sisters, who have to move farther inland, or by our cousins in the South Pacific who have to move from their island homes to mainlands, both because of the current sea level rise, or, to take an earlier example, by 500,000 of our impoverished fellow workers in Bangladesh and India who died in the Bhola cyclone in 1970 (even more than the number of our classmates who were killed by the 2004 tsunami in Asia), or the millions of us who have died in the wars in the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan and so many other places; or the thousands of us during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans, who lost our homes if not our own lives or those of our relatives, friends, and neighbors. These catastrophic events have happened first to those of us who are most victimized by the racism that capitalism spawns and that poisons the entire planet. We described above how workers in the Soviet Union and China, with communist leadership, were able to achieve the “impossible.” This time the world’s working class will do the “impossible” and defeat resource depletion and global warming, as well as put an end to imperialist war and the other miseries of capitalist rule.

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1

Furthermore the amount of water vapor is highly variable and mainly dependent on air temperature, which in turn is mainly driven currently by concentrations of CO2, so CO2 is the one to watch, though the warming-caused release of methane may eventually overtake CO2.

in social organization have been, and can and will again be, brought about by a determined working class led and organized by communists using dialectical materialism as a scientific guide to theory and action, just as we workers will be able to use our communist system to repair the planet once we have power.

Secondarily contributing to the Asian brown haze is the burning of firewood, for warmth and cooking, by the impoverished working class, who can’t afford other forms of fuel. However, this particular contributing source to the Asian haze has an unclear impact on global warming. While burning of wood definitely adds choking pollution to the air, its net contribution to climate change has two contradictory aspects. The reason is that the carbon that it adds to the atmosphere has only recently been incorporated into the wood out of the air as forests grow; it does not come from fossil fuels that took up the carbon millions of years ago. So burning of wood is only recycling back to the atmosphere carbon that the wood has more recently absorbed from it. Additionally some aerosols, such as white smoke, end up reflecting a certain amount of sunlight back into outer space and therefore actually have a cooling effect on the ground, while black soot does add to global warming as it absorbs at least as much heat from the ground and oceans below as it reflects into space and therefore traps the heat.

7

2

It is now proposed by an increasing number of investigators that the cause of the collapse of the Mayan (in Mexico), Akkadian (ancient Mesopotamian, in present day Syria and Iraq), Anasazi (in the U.S. southwest) and other great civilizations was not war but rather years of drought-produced dehydration and starvation. Global warming will only make such droughts more commonplace.

3

This, however, will not raise sea level, since the ice is already floating in the ocean and not resting on land like glaciers and ice sheets. 4

Examples of stabilizing forces include oceans (through plankton on the relatively cool surface), soils, and forests (through their photosynthesis) each of which absorb much of the CO2 emitted by factories and vehicles, as well as by natural sources, thus blunting the warming effects of this major GHG.

But even these stabilizing forces have their limits, because in a few more billion years the sun’s core will run out of hydrogen, and, as other similar stars have done, the sun will then grow explosively in size into a so-called red giant, engulfing the earth’s orbit and those of other planets. That will be the destabilizing event to literally end all destabilizing events as far as the planet earth and humanity are concerned.

8 Photosynthesis is a chemical process in green plants, in which sunlight is used to convert CO2 to O2.

It is of significance to the working class that the discovery of the general process under which life initially arose out of nonliving simple molecules was made principally by two Marxist scientists in the 1930s, working independently – A.I. Oparin in the Soviet Union and J.B.S. Haldane in England. Even staunch anti-communists credit these two communist scientists with this earthshaking discovery.

9

A breeder reactor is a nuclear reactor that breeds further radioactive fuel as a by-product of using the initial uranium to produce energy. Breeder reactors are not yet used in U.S. nuclear plants, but are being evaluated in Japan and some European countries.

10

The fear runs so high that in the early 1980s, even before the Chernobyl accident, the name of the then new medical imaging modality, originally called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), was changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in order to remove the word “nuclear” from the name. 11

5

The illusion that humanity cannot affect the climate is as wrong as the mistaken notion, shared even by many workers, that our class is incapable of overturning capitalism and organizing a communist system throughout the world to serve the interests of the working class and our allies. Big changes 6

In 1986 the Argonne scientists deliberately set in motion the start of a Chernobyl-type accident with an IFR, and the reactor passively shut itself down before any danger arose, an inherent aspect of the very design of the reactor.

12

Luxury items, like 40 karat diamonds or newly found Van Gogh paintings, are something of a special case and do not affect the general truth of Marx’s argument.

13

University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2003.

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References and Bibliography for further reading

– – – Nemesis, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2006.

Benton, Michael, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, Thames and Hudson, New York, 2003.

Jones, Van, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, Harper One, New York, 2008.

Black, Edwin, The Plan: How to Rescue Society When the Oil Stops—or the Day Before, Dialog Press, Washington, D.C., 2008.

Klare, Michael T., Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2008.

Blees, Tom, Prescription for the Planet, Book Surge, 2008.

Koch, Leonard J., Experimental Breeder Reactor-II, Argonne National Laboratory.

Cohen, Bernard, The Nuclear Energy Option, Plenum Press, New York, 1990.

Kolbert, Elizabeth, Field Notes From a Catastrophe, Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2006.

Damon, Paul and Laut, Peter, “Pattern of Strange Errors Plagues Solar Activity and Terrestrial Climate Data,” Eos, Vol. 85, No. 39, 28 September, 2004.

Kovel, Joel, The Enemy of Nature, Zed Books, New York, 2007.

Deffeyes, Kenneth S., Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak, Hill and Wang, New York, 2005. Emanuel, Kerry, What We Know About Climate Change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2007. Flannery, Tim, The Weathermakers, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2005. Foster, John Bellamy, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2000. – – – Ecology Against Capitalism, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2002. – – – ed. Ecology: Moment of Truth, Issue of Monthly Review, July-August, 2008. Friedman, Thomas, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008. Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth, Rodale, New York, 2006. Hannum, W.H., Marsh, G.E., and Stanford, G.S., “Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste,” Scientific American, December 2005. Hansen, Jim, http://www.cleanenergy-project.de/2008/08/10/ trip-report-from-dr-james-hansen

Luntz, Frank, The Environment: A Cleaner Safer, Healthier America, http://www2.bc.edu/~plater/Newpublicsite06/suppmats/02.6.pdf Lynas, Mark, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, National Geographic, Washington, D.C., 2008. MacKay, David JC, Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, UIT, Cambridge, England, 2009. Monbiot, George, Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, South End Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2007. Morris, Robert, The Environmental Case for Nuclear Power, Paragon House, Saint Paul, Minn., 2000. Pearce, Fred, When the Rivers Run Dry, Beacon Press, Boston, 2006. Pearce, Fred, With Speed and Violence, Beacon Press, Boston, 2007. www.realclimate.org Romm, Joseph, Hell and High Water, HarperCollins, New York, 2007. Scientific American Earth 3.0, Volume 18, Number 5, 2008. Scientific American Earth 3.0, Volume 19, Number 1, 2009.

Heinberg, Richard, The Party’s Over, New Society Publishers, British Columbia, 2003.

Scientific American Earth 3.0, Volume 19, Number 2, Summer 2009.

Johnson, Chalmers, Blowback, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2000.

Simmons, Matthew, Twilight in the Desert, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, 2005.

– – – The Sorrows of Empire, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2004.

Speth, James Gustave, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008. Weart, Spencer R., The Discovery of Global Warming, Harvard

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Review of The Green Zone

Barry Sander’s new book The Green Zone: the Environmental costs of militarism should have been subtitled “The environmental costs of US Imperialism” or, even more simply put, “the Environmental costs of capitalism”. This book does a great job of exposing exactly how much of a farce the whole “green capitalism” movement is and how the US military is destroying the Earth itself. The struggle to preserve the environment is the struggle against capitalism. The two are directly interrelated as the resources of the Earth are being used to fuel a war machine for profit – humanity be damned! The weakness of the book is that, though Sanders does mention capitalism and imperialism, he does not call for a revolution to smash capitalism by building a communist world that will rebuild the world so that it can meet the needs of the working class. Though Sanders makes some good observations such as “war is deeply embedded in the democratic system – in fact in many ways it is the system...”, he never actually explicitly identifies the system as capitalism. He is drenched in a liberal world view where rich and poor can put aside their problems and work out how to save the earth. In light of the rest of the text, this liberal humanism comes across as disingenuous, pathetic, and fully inadequate. There’s no way that you can read this book and believe that he believes his own solutions. His anti-communism is masked by two attacks on the USSR in order to separate himself from the errors of the past and place himself safely within the liberal camp. He uses the word “Communitarian” and calls for a world wide movement for this world that is designed to meet the needs of the whole community, yeah, we know this world is a Communist world, and neither boycotting the military through not paying taxes or non-violence will bring this about. The ironic aspect of Sanders’ liberalism is that this helps us to use the text within the classroom and with our liberal base. This is a book that must be read by every person in the Party, our base, and our base’s friends. It takes an unflinching view of the environment and obliterates the arguments of the environmentalist movement or the

green movement as “the absurdity of a green military ... of pollution-free decimation. So what if the military switch to millions and millions of low-energy light bulbs? The united states military remains in the business of the wholesale destruction of life on this planet... but the price of imperialism demands an unbridled military, one that we [sic] must allow to decimate whatever it wishes on its way to total control, even over the earth itself.” He finishes off the liberal/green argument when he points out that “James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA and a devout Iraqi Hawk, has learned to look like an environmentalist” to make the racist geopolitical point: “let us not be so dependent on the Muslim theocracies for our oil.” Sanders discusses the fact that “US troops or Iraqis breathing in no more than a gram (of depleted uranium) is equivalent to receiving an x-ray every few minutes over the course of their shortened lives.” He goes on to discuss the fact that 320 tons of depleted uranium were dumped in the heavily populated city of Baghdad and Iraq in just the first two days of the war. Further dispelling the lies of the US military pedo-recruiters is his discussion that employers don’t want to hire returning soldiers, and that when “they do find jobs, GI’s get paid less than their civilian counterparts .. because of employer concerns about their mental health and overall skills.” Sanders illustrates how the capitalists use their military to suck the life out of working class youth, murder workers all over the world, and then try to paint their military green so that there is an appearance of “environmentalism”. “We need to start telling a new story, one that describes the overwhelming majority of the Earth’s population, not at odds with each other, but moving ever closer and closer together. Climate change is a global issue” caused by capitalism “and thus only a truly vast communitarian spirit [sic] can confront the vastness of its dreaded fallout.” The five gallons of fuel per Abrams battle tank dwarfs whatever numbers of light-bulbs and organic food that is bought to assuage the liberal conscience. That five gallons per mile is a drop in the bucket compared to what a battleship or battle helicopter use, let alone the massive bombers and the even more massive planes that refuel them. Only a world that cares about meeting the needs of all can effectively fight the climate change that has caused millions and millions to be displaced and/or die. Even though there are weaknesses in the text, this text is a valuable weapon in the Party’s arsenal to help dispel the lies of the green movement, challenge capitalism, and help us build a communist world.

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Young People in the Fight Against Fascism

There are many lies taught within history classes all over the world. The most damaging and insidious of these lies is that the United States defeated the Nazis with help from the Russian Winter. These rotten capitalist textbooks leave the role of the International Communist movement completely out of their portrayal of the monumental struggle against fascism. They misrepresent the role of the United States as the primary hero, and do not show that the US waited for years to see if the Nazis could crush the Red Army. It was only when the Nazis were defeated and in retreat, that they entered the war in Europe to make sure that they could ensure that the Red Army did not liberate all of Europe from the Nazi scourge. Another thing that is left out of history classes is the role of young people and women in the fight against fascism. Not only did young people fight fascism, but they played an integral part in its eventual defeat. The old Communist movement (OCM) did not fight directly for Communism, but instead fought for Socialism. Socialism is basically the use of all of the elements of capitalist production in the interests of the working class and under the leadership of the working class’ Communist Party. Socialism did not struggle to negate all of the elements of class society, as the OCM thought that class collaboration, the wage system, and nationalism were all needed to build socialism as the first step on the road to Communism. Even though it had its weaknesses, it must never be forgotten that the International Communist struggle for socialism was the primary historical movement violently and militantly opposed to fascism. Fascism is the use of all of the elements of capitalist society organized to defend the bosses from the working class and other bosses. The bosses use every ideology of capitalism – nationalism, religion, sexism, and racism – to further their cause of drenching the world with the blood of workers in order to maximize their profits. Fascism has the appearance of progress, but its essence is determined to get the workers to militantly sacrifice themselves in the interests of the bosses. The catch phrase for fascist movements is always “Shared Sacrifice”, as they want the workers to sacrifice their blood and children so they can protect their profits. The bosses use fascism’s best friend patriotism to get workers in one nation to kill workers in another nation. Socialist theory reasoned that since the masses were too backward for advanced communist ideas, concessions to capitalist ideology and organization therefore were

necessary. The OCM saw it as progressive to organize based on culture and nation. They did not go far enough in their struggle against capitalism. They did not root out all of the capitalist system’s rotten ideology because of their concessions and class collaboration. It is never enough to just struggle against fascism, as capitalism has already proved that it can survive the defeat of fascism. Capitalism can not survive a Communist revolution that negates the whole social, economic, and political relationship of capitalism. Reformist anti-fascist struggles are not, in and of themselves, revolutionary. They may mow down the fascist grass, but they leave the capitalist root to regrow in a new form. It is one of history’s greatest tragedies that the victory against fascism did not defeat capitalism, but instead gave it new life. This rotten system that we are brutally oppressed under should have been flushed down the toilet of history long ago, but the reformist errors of the old movement prohibited that from happening.

History by the Bosses: lies on top of lies The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has learned from the experiences of the OCM. The only reason why the Nazis weren’t able to continue their slaughter of Jews is due to many brave Communists actively struggling to organize, arm, and fight alongside Jewish workers against the Nazi’s war machine. The capitalists spend a lot of money in order to teach the horrible lie that the worker’s state of the USSR was just as bad as the Nazis. Whereas, the USSR was a nightmare for the bosses who were living under the threat of revolution and having their profits damaged by angry workers, it was a beacon of hope for the worlds’ workers. And, it was definitely not as bad for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish and other non“Aryan” workers that were saved by Communists because they were marked for death by the genocidal Nazi war machine. The Communist Party organized internationally, in prisons, forests, homes, farmhouses, schools, and factories. It set up sports clubs for youth, schools to teach skills, universities to teach science, and weapons training classes for the future armed struggle. For years before WWII, the Soviet government had armed, trained, and organized the entire population for total war in the future. The main government organization carrying out this task was the Osoaviakhim (“Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Air Force and Chemical Defense”). Its membership

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numbered fifteen million. It carried out military training among all sections of the Soviet population, particularly among youth. Instruction was provided by army reserve officers and included marksmanship, horse cavalry skills, aviation, parachuting, skiing, and other military sports. Millions of youth won riflery badges. The skills of communist led partisans in all aspects of guerrilla warfare were due in large part to this training.

History by the Bosses: What the bosses want us to believe about WWII The image of WWII that the bosses shove down students’ throats is of an Anne Frank cowering in an attic with her family as the Nazis prowled about looking for Jews. What the history books try to hide are young people like Halina Mazanik who placed a bomb underneath the bed of a Nazi officer. This particular officer had watched from his limousine while his orders where carried out to push the children from the orphanage into a trench, toss quicklime over them in order to burn their skin, and then bury them alive. As their screams reached their highest point, the Nazi officer started to toss candy to the children as they choked to death. The mostly Communist led underground decided that he had to die, and young Halina risked everything to place the bomb under his bed. The bosses constantly want to teach passivity and dependence to young people. They want them to not rely upon their own power but to rely upon a power existing outside of themselves. Mao Zedong, another Communist leader villainized by capitalist textbooks, wrote that the primary task of capitalists is to get workers to constantly place their hope in external forces outside of themselves. These things can be cults of personality like Obama, Castro, and Chavez or sell-out leadership in unions, politicians, voting, boycotts and anything else that makes workers rely on a force other than their own power as workers. Communists know that the internal is primary, and that relying upon any force other than ourselves organized within the PLP to seize state power is going to doom us workers into being led by other bosses. The bosses’ lies pile on as The Edelweisse Pirates are left out of history classes, and until just a few decades ago were considered criminals and gang-members since they broke the Nazi’s laws. The Edelweiss Pirates were working class members of the Hitler Youth who rebelled against the Nazi state, organized themselves, and would then go roving in packs beating up Hitler Youth. They hid Jews in basements, wrote revolutionary slogans on walls, carried out acts of sabotage and, in some cases, armed resistance against the Nazi soldiers themselves. They did not rely upon anyone else but themselves as the children of workers who realized that they did not have a stake in the Volkenstaadt1 that the Nazis were pushing. Many of the Edelweisse Pirates were influenced by Communist

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ideas, had parents that were Communists, and risked their lives to fight against fascism. The reinforcing of a dependency upon a force outside of the working class is the reason that the resistance to fascism is taught as a waiting and stockpiling against the Nazis until that one great moment called D-day when the invincible US forces stormed the beaches. It is doubtful that D-day would have been a success without Communists engaging the fascist’s forces. The Communist led partisan and guerilla forces created a front within Greater Germania (what the Nazi’s called the territories that they conquered) that forced the fascists to concentrate many forces there that would have been used to drive the US and UK forces back into the ocean. The bosses’ textbooks do not spend too much time discussing how revolutionaries from Spain, undocumented workers in France, and Jews in Eastern Europe had been fighting the fascists in Europe during the time that the US was sitting on their hands in England. Why is it that the bosses’ history books show Jews complicit in their doom and passively walking to the slaughter? The answer is simple. The capitalists don’t want working class youth to know that they can fight back and win against their armies. They don’t want the working class’ response to Nazis and KKK marches to be militant actions like when they tried marching in Cincinnati in 2006, and the working class youth fought them off and burned down the house and business associated with that fascist scum. Or when the fascist KKK tried to march in NYC and we, the Communist PLP, infiltrated them, beat them bloody on national television, and led masses of angry workers to fight them. Young people should know that they can go toe to with fascists and win, and PLP will continue to organize youth to violently confront the forces of fascism with the organized force of the working class. The capitalist class wants a compliant workforce that waits peacefully for some superhero to do something while the workers just keep on producing commodities, wealth, and profit for them. The capitalists want the working class to put their hope in the Obama of the moment. The PLP wants the exact opposite. In antithesis to the capitalist’s desire for a workforce alienated from deciding what society should do, the PLP wants a Communist society where everybody can take part in the decisions that affect all of us, a society where the needs of all are met by all, and the development of each depends upon the development of all. Communism is a society where people don’t rely on other people to make their decisions for them, but actually collectively participate in all of the important decisions that society needs to make. Capitalism is a society whose expressed purpose is the brutal murder and enslavement of nearly 80% of the world’s population. Workers all over the world need to join the PLP so that the bosses will be met with the full fury, force, and, especially, violence that their murderous aims deserve.

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History By The Bosses: Anti-Communist lies The bosses’ history books use outright lies to say that the Communist leader Stalin was worse than Hitler.2 They use tired old lies that have been debunked over and over again to prove that the socialist Soviet Union did not defeat the Germans, but that a really cold Russian winter defeated the most powerful army that capitalist society has ever been able to field. The standard myth popularized by the bosses’ textbooks credits the Soviet victory to the availability of limitless human hordes used as cannon-fodder, as well as vast stocks of U.S. donated arms. The lie says that massive suicide charges eventually exhausted the enemy. The Russian winter plays the hero in these fairy tales – as if the weather had been warmer for the communists than for Nazis. The opposite of this racist “horde” lie is the case, as the Nazi invasion represented far more than an onslaught of an “outnumbered” seventy million Germans against one hundred ninety million Russians. The reality of the situation was that virtually all of Europe, a total of 310 million people, assaulted the USSR in June 1941. The Germans had been on a war footing for a full year and a half, and had easily overrun the rest of Europe before turning on the Soviet Union. The fascists had one hundred eighty million Germans and active German allies as well as one hundred thirty million conquered and enslaved people whose labor power, albeit unwillingly, aided their racist war effort. With his vast labor reserves, Hitler could mobilize an army numbering between fifteen and eighteen million troops. The Soviets could mobilize about ten million troops. A million of these were needed in the Soviet Far East and on the Afghan, Iranian, and Turkish borders, more than offsetting the Nazis’ need for troops to occupy Western Europe. Nazi manpower superiority at the time of the invasion can therefore be reckoned as three to two. As the men went off to the front, women replaced them in every conceivable job. Women engineers constructed the defense works; women became police, locomotive drivers, miners, and steel workers. Youth rapidly matured under these conditions, and most sixteen-year-olds could perform any task. Children between the ages of twelve and fifteen did one-third an adult’s work share. Other than the infirm and very old, non- producers were unknown during the war. Women and children participated in the fighting, on the front, as well as among the partisans in the occupied territories. Even Imperialist toadies like Harrison Salisbury had to marvel at the skill and commitment with which thirteen-year-old Soviet Jewish boys took up guns to kill Nazis when they became guerrillas. The Communist concept of anti-fascist struggle was Zen-like in its simplicity. Communist leaders like Stalin and Tito regarded the entire country as the theater of war and every worker as a soldier. Non-combatants

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worked feverishly to guarantee production. The fighting forces themselves were divided into three distinct but complementary groups: the Red Army, fighting in the front zone; the guerrilla army, spreading havoc throughout the Nazi rear; and the armed population, organized as partisans, denying the fascists access to the Soviet rear. The concept of the Soviet people in arms is not well-known in the West and merits mention, as the magnitude of the Soviet war effort cannot be comprehended otherwise. The Wehrmacht, the fascist German army, that invaded the USSR was deeply committed to purging the Earth of all non-white peoples. This commitment to genocide had sustained these murderers during the days of easy victory over capitalist opponents. But the Wehrmacht was defeated largely because the Communist led forces, guerillas, and partisans enjoyed overwhelming ideological superiority. Hitler’s troops fought to conquer “living space” for the “master race.” The Communists, though saturated with nationalism, fought for the glimpse of communism that a generation of socialist life had given them. The bosses pile on more lies as they say that the Communist movement was not the primary force that defeated the fascists, when not only did the Communist movement defeat fascism, it also defeated colonialism, struggled to liberate women from traditional gender roles, helped to organize and eventually defeat segregation, actually made racism illegal in socialist countries, and, during the 1970’s, defeated a resurgent KKK and Nazi movement in the United States. Yet, the history books say that pacifistic speeches and marches helped end the war in Vietnam, and not the heroic struggle of workers in Vietnam and working class soldiers in the US Armed forces fragging their officers while refusing to fight. The history books say nothing at all about the resurgent fascist movements of the 1970’s where ROAR3 and its thugs were free to terrorize the Black workers of Boston with the full license of the local Democrat party. Contemporary books about the left during the 1960’s and 70’s leave out the heroic fight waged by the PLP against the fascists. The role of the Communist led struggle to organize against the fascist state in Franco’s prisons after the defeat of the Left during The Spanish Revolution and of Communists entering into the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw and Minsk knowing that they were going to die, but knowing that resistance to stir the spirit of revolt against the Nazi war machine was much more important, is completely left out of the history books. Instead, we are taught that the Stalinists killed the revolution, sold out the struggle, and were murderers and killers. Yes, there were many huge mistakes due to the OCM’s dedication to fighting for socialism and their opportunist errors, but the defeat of fascism would not have happened without the collective participation of hundreds of millions in the struggle against it.

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What did the Communists have to do with the struggle? Why is it that Tito’s male and female partisan army is completely left out of history books? An army of peasants that had male and female fighters that was able to move all throughout the Slovene part of Carinthia since “90% of that population was in sympathy with the partisans, supporting them, feeding them, and hiding them in their homes.”4 The Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) had carried out massive literacy campaigns, political campaigns, and struggled to organize within both the cities and countryside of Yugoslavia. The CPY had over 100,000 dedicated female anti-fascist fighters alone engaging the murderers who had invaded and enslaved them. 68,000 of these brave women were killed, wounded, or incapacitated because of the war. The brave antifascist fighters of both sexes were peasants and workers who picked up guns, engaged in the class struggle, and envisioned the possibility of a social transformation taking place. They were politically committed to fighting for a world where the working class ran the means of production. Unfortunately, they were fighting for Socialism and not Communism, but without the CPY organizing and arming the working class to fight in their own interests, how many much workers’ blood would have fueled the fascist war machine? The Communist Party of France organized immigrant workers from Paris to Lyons and from Marseilles to Nice to fight the Nazi murderers. This organization was known as the Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée-Franc Tireurs et Partisans (MOI-FTP) and was made up of undocumented workers that had migrated from all over Europe. They were working together under Communist leadership to attack the Nazis. “The militant women and men of the MOI were the first to embark upon armed resistance, and the last to receive any credit for their war record in postwar France.” We have celebrated the MOI-FTP several times in the pages of Challenge (insert issues here). The weakness of the OCM can be seen here, as there is a deliberate “veil of forgetting” “The MOI was not made up of “authentic” French people, but of foreigners, immigrant workers, most of them Jews. These fighters carried a triple stigma: they were foreigners, they were Jews, and they were Communists. Theirs was a particularly difficult situation. Regarded as Communists and perpetrators of atrocities, they were regarded by the (US and) London-backed Gaullist resistance with little sympathy.” They were also in antagonism with the patriotic line that the Communist Party of France (CPF) had been peddling since they allied themselves with DeGaulle and had a hard time accepting the very non-French names of its most active and daring fighters. As immigrants and children of immigrants, and thus very internationalist, they were at odds with the nationalist line pushed by the OCM. The Red Army would organize its units based upon

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nationality, (find the quote about the particular national divisions of the Red Army). The Vichey (French fascist government) and Polish governments had no problem killing off the Jews. The Armia Krajowa (AK) waged a “partisan war” of waiting to be liberated while actively attacking and killing any Jews or Communists that they came into contact with. They literally hacked over 30 Communists and friends to death with axes. They spared their bullets for the moment of liberation when the call from the Polish government in exile would come and they would help with the liberation of their nation. Numerous examples of the Polish, Lithuanian, French, and other police forces helping the Nazis to murder Jews and Communists abound. Nationalism is always a dead end for the working class, and that’s why the PLP organizes to destroy nationalism on an internationalist basis.

What Does this Mean for Young Communists today? Young people today have an important role in the fight against fascism. Students at colleges within the US have begun to occupy buildings in order to fight back against racist budget cuts and skyrocketing tuition. Students have refused to take standardized tests that siphon off much needed funds from the classrooms and new teachers into tools that can help to fire teachers and reduce students to impersonal data. Students have attended PTA meetings and asked parents to meet them at protests. Students have walked out of school, have helped lead attacks against the fascist Minute Men, and they burned down police stations while setting cops on fire in Greece. It is the students who make up the schools and the future producers of tomorrow as they are future workers. Students should be challenging the anti-communist lies that their teachers push in the classroom, they should be distributing Challenge, and bringing friends to Party study groups so that they can raise the collective conscious of themselves and others. When an undocumented worker was murdered in Long Island, it was discovered that the group of teenage thugs that had carried out the murder had been carrying out attacks for a while. Students in the high school that those thugs attended knew who they were. Communist youth should militantly and violently confront fascists that are organizing racist attacks in their school. If Communists had been able to attack those thugs, then maybe a life would have been spared. The bosses want to continue to build their false consciousness through video games, decadent stars, music that inspires selfishness and capitalist ideology, and to keep them running from test, to after school program, to class, to after school classes, on a hamster wheel of activity to keep them busy and not organizing. Students must work to drive ROTC and Armed Forces Recruiters off of their campuses. Students that

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are committed to the Party need to consider joining the Armed forces in order to build the Party within them. Communist Students should be joining the bosses’ mass organizations such as National Service. National Service is a great opportunity for us to build within the bosses’ organizations and use them to build the Party. The bosses are going to be using their organizations to help build for massive wars in order to secure their empire, and they will spare a single drop of our blood in their quest. Other Communist youth should consider getting jobs in industry so that we can build the Party at the point of production. The potential for the PLP to organize among undocumented immigrant workers, while at the same time organizing in the military, the schools, the factories, and public transportation will allow us to be able to confront the bosses on an even stronger basis than the old Communist movement was able to. Just as the MOI was able to directly confront the Nazis and struck deep rooted fear into their hearts, so too will we be able to one day directly confront ICE and the other fascist arms of the capitalist’s state. We will not make the old Communist movement’s mistake of organizing on cultural, racial, or nationalist lines. We want one world based on one working class working and producing together within one Party – the PLP.

This directly translates as “folk’s state” and is what the Nazis called Germany. They constantly pushed the idea that the German people were all to be united as one powerful “Spartan” state.

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2 For a more thorough analysis, read “Stalin’s Sucesses, Humanity’s Gains” The Communist 1990

3 For a more detailed description of PLP defeating the Democrat led racist organization of ROAR, read “Boston ‘75”.

Strobl, I. “Partisanas: Women in the armed struggle against fascism” trans. Sharkey, P. AK Press 2008 (all quotes that follow are from this text unless otherwise stated.) 4

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Herr Hitler Goes to Hollywood

During the past two years we have been bombarded with films, many critically acclaimed, about Nazis and the Holocaust. Most shed the standard format of telling the story of WWII from the viewpoint of the US and tried to tell the story of the Nazis themselves. The United States’ capitalist class has always been enthralled with Nazism and Nazi ideology.1 The seeming cross class cooperation of Nazi fascism, the efficiency of forced labor, the widespread hysterical anti-communism and the “invincible” military all have a certain appeal to the ruling class. As they are forced more and more to revert to fascist techniques of governance in the face of rising inter-imperialist rivalry and growing economic crises, their fetishization of Nazism intensifies. The six films chosen for this review were chosen either for their critical success, The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Downfall or their mass audience, Valkyrie, Defiance, and Inglorious Basterds. These films share one or all of the following characteristics critical to the goals of US fascism: • They present the Nazis as sympathetic and reasonable victims of circumstance • They praise the heroism of the German military • They attack and rewrite the role of the Soviet Union in the partisan movement and the war as a whole • They deny the involvement or knowledge of the German people in the death camps These four aspects all serve to elevate the “prestige” (in the mindset of the ruling class) of fascism. They praise Nazi efficiency (a myth in itself2) while attacking, rewriting, and erasing the role of mass communist politics in defeating European fascism.3 The capitalist position regarding fascism was made clear by the Chief of the British Imperial General Staff in 1944 when he stated, “Germany is no longer the dominating power of Europe, Russia is. Unfortunately Russia is not entirely European… Therefore foster Germany, gradually build her up, bring her into a federation of Western Europe.”4

Those Poor Nazis One of the main goals of Western Nazi cinema is to rehabilitate Nazis by focusing on the personal. Depicting them as sympathetic characters caught up in the moment implicitly asking the question, “What would you do in their situation?”5 thus implying the inevitability of fascism. The truth is that millions of people were in that same situation, under the boot of fascism, and chose to

fight back helping to cripple the Nazis ability to fight and providing an invaluable military function for the advancing Red Army. But this story is systematically obscured and ignored making “What would you do?” a false question with a predetermined answer: be a good fascist of course! The Reader (2008) is just such a film. Based on a book that became a bestseller after being put on Oprah’s book club, the film garnered much critical acclaim being nominated for five Oscars (including Best Movie) and winning one for Best Actress (Kate Winslet). The movie demonstrates many of the crass techniques filmmakers use to build sympathy for their Nazis. The film begins with 45 minutes of gratuitous nudity involving Hannah (Kate Winslet) seducing a 16 year old school boy in her post-war apartment. Before being informed of Hannah’s Nazi past we are treated to every part of her body in a disingenuous effort to bring you closer to Hannah’s character through the use of crass sexuality. The sexism is apparent; as it is, “attractive” Kate Winslet chosen for the role of Hannah to ensure viewers are not turned off by an unattractive Nazi prison camp guard. At no point is the question raised as to the nature of this relationship or its participants (or its illegality for that matter). It is simply a disturbing, prolonged peep show falling into the category of what some social critics have termed “Nazi porn.”6 About an hour into the film we see the once young boy, now college student Michael is attending law school where his class is witnessing a trial of Nazi prison camp guards.7 After learning that the six women on trial personally selected people for execution and burned 300 prisoners alive in a barn it is revealed to Michael that Hannah is one of the defendants! At this point the director is afraid that he might be losing audience sympathy for Hannah so he has the law school professor remind the audience that “You are not guilty of anything merely by working at Auschwitz” and “The question was never was it wrong, but was it legal and not by our laws but by the laws of the time.” Another young student loses it and chastises the class saying that all six women should be executed. He argues that while West Germans pretend to not know anything about the Holocaust it would have required the complicity and active participation of millions. Despite the correctness of the student’s position the director portrays him as an irrational hot head. The audience is “spared” from hearing from him anymore in the film. Hannah pleads her case to the court, regarding the camp

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executions - “There were new ones (prisoners) coming all the time, we had to make room.” She then challenges the courtroom (and the viewer) “What would you have done?” The question is met with stunned silence. While watching the film my wife joked with the obvious, “You could have let them go!” At this point in the film you wonder if they are going to convict her or pin a medal on her. The director feeling that the audience might still be turned off by Hannah’s burning of 300 people alive crudely shifts the conversation from one of Hannah’s guilt to her victimization. The other five women on trial turn on Hannah and claim that she was the ringleader. The audience is supposed to feel bad for the poor little Nazi, after all, everyone is attacking her. When she is presented with falsified evidence, created by the other five defendants, she can easily dispel the charge, but she would have to reveal a secret. Yes, in the final appeal for audience sympathy, we learn that Hannah harbors a dark secret, she can’t read. The very fact that illiteracy could be considered a worse crime or social stigma than murdering hundreds if not thousands of people shows the disgustingly racist/fascist nature of this film. She refuses to reveal her secret and receives a long prison sentence. Further hammering home the notion that Hannah was wronged at the end of the film Michael who is now an old man visits the witness, the sole survivor of the barn fire, whose testimony helped get Hannah convicted. She is shown as a wealthy Jewish woman who lives in a plush New York high rise (probably in Manhattan). We are to assume that she made this money off of the book that she wrote about her camp experience. She reveals that her mother died some time ago in Israel. Every bit of antiSemitic venom is thrown at this character who is then juxtaposed with poor Hannah who kills herself in her tiny spartan prison cell. By the end of the film we learn who the “real” victims were of the Holocaust. Director Stephen Daldry has made a great work of pro-Nazi propaganda and for this he was awarded with nominations for Best Director at every major film awards show. The German film Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004) was perhaps the first of this new brand of Nazi film shot from the viewpoint of history’s most despicable characters. The movie purports to tell the “true” story of Hitler’s last days in the bunker… as told by his loyal secretaries. The film opens with the secretaries being interviewed for the job and getting to meet Hitler himself. They are star-struck as Hitler comes in with a warm smile and behaves as a “true German gentleman.” The director seeks to introduce us to Hitler’s softer side, just what the world needs. Before we are introduced to the chaos of the final days in the bunker we are to be reminded of the more genteel times in Nazi Germany. At no time, except for some clips at the very end of the film, is what the “gentleman warriors” of Nazi Germany doing to people outside the bunker ever discussed. For the director we are to focus

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solely on Hitler and his internal struggles. Much as in The Reader it is easier for the director to build sympathy for the German leader if we don’t cloud our minds with thoughts of war crimes or systematic genocide. As the film progresses we move into the bunker and we see Hitler fall deeper into insanity. His senior officers withhold information and plot against him. Our fearless secretaries lament how Hitler’s disloyal staff has made him a prisoner in this bunker with their connivance. If only they would leave the Fuehrer alone. In one famous scene Hitler completely breaks down yelling at his top command, outside the secretaries cry on each other’s shoulder as their hero falls apart. By the end of the film we join the secretaries and several of the officers from the bunker as they try to escape the incoming Russian “savages.” Much as in The Reader director Oliver Hirschbiegel seeks to rehabilitate the Nazis by changing the standard formulation of victims and victimizers in WWII. Through his “nuanced” look at the victimizers we learn that in reality everybody was a victim during WWII. Maybe one person’s whole family was wiped out in the death camps, but hey that Auschwitz prison guard can’t read. Whole towns were wiped off the map in Eastern Europe, but hey Hitler has people lying to him and treating him badly. Who’s to say who the real victim is? That is the message that capitalists want us to take away from these films.

Those Heroic German Soldiers Beginning with 1951’s The Desert Fox Western filmmakers have long tried to tell the story of heroic German soldiers fighting bravely abroad while devious Nazis at home engage in their nefarious deeds. Like many of these things this myth of heroic German soldiers has a political root. After the Second World War the US military hired on Nazi generals and gave them the job of re-writing the history of German involvement in the war against the Soviet Union. The histories were designed to be used as a propaganda weapon against the Soviet Union. Predictably the generals whitewashed their involvement in civilian executions, selection of camp prisoners, and other war crimes. They also began to create a myth that the true source of Soviet victory was not the tactical and political organization undertaken by the communist USSR, but the incompetence of a maniacal Hitler’s military leadership. Despite the facts that this myth contradicts all the historical evidence, it has become an enduring part of Western culture.8 Valkyrie (2008) continues this long tradition of whitewashing the role of the German military in an effort to rehabilitate them. The movie begins with “The Following is Based on a True Story” scrolled across the screen in German so you know its trustworthy. Besides starring Tom Cruise the film commits other common crimes against cinema. Using a time honored trick the

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“good” Nazi (as if such a thing could exist) characters are sorted from the bad Nazis by way of accent. Good Nazis get English accents, bad Nazis get German accents, Tom Cruise talks like Tom Cruise. The film opens with Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) in North Africa writing a letter to a fellow officer. In it he assures the audience that there was “widespread disgust in the officer corps over the murder of civilians, Jews, and the torture/murder of POWs.” This will be the general theme of the film that we will be asked to buy into. The problem of course being that this statement is total and utter non-sense. We are asked to believe that the disgust over what was going on was widespread, but the German officer corps continued to follow orders to the bitter end when the territory of Nazi Germany could only be measured in square feet. We also know from the historical record that involvement in mass executions and the death camps was far more widespread than the SS. Generals idolized by “military buffs” in the US such as Franz Halder and Erich von Mannstein personally picked prisoners to be sent to the camps and gave mass execution orders for civilians that were carried out by regular army soldiers. Regular German police units were used as reserve death squads and were regularly sent into Eastern Europe to cleanse villages of communist influence.9 Even if it were true that an opposition to civilian executions existed in the military, (which there wasn’t) wasn’t the Nazi war of aggression that killed tens of millions and destroyed the cities of Europe a crime against humanity by itself? This is the message of the film though. The war against the Soviet Union in the eyes of the capitalist class was heroic and just. Time and time again the capitalist class has shown that no amount of violence should be spared in fighting communism. The war against fascism during WWII was a people’s war that Western capitalists have tried to co-opt, subvert, and destroy for 60 years.10 All through the 30s, 40s, and even into the 1950s (many ex-Nazis were put in charge of West Germany) the Western capitalists lent material aid and assistance to the fascists who they saw as heroic warriors in the fight against communism. As the film progresses Stauffenberg is pulled into a world of underground plotters conspiring to kill Hitler. He wants in. Stauffenberg sets up the moral superiority of the plotters, “It only matters that we act now before we lose the war. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany. We have to show the world that not all of us were like him.” Proclaiming later, “Once we have control of the government we will shut down all the concentration camps.” Wow, how heroic; too bad it is also false. The Valkyrie plotters were simply rats trying to desert a sinking ship. Their altruism is demonstrated by their loyalty oath: We know that the German has powers by virtue of

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which he is called to lead the community of Western nations into a more beautiful life… We want a New Order that makes all Germans into bearers of the state and guarantees them law and justice. But we despise the lie of equality and demand the recognition of naturally given ranks.11 The truth being that the plotters had no intention of saving anyone other than themselves. This is why it took them until June of 1944 (Germany surrendered May, 1945) to find their conscience. Towards the end of the film one of the plotters states, “The point of killing Hitler is to make a truce with the allies” This is basically the only true statement in this film. As one historian notes, “There is no getting around the fact that a considerable number of the persons who actively participated in the July 20th plot … earlier took part in the war of racial extermination [i.e., on the Eastern front], for periods at least approved of it and in some cases actively promoted it.”12 These plotters had no problem with Nazi genocide, but as the Red Army advanced and defeat seemed inevitable these cowards sought to save themselves from Soviet retribution. Many in Germany in 1944 and 45 attempted to broker deals with the US and English in order to either close off the Western front or fight as Allies against the Soviet Union. Seeing how genocide on the Eastern front was a critical part of Nazi race theory and the forced labor of the concentration camps was a necessary element of German arms manufactures, it would be absurd to think that these “good” Germans would do anything other than maintain the status quo in Nazi Germany. The film was promoted with the tagline, “Many saw evil, they (the Nazi plotters) dared to stop it.” This offensive garbage is an anti-communist lie. The antifascist movement saw hundreds of millions of workers rise up around the world to smash fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan/China. To this day capitalists tremble at the implications of such a movement and use films like Valkyrie to obscure the real past in order to disarm workers. When capitalists say “Never Again” they do not mean the genocide of WWII, many such genocides have been repeated since then at the hands of the Western powers, they mean the communist led anti-fascist movement.

Partisans and Anti-Communism Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009) was not meant to be taken seriously. A spaghetti western shot against the backdrop of WWII, the film willfully and purposefully rewrites the war. I must admit that in watching the film there is definite pleasure to be taken in Tarantino’s new ending for the war where Jewish guerillas gun down Hitler and most of the Nazi high command. Tarantino is not trying to make a historical

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piece with Inglorious Basterds. As with most of his films he is elevating style over substance. But still the fact that he took a definite historical moment and weaved in a fiction regarding US led partisans leads to much confusion over the facts of the matter. Few, hopefully, in the audience will leave this film thinking that the war ended with Hitler gunned down in a Paris theatre, but the idea of the Basterds will probably have sticking power.

onto the agenda of Allied meetings until November 1943 when Allied ministers met in Moscow.17 After the war, the displaced persons’ camps, which were filled with prisoners from the death camps, were placed under the control of ex-SS members who now worked for the US intelligence services prolonging these prisoners suffering (and leading to the deaths of thousands more prisoners after the war’s end).18

Brad Pitt leads the “Basterds,” an all Jewish US Army guerrilla unit fighting behind enemy lines in occupied France. They hunt down Nazis collecting their scalps and acting as avengers for European Jews. While entertaining to watch this film leaves the viewer with two misconceptions: 1) That the US engaged in/aided partisan warfare and 2) The US cared about what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany.

Taking place on the other side of the war on the Eastern Front, the film Defiance (2008) looks at the partisan group formed by the Bielski brothers in the woods of Nazi occupied Belarus. The oldest two Bielski brothers fight over whether or not they should simply hide out and try to avoid capture or whether they should join with the Soviet led partisans and fight the Nazis. Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig) argues that by fighting the Nazis you become like them and despite many violent scenes in the film seems to advocate a pacifist position. At the end of the film Zus, Tuvia’s “hot headed” brother, vindicates this position by leaving the Soviet partisans and rejoining Tuvia’s group.

The actual history is that the partisan movement in WWII took on its special character and influence from its communist leadership. The Soviet Union had called on all the workers of Europe to organize partisan groups and then coordinate with the Red Army against the Nazis with devastating effect.13 The US and Britain were largely hostile to the partisans due to their communist leadership. Instead of fighting a people’s war as the USSR did, the US and British preferred the large scale terrorizing of civilians through a campaign of carpet bombing cities into dust. After the war, Marshall Plan aid came with the precondition that the communist parties of the Western governments, who enjoyed immense popularity for their role in the resistance, could not participate in politics. By 1953, almost all those who had been arrested for war crimes or wartime collaboration in France and Germany had been given amnesty and released from prison. In West Germany the communist party became an illegal organization in 1956 as the West German government swelled with ex-Nazi bureaucrats. In France, Vichy collaborationists were allowed back into power as the French Communist Party receded into the margins. The second misconception that this film creates is that the US cared about the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany. In reality anti-Semitism in the US continued and intensified through the Nazi’s worst atrocities. In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt refused to support the WagnerRogers Bill which would have allowed 20,000 Jewish refugee children safe haven in the U.S.14 That same year the US also denied the steamship St. Louis port in New York. The ship, which was full of Jewish refugees, was turned back to Europe and many of its passengers ended up in Nazi death camps.15 In fact, it was the official policy of the US State Department and the British Foreign Office during WWII to deny the existence of death camps, even after their existence was confirmed in 1942. While Western newspapers took frequent potshots at the Soviet Union, news about the Holocaust was “regularly suppressed, ignored or trivialized throughout the war.”16 The issue of German war crimes did not even make it

While it is true that the Bielski group was not as militarily active as other partisan groups this is almost certainly because of the large numbers of refugees that they cared for, not some pacifist belief. The Bielski group helped Red Army partisans in many military raids throughout the war, as well as provided the Soviet partisans with members and supplies. Far from being conflicted about their fate, the Bielski group fought actively to save those who fled the ghettos and to ensure the success of the Soviet partisans. The stated purpose of Defiance was to show that Jews did fight back, but the filmmakers show their own politics by relentlessly attacking the motivation for partisan resistance in Eastern Europe, communist politics. Early in the film, one of Tuvia’s old school teacher’s shows up, now an old man, providing wise, sage like wisdom whenever Tuvia is in a moral quandry. He argues that “Hitler is a devil with a little moustache and Stalin is a devil with a big moustache.” This man is portrayed as the conscience of the camp, but Tuvia’s closest advisor is the former editor of a socialist pamphlet and the camp itself runs on a policy of ‘everybody works’, points the film tries not to dwell on. In the few scenes that depict the Red Army partisans they are always either drunk, spewing anti-Semitic remarks, or both. One wonders how guerilla fighters living in huts in the woods got their hands on so much vodka. Adopting the crass anti-Russian racism of Nazi propagandists, the director makes it clear that the Russians are no better than the Nazis. But if the Soviet people were so virulently anti-Semitic then why was the Soviet Union the only country with laws against antiSemitism, the only country to evacuate Jews (and others who might face special persecution) in the face of the Nazi advance, and the only ones to acknowledge the existence of

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death camps during the war? Here, the filmmaker masks the rampant and deadly anti-Semitism of the Western powers by trying to project it onto the Soviet Union. The capitalist class has worked very hard to erase the role of the Soviet Union and communist politics in the fight against fascism. As stated earlier, fascism was never the enemy of the US and Britain who both dabbled in fascism themselves during the 1930s, communism was. Where they can, capitalists deny Soviet involvement in the war altogether. When that is impossible, they slander and libel the Soviet leadership and Soviet people in order to obscure and de-legitimize their contribution.

What Holocaust? Unfortunately for capitalists who fantasize about Nazi “efficiency” as they incorporate more and more fascist politics in the face of crisis, workers have a general distaste for the genocidal policies of fascism’s most infamous incarnation. As part of their effort to portray fascism as a viable alternative, the ruling class has to whitewash the crimes of the Nazi regime, claiming them to be an aberration caused by a few bad apples in the generally good fascist bunch. This requires them to constantly restate the tired old German myth that regular people did not know about the Holocaust. In The Reader the part of the young boy seduced by Hannah was created by the author to take us into the mind of the average German who was “seduced” by fascism and then later had to come to grips with the “revelations” of Nazi war crimes. In The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) a family is shocked to learn about German mistreatment of Jews when the father is promoted to camp commander of Auschwitz. It takes a couple of months after arriving but they eventually realize that apparently the camps aren’t beach resorts. Their son discovers this with “tragic” consequences. At the end of Downfall we are treated to an interview with the secretary whose testimony the movie is based off of. She assures us repeatedly that she had no idea that the camps existed in a pathetic attempt to rationalize her own devotion to Nazism. In Valkyrie, we learn that, well yeah, the German people did know about the Holocaust, but they didn’t approve of it… well at least they stopped approving of it once it became clear they were going to lose the war. The reality is that the death camps required the participation of millions of people to run. The German railway which was critical to transporting prisoners to the camps and transporting clothes and other valuables away from the camp employed 1.2 million German workers by itself. Germans who (as well as French, Polish, Czech, Belgian, Danish, Austrian, etc) turned in their neighbors seemed to know exactly where they were going. After these “undesirables” were rounded up, the “good” Aryans broke

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into their houses looting them, and in many cases moving into them. German soldiers engaging in mass executions and working at the death camps sent home photographs and letters describing their “heroic” deeds. During the war it became a popular past time for Germans to collect and catalogue these photographs which depicted firing squad executions, hangings, and starving prisoners.19

Why Now? The problem with these movies is that their form hides their content. Each film is well made to create maximum sympathy for the German characters (with the exception of Defiance and Inglorious Basterds). For capitalists, the lesson they hope to impart is that Nazism was not inherently bad, it just needed better leadership. In the US, the liberal wing of the ruling class hopes to be that leadership. The culture of fascism in capitalist film has been growing stronger and bolder for the last decade seeping into every genre. 2006’s comic book adaptation 300 is probably the vilest film Hollywood has put out in the last fifty years. Depicting a battle between the freedom loving West (the ancient Spartans) and the evil, androgynous, dark-skinned East (the Persians), the film mimics the 1915 epic about the “heroic” rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation. Once you get past the many historical inaccuracies of the film20 300 boils down to a celebration of eugenics and the myth of the white European “superman.” The film stands as a cinematic call for race war against an unfriendly and “dark” world, a perfect justification for increasing US aggression in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Africa. 2008’s Batman: Dark Knight would serve a similar purpose as it depicted a conflicted hero who must resort to being the villain and using fascist spying techniques to bring justice and order back to Gotham. Much as Hitler shouldered the full burden of becoming Fuhrer of the German people, Batman must become the Dark Knight and spy, murder, and steal in order to protect us lowly workers. By the end of the film, we learn that sometimes fascism is necessary and in the “right” hands it can benefit all of us. The US ruling class is under increasing strain as the economic crisis and inter-imperialist rivalries all heat up. The need to make fascism available as a weapon to prepare for and initiate WWIII is becoming a pressing concern. In order to win the population to support this, and the increasing levels of violence (euphemistically called “sacrifice”) that come with it the Nazi regime (the most well known and accepted example of fascism) has to be rehabilitated to make room for a new American fascism. As workers we must take our own lessons from WWII and the fight against fascism. The lesson of how communist politics built and rebuilt a Soviet industrial base capable of out-producing Hitler’s millions of slave laborers, how the politics of collective sacrifice and the

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protection of the workers’ state inspired millions to fight against the largest invading army any capitalist state has ever fielded, despite horrific conditions and unimaginable loss and tragedy. Most of all, we have to remember that

it was workers following a communist political line that ultimately crushed the fascist machinery of the Nazi state, despite the attempts to undermine and sabotage the struggle by the Western capitalists.

A recent editorial in the New York Times urged readers to look at and consider the “good” parts of Nazism. The author was the paper’s lead economics reporter. NYT, Stimulus Thinking, and Nuance, 4/1/09

For more see Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning or Alexander Werth’s still classic Russia at War

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Adam Tooze destroys the notion of the efficient Nazi economy in his book Wages of Destruction revealing that the Nazi war effort was designed to save the crumbling economy. This confirmed R Palme Dutt’s conclusions regarding fascism in his seminal 1936 work Fascism and Social Revolution 2

The military policy in the Second World War of Britain and the US was created largely in reaction to the success of the Soviet Red Army and the communist led partisan movement. The invasion of Italy was undertaken only after Mussolini’s military began to crumble under partisan pressure forcing the German military to occupy large portions of the country. The US invasion was designed to prevent partisan victory not save Italy from fascism. The much praised invasion of France was launched in 1944 in response to Western fears that if the West didn’t occupy Europe then the Red Army would soon take Berlin anyways and all of Europe might fall to communism which was the mass line at the time.

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10 For more see the PLP special Challenge supplement from 1995 “10 Lies About WWII,” http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/cd4.html and PLP’s “Bosses Still Don’t Understand Why Red Army Defeated the Nazis,” http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/pbsstal3.html 11 John Rosenthal, Valkyrie’s Revisionism, http://pajamasmedia. com/blog/valkyrie-and-the-myth-of-the-good-german/

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David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 237.

4

I remember, with many others I am sure, even being asked this question as part of my public school education on WWII

5

Sunday Telegraph, Oscar Hopes Fade as Battle Rages Over ‘Nazi Porn,’ 2/16/09 6

West Germany began trying war criminals in the mid-late 1960s. This was a result of the pressure put on the West German government by communist East Germany and the German Left who had long pointed out that the West German government was largely an extension of the Nazi government made up largely of ex-Nazis. These trials were mainly for show with most ex-Nazis maintaining their social/political prominence.

7

For more on the creation of Operational History (German) Section and its influence on Western culture see, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Pop Culture by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II.

8

Ibid., Rosenthal cites the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, http://www. kirchen.ch/pressespiegel/nzz/200009141132.pdf (German language) 12

13 For more info see Alexander Werth’s Russia at War and A. Fyodorov’s The Underground Revolutionary Committee Carries On

Debra Kaufman, Gerald Herman, James Ross, and David Phillips, eds., From the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Holocaust Denial Trials: Challenging the Media, Law and the Academy (Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell, 2007), 73. 14

Myers, Gustavus. History of Bigotry in the United States (New York: Random House, 1943), 387. 15

16

Kaufman, 67-68.

17

Kaufman, 69.

John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 60-61

18

Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel, Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Photos, http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/studies/ ordinary/levein_uziel_full.html

19

For one the democratic freedom loving Spartans in fact lived in monarchical state where slaves made up 90% of the population. 300’s heroes are also intensely homophobic, a curious trait to give a society that considered the common-place sexual relationships between men and young boys to be perfectly acceptable.

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INSIDE:

REFORM AND REVOLUTION H ZIZEK: “MARXIST” LOYALLY “OPPOSED TO CAPITALISM” H A CRITIQUE OF THE 9/11 TRUTH MOVEMENT H A BRIEF HISTORY OF HAITI H THE LAND OF THE FEE AND THE HOME OF THE SLAVE H NOTES FOR STRIKE TALK

OUR FIGHT: J PLP fights to smash capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class. We organize workers, soldiers, and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism. J Only the dictatorship of the working class – communism – can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today’s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP. J Worldwide capitalism, in its relentless drive for profit, inevitably leads to war, fascism, poverty, disease, starvation and environmental destruction. The capitalist class, through its state power – governments, armies, police, schools, and culture – maintains a dictatorship over the world’s workers. The capitalist dictatorship supports, and is supported by, the anti-working-class ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, individualism, and religion. J While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim “communism is dead,’ capitalism is the real failure for billions worldwide. Capitalism returned to Russia and China because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system, like wages and privileges. Russia and China did not establish communism. J Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. Everyone will share in society’s benefits and burdens.

table of contents ANOTHER FASCIST TROJAN HORSE: A CRITIQUE OF THE 9/11 TRUTH MOVEMENT

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HAITI

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THE LAND OF THE FEE AND THE HOME OF THE SLAVE: MYTHS AND ILLUSIONS ABOUT U.S. CAPITALISM THAT KEEPS US ENSLAVED

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REFORM AND REVOLUTION (1976)

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ZIZEK: “MARXIST” LOYALLY “OPPOSED” TO CAPITALISM

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Notes for strike talk

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J Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous workers; and to divide the entire working class. J Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women – sexism – and divisive gender roles created by the class society. J Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class one world, one Party. J Communism means that the minds of millions of workers must become free from religion’s false promises, unscientific thinking and poisonous ideology. Communism will triumph when the masses of workers can use the science of dialectical materialism to understand, analyze and change the world to meet their needs and aspirations. J Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers – eventually everyone – must become communist organizers.

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ANOTHER FASCIST TROJAN HORSE A CRITIQUE OF THE 9/11 TRUTH MOVEMENT

In the last ten years the Truth Movement, those that believe the September 11th terrorist attacks were an “inside job,” has grown from an obscure radio host in Austin, TX to a massively influential movement.1 By 2006 one poll found that a third of Americans believed in some form of 9/11 conspiracy theories.2 A large internet based industry has sprung up around supplying 9/11 conspiracy films, books, music, clothing, and other paraphernalia that has turned men like Alex Jones from a small time radio host into a millionaire. The explosion of the Truther Movement has also prevented many honest well meaning workers and students from asking serious and probing questions about what brought on the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. And this is the real danger of the Truth Movement. Yes it is an opportunist business that pedals tragedy as a commodity, but its real crime is that it diverts workers and students from the real struggle against imperialism and delivers them into the hands of the ruling class. What follows is an analysis of the two most popular Truther films, Loose Change and Zeitgeist (which is one very long film in two parts), and the Alex Jones media empire from which Truther ideology comes from. This article hopes to expose the Truth Movement for what it is, a Trojan horse filled with racist, hyper-nationalist, and anti-communist politics. And as such the Truth Movement can provide no source of liberation for the working class.

Just to give a sample of the many ludicrous claims and fabrications in the film, right out of the gate two minutes into the film they describe an exercise where a drone aircraft is tested. By their description the plane has ten takeoffs and thirteen landings; apparently they failed to do the math on that one!5 The filmmakers have a similar math error later in the film. To prove that a plane collision cannot knock down a skyscraper they retell the story of an errant B-25 that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. As their twisted logic goes, if the B-25 collision did not cause the collapse of the Empire State Building then a 767 which weighs over eight times as much, traveling over three times faster, carrying almost fifteen times more fuel, and colliding with a force ninetythree times greater than that of the B-25 collision could not have possibly brought down the World Trade Center. These examples are clearly far from comparable and the B-25 canard lays bare as either the result of complete ignorance or a deliberate attempt to misrepresent the events on 9/11. At another point in the film Loose Change claims that fires caused by jet fuel could not have reached the 3,000

Loose Change: Who Needs Facts? Loose Change is a film that was released on the internet in 2005, with several revisions that followed, which serves as the “factual” foundation of many Truther myths.3 The film’s exclusive focus on poking holes in the official account of the 9/11 terrorist attacks makes it mandatory viewing for those entering into the Truth Movement. All of the “evidence” presented in this film can be described alternately as quotes taken out of context so as to alter their meaning, photos and video manipulatively displayed so as to misrepresent actual events, wild speculation, or outright direct fabrications.4

The creators of Loose Change

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collision with the Pentagon Loose Change compares the diagram of a Pratt & Whitney JT8D jet engine with wreckage found at the site.11 They correctly point out that the wreckage does not match the components of the diagram. They however fail to mention that the reason for this is that the Boeing 757 aircraft that collided with the Pentagon had Rolls-Royce RB211535 jet engines not the Pratt & Whitney model they showed. The wreckage does correspond with the correct Rolls-Royce engine. In a particularly revealing scene in the first edition of Loose Change the filmmakers state that the video of Osama Bin Laden claiming responsibility for the attacks That the World Trade Center buildings fell at “free-fall speed” is an accepted had to be a fake because Bin Laden was “fact” in the Truther world, but that claim is again based on deliberate wearing a ring and a wristwatch.12 Wearing deception. Loose Change begins timing the collapse of the South Tower gold jewelry is forbidden in the Koran, a using footage from the angle pictured on the left. What the smoke obscures dictate which Loose Change assures the from that angle is pictured to the right. Loose Change allows the tower to collapse for a while before starting their timer in order to create the illusion viewer would make it impossible for Bin that it falls at “free-fall speed.” Laden to be wearing this ring and watch. Besides the utter ridiculousness of this degrees Fahrenheit required to melt steel. Again this is assertion, one of the photos that they show of the “real” a deliberately created straw-man. Nobody claimed the Bin Laden as a comparison with this “fake” Bin Laden towers collapsed because the steel framing melted, they struck a Loose Change critic as being particularly odd. claimed that the steel framing was severely weakened The photo had been carefully and deliberately cropped by the incredible heat of the fires which eventually by Loose Change caused it to fail and the building to collapse. The film in order to cut out states sarcastically that these are the only steel framed Bin Laden’s right buildings to ever collapse because of fire.8 Another hand where you can deliberate fabrication, the World Trade Center buildings clearly see the same collapsed not just from a fire, but from the combined ring and watch that effects of massive airliners colliding with the buildings they so vehemently at high speed and the subsequent fires that ensued. But claimed that he 13 for the sake of argument there have been several steel could not wear. framed building that have collapsed from fire alone: The reason for McCormick Place Exhibition Hall in Chicago (1967), the pointing out this Kader Factory in Thailand (1993), and a fire led to the small sampling of partial collapse of the Windsor building in Madrid (2005). factual errors in Early in the film Loose Change reports that NORAD the Loose Change had been training to intercept hijacked planes in 9/11 type film is not to wade scenarios all the way back in 1999 as some sort of proof into the swamp that that the government had begun planning this attack for is 9/11 conspiracy years.9 Again they deliberately misrepresent their source. “science,” but rather The article in question actually said that the training to demonstrate that scenario involved international flights (the 9/11 attacks not only are these involved domestic flights), that had been hijacked over theories completely but the Atlantic for the purpose of crashing planes laden with ludicrous, poison or some biological weapon into a city center. It they are based on that says nothing about using planes as missiles and ramming “evidence” deliberately them into a building. Furthermore the article states that is the Pentagon scrapped the training exercises claiming m i s r e p r e s e n t e d A size comparison of a 767 (above) or fabricated. If and a B-25 (below) illustrates the that the scenario was “too unrealistic.”10 there were only a misdirection used by Loose Change In its effort to debunk the official story regarding the

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GET TO KNOW TRUTHER “SCIENCE”… Truther Science vs Real Science As communists we seek to understand the world through the development of a scientific analysis of events around us and their relationship to the greater political economy of capitalism. We develop hypotheses about the cause of world events and then we test these hypotheses through the careful study of history using dialectical materialism as our guide. This process of testing allows communists to develop theories about the world and how it functions. Truthers flip this process on its head. They begin at the end by developing their conclusion first. In this case that the WTC was brought down by a controlled demolition, energy weapons, “mini-nukes,” etc. This conclusion is indisputable and those that claim otherwise are labeled either hopelessly ignorant (“sheeple” is the term used in Truther circles) or part of the conspiracy. The fact that their conclusions are based not on evidence but on cues imbedded in American culture does not bother the Truther. Second the Truther goes looking for “evidence” to poke holes in the “official” story. This is a process known as “anomaly hunting” and it is highly unscientific. In this process the Truther looks for something that is either currently not explained in full detail or that has been explained but the Truther is simply ignorant of that explanation. They collect these isolated incidents and then point to them as “proof” of their conspiracy. The Truther demands that every detail be known in a complex event. If one detail is unknown at the moment they throw out the vast mountain of evidence to the contrary, cling to their anomaly, and shout “conspiracy!” In doing this they are not seeking evidence to test a hypothesis, but evidence to prove a conclusion. In short the evidence does not inform their conclusion, but rather their conclusion informs their interpretation of the evidence therefore tainting their analysis of the event. This can be easily seen in the way that Truthers handle criticism of their evidence. When one of their anomalies is explained they don’t pause for even a beat to reflect on why they got their analysis wrong and what it could mean for the whole structure of their argument as a scientific thinker would, rather they go hunting for their next anomaly always firm in their unfounded, foregone conclusion. As a result of this lack of criticism and self criticism the Truther mythology grows at an exponential rate shooting off in a variety of directions. Like the mythical hydra every anomaly that is explained is replaced by two more. Even those anomalies that have been explained time and time again, the fallacious “melted steel” argument for example, end up being recycled back into new arguments. After all the Truther is not interested in evidence or proof, but in the maintenance of a particular world view. Finally the unscientific nature of Truther science compels the Truther to engage in overtly dishonest argumentation. The Truther feels that the story they have to tell is so critical to humanity and the Truther’s need to believe is so important to their sense of self that they frequently and flagrantly manipulate images, deliberately take quotes out of context, and simply lie in order to build a case and win converts to their cause. The Truth Movement is built largely on a foundation of lies like this. It is no accident that the Truth Movement is awash with Holocaust deniers and other bottom feeders. The working class needs a scientific communist analysis of the world to break the chains of capitalism. The Truth Movement just like all other racist-nationalist niche movements only serves to strengthen capitalism’s grip on the working class.

few errors in the film it might be seen as the result of amateurs trying to play detective, but when every claim is provably false a conspiracy begins to take shape. This conspiracy is not the shadowy New World Order conspiracy promulgated by Truthers, but a conspiracy to play on people’s unease, cynicism, and fear in order to make a buck. It is no coincidence that the first thing that greets you when you go to the Loose Change official webpage is an advertisement to buy a $20 Loose Change t-shirt. But apart from the crass money grab from the Loose Change filmmakers, there is a deeper ideological subtext to the films. The movies help to perpetuate anti-Arab racism and a nationalist myth of American invincibility. At the very end of Loose Change an extended Fox News interview is aired with University of Wisconsin Truther Kevin Barrett. When pushed during the interview by

the caustic Sean Hannity Barrett makes a revealing statement, “I think you (Hannity) have the bizarre theories. You think it was nineteen guys with box cutters led by a guy on dialysis living in a cave in Afghanistan? That’s ridiculous!”14 This quote from Barrett sums up the ideological weaknesses that pervade Truther thought. His essential argument is that it is ridiculous to think that Arabs, who have been demonized as sub-human primitives in the U.S., could possibly strike a blow, no matter how small, against the United States. This is racist non-sense. The other side of this argument is that since the United States is invincible, a notion that is drilled into our brains by Hollywood from the first time we open our eyes, only an internal cabal of white American men could possibly attack it. This theme pervades other cultural representations of

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GET TO KNOW A TRUTHER… Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911) Scholars for 9/11 Truth (S911) AE911 and S911 represent the effort of the Truth Movement to create legitimate fronts for their reactionary message. Both groups seek to counter the critique that early Truthers were in no way qualified to speak to the events of 9/11 by gathering together “experts” to testify on the behalf of the Truth Movement. Despite much bold talk these groups never were able to find the legitimate experts that they sought instead collecting a hodgepodge of frauds, discredited academics, and people whose credentials, to put it politely, are a little sparse. The reason for this failure is that no respected scientific organization or professional group agrees with ridiculous Truther “science.” Expert opinion is near universally in opposition to the Truth Movement. The sordid history of the short-lived S911 exposes the absurdity of Truther science. S911 was formed by James Fetzer in his downtime from writing on JFK conspiracy theories. Steven Jones, a physicist from BYU, joined shortly after and became the group’s most prominent member. Jones was fired from BYU amidst a firestorm of criticism of the shoddy research methodology permeating his work for the Truth Movement. After only six months of existence a fight broke out between Fetzer and Jones, now serving as co-chairs, over the future direction of this “scholarly” organization. At the center of the fight was S911 member Judy Wood and her theory that no planes hit the WTC and that the towers fell after being attacked by space based energy weapons. This was the quality of the debate that these “scholars” were engaged in. AE911 was founded less than a year after S911 by architect Richard Gage. The organization engages in all the same non-sense as other Truther groups. They rehash long disproved arguments basing most of their website materials off of the discredited Loose Change movie and the work of David Ray Griffin. The organization claims expertise, but fails to prove that it actually has any. Gage himself, while an architect, has no experience in high-rise building construction or design. But the most notable thing about AE911 is its blatant profiteering on the cynicism and unease created by the terrorist attacks. Gage and AE911 never miss an opportunity to ask for money to fund their crusade. Where does this money go? A 2009 study of AE911’s tax documents showed that Gage took in 21% of AE911s total revenue as his personal salary. (ae911truth.info/wordpress/2010/ae911truth/75450)

American defeat, particularly those of the Vietnam War. For example, in the movie Rambo Sylvester Stallone’s unhinged Vietnam vet character goes on a tirade at the climax of the film about how the soldiers wanted to win the war but the government wouldn’t let them. The message is clear, third world Asians couldn’t defeat white soldiers unless whites in the U.S. conspired against them.15 The Truther claim that Arab terrorists could not have been behind the terrorist attacks is simply a rehashing of this same old racism. The “inside job” myth relies on an underlying belief in American invincibility. Truthers constantly state that it is inconceivable that the military was caught off guard and unable to scramble fighters to the defense or that it is crazy to believe that American intelligence agencies could be outwitted by Arab terrorists. But as we have learned from the past decade the U.S. military really isn’t the invincible fighting machine that Hollywood would have us believe and our intelligence agencies really aren’t all that efficient. The U.S. is not run by an omniscient X-Files style cabal of men in the shadows able to maintain a decade long conspiracy of silence involving many thousands of people, but rather by mortal men who because of their own internal weaknesses were caught with their pants down on September 11th. Promoting the idea of an invincible, omniscient ruling class can only breed cynicism and is quite frankly, a fantasy. Worse still Loose Change serves to redirect people from

examining the actual important questions about the September 11th attacks. By declaring 9/11 an “inside job” Truthers halt any discussion about American imperialism as the roots of terrorism and global instability before it can even start. Left by the wayside is U.S. intervention in Afghanistan dating back to 1979 (prior to the Soviet invasion) and continuing through the 1980’s and 90’s. Serious analysis of Osama Bin Laden’s demand that the U.S. abandon its bases in Saudi Arabia, bases most Americans did not know existed, gets swept aside replaced by fantasies of domestic betrayal.16 In the Truther world the whole view of the war on terror becomes a critique not of imperialism, but of nationalism pitting the real super patriots against the shadowy traitors (more on their identity later).17 In short, Truther myths become a smoke screen for American imperialism.

Zeitgeist: Resurrecting Old Enemies The Zeitgeist film series (Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist: Addendum) has gained a cult following since the first film premiered on the internet in 2007. Discussions of the films is common in Truther circles and the Zeitgeist Movement, which the films have popularized, has claimed a rapidly growing membership of 391,000 people. The films cover topics as diverse as religion, 9/11 conspiracy theories (this section is simply a rehash of Loose Change), and the Federal Reserve tying them all together with the all too

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familiar theory of an international banking conspiracy pulled straight from the anti-Semitic, anticommunist Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Zeitgeist builds on the Truther mythology by beginning to provide an outline of the ultimate villain in the Truther fairy tale. Like Loose Change, the information contained in the Zeitgeist films is a mix of gross misrepresentations and outright lies.18 The film begins with the nonsensical ramblings of some New Age yogi while third rate computer graphics play in the background. This leads into a discussion on religion that can be described as amateurish at best. Just to give a quick example the film tries to draw a connection between astrology and Christianity by connecting the term “God Sun” with “God’s Son.”19 The only problem with this logic is that the original text of the Bible was not written in English, nor was modern English a language spoken anywhere in the world at the time of the founding of the Christian religion. The section on religion has generated a lot of interest among young viewers of the film who have become cynical of religious demagogues. But what criticism is it really? Its arguments that Christianity borrows from other cultures and religions is nothing new, although Zeitgeist does falsify most of its evidence. This process, called syncretism, is a well documented factor behind Christian expansion and has already been written about much more competently. The idea that Europe borrowed its ideology from Egypt is likewise not particularly controversial, although Martin Bernal’s Black Athena covered the subject far more competently twenty five years ago. What Zeitgeist does do with the concept of religion is invert the Marxist understanding of it. Marx wrote that “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.”20 Religion becomes a reflection, an outgrowth of the class society and its particular stage of development. Hence Christianity can be an ideology for slaves and the poor with revolutionary potential in 50 C.E., but become the religion of the maintenance of slavery in the American South 1,800 years later. The character of religious ideology is determined by the class society and the class struggles that are reproducing it. Zeitgeist follows the lead of many wrongheaded reformers before it by declaring religion the ultimate evil in the world, placing the proverbial cart ahead of the horse.21 Religion does not “empower men to do evil” as Zeitgeist claims, but rather is used as a post-facto justification for real world materialist goals. Religion does not push class conflict, class conflict pushes religion. By turning the Marxist analysis of religion on its head Zeitgeist effectively nullifies class conflict as

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the basis of dialectical motion. This is not a liberating philosophy, but an imprisoning one. The second section on 9/11 conspiracy theories is simply a rehash of Loose Change with some commentary from neo-fascist Alex Jones thrown in (more on him later). Section three of Zeitgeist rounds out the first film and ties it all together by claiming organized religion and the 9/11 terrorist attacks to be elaborate conspiracies created by an international banking cabal hell bent on creating a one world order. This third section of Zeitgeist and the follow up movie Zeitgeist: Addendum represents the filmmaker’s effort, and ultimate failure, at doing political economy. The filmmaker begins his analysis of the banking system with a complete misrepresentation of the nature of money. He would do well to read section one of Marx’s Capital to learn how money actually gains value. Instead the labor theory of value is completely ignored for idealist notions of growing debt that has no origin and is reproduced by “magic.”22 The dialectical contradiction of the money commodity and the larger contradictions inherent in capitalism itself are left by the wayside for simplistic mysticism. Now this is far from a victimless crime. Marx in his identification of a phenomenon he dubbed the “fetishism of commodities” explains how money, as a universal exchange commodity, becomes an abstracted form of socially necessary labor time.23 In short it becomes a representation of human labor that is made opaque by the process of exchange and ultimately obscures the labor component of value. This is critical for the continuing exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class. Instead of being told that we are exchanging one hour of labor with the capitalist in return for the exchange value of ten minutes of labor time, we are told that we are given a wage. One hour’s work for ten dollars. An exchange that obscures the fact that we produced sixty dollars in that one hour. This disjuncture hides the true nature of capitalist exploitation and reminds of the importance of communists studying and forming study groups around Marx’s Capital. The simplistic analysis of Zeitgeist fits in nicely with the libertarian rhetoric of American political culture, but it makes debt the center of economics, supplanting and ultimately denying the reality of class exploitation. This is a dead end for the working class. The history in Zeitgeist and Addendum is as bad as the political economy. Claims that the Federal Reserve is a private bank, that the income tax is unconstitutional (as if such things mattered), and that imperialism is a creation

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class or to spread mass terror by arming imperialist states with the latest doomsday weapons. Shortly after the technocracy pseudo-Leftists began formulating this idealist religion the very technology they held up as so pure and liberating was used to instantly vaporize 140,000 people at Nagasaki and Hiroshima (160,000 more would die within five years from the effects of the bombs). The final section of Addendum attempts to tie all these disparate elements back together again in a confusing, nonsensical fit of idealist pseudo-intellectual posturing. The viewer gets reintroduced to the ridiculous international banking conspiracy theory and the film is finished off with some truly bizarre random New Age nonsense about spirituality and oneness. Loose Change and Zeitgeist spend a lot of time dwelling on the “mysterious” collapse of WTC 7. Again deception is at the heart of their argument. They claim no pre-collapse damage to the building while only showing one side of WTC 7. Of course if they were to show the other side of the building they would see the massive gash (above) caused by the collapse of the North Tower. FDNY Captain Chris Boyle reported, “On the north and east side of 7 [the perspective shown by Loose Change] it didn't look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn't look good.”

long series of economic crashes in the U.S. and worldwide that dated back to 1873.25 Again Zeitgeist obscures and ultimately erases a critical aspect of the Marxist critique of capitalism. Far from being the creation of a few bankers the series of Panics during this period which would become known as the Long Depression were the result of the irreconcilable contradictions at the heart of the capitalist system itself. The falling rate of profit and ensuing crisis of overproduction that precipitated this Depression are well described in Marx’s third volume of Capital while the imperialism and war the capitalists would use to get out of it is dealt with in Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Zeitgeist only offers us the tired old boogeymen as a replacement for the ultimate failures of capitalism itself. But the working class does not need these distractions which only serve to breathe new life into the decaying capitalist system.

The third part of Addendum forgets the first five sections of the Zeitgeist mythology to venture into the purely idealist world of the Venus Project a rehash of the anti-communist “technocracy” theories of the 1930’s. These theories sought to write exploitation and class struggle out of history by claiming that world problems could be solved by “competent” technicians and modern technology.

By denying class these modern day mystics ignore the key question of who controls the technology. The 20th century saw an explosion of new technologies, almost all of which were used to either further exploit the working

The Zeitgeist film series is an attempt to analyze the world without getting into sticky issues like class-conflict or exploitation. Where the Marxist analysis of political economy is rejected by Zeitgeist it begins to erect a new view of the world. This view, infused with the paranoid individualism of modern capitalism, is one of super patriots fighting a cabal of international bankers to take back their country. Students of history will recognize this simply as the latest rehash of the racist Protocols myth (more on this later). The Protocols myth which placed all conflict in the world at the feet of “communist Jews” and their supposed “international banking conspiracy” formed the foundation for German fascism in the 1930’s. It is not surprising then that Zeitgeist opens its section on the

Heil Lindbergh A Nazi Decoration Well Deserved! Cartoon criticizing Charles Lindbergh's acceptance of the Nazi Cross of the German Eagle medal in 1936. Like Henry Ford, Lindbergh refused to return the medal during the war.

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banking system with a long quote from the anti-Semite, Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh.26 In this quote he repeats the vicious lies of the Protocols myth that Jewish bankers pulled Europe and the U.S. into WWI and connived to pull the U.S. into a war with Nazi Germany.27 The film later goes on to anoint the fascist U.S. congressman Louis McFadden as one of the lone defenders of America against the shadow banking interests.28 A staunch supporter of Hitler and the Nazi regime McFadden’s much hyped, in Zeitgeist at least, 1936 Presidential campaign ran under the slogan “Christianity, not Judaism.”29

Alex Jones: The Racist Underbelly of the Truther Movement Loose Change and Zeitgeist are ultimately primers for the paranoid, neo-fascist politics of Alex Jones.30 Jones is a popular radio talk show host and “documentary” film maker based in Austin, TX. He is a New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theorist and founder of the 9-11 Truth Movement. His appeal is largely directed toward disenchanted white, “middle class” youth. His followers range from anti-globalization activists to neo-Nazi skinheads. Although his ideas may seem ridiculous, Jones has

GET TO KNOW A TRUTHER MYTH… The Federal Reserve One of the more enduring myths of the white power movement that the Truth Movement was able to bring into the mainstream via Ron Paul is the story that the Federal Reserve is a private bank and that it is part of a larger international banking conspiracy. Federal Reserve conspiracy theories are rooted in the racist Protocols myth and were brought to the fore amongst American reactionaries by the arch-conservative John Birch Society. John Bircher G. Edward Griffin is the author of the foundational Federal Reserve conspiracy text The Creature From Jekyll Island. The creation of a central bank was not the result of some secret conference of New World Order elites, but was rather the result of capitalists trying to cope with the inherent instability of capitalism itself. Forty years into a period of continuing economic crisis (the Long Depression began with the Panic of 1873 and lasted until the First World War) members of the American ruling class began discussing theories on how they could “manage” capitalism. Discussions over the creation of a new central bank predated the Federal Reserve Act by a decade. Capitalists distressed over the worsening boom and bust cycles of capitalism sought to develop an agency that could help manage these crises and stabilize the power and wealth of the ruling class. The Federal Reserve Act passed in 1913 was the result of these debates over managing capitalism. It should be noted that the development of central banks to manage capitalist crises has occurred in every modern capitalist state in the age of imperialism. It is clear that the need to exercise some control over economic crisis is a critical need of imperialist states. The functioning of the Federal Reserve in the US is complicated, but no more complicated than other state regulatory regimes. The Federal Reserve is made up of 12 Federal Reserve Banks (based on geographic region) that oversee member banks in their region. In order to become a Fed member bank, these banks have to lease “stock” in the Federal Reserve. This is the source of much of the “Fed is a private bank” confusion. While member banks purchase fed stock it should be noted that they do not get full drawing rights. They lease the stock meaning that they cannot sell it without losing their membership. The reason for setting up this stock system is that it not only helps to capitalize the Fed system but it was also felt that it would help encourage private banks to buy into and become invested in this federal system. In exchange for purchasing this stock 60% of the seats on the boards of these regional Fed banks are determined by private banks. Again this is not abnormal within federal regulatory agencies. An examination of the EPA will uncover the worst polluters in industry, the FDA is populated by the pharmaceutical industry, and the NLRB is populated with the friends of industry. This is not because of some New World Order conspiracy, but because the state is an extension of capitalist class power itself. Now the 12 Federal Reserve banks are not free to do whatever they want. They are controlled by a Board of Governors that is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. These are the people that make monetary policy and yes they make it unilaterally, just like every other branch of the state bureaucracy. Being a member of the federal bureaucracy the Federal Reserve and its Board of Governors are subject to multiple yearly audits and are forced to report annually to the General Accounting Office. The Federal Reserve is not a private bank, it is not the creation of a Jewish conspiracy, it is a part of the federal government and an important part of the capitalists’ quest to control the natural instability of capitalism itself. A communist critique of the Fed needs to be folded into a critique of capitalism as a whole. Claiming that the Fed is a conspiratorial aberration is simply an apology, and cover, for capitalism itself.

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receive four million hits a week. He has been endorsed by celebrities Charlie Sheen (before he went crazy) and Rosie O’Donnell, and has appeared in the popular Richard Linklater films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. He has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Fox News, and has had feature articles about him in magazines ranging from Texas Monthly to Hustler. Jones has been the main organizer behind the Ron Paul presidential runs which in 2008 raised a record one day sum of six million dollars. Jones was also the creator of the now ubiquitous Obama/Joker “socialism” poster.

Jason Bermas and Alex Jones promoting their new movie

become highly influential in the last few years. His Facebook page has over 188,500 friends, his radio show is syndicated on over sixty stations and has two million listeners a week, his infowars and prisonplanet websites

Jones has drawn people in over the last ten years through his exploitation of Truther issues. Once people are drawn in to his radio shows and movies he hooks people on the Left with his use of anti-globalization and Bush-bashing language and he hooks people on the Right with his appeals to libertarian ideas and down home American racism. Jones’ world view can be summarized simply as: • 9-11 was a “false flag” (staged) operation designed to convince Americans to “give up their freedom” • It was perpetrated by a conspiracy of

GET TO KNOW A TRUTHER… David Ray Griffin David Ray Griffin represents the “respectable” end of the Truth Movement. His books The New Pearl Harbor and Debunking 9/11 Debunking have become an integral part of the cannon of the Truther religion. While Griffin has gone the farthest to try and maintain the illusion of respectability his work is riddled with all the same flaws and shortcomings of the rest of the Truth Movement. One of the reasons for this is that Griffin’s works largely recycle the tired and well-worn arguments of the original Truthers. A critical analysis of Griffins Debunking book found that of those citations that he cited in the affirmative are almost all from fellow Truthers. This rogues gallery includes Eric Hufschmid who when he is not writing foundational Truther books like Painful Questions is busy pursuing his first love, Holocaust Denial. Racist Holocaust Denial is a favorite hobby of Truther Christopher Bollyn who also receives a place of distinction in Griffin’s work. Other notables include Judy Wood, James Fetzer, and Steven Jones who were founding members of the doomed Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The group disintegrated when the three could not resolve a disagreement over whether or not the twin towers were brought down by secret “energy weapons” based in space. Griffin’s “science” demonstrates many of the problems in Truther logic. The most prominent, as seen above, is how inbred this subculture is. Griffin came to the Truth Movement after reading Eric Hufschmid’s Painful Questions. Hufschmid’s book was largely inspired by the racist October 2001 article by Jim McMichael Muslims Suspend the Laws of Physics. Now McMichael borrowed his accusations largely from Carol Valentine’s 911: No Suicide Pilots published two weeks prior. Valentine who was part of the early Alex Jones crowd spent her free time prior to 9/11 engaging in… you guessed it, Holocaust Denial! Along with her 911 article she is also the author of the piece The American Coup d’état and the War For Jewish Supremacy. Griffin’s science is a fraud. His sources are compromised and his theories are infused with the paranoia of the white power movement. Griffin’s claims have been thoroughly debunked again and again yet he continues on his idiotic quest to claim some legitimacy for the Truth Movement. This is what is important to understand about the Truth Movement, it is not about crafting a legitimate critique of the official story regarding 9/11, it is about shaping a racist world view that obscures the reality of class war and inter-imperialist war with a mythology of race war. For a debunking of Griffin’s Debunking 9/11 Debunking see: Ryan Mackey, On Debunking 9/11 Debunking, Version 2.1, 5/24/08. www.jod911.com/drg_nist_review_2_1.pdf

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omniscient, omnipotent global elites alternately referred to as globalists, Free Masons/Illuminati, Socialists/Communists/ international bankers, and Zionists • The goal of this devious cabal is to put the whole planet under one world government (the New World Order, or NWO), kill off 80-95% of the population31, and enslave the rest Jones’ deception is nothing new however; he is simply rehashing the same lies that have been pushed throughout the last century in order to mobilize the population when capitalism is in crisis in a particular country. On his website he lists two chronologies that map out how this secret cabal has been manipulating governments and populations for the ultimate purpose of creating this New World Order.32 Looking at these chronologies the astute reader quickly realizes that they have heard this story before. The “globalist conspiracy” is simply a rehashing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the racist tract created by the Czar’s secret police in order to tighten the screws on the Russian police state and attack the Left just before the Russian Revolution.

Masonic Design: Israeli Supreme Court or NWO HQ? This picture is featured on the prisonplanet website. The pic portrays Tel Aviv, Israel as the home-base of the New World Order, part of the anti-Semitic worldview promoted by Jones.

The Protocols argued that Jews, the easiest population to scapegoat in Russia, had created an elaborate banking scheme to take over the world and create a one world Zionist government. After the Russian Revolution the Protocols were adapted to attack the Soviet Union and workers’ movements around the world. Suddenly Marxism and communism became instruments of evil Jewish conspirators in their struggle for global dominance. This fusing of anti-communism with anti-Semitism is outlined in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, “With infinite shrewdness the Jew fans the need for social justice… into hatred against those who have been better favored by fortune… In this the Jew keeps up an outcry against international capital

and in truth he means the national economy which must be demolished in order that the international stock exchange can triumph over its dead body… [Jews] thus give this struggle for the elimination of social evils a very definite philosophical stamp. He establishes the Marxist doctrine.”33

This fusion allowed capitalists around the world to use racism to attack the communist movement. Henry Ford made the Protocols mandatory reading for his factory employees in the US and his newspaper, which all the employees received regularly, contained editorials connecting the Zionist conspiracy in the Protocols to the communist movement. In many schools throughout the Western world the Protocols were treated as a historical fact and were used to teach anti-communism. This was done despite the fact that a wealth of articles had been written proving the Protocols to be a forgery! These inconvenient truths were ignored by the capitalist class who correctly saw themselves as engaged in a fight against communism for their very survival.34 Jones resurrects the Protocols and uses it as a tool to attack those that would oppose capitalist fascism and war. One of the chronologies on the prisonplanet site written by D.L. Cuddy assures us in its first paragraph that his conspiratorial plot is in no way related to the Protocols. This warning is reminiscent of when someone says to you “I’m not racist but…” and you can be just about 100% sure that something really racist is about to be said. In Cuddy’s chronology the conspirators are almost always labeled as being socialist, frequently labeled as being bankers or financiers, and occasionally as socialist bankers. Making a decision based on perceived intolerance for blatant antiSemitism Cuddy simply replicates Hitler’s version of the Protocols without using the term Jew instead relying on the reader, thanks to years of capitalist racist training, to make the connection. The Protocols form the backbone of Jones’ world p h i l o s o p h y. Recognizing that the Protocols can be a tough sell to those who are not so openly

Jones was the creator of the ridiculous Obama “socialism” poster now ubiquitous on the Right. Jones is also one of the final holdouts still pushing the racist Obama birther conspiracy.

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GET TO KNOW A TRUTHER… Ron Paul Texas congressman Ron Paul has shocked political analysts during the last two election cycles with his runaway, out-of-nowhere popularity particularly among youth. With his anti-war, anti-empire statements this self-professed Libertarian has even become a darling of the liberal Left receiving favorable treatment from liberal culture makers such as Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and the show Democracy Now. What is less known is that Paul’s recent popularity comes largely from the Truth Movement and white power circles. Ron Paul has always been heavily endorsed by Alex Jones and has made frequent appearances on Jones’ radio show. During the 2008 campaign cycle he also received help from infamous racist Don Black who runs the Stormfront website. The website endorsed Paul and even included a donation link for his campaign. A 2008 thread on the site titled “Why We Should Support Ron Paul” featured such arguments as Paul “is the strongest opponent of ‘Hate Crime’ laws,” that Paul was the most anti-immigrant, and that Paul was “the least likely to support government crackdowns on Pro-White organizations, and the most likely to veto any legislation to that effect.” The fact that Paul is adored by Truthers and their friends in the white power movement is not evidence enough on its own to label Paul a racist. His record of working as a Trojan Horse to bring the paranoid fantasies of the white power movement into the mainstream is fairly extensive, however. He is the most prominent proponent of Federal Reserve conspiracy theories that have their roots in the racist Protocols myth and are foundational beliefs of both the Truther and white power movements. Even Paul’s anti-imperial statements can be traced to the paranoid New World Order mythology. During the 2012 election cycle Paul’s barely submerged racism began to bubble up to the surface as copies of his old newsletter the Ron Paul Political Report resurfaced. In it Paul discusses paranoid racist fantasies about the “end of white America” and the “coming race war.” Among his many racist statements regarding black people, in 1992 after the LA riots Paul wrote, “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began... What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off and the violence subsided.” Among his many anti-Semitic remarks, in 1993 he wrote, “Sneaky goddamn Jews are all alike.” In 1994 as the world celebrated the end of Apartheid in South Africa Paul lamented the loss of the racist regime stating, “There goes South Africa” and warned of a “South African Holocaust.” (The New Republic, 12/23/11; 1/17/12)

committed to racism Jones uses couched language to lure people into following him. On his radio show and in his films Jones simply refers to these conspirators Ron Paul posing with Stormfront founder as globalists. Don Black By doing this he can pose as just another anti-corporation, anti-globalization advocate. For those who listen and watch more carefully he identifies the globalists as members of secret orders such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati. For readers who delve still deeper into his websites the terminology changes again and the conspirators are labeled socialists, communists, and bankers. If you delve still further into his prisonplanet webpage and read into the articles that he has collected from other authors and those that have been sent in to him you will find the conspirators once

again relabeled Zionists (Jones’ not so subtle code word for Jews). This manipulation of the names helps Jones to lure otherwise well meaning kids into being won over a little at a time to racism and fascism.

Globalists/Freemasons/Illuminati/Bankers/ Socialists/Communists/Zionists An examination of Jones’ following reveals that they have received the message loud and clear. If one searches “Jew” and “New World Order” on Jones’ prisonplanet forum you get thousands of hits displaying the most vile racist garbage.35 A 2009 film inspired by Alex Jones, The Conspiracy to Rule the World: From 9/11 to the Illuminati, begins by asking the viewer, “Are we being controlled? And who is controlling us?” It then answers the question moments later by affirming the legitimacy and correctness of the Protocols document.36 An incoherent and rambling article on the prisonplanet site “details” the Jewish NWO conspiracy. Commenting on Russia the author states, “The fact is that Yeltsin was a hired tool whose job it was to turn Russia’s wealth over to the same cartel of Jewish racketeers who controlled Clinton.”37 Frequent contributor for Jones, Henry Makow, explicitly states that the NWO conspiracy is the work of Jews,

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“To all appearances Jews have a disproportionate role in the Illuminati New World Order… Many secular Jews became radicals as they tried to replace their lost religion with belief in a worldly utopia. The Illuminati were able to dupe them with their fraudulent Communist promise.”38

Makow on his own blog (amongst his sea of Hitler apologia), frequently visited by Jones fans, goes further stating that the “Illuminati are a loose alliance of Jewish finance and the British/America/European aristocracy” and that they were the creators of the Soviet Union.39 In another article featured on prisonplanet Makow argues that the Protocols are authentic and that the Israeli Supreme Court building is the NWO headquarters.40 While Makow complains that Jews/communists/Illuminati ruined Nazi Germany for him another Jones contributor, Albert Burns, explains how the Jewish/Soviet conspiracy infiltrated the highest levels of American government. This he says vindicates the work of the racist John Birch Society and the McCarthy witch hunts.41 Attack pieces on Rahm Emanuel and William Kristol on prisonplanet derisively refer to each as a “committed Jew” and a “Jewish Trotskyite.”42 Jones can claim all he wants that he is not an antiSemite, the fact that his site is literally wallowing in the gutter of anti-Semitic racism speaks for itself. He has even featured appeals on his website that refer to the vile racist scum David Irving and Ernst Zundel (the world’s two most infamous Holocaust deniers and Hitler apologists) as political prisoners “wasting away in prison.”43 Not content to utilize only one infamous racist tract Jones, in his analysis of the immigration issue, invokes the book The Turner Diaries. Written under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald in 1978 by Dr. William Pierce, founder of the white power group the National Alliance, The Turner Diaries depicts a future race war in which a guerrilla white separatist group called “the Order” engages in a civil war in the U.S. during which all “non-white races” are ethnically cleansed. Immensely popular in the white power subculture this book is said to have been the inspiration behind the Oklahoma City bombing, the murder of radio show host Alen Berg, and the dragging death of James Byrd. The antagonists in the book are the Zionists who aspire to create a New World Order devoid of white people. One of the NWO methods for combating white resistance and fomenting this move towards one world governance is to open up the U.S./Mexico border in an effort to provoke a race war which the Zionists could then simply mop up after. This theme is repeated almost verbatim by Alex Jones as he discusses the need to shut down the U.S./ Mexico border. According to Jones, Chicano groups such as MEChA are in league with rebel groups across the Mexican border in order to bring about a Reconquista. Under the title

the Plan de San Diego these groups plan to invade and occupy the Southwestern United States and create a “Communist military dictatorship.”44 However, Jones warns that this is all a trick perpetrated by the globalists, aka Zionists. The Zionists are using these Chicano nationalist groups to provoke a race war in the Southwest U.S. that would justify their military occupation and creation of concentration camps for U.S. citizens.45 This reasoning forms the basis for Jones’ support of the fascist Minute Men and racist anti-immigrant laws. For Jones and his followers immigrants from Central America are not victims of capitalism simply looking for work, but armed criminals and rapists hell bent on attacking white America. In one of his trademark “spontaneous” outbursts on his radio show Jones referred to immigrant workers as an “invading army” that is “above the law” being used by the NWO to attack the American people. He later elaborated on this theory stating that the NWO is being run by the “Rothschild banking cartel” (long a favorite target of anti-Semites) which is dead-set on creating and exploiting “white slaves.” In a move to bring the narrative back to the Protocols Jones again began to fling around the label of “socialist bankers.”46 Another theme from The Turner Diaries that Jones likes to employ is the idea that the Zionists are trying to disarm us through gun control legislation in order to make us more susceptible to invasion. The race war in Pierce’s book is started by the Cohen Act (one of many anti-Semitic references) which makes gun ownership illegal. Jones sympathizes and frequently laments the increased difficulty in obtaining firearms for hyper nationalist, uber-patriots besieged by an “invasion” from Mexico.47 Jones sees the source of the plot to take away gun rights as being the Israeli lobby in the U.S. (this is lifted verbatim from The Turner Diaries).48 He claims that the NWO and their government lackeys are moving to “legalize” immigrant workers in order to create an antigun rights voting block. The reason for immigrant support

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GET TO KNOW A TRUTHER… Joseph Farrell Living on the periphery of the Truth Movement but still exercising sizable influence is alternative “historian” Joseph Farrell. Farrell’s bizarre world view can be summed up as: 1) an ancient race of aliens once had a highly advanced civilization on Earth 30,000 years ago, 2) this ancient society was destroyed in a “cosmic war,” 3) the alien diaspora integrated and interbred with human society, and 4) these aliens, now divided into good and bad factions, formed secret societies (Free Masons, Illuminati, etc) to regain their ancient technology. As always the devil is in the details of Farrell’s ridiculous story. In an interview for his book Babylon’s Banksters on the Byte Show (10/1/11) Farrell discusses the current whereabouts of these aliens. He mentions that Europeans, particularly those from Northern Europe, have the most mixed blood out of all the human “races.” He casually mentions that Africans have the purest or most “human” blood. His catch, the “mix” in European blood is actually the result of inter-breeding with these super advanced aliens. As evidence of the “racial” relationship between Europeans and the aliens he argues that around the world all the “civilizing gods” are white. These gods of myth of course represent ancient contact with these aliens. A quick perusal of the racist Stormfront message boards show how grateful the white power movement is to Farrell for concocting an alternative to the Out of Africa thesis of human origins. Along with his theory of the origins of “white supremacy,” which Farrell openly admits to borrowing from Nazi Aryan race theory, Farrell also builds on the Protocols myth. At the head of the bad faction of aliens he places the Rothschild family, that favorite whipping boy of anti-Semites everywhere. In his book Babylon’s Banksters he talks about how this bad faction with its “oriental” roots created the banking system in order to enslave the human race. He traces the rise of the Rothschilds to the fall of the Roman Empire. Arguing that Rome collapsed because of the increasing “orientalization” of Roman blood. Regretfully noting that Romans did not have the same hang-ups about “miscegenation” that we have today, Farrell argues that Roman inter-breeding with their slaves meant the diminution of Roman blood that was “99% oriental” at the time of Rome’s fall. The Rothschilds then took their banking empire from Rome to England where they currently control the international banking conspiracy. This is of course simply a restatement of the racist Protocols myth. It is easy to dismiss Joseph Farrell as just another racist lunatic, but his influence is greater than it might seem on the surface. Farrell and his research partner Richard Hoagland are frequent guests on disturbingly popular radio shows like The Alex Jones Show and Coast to Coast AM. Much of the pseudo-religion espoused in the popular Zeitgeist film series is borrowed from Farrell. Silly ancient alien theories pioneered by Farrell among others are the basis of the popular Ancient Aliens series on the ironically named History Channel. His fetishizing of Nazism and Nazi technology plays an important role in buttressing the “intellectual” side of the modern white power movement. And finally it is clear that Farrell’s book Roswell and the Reich was one of the influences in hack journalist Annie Jacobsen’s widely publicized anti-communist book Area 51. Despite Jacobsen’s ridiculous claims the book was favorably reviewed on NPR, Democracy Now, The Daily Show, and the New York Times among others with only Popular Mechanics denouncing it in the popular press.

for the anti-gun measures for Jones is of course to lay the groundwork for their Plan de San Diego plot.49 The racist and anti-communist underpinnings of Jones’ theories about the New World Order become even more obvious once his sources are closely examined50: • His Prison Planet website features 25 articles from Christopher Bollyn, 52 articles from Henry Makow, and over 1,000 articles from Kurt Nimmo. These men are all Holocaust deniers who feel that the extermination camps were fabrications that the Jews created to manipulate world governments into having sympathy for the Jewish people. All have written articles defending infamous Holocaust deniers Ernst Zundel (author of the pamphlet The Hitler We Loved And Why) and David Irving.

• The American Free Press is cited over 1,400 times. This “news” source is known for its antiSemitic slant and was founded and owned by Willis Carto, a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier. • William Norman Grigg and William F. Jasper combine for 53 articles on the website. Grigg and Jasper are both editors of The New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society a group created to attack suspected communists in 1958. The John Birch Society fought against the Civil Rights Movement frequently accusing its leaders of being communists. Today the John Birch Society continues along much the same path advocating for stronger police monitoring and repression of leftist groups and promoting racism against Hispanic people under the guise of “immigration reform.”

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• NewsMax and the Texas Eagle Forum combine for 238 articles. NewsMax is an ultra-conservative, anti-communist online news source. It attacks feminists and environmentalists as communists claiming that they want to turn the US into the “new Kremlin.”51 The Texas Eagle Forum is an ultra-conservative religious lobbying group that argues that environmentalism is the new communism and that Christianity is the birthplace of capitalism (pro-Christian = procapitalism; anti-capitalist = anti-Christian).52 • Another favorite news source of Jones is World Net Daily which is cited 119 times on Prison Planet. This “news” website has such esteemed contributors as Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell (thankfully now dead), disgraced racist baseball player John Rocker, and Ann Coulter. One of its contributors, Jesse Lee Peterson, was once quoted as saying, “about five years ago … I stated that if whites were to just leave the United States and let blacks run the country, they would turn America into a ghetto within ten years … I gave blacks too much credit. It took a mere three days for blacks to turn the Superdome and the convention center into ghettos, rampant with theft, rape and murder.”53

meals for after the apocalypse), gas powered generators for combating “growing socialism,” and a world view that leaves the capitalist class and their exploitative system completely unquestioned. A quick survey of the comments (which are typical for Jones’ site) that followed a story reposted on Jones’ website about the fact that minority toddlers now outnumber white toddlers in the U.S. shows the effect that Jones has on his listeners. RosePink writes, “A White American would resist a non-White America!” Bastet777, “Operation Wetback 2012. Well I can dream…” Interplod mentions the account of a Muslim man in Britain taking offense at being called an “ethnic minority” because he was born in Britain and so should be considered British. Interplod then channels Goebbels and replies, “Is a dog born in a stable a horse?”58

Left Abdication Allows Flourishing of New Right The question must be asked, how did a movement like the Truth Movement with all its roots in old, presumed dead racist mythology manage to attract millions to its ideas? Indeed many well meaning, honest workers and students have been seduced by the epic mythmaking of films like Loose Change and men like Alex Jones into

• Jerome Corsi is cited in dozens of articles on Jones’ site. A recent addition to the Jones universe Corsi is probably best known for his tireless work in keeping the racist Obama birther myth alive. A recent study released in 2011 proved the strong correlation between racism and belief in the birther conspiracy.54 • A constant guest on Jones’ radio show Bob Chapman has also contributed over 20 articles to Jones’ website. Chapman considers himself a close personal friend of the Le Pen family in France.55 The Le Pen’s spearheaded the return of openly fascist political parties in Europe in the 1980’s. Patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen was famous for running for the presidency under the racist slogan, “three million unemployed means three million immigrants too many.” A position that both Jones and Chapman have referred to as “sensible.”56 Jones, far from being a lowly underdog fighting against a vast criminal conspiracy as Richard Linklater portrays him in A Scanner Darkly, is an opportunist who exploits the most vile racist filth in order to bring in $1.5 million in yearly profits. Living not in a bunker, but in a $800,000 home in the Austin suburbs Jones sells his cynical vision to youth and adults who have real problems.57 Instead of solutions Jones hawks gold, survival food (freeze dried

ONLY COMMUNISM CAN SMASH FASCISM!

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believing in some of the vilest racist filth. What has made this coup for the capitalist class possible has been the abdication of the Left following the collapse of the old communist movement.

in order to come to an understanding that is liberating for the working class. Listed below are some important facts about the 9/11 attacks that there has been an actual conspiracy of silence around59:

With no powerful center like the Soviet Union or communist China and the collapse of the communist led social movements in the capitalist states the capitalist class has been allowed to control the narrative of world events. Today, moreso than ever, workers are forced to view the world through the twisted prism of capitalist ideology. Capitalist individualism, nationalism, and racism form the basis of the Truther Movement’s mass appeal. Without a communist movement of sufficient size and influence to push back against these ideas they are given free reign to corrupt the working class.

• Osama Bin Laden and his Al Quaeda terrorist organization were created and funded by the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980’s.

This is why Progressive Labor Party has always emphasized the political in class struggle. The battle between the capitalist class and revolutionary communism is a political struggle where the battleground exists just as much in the worker’s mind as in the factories or streets. Capitalism’s current domination of the world of ideas means that when workers get disgruntled and angry about the very real problems exploitation creates in their lives they can easily become subsumed in capitalist “conspiracy theories” like those put out by Truthers that not only fail to combat capitalism, but rather retrench capitalist power. Progressive Labor Party urges those in the working class that are angry to be skeptical of the lies the ruling class feeds them, but also to be scientific in our own analysis of events. This means participating in collective study groups that seek to glean lessons from the great communist works of our past (Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.) while discussing how to use dialectics to understand the problems of the present.

Real Conspiracies vs. Racist Myths One does not have to go to the lengths of the Jones’ clique to find conspiracies in the world today. Indeed many conspiracies surround the events of 9/11. But we need to be scientific in our examination of those events

• Saddam Hussein was an American CIA asset and direct ally of the U.S. all the way up to the first Gulf War in 1991. • The Taliban were American allies, frequently called “Unocal’s mercenaries.” The U.S. supported the Taliban regime all the way up to 2000 when they became convinced that the Taliban could not control all of Afghanistan. • The demands of Al Quaeda in the aftermath of 9/11 were political, not religious or “civilizational” as we were told. Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi nationalist, demanded that the U.S. remove its troops that it had stationed in Saudi Arabia and pull out of the Middle East altogether. The conspiracy on the part of the government and the media to hide these important details (among many others) represents a real conspiracy to hide the reality of inter-imperialist conflict from the working class. Uncovering the ruling class’ imperialist agenda as PLP has done for decades is an empowering act. It can reveal the contradictions within the capitalist system and drive home the need for the creation of a revolutionary workers state. This analysis, achieved through the scientific analysis of both current events and the histories that underpin them, is liberating for the working class. The false analyses of the Truther Movement that rely on the constant repetition of old racist lies and tired appeals to jingoist nationalism only further retrenches the power of the capitalist class and tightens the chains around workers’ necks. This is why as communists we must fight the fascist leaders of the Truth Movement like Alex Jones and reach out to our friends in the working class who have been seduced by the Truth Movement and reveal its rotten core.

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As this article will not concern itself in refuting all the various claims made by Truthers (a Quixotic quest by itself since like the mythical hydra every debunked Truther claim seems to give birth to two more equally outrageous claims) for a point by point debunking of Truther claims see the book put out by Popular Mechanics. The Editors of Popular Mechanics, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts. 1

Scripps News, “Third of Americans Suspect 9-11 Government Conspiracy,” 8/1/06.

2

Loose Change has had four subsequent revisions since its release in 2005. This article deals with the content in the 2nd Edition of the film which seemed to get the greatest circulation. 3

For point by point rebuttals of Loose Change’s “facts” see Screw Loose Change: Not Freakin Again Edition available on google video and www.loosechangeguide.com.

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Loose Change: 2nd Edition Recut (LC from here on), 00:02:19.

LC, 00:31:56. For the sake of comparison a B-25 weighs 33,500 lbs, carries 670 gallons of fuel, and in this crash was traveling at 150 mph. The 767s that collided with the World Trade Center were 280,000 lbs, carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel, and traveling in excess of 500 mph at impact.

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LC, 00:36:52.

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LC, 00:31:00.

9

LC, 00:02:40.

The Panic of 1873 was followed by the Panic of 1884, then the Panics of 1893 and 1896, followed by the Panic of 1901 and finally the Panic of 1907.

25

26

Zeitgeist: The Movie, 01:14:28.

Lindbergh, an ardent supporter of the Nazi regime, was not against war altogether, rather he urged the West to aid the Nazis in a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union which he saw as the source of the Jewish conspiracy.

27

28

Zeitgeist: The Movie, 01:25:30.

Robert Michael, A Concise History Of American Antisemitism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) p 142, 180. 29

Loose Change producer Jason Bermas even got his own internet radio show on the Alex Jones’ infowars network after making LC. Though the show was canceled in 2010 he still serves as a fill-in host for Jones’ own radio show. As noted earlier Zeitgeist uses liberal doses of Jones’ radio and film content. Zeitgeist creator Peter Joseph even received a rare, though mildly combative, two hour interview on the Jones’ radio show to promote Addendum. Alex Jones Radio Show, 10/15/08.

30

Paul Joseph Watson, “The Population Reduction Agenda for Dummies,” Prisonplanet.com, 6/26/09, retrieved 6/20/11. There is little reason given for why they would want to do this other than that they are “evil,” though one wonders who is going to work for all those “globalists” once all the workers are dead?

31

D.L. Cuddy, “A Chronological History of the New World Order,” Prisonplanet.com, retrieved 5/30/11; “Timeline to Global Governance,” Prisonplanet.com, retrieved 6/20/11.

32

10

USA Today, “NORAD Had Drills Eerily Like Sept. 11 ,” 4/19/04.

11

LC, 00:19:33.

12

LC: First Edition, 00:57:57.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, (New York: Mariner Books, 1999), p 319.

13

Screw Loose Change: Not Freakin’ Again Edition, 02:29:00.

34

14

LC, 01:22:20.

th

For more on the cultural reconception of Vietnam and the role of racism and sexism in recasting America’s defeat see Jerry Lembcke’s The Spitting Image and Hanoi Jane.

15

Clear analysis of the effects of U.S. imperialism on international terrorism can be found in Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim and Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban.

16

Asked about the Truth Movement Noam Chomsky astutely noted the movements usefulness to American imperialist designs stating that he would not be surprised in 10 years to find out that it was created by the FBI. While the accusation is simply speculation it does highlight the great asset Truthers are to the imperialist state.

17

A point for point refutation of the non-sense spouted in the Zeitgeist films can be found here http://conspiracyscience.com/ articles/Zeitgeist/

18

Zeitgeist: The Movie, 00:15:00. These linguistic gymnastics continue for another fifteen minutes from here. 19

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p 79.

20

21

Zeitgeist: The Movie, 00:37:00.

22

Zeitgeist: The Movie, 01:17:30; Zeitgeist: Addendum, part 1.

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p 71-83. 23

24

Zeitgeist: The Movie, 01:19:40.

33

For more on the twisted history of the Protocols see, Debra Kaufman, Gerald Herman, James Ross, and David Phillips, eds., From the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Holocaust Denial Trials: Challenging the Media, Law and the Academy. Search of prisonplanet forum for terms “Jew” and “New World Order,” 6/20/11.

35

The Conspiracy to Rule the World, 00:02:00. The filmmakers were so inspired by Jones that they even have a gag called the “Alex Jones Announcement.” Conspiracy, 01:28:30.

36

37

“The Next Gaza,” Prisonplanet, 1/20/09, retrieved 6/20/11.

Henry Makow, “Why Do the Illuminati Hate Jews?” Prisonplanet, 10/13/07, retrieved 9/1/09.

38

39 Henry Makow, “Bormann Ran Hitler for the Illuminati,” Save the Males blog, 5/4/09, retrieved 6/20/11.

Henry Makow, “Protocols Forgery Argument is Flawed,” Prisonplanet, 12/15/03, retrieved 6/19/11.

40

Albert Burns, “Reds in America: Conspiracy to Rule the World,” Prisonplanet, 1/21/03, retrieved 6/19/11.

41

“Rahm Emanuel: Attack Dog, Policy Wonk, Committed Jew,” Prisonplanet, 11/10/08, retrieved 6/20/11; “American Exceptionalism is Just More NWO Rhetoric,” Prisonplanet, 6/17/11, retrieved 6/20/11.

42

Ted Pike, “Democrat Control Means Hate Bill Will Pass,” Prisonplanet, 11/15/06, retrieved 6/20/11; Kurt Nimmo, “American Politicos Campaign for Likudnik Total War Against the Palestinians,” Prisonplanet, 1/26/07, retrieved 6/20/11.

43

THEcommunist

16

44

Paul Joseph Watson, “Racist Mexican Gangs “Ethnic Cleansing” Blacks in LA,” Prisonplanet, 1/22/07, retrieved 6/26/11.

53

45

Ibid; Alex Jones, “The New World Order Elite has Big Plans for Arnold,” Prisonplanet, 9/4/03, retrieved 6/26/11.

54

Alex Jones Radio Show, 5/16/11. With record numbers of deportations (see The Communist, Spring 2011) one wonders what “law” Jones’ believes immigrants are above. This is just one example of how Jones turns reality on its head in his racist paranoid fantasy.

55

46

Kurt Nimmo, “DHS Proposes US Gun Laws to Fight Mexican Drug Cartel Violence,” Prisonplanet, 3/12/09, retrieved 6/26/11; Aaron Dykes, “Mexican President Wants to Disarm Americans,” Prisonplanet, 5/21/10, retrieved 6/26/11.

47

48

Alex Jones Radio Show, 5/24/11.

49

Alex Jones Radio Show, 5/16/11.

These numbers come from an examination of the prisonplanet website 6/2/11.

50

NewsMax, “UNESCO: Strangle This Monster in its Crib,” 6/18/03.

51

Texas Eagle Forum, “Free Market Capitalism: Obama’s Scapegoat,” 5/3/10. They complain that Americans’ “anticapitalism” comes from their lack of instruction in economics in school. Although it would seem to be the Texas Eagle Forum that needs a lesson in both economics and history as Christianity predates capitalism by over 1,000 years.

52

World Net Daily, “Moral Poverty, A Black Man’s Comments,” 9/21/05. USA Today, “Study: Racial Prejudice Plays Role in Obama Citizenship Views,” 5/1/11. Chapman gives a loving account of his relationship with Le Pen on the Jones’ radio show. Alex Jones Radio Show, 5/20/11. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzche to Postmodernism, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p 259. Le Pen also participates in a form of Holocaust denial in which he regularly downplays and minimizes both the importance and the consequences of the Holocaust. Ibid, p 272. Many on Jones’ site have demonstrated an affinity for Le Pen’s neo-Nazi politics. Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones, “The Fruits of Globalization: Rotten to the Core,” Prisonplanet, 11/8/05, retrieved 6/26/11.

56

57

Texas Monthly, “Alex Jones is About to Explode,” March, 2010.

Reader responses to the story “Babies Born to Ethnic Minorities Outnumber Number of White Toddlers for First Time in U.S. History,” Prisonplanet, 6/23/11, retrieved 6/26/11.

58

Some good books on the U.S. relationship with the Middle East: Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror; Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy; Ahmed Rashid, Taliban; and Research Unit for Political Economy, Behind the Invasion of Iraq.

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17

PLP

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HAITI

The history of Haiti provides lessons for all working people. Haiti was born of slave rebellion and makes clear the slavery and racism were essential elements of the foundation of capitalism itself. The Haitian working class has also experienced some of the most vicious exploitation by imperialism, both direct and indirect. Yet since Haitian workers rose up to abolish slavery in the 1790’s, the Haitians have fought back with militancy, fighting for reform after reform in the effort to free themselves from exploitation. But time and time again, these reforms failed. This history illustrates the most important lesson for all workers: that only communism can end exploitation and put the working class in control of their own lives.

Hispaniola and the Birth of Capitalism Haiti is located on the island of Hispaniola, the island that Columbus first landed upon and claimed for Spain in 1492. Some 3 million Taino people lived there at that time, but within a decade disease and brutal slavery, all part of a deliberate genocide on the part of mainly Spanish Europeans, had wiped out the entire population. By 1625 the Spanish were more focused on their conquests of Mexico and Peru. French pirates took control of the eastern part of the island. In the eighteenth-century, this area, which the French called Saint-Domingue, became the world’s richest sugar colony, the crown jewel of the French Empire, all based off the labor of slaves imported from Africa. By the 1790’s, some 30,000 French and 20,000 mixedrace free people supervised 500,000 enslaved workers in Saint-Domingue. The death rate was so high that new Africans were constantly being imported. In fact, the majority of slaves in Saint-Domingue had been born in Africa, many in the Kongo region. There were also 5,000 or more “maroons,” former slaves living in liberated zones

in the mountains and waging frequent warfare against the slave masters to maintain their independence. Saint Domingue and other Caribbean colonies were a locus of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—a process that included the theft of land from the population of the Americas, the enclosures that forced English workers off the commons, as well as the violent expropriation of the bodies and labor of people from Africa. The profits extracted from the super-exploitation of enslaved sugar workers and the trade networks that sugar production spawned (including the slave trade itself) produced vast wealth for both French merchant capitalists and British industrial capitalists. This “fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of people”— including the enslaved workers of Saint-Domingue— funded the development of manufacturing and the markets necessary for sustained industrial production and capitalist development.1 The sugar plantations also provided a model of new forms of work. In fact, the enslaved workers of Saint-Domingue were among the most industrialized workers in the eighteenth-century world. They built sophisticated irrigation works, operated massive mills, and manufactured barrels and metal goods, as well as cultivating food crops for themselves and sugar for their owners. This production regime required both an elaborate division of labor and extensive organization and coordination among the work force.2

THEcommunist

The Fight to Destroy Slavery While school books point to the rhetoric of the American and French revolutions as inspiring struggles for freedom, the most profound fight of the 18th century came from the enslaved workers of Saint-Domingue. As the newly independent United States expanded slavery, the working class of Saint-Domingue rose up to take its freedom. In 1804, Haiti became the second independent republic in the western hemisphere, and the only country to be established as a result of a slave rebellion. The movement that abolished slavery and led to the independence of Haiti began during the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution against the limits imposed by historic feudal privileges. The merchant capitalists of Bordeaux and Nantes, who organized the French slave trade and whose wealth was tied to Saint-Domingue, were among those most active in the initial phases of the Revolution. The bourgeoisie raised the banner of equality, which to them meant more power in the government and more power to shape trade in their favor.3 The banner of equality was then taken up by SaintDomingue’s gens de couleur, the mixed-race free people. Many of the gens de couleur were French-educated property owners, often slave-owners, who operated coffee plantations in the southern and western parts of the colony. They demanded the same rights of French citizenship that were given to other property owners, including the right to vote. These demands were initially rejected by the large white sugar planters and their allies, who saw racial divisions as key to maintaining slavery. Leaders of the gens de couleur argued that class unity (of all slave-owners) was more important than race in maintaining slavery and pointed to their role in the militias that enforced slavery. As this debate raged, enslaved workers organized to claim their own freedom. The slave insurrection began in mid-August 1791, when 200 slave-delegates from plantations throughout the northern sugar region of Saint-Domingue met at what their owners thought was a “dinner.” Many of these delegates were slaves who worked as slave drivers, overseers, and skilled artisans on the plantations, and as such had been granted the privilege of travel to such events. This group planned for an uprising to begin later that week when owners would be in the regional capital of Cap Français (now Cap Haitian) for a political meeting. In the third week of August, slaves rose up, killing their white owners and mill supervisors, burning sugar mills and cane fields, smashing manufacturing equipment— that is destroying all the tools of exploitation. Only their own homes and garden plots were spared. The insurrection involved men and women, African-born and creole, overseers and field workers, slaves from sugar plantations and from upland coffee plantations.

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Within 8 days, 184 plantations had been destroyed. By late September, 200 sugar plantations and 1200 coffee plantations had been sacked, and at least 20,000 (by some estimates 80,000) were in the insurgent camps. By 1793, insurgents had networks of communication throughout Saint-Domingue and the rest of the Caribbean.4 In 1791, the demand to end of slavery was expressed in a variety of political forms. Some thought that the king of France had extended protections against the most brutal practices of the planters, and thus expressed loyalty to the king. Some used religious ceremonies to protect their rebellion, an aspect of the insurgency that became a major part of Haitian national mythology.5 Many—and sometimes the same people—adopted the rhetoric of the French Revolution with its call for universal rights. But the main source of success was the early organizing and the careful planning of groups of slaves from different regions, and the discipline these industrialized agricultural workers displayed as a military force during the ensuing twelve years of armed struggle. By 1792, the French Revolution had entered a more radical phase, deposing the king and considering war against all monarchs. As the large sugar planters of Saint Domingue fled to support the royalist opposition, the Jacobin French commissioner, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, opened political offices and the army’s officer corps to gens de couleur. A racially integrated delegation was selected to represent Saint-Domingue in the National Assembly in Paris. Then in 1793, the king of France was executed, and Republican France found itself at war with Spain and Great Britain, the other major colonial powers in the Caribbean. The on-going slave rebellion became a force in the inter-colonial warfare. The Spanish in Santo Domingo, the eastern half of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic) recruited Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, and other leaders of the slave insurgency to their army with offers of

Haitian Revolution, Battle of Vertieres, 1803

19

PLP

HAITI

1492 - 1806 • 1492 Christopher Columbus lands and claims the island of Hispaniola for Spain • 1625-1650 First French settlements on Haiti are established • 1700’s The French colony of Saint Domingue is the most lucrative colony in the world, at this time, more lucrative than the 13 Colonies. Its slaveproduced tropical crops – sugar, rum, cotton, tobacco, and indigo – generated great wealth. Near the end of the 18th century, 500,000 to 700,000 people, mainly of western African origin, were enslaved by the French. • 1791 Haitian Revolution begins when a group of slaves gather at Bois-Caïman in the northern part of the colony • 1804 Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent on January 1, after crushing the French army Napoleon sent to re-enslave Haiti. Over half the people in Haiti die during 1791-1804. • 1804-1806 The US and other countries begin an embargo of trade from Haiti

freedom and land. Britain, on the other hand, acted to protect sugar profits and to gain more territory for exploitation by invading and occupying southern and western Haiti (the region closest to its sugar colony of Jamaica). There they both enforced slavery and reinstituted racebased restrictions on the gens de couleur. In this context, Commissioner Sonthonax reached out to the slaves to defend the French republic. He reduced hours of work, then offered freedom and French citizenship to all black warriors who fought for France. In August 1793 after a mass meeting in Cap Français voted for emancipation, the commissioner took the final step and abolished slavery throughout the colony, in a sense acknowledging in law what was the reality in fact.6 In 1794, Saint-Domingue’s delegates to the French National Assembly—one white, one mixed race, one an African-born former slave—asked that the Assembly abolish slavery in all of France’s colonies. The privations of war had further angered the French working class and weakened (for the moment) the power of the planters, and the Assembly ratified the proposal by acclamation. The slave insurrection of SaintDomingue had pushed the French Revolution into its most radical endorsement of freedom. French officials freed slaves in Guadeloupe and in the other islands they captured during the ongoing war with Britain and Spain. With this Toussaint Louverture and others deserted Spain to swear allegiance to the French Republic. Toussaint became the most important French general, leading French troops, most of them former insurgents, as they drove Britain out of Saint-Domingue in the name of abolishing slavery. Enslaved workers throughout the Americas took notice. As word of the 1791 uprising in Saint-Domingue spread, slave revolts broke out in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Curacao, and Grenada. Major slave conspiracies were detected in Cuba and Spanish Louisiana. Armed slaves battled to establish an inland maroon sanctuary in Jamaica. And in 1800, the enslaved blacksmith Gabriel, inspired

by Saint-Domingue and the French Revolution, attempted to end slavery through an insurrection in Virginia.7 Slave owners, however, were determined to end these threats to their profits. By 1798, French planter interests had begun to reestablish their power in Paris. They found an ally in Napoleon Bonaparte, the French general and future emperor, whose wife was from a Caribbean planter family. In 1802 Napoleon invaded SaintDomingue with encouragement from British and American elites. The British and French would fight each other in Europe for another decade. But when it came to defending the super-exploitation of slavery they could unite: British Prime Minister Henry Addington declared that with regard to Saint-Domingue, the “interest of the two governments is exactly the same—to destroy Jacobinism, especially that of the blacks.” Thomas Jefferson described Toussaint and other black leaders of Saint-Domingue as “Cannibals of the terrible republic” and promised to aid French efforts to “starve Toussaint” into submission.8 The initial French expedition was led by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, the slaveowning General Charles Victor Leclerc, and involved half of the entire French fleet. Leclerc initially appealed to loyalty to the French republic—to patriotism—to win some insurgent generals to his army and to arrest and deport Toussaint Louverture. But when the French re-imposed slavery on the island of Guadeloupe, the people of Saint-Domingue rose up in resistance, forcing their former leaders to desert Leclerc and begin a renewed insurgency. When Leclerc declared a war of extermination that aimed to kill all black men and women except “infants less than twelve years old,” some white troops, many of them Poles, deserted the French army to join the insurgents.9 By 1803, the workers of Haiti— ideologically committed to their struggle for freedom, disciplined and experienced in guerilla warfare—did what no army in Europe had done. They gave Napoleon’s army its first defeat. And in 1804, SaintDomingue declared its independence as the nation of Haiti. The British lost 40,000 soldiers and the French close to 50,000 in the effort to re-impose slavery in Haiti

THEcommunist

and other islands of the West Indies. Half of Haiti’s black population was killed. In all over 300,000 people died in the fight to end slavery in Haiti. The United States refused to recognize the independence of Haiti, and in 1815 the treaty ending Europe’s Napoleonic Wars accepted France’s claim to Haiti as a colonial possession. Jefferson continued his efforts to protect slave owners by isolating Haiti as an economic and ideological force. While Saint-Domingue/ Haiti had been the US’s second largest trading partner (even through the period of warfare), Jefferson instituted a trade embargo and exhorted the New England merchant-traders to accept the loss of a prime market as a sacrifice for the nation. The slave owning nations—the United States, Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal—expanded slavery in the years after the Haitian revolution. In the US slave-based cotton and sugar production expanded into the old southwest and the new Louisiana territory. The French re-imposed slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique. The Spanish expanded sugar production in Cuba, and the Portuguese developed sugar and coffee plantations in Brazil. All of this meant an increase in the slave trade to restock the depleted labor force in the region.10 The Republic of Haiti, on the other hand, continued its attempts to spread the idea of revolution against slavery. In 181516, Haitian president Alexandre Pétion sheltered Simon Bolivar as he initiated an independence movement against Spain. Haiti provided Bolivar with ships, arms and ammunition, a printing press, and troops to train his men, demanding in exchange that he pledge to free the slaves in any republics gaining independence from Spain. As Spain was importing slaves, many free blacks and slaves within Spain’s colonies flocked to the armies of the independence movement. In Peru up to three-quarters of those who fought in liberation army were men of color. In 1821, Gran Colombia adopted a law to emancipate all born of slave mothers after that date. In 1829, Mexico became the second American nation to abolish slavery absolutely.11

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Defining a New NineteenthCentury Nation The rebellion of the enslaved workers began at the point of production, with the destruction of the mills and cane fields; control over production and reproduction continued to be at the center of the struggle to define freedom. As Haiti declared its independence, this struggle expanded to new arenas, including efforts to define race and nationality and to develop formal institutions of government. During the insurgency, rebels had continued to farm family plots to raise food, often claiming these small pieces of land as their personal property. Sometimes these plots were farmed by small groups. When slavery was formally ended, the effort to define work and labor rights in a free French San Domingue was taken up by the new political elite, initially by Toussaint Louverture. But in 1790’s, what did freedom look like? To Toussaint freedom for SaintDomingue required the rebuilding of a plantation economy so the country could once again become a major exporter of sugar and coffee. Toussaint wanted a “modern” economy and invited white planters who were still in exile to return to help rebuild. Confiscated plantation lands were turned over to leaders of the insurgency, creating a new group of black plantation owners. Strict labor laws required former slaves to return to the plantation under year-long labor contracts where they would be paid wages defined as a share of the profits of production. To keep people at work in the industrial style plantations, sales of small plots of land were forbidden.12 Toussaint’s effort increased the production of coffee and sugar, and throughout the 19th century Haitian elites—both black and gens de couleurs— repeatedly adopted similar laws (called rural codes) to reinvigorate the economy by forcing people to work as plantation laborers.13 These elites tried to reorganize their world in class terms, with a rural proletariat of contracted wage workers exploited for capitalist profits. But the Haitian workers had a different definition of freedom. To the ex-slaves freedom meant working for one’s family

HAITI

1815 - 1935 • 1815-1816 Simón Bolívar gets asylum in Haiti twice and also receives military assistance to liberate South America from Spain. • 1825 France threatens to invade Haiti and demands 50 million gold francs as payment for its loss of property, i.e. its slaves. • 1838 France recognizes Haiti’s independence. • 1862 The United States recognizes Haiti. • 1890-1915 German, French, British, and US interests compete for Haiti’s commerce and ports. • 1915-1935 United States Marines invade and occupy Haiti. The US seizes the gold in the Haitian national bank and moves it to NYC for “safe keeping.” The US establishes economic and strategic dominance. A largely peasant guerrilla army, known as the cacos, resists the occupiers.

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without any bosses. They rejected all forms of slavery, including the wage slavery that was becoming dominant in Europe and the northern United States as industrial capitalism developed. In Road to Revolution IV, PLP noted that true freedom can only exist under communism. But that understanding had not yet emerged. Instead of communism, a form of peasant economy emerged. Former plantation laborers, most of them armed and experienced in the wars against slavery, forced the break-up of many plantations. The industrial production of sugar was replaced by small-holders and squatters operating subsistence farms and growing small quantities of coffee and other goods for sale internally and for export. Race would likewise be redefined in the course of the struggle. Racism (in fact the very concept of race) was the product of slavery. And racist divisions—in colonial Haiti a three-part division between whites, gens de couleur, and blacks—were part of the structure of the slave economy.14 In the 1790’s, when the French Republic abolished slavery, the political leadership of Saint-Domingue had been multi-racial, and black leaders such as Toussaint Louverture had welcomed the aid of whites.15 But race also had a class dimension since most slaves were black, often African-born, and those who owned slaves were white or mixed race gens de couleur. The struggle against Napoleon brought race to the forefront. The formal declaration of independence was issued by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Like Toussaint, Dessalines was an ex-slave insurgent leader who had fought for the Spanish and had served under Leclerc. In declaring independence and choosing the name Haiti (from the Taino name for the island), Dessalines rejected any further association with French colonizers. As he pursued those who had participated in the Frenchorganized massacres of blacks, Dessalines ordered and supervised the killing of many white inhabitants. Other whites—including Poles who had joined the fight for independence, a group of Germans who had settled in Haiti before its revolution and many white women who were willing to renounce France—were given Haitian citizenship. The constitution merged nationalism with race. It declared Haiti to be a “black” nation, and declared that all Haitians (including the gens de couleurs and the naturalized whites) would be known as “black.” The constitution also stated that “no white, no matter what his nation,” could henceforth come to Haiti as “master or property owner.”16 With independence, Haiti also struggled to set up structures of government. This effort was defined by conflicts within the revolutionary elite, often between the old elite of the gens de couleurs who had owned small plantations before the insurgency and black ex-slave generals who had gained control of plantations as rewards for their military and political prowess. In its earliest years, Haiti was divided, with a monarchy claiming to be

PLP

based on African patterns in the north, and a republic in the south. By 1821, the country was unified under one government which had established control of the entire island of Hispaniola.17 While independent, Haiti had not escaped the reach of colonialism or slavery. In these decades, Haiti’s economy developed in new ways. The ex-slave peasants preferred to grow subsistence crops not cash crops. And while local markets flourished (often organized by women), the export trade languished. Sugar production, which required capital investment and an industrial organization of work, collapsed. However coffee production was high enough to make Haiti a major exporter, especially to France. Unable to force black workers to work on their plantations, many gens de couleur migrated to the cities, becoming government officials and merchants, and creating a new geography of race and power between rural and urban areas. France pushed to reestablish control over its former colony. In 1825, France announced that it would recognize the independence of Haiti if Haiti paid compensation to former masters for their property losses when slavery was abolished and plantations confiscated. As the French anchored warships in the harbor, the Haitian government decided to negotiate. It allowed the French to assess the value of their losses (including appraising the “value” of some of the government officials who had once been slaves). In the end, France demanded that Haiti pay some 150 million gold francs for the slaves whose lives and labor French planters had stolen in the first place! The French also demanded and won lower tariffs for Frenchmade goods. The Haitian government had to borrow money from French banks to make these payments, and in 1871 French bankers set up the National Bank of Haiti to serve as a tool of economic power in its former colony. It took Haiti over 100 years, and 70% of the state’s income to repay this claim. In the 19th century, over a quarter of the government’s income went to debt repayment, and another half of government income paid for a large military, originally needed to protect against France. Over time the military focused on suppressing domestic rebellions against high taxes and increasing exploitation by merchants. In the 1840’s slave-produced Brazilian coffee began to flood international markets and drive prices down. In the face of increasing economic hardship, Haitian peasants rose up in 1843, 1865, 1867, and 1911.18 The Haitian working class had defeated slavery at home, but the existence of slavery elsewhere, with its super-exploitation of sugar, coffee and cotton workers, was still felt. While Haitian peasants were not wage slaves, exploitation and colonialism continued to dominate their lives.

THEcommunist

Haiti and Inter-Imperialist Competition, 18801934 French domination of Haiti came under challenge in the 1890’s as new imperialist powers vied for trade and influence. Germany, a weak third in the imperialist competition to carve up Africa and Asia, increasingly sought influence in smaller countries such as Haiti. The US began to look at Haiti for strategic reasons. Efforts to develop a canal linking the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean increased competition for the Haitian port of Mole St. Nicolas, which commanded the Windward Passage. US efforts were rebuffed, and then waned when the US acquired Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay after the Spanish American War. From 1908-1915, imperialist competition brought political instability to Haiti. Legally foreigners could not own land, and Haitians were resistant to plantation labor, so imperialist powers set up merchant houses linked to rival elite families (who were descended from the original free black slave-owners). These merchants competed for control of the export of coffee and fruit grown on small farms and for contracts to build railroads. By 1910, German merchants who had married into elite local families dominated trade and shipping. Trading profits depended to a great extent on government policies (taxes, tariffs, construction concessions), so each imperialist power sponsored its own politicians. And each imperialist used military threats to collect debts, threaten governments connected to rivals, or enforce the influence of its friends. In both 1902 and 1911 Germany sent in gunboats to assist their claims; and in 1909, Germany got a concession to control Mole St. Nicolas, which was overturned when US-sponsored politicians moved into power.19 By 1910, US capitalists began increasing their investments in Haiti. The railroad builder James P. MacDonald acquired a former German concession to build a railroad from Cap Haïtien to Port-au-Prince. MacDonald also received a Haitian government guarantee of profits to his financiers, the right to develop banana plantations, and a 15-year monopoly over banana exports. By 1911, the railroad concession had been taken over by its bankers, most importantly by the National City Bank of New York. At the same time, National City Bank in cooperation with the US government began a struggle to seize control of the National Bank of Haiti from French and German investors.20 MacDonald’s efforts to set up banana plantations sparked an armed uprising of peasants. Many peasants had farmed for generations without formal title and faced loss of their farmsteads as the railroad exercised its concession. And when World War I broke out in Europe, US bankers pushed US president Woodrow Wilson to intervene in Haiti and save their investments from both the rebellion of local workers and the refusal of the Haitian

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government to continue to pay for railroad construction. In 1915, citing Haiti’s instability and the threat of German power, Wilson sent US Marines to occupy Haiti, an action he claimed had been “forced” upon the US by circumstances. The US occupation had begun in anticipation of future profits and to push out rivals in the context of the inter-imperialist World War I. The first act of the US occupiers was to remove all the gold from the Haitian National Bank and transport it to New York for “safekeeping.” By 1919, National City Bank was in full control of the National Bank of Haiti and had taken over Haiti’s national debt. The US dissolved the Haitian government at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, took over the collection of customs (the main source of government revenue) and used the revenue to pay the banks before all else, and changed the rules of land ownership to ease the creation of foreign-owned plantations.21 US Marines, having just occupied Veracruz, Mexico for six months, now attempted to put down the ongoing peasant rebellion in Haiti and to open Haiti for commercial sugar and cotton production. They built roads to facilitate the movement of goods, and machinery, using a system of forced labor known as the corvée. When many fled what they saw as a new form of slavery, the Haitian gendarmerie, led and trained by Marine Major Smedley Butler, used arrests to fill their labor needs. Men accused of petty crimes, from vagrancy to cursing Marines and gendarmes, were sentenced to prison and then roped together and marched to work on the roads. The racism of US Marines and the brutality of forced labor led to increasing armed struggle.22 Haitian peasants, in some cases whole villages, began to join the armed caco resistance.23 The more Haitians resisted, the more the corvée was imposed to build roads now needed to speed the movement of troops. Ultimately the Marines mounted a campaign of extermination. A curfew was declared, and any dark-skinned Haitian out after curfew could be shot on sight as a suspected guerilla. Entire villages were

US officer surrounded by dead Haitians killed during the 1915 occupation

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HAITI

burned when Marines were fired upon. Over 11,000 were killed putting down the growing resistance to US occupation.

• 1957-1971 François “Papa Doc” Duvalier becomes President of Haiti. From 1958-64, Duvalier’s attacks, led by his private militia, the Tonton Macoutes, will drive many opponents into exile. In 1971, François Duvalier dies and is succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

In the United States, the black press denounced the occupation, and the NAACP and pacifist groups published exposés and pushed for a Congressional investigation. The NAACP also helped resurrect a pacifist resistance movement among Haitian elites, L’Union Patriotique, and brought the Congressional hearings to Haiti itself. But the results of these reform efforts were a US reaffirmation of the need to occupy Haiti for another 20 years.24

1957 - 1986

• 1982-1984 The US State Department’s Agency for International Development and the Organization of American States (OAS) oversee the slaughter of Haiti’s “creole pigs,” accused of being carriers of African swine fever. This is a major blow to the peasant economy. • 1980’s Thousands of Haitians flee poverty and repression in Haiti by boat, often arriving in South Florida, creating an immigration “crisis” for the US government. • 1986 Widespread protests against repression force Baby Doc to flee Haiti. The US Air Force flies him to exile in France. A military junta takes power.

Racism was the justification. Repeatedly US politicians and the bourgeois press interpreted peasant resistance to forced labor and wage labor as evidence that Haitians were “primitive” and needed US leadership. Smedley Butler, the US marine officer leading the Haitian police, privately described Haitians as “savage monkeys.” Ignoring the brutality of the occupation, the bourgeois press swooned instead over the military honors conveyed on Butler for his activities in Mexico and Haiti—all in the service of US imperialism.

1934-1980: Communism and AntiCommunism under the “Good Neighbor Policy” As a result of the long resistance of Haitian workers and the racism of US firms, few American companies invested in Haiti during the occupation era. But the US emerged as the predominant market for Haitian products such as coffee, having displaced all its earlier rivals. Local economic power centered on a mixed-race merchant elite who purchased coffee from peasant farmers and leased out contract laborers (braceros) to work on U.S.-owned sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic and Cuba.25 By 1929, as the US ruling class began to grapple with the Great Depression, it decided that the costs of occupation were too high. With Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean clearly in the sphere of US imperialism, the US embarked on a socalled “good neighbor” policy. US troops were removed in 1934, leaving the US reliant on local strong men to discipline

the working class. Politicians who could control their populations for imperialist exploitation were favored and those who failed were deposed. During the 1930’s and 1940’s, the US encouraged conflict between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which was led by its favorite dictator Rafael Trujillo, as a way to control client politicians. Trujillo had been trained by the US military and gained a reputation as an anticommunist and a manipulator of racism. In 1937, Trujillo’s army murdered over 15,000 Haitian immigrant workers in the Dominican Republic, a massacre covered up by pro-Trujillo politicians in Haiti and the United States.26 At the end of World War II as Haitian farm laborers faced massive layoffs, workers rose up in what Haitians called the “Revolution of 1946.” The uprising began with a student strike protesting the shut-down of a newspaper that had denounced the Haitian government as fascist. Bus drivers, bakers, government employees, workers at American firms such as Standard Fruit and American Refining Company, and even some in the army joined the striking students. As a result, the Haitian military and the US ambassador demanded that the unpopular president step down and go into exile. President Élie Lescot had long been a staunch ally of US imperialism, but his inability to control the population made him dispensable.27 As students and workers celebrated their success in deposing a fascist regime, they embarked upon an effort to define their revolution. New parties were formed, and candidates announced. The real struggle was a struggle for ideological influence within the working class. On the one hand were numerous communist and socialist groups and the independent unions they sponsored; on the other the noiriste, or black-power, movement associated with the labor leader Daniel Fignolé and the physician François Duvalier.28 In the early 1930’s, Haitian intellectuals inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution and developments in the Soviet Union had formed a communist party. In the early 1930’s, they attempted to organize dockworkers, attacked nationalism,

THEcommunist

and organized to fight both local and foreign capitalists. Many were jailed or forced into exile. By the late 1930’s, Haitian communists like the rest of the international communist movement, adopted a popular-front ideology29 that focused on fighting fascism and accepted alliances with lesser-evil capitalists; some of its leaders accepted positions in the Haitian government that had once jailed them.

24

life. This position found support after the war in elite efforts to promote tourism by highlighting a commercialized, exoticized Haiti.

In the wake of the 1946 “revolution,” Haitian communists’ initially called for the socialization of all land and industry. But after being criticized by Cuban communists for being “too left,” the Haitians moderated their program into a reformist call for a democratic constitution, maximum-hours legislation, the legalization of trade unions, and an end to anti-communist legislation. The communists focused their attack on imperialism—targeting Arabs, Italians, and white Americans—not capitalism, a position that left them ideologically disarmed for the struggle within the working class over the next decade.

Most importantly, the noiristes asserted that the solution to Haiti’s poverty was a cross-class alliance between the black working class and black elites against mixed-race elites. Embracing the black and red imperial flag of Dessalines, they promoted a “black legend” that claimed that the revolution of Toussaint and Dessalines had been undermined by the mixed-race elites. The Marxist idea of working-class unity was denounced in racist terms, as a European idea not suited for black workers. While their ideas seemed “radical” to some, the noiristes seldom attacked US investment or influence in Haiti, and were never jailed or driven into exile as the communists were. In fact, in the 1940’s, Duvalier went to the United States for advanced training in public health and returned to Haiti to serve as a medical examiner for the American Health mission to eradicate malaria in the countryside.

The noiriste movement also began in the 1930’s. The noiriste black-power program was explicitly anti-communist and focused on color, not class as the key division in Haiti. One of the intellectual leaders of the movement was François Duvalier, who embraced the racist ideology of Arthur de Gobineau. According to Duvalier, Africans and Europeans had different social and psychological traits, with Africans more inclined to paternalistic and despotic government. In emphasizing racial and color distinctions, Duvalier called for the incorporation of peasant folk practices such as vodou into political and cultural

As a result of the uprising of 1946, a black politician, Dumarsais Estime, was elected to the presidency. Though Estime had ties to traditional elites, his “color” was heralded as a sign of “revolutionary” progress. Yielding to the anger of the moment, Estime instituted some reforms—raising the minimum wage, paying off the occupation-era debt to the United States, and nationalizing the banana industry in favor of local political allies. At the same time, he set up state-sponsored unions to undermine independent unions and limited the right to strike. By 1948, he had reinstated laws

Masthead of student newspaper La Ruche, whose banning sparked the protests of 1946

HAITI

1987 - 1991 • 1987-1990 During this period there are three successive military governments, each overthrown by another general, until a provisional government is set in place and schedules new elections. • 1990 In July 1990, big landowners (grandons) massacre hundreds of peasants demanding land in Jean-Rabel. In November, presidential elections are canceled after Army soldiers and former Tonton Macoutes massacre dozens of would-be voters. In December Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an advocate of “liberation theology known for his sermons in support of the poor, is elected President with 67.5% of the counted popular vote. • 1991 In September, Aristide is deposed by a military coup led by former members of the Tonton Macoutes and by groups such as FRAPH allied with the traditional elite and funded and trained by the US (through the National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA funded groups).

25

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personal accounts. Duvalier’s corruption and brutality were well known, but acceptable by the United States because Duvalier was an anti-communist, something especially important after the Castro revolution in Cuba. Though some US politicians criticized Duvalier, as long as he did what the Cold-War US ruling class wanted, that is arresting and executing communists and trade unionists, he received US military assistance and aid dollars.

US Imperialism and Cheap Labor

Francois Duvalier (center) with “liberal” Republican Nelson Rockefeller, Haiti 1969

making communist parties illegal, and in the 1950’s, government repression of communists, socialists, and independent trade unionists increased. During the 1950’s, economic aid poured into Haiti from the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the US’s Point IV program, and missionaries. The tourist industry boomed and concessions were made to US investors such as Reynolds Aluminum. But in 1956, falling coffee prices and the destruction of crops by Hurricane Hazel, left many peasants homeless, forcing them to migrate to the cities where they found little work. Urban merchants who had traditionally dominated the export of coffee also faced losses. With mass protests mounting, the US forced out Haiti’s then president Paul Magliore, whom they had ushered into power 6 years earlier.

In the 1970’s, the United States began to look to Haiti as a source of cheap labor in manufacturing. The first Free Trade Zone in Haiti was opened in 1972; and in 1982 the Caribbean Basin allowed goods manufactured in Haiti (and other Caribbean nations) to come into the United States duty free for a 12-year period. The government of Jean Claude Duvalier also promised a long period of no local taxes to investors who established assembly plants for electronics, textiles and garments, and most notoriously baseballs. In the 1980’s, 90% of the world’s baseballs (and all those used in the major leagues) were manufactured in Haiti, where the minimum wage was $1.30 a day. Labor costs for a ball that sold for $2.50-$4.50 were 9 cents.30 At the same time US workers were increasingly under attack as US bosses moved factories out of unionized areas in the Midwest and Northeast to the South and overseas. The low-wages paid to Haitian workers, reverberated as an attack on workers in the United States and the rest of the world.

The ultimate victor of Magliore’s removal was François Duvalier, who won the support of the Haitian Army and the United States during a four-way electoral contest that pitted Duvalier against his one-time noiriste ally, Fignolé. Unlike the election of 1946, that of 1956-57 saw little activity by independent labor groups or Marxists. Instead it was dominated by intimidation as Duvalier associated thugs terrorized residents of urban slums.

In Haiti, the creation of a super-low wage labor force required the further destruction of Haiti’s peasant agriculture. Haitian peasant and worker resistance since independence had been based on their ability to grow their own food, and their willingness to maintain this independence even if it meant they were poor. As food production was destroyed, Haitians were forced off the land into wage labor in the process of dispossession that Marx called “proletarianization”.

Duvalier, known as “Papa Doc” as a result of his activities with the Health Service, ruled Haiti from 195771, and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier ruled from 1971-86. The Duvaliers accelerated the pattern of working-class repression that had begun in the early 50’s. “Papa Doc” initially won some workers to his concept of “black” unity and by manipulating rural folk traditions such as vodou, which he said represented the authentic “African” voice of the Haitian nation and of the Haitian struggle against slavery. But he ultimately ruled through death squads known as the Tonton Macoutes; some 50,000 Haitians were killed and millions driven into exile during his time in office.

The process of proletarianization accelerated with IMF and US demands in the 1980’s for changes in the economy to repay of the Haitian national debt (which had soared under the rule of the Duvaliers) and to correct balance of payment issues. The IMF and the United States insisted that the government reduce the already minimal spending on domestic needs such as education. And more importantly to enforcing Haiti as a center of low wage labor, the US insisted that Haiti’s tariffs on imported agricultural products be reduced. As a result US agricultural surpluses, especially rice, were dumped into Haiti at prices that began to undercut the viability of Haiti’s peasant economy.

Duvalier (father and son) funneled foreign aid and money borrowed in the name of the government into their

The attack on Haitian peasant agriculture was intensified in 1982-84 when Haiti’s creole pig population

THEcommunist

was exterminated by USAID. The excuse was an episode of swine fever in the neighboring Dominican Republic, which US experts warned might damage the US hog industry. The US eventually shipped in pigs from Iowa, but these animals were only available to those who met minimum income and property ownership requirements. Unlike the creole pigs, which were remarkably disease resistant and able to forage for food, the new pigs were highly susceptible to disease and required expensive feed to survive. Where pigs had once provided food and a source of cash for peasants, now wage work was required to pay for their upkeep. The peasant economy was devastated, and with this school registration and sales of merchandise dropped. Per capita food production began to fall, and dependency on imports soared. In the 1970’s, Haiti imported only 10% of its food needs. By the 1990’s, Haiti imported 42% of its food, and by 2004, Haiti imported 70% of its food. In the period 1980-1990 real wages fell 50%. In the early 1980’s, as Haitian workers confronted continuing violence at the hands of the Tonton Macoute and increasing poverty, an exodus of “boat people” fled Haiti for the United States, which refused to give them asylum. In November 1985, student protests sparked open peasant rebellions. Jean Claude Duvalier’s regime was increasingly ineffective in creating a stable environment for new low wage factories; and in 1986, the United States persuaded him to go into exile. He was allowed to take the millions he had stolen with him. From 19861990, military regimes were in charge of the country; in 1990 elections were held for a new parliament and a new president.

Aristide and the Limits of Reformism: For some, the 1986 exile of “Baby Doc” seemed a repeat of 1946, a “revolution.” Daniel Fignole, the anticommunist noiriste labor leader who had been living in exile in New York, returned to a hero’s welcome. In 1990, Jean Bertrand Aristide, the candidate of a peasant and worker resistance movement known as Lavalas, was elected president with 67% of the vote. Aristide was a former priest and proponent of liberation theology. He had opposed Duvalier using symbolism that traced back to Fignole, and was widely seen as an advocate of the poor. His platform included calls for land reform, a higher minimum wage, price controls on food, and the expansion of education; it opposed the privatization of public services. But he also announced that his supporters did not want the land and wealth of the rich. Nine months into office, Aristide was force out by the military. Though Aristide’s program was limited, the fact that he had mobilized working-class forces behind it was too much for the traditional elites (those with export subcontracts and large landowners with tenants) who had long supported the Duvaliers and who were accustomed

26

to removing politicians they didn’t like. They initiated efforts to suppress Lavalas, using murdering paramilitary groups funded and trained through US agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA. One of the most notorious of these was FRAPH (Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti). As repression increased, the coup was denounced by the UN, and many Haitians attempted to flee. In the period 1991-94, thousands of Aristide supporters were raped and killed, 300,000 became internal refugees within Haiti, and others fled to the Dominican Republic. Once again tens of thousands took to the sea in hopes of landing in the US, and once again the US was patrolling the sea lanes to turn back immigrants (over 40,000 were interdicted at sea and returned to Haiti). The US faced a public relations crisis as those fleeing met death on the seas or prison and deportation when they got to the US. In this situation, the US ruling class looked to Aristide as a solution. Capitalists use violence when they need to, but are also willing to use the carrot to entice people to put down their resistance. Even though he blamed the US for the coup (i.e. the Republicans), Aristide had gone into exile in the United States. In the US, he developed ties to groups such as the Congressional Black Caucus (particularly to Maxine Waters of LA) and to left-liberal entertainers such as Danny Glover. During the election campaign of 1992, Clinton promised that he would work to return Aristide to government if elected. In 1994, a deal was made. US troops would occupy Haiti to suppress disorder (later the US turned this portion of its role over to the UN; the last US troops left Haiti in 2000), and Aristide would be returned to power. The reasons are clear: paramilitary forces had been unable to control the resistance of the working class and the flood of refugees was unacceptable and embarrassing to the US image. Aristide, in turn, now accepted the neo-liberal, freetrade agenda of the Clinton Administration and the US ruling class. He agreed to impose IMF demanded “structural readjustments” which included further lowering tariffs and the privatization of government agencies and services; he agreed to disband the army (according to Aristide, Haitians were a peaceful people and didn’t need and army). Most importantly he pledged to set up additional free trade zones31 and to work to “reconcile the rich and the poor,” i.e. to minimize any talk of class conflict. Yet in 1994, the economic situation had changed for Haiti. Many of the manufacturing firms that had dominated Haiti in the 1980’s were leaving. The earlier creation of free trade zones in countries such as Haiti had pushed wages down elsewhere. With its initial tax breaks ending, and after years of protests against exploitation in its Haitian factories at home, Rawlings, for example, moved its baseball manufacturing to Costa Rica. And in

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HAITI

1991 - 2000 • 1991-1994 Thousands of Haitians flee violence and repression in Haiti by boat. Although most are repatriated to Haiti by the US government, many enter the US as refugees. • 1994 The US reinstates Aristide after he agrees to an IMF and USdemanded economic reform package, including reducing tariffs to let in more US produced food and the opening of low-wage Free Trade Zones. US troops again occupy Haiti. • 1995 Military authority over the island is handed over to the UN. Aristide dissolves the Haitian army, and CIA front DynCorp is brought in to train a new national police force. The US will continue to fund the opposition to Aristide. • 1996-2000 Aristide is succeeded as president by René Préval, who continues structural adjustment and privatization programs begun under Aristide. • 2000 In May 2000, legislative elections are held and some results are challenged by OAS election supervisors. In November, Aristide is reelected for a second five-year term in elections boycotted by the opposition.

1994, the Clinton Administration signed the NAFTA agreement which made Mexico a low cost (and larger) site for manufacturing than the Caribbean Basin. Imperialism in Haiti, now took a particular form with the rise of the NonGovernmental Organization (NGO). The move to privatize government services led to an increasing role of NGOs as providers of education and health care within the country. In fact there are more NGOs working in Haiti than in any other country (some 10,000), most receiving funds from US or other governmental funders (such as USAID) or from corporations. As agriculture was destroyed, and people were forced into the cities to find wage work, NGOs such as CARE provided food assistance. Debt service takes up most of the government’s revenue (in 2003, $57.4 million was allocated for debt service and only $39 million for education, health care, the environment, and transportation) so NGOs rose to increasing prominence. Eighty percent of Haiti’s health, education, food and water services are provided by foreign agencies.

rely on the working class to fight for their own power, for the communist revolution for which PLP fights. Rather, his program provided avenues of advancement for some of the poor and relied on liberal capitalists (and rival imperialists), not the working class at home or abroad. In 1996, Aristide finished his term, and a new president, Rene Preval, was elected (in an election with only 25% of the voters bothering to participate) and continued with the Aristide program. In May 2000, elections for the legislature were held, and the results of a few of the seats were contested by conservative parties, who then boycotted the November presidential election. Aristide was reelected president with 90% of the vote, and the alleged corruption of the legislative elections became a rallying cry for opponents of Aristide. But, Aristide continued to carry out his promises to set up Free Trade Zones. In 2002, Aristide and the president of the Dominican Republic presided over the opening of the second free trade zone in the northeast on the border with the Dominican Republic. Coevi FTZ in Ouanaminthe was built on land taken from farmers by eminent domain. Its zone was part of the “Hispaniola Plan” to open some 14 free trade zones in Haiti, all to be subsidized by the US or the World Bank. By 2003, two more zones were in the works. The firms in Coevi FTZ were almost all Dominican-owned subcontractors for American companies, making clothing for

We can see here the purpose of reformism as a political movement: to limit fight back. The reform movements — demanding higher wages, schools, health care, running water and electricity — were fueled by the anger and aspirations of the working class. But leaders such as Aristide (and the various NGOs that operate in the world) act to limit who is targeted and ultimately to win workers away from a potential class analysis into support for capitalist solutions. Aristide’s opponents have charged him with corruption, charges that have never been proven, but the issue of corruption is irrelevant. Even if Aristide was strictly honest, his program was limited from the start, and the longer Aristide was in office, the more clear the limits would become. When Aristide was attacked (in 1991 and then in 2004) the one thing he would not do was arm and Haitian boat people

THEcommunist

Target, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, JC Penny, etc. The Dominican Republic had exhausted its quotas to export these items to the US, and now would import into the US under the Haitian quota, and Haitian wages were about a third of those in the Dominican Republic. In 2003, the Haitian Parliament raised the minimum wage, but the Aristide government accepted an IMF adjustment of fuel prices that raised consumer prices 40%. Capitalism only gives so that it can take more. As a result, the buying power of the minimum wage fell from $3 a day in 1994 to $1.50-1.75 a day in 2004. As real wages fell, Aristide faced new opposition. The conservative opposition continued, but now there was opposition from the working class. In 2003, Aristide’s government cracked down on workers organizing, and the police beat and shot workers demonstrating at a factory in Port au Prince. As PL has learned from history, we can’t ever trust a boss no matter how many promises he makes, whether or not s/he is the same race as us, or whether or not god is on his side, because bosses will always betray the working class. As anger mounted against him, Aristide came up with a new response, a new target for working class anger: he demanded reparations from France. Aristide mounted a campaign, complete with TV ads and petitions to the UN, to demand that France repay the money it had stolen in 1825, which by his calculation amounted to $21 billion. Aristide’s concessions to imperialism were now to be masked by a demand on France, the original exploiter of the Haitian working class. France was unhappy; and the US, dissatisfied with the reemerging working class anger in Haiti, accused Aristide of corruption. In 2004, the United States and France pressured Aristide out of office. Threatening to arrest him as a drug trafficker, or to leave him vulnerable to opposition forces in the police,32 the US and French ambassadors demanded that he sign a letter of resignation. He was then flown on an unmarked US military plane to a French base in Africa. In the elections that followed Aristide’s departure, former president Preval was reelected, and the effort to privatize government services and to open free trade zones continued.

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Bill Clinton, now special UN envoy for Haiti, became an advocate for investment on the island. His goal was to open more free trade zones for garment production and zones for the commercial production and export of mangos. He was joined by US investor and philanthropist George Soros, whose Open Society Institute set up a Haitian wing called FOKAL. In 2009, Bill Clinton and Soros announced new plans to work with the WIN Group of Haiti to open a $45 million industrial park near Cité Soleil called the West Indies Free Trade Zone. The WIN Group is owned by Haiti’s Mevs family. This family is one of Haiti’s richest five families, former supporters of Duvalier whose wealth goes back to merchants who allied themselves with the United States in 1915-34. The Mevs owns shoe and soap factories, control Haiti’s sugar imports, own much of downtown Port au Prince, and control oil import and storage facilities. Haiti also remains a strategic location for the United States due to the continuing importance of the Windward passage, the potential for oil in the waters off Cuba and Haiti (more important now than before due to increasing competition and prices for oil), and the potential importance of its ports. In 2004, the US embassy in Haiti was the fifth largest in the world, despite the nation’s small size, after the embassies in Iraq, China, Germany, and Afghanistan.

Lessons for the Working Class: Often people tell us that we must work within the system, work for gradual changes that are possible etc. But the story of Haiti and Aristide reveals the limits of reform. When the capitalist classes need cheap labor, they don’t give reforms, at home or abroad. Just as Bill Clinton pushed Aristide to accept “structural adjustments” in Haiti, he was abolishing the welfare system that undergirded minimum wages at home. Aristide gained a big following among the working class, but as a reformer he agreed explicitly to minimize class struggle. Workers were misled and killed. Aristide, the reformer, didn’t arm the working class, but disarmed it, in both an ideological and a military sense, and the

HAITI

2001 - 2008 • 2001-2003 Aristide’s opponents use the OAS challenge to legislative elections to increase attacks on Aristide and his party. Former Haitian soldiers carry out guerrilla attacks, primarily along the Dominican border and in the capital. • 2003 Aristide breaks ground on a Free Trade Zone near the border with the Dominican Republic, one of a proposed 14 FTZs in the “Hispaniola Plan.” He cracks down on protesting workers in an FTZ in Port au Prince, while announcing a call for $21 billion in reparations from France. • 2004 In 2004, Aristide is removed from office by the US and France. UN troops return to occupy Haiti. • 2006 In 2006, Rene Préval is reelected president on a platform of all-class unity. He accepts aid from Venezuela and others in the region. • 2008 In 2008, workers protesting high food prices attack the presidential palace. In the 1970’s, Haiti imported 10% of its food; in 2004, it imported 70% of its food. Food prices rose 50% from 2007 to 2008.

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HAITI

2009 - 2010 • 2009 Bill Clinton named special UN envoy to Haiti. He announces plans to join with George Soros and the WIN group, owned by the elite Mevs family to build a new FTZ. • 2010 In January earthquakes rock Haiti. Capitalism compounds this natural disaster into a world tragedy. Over 200,000 people die and millions more are affected to this day.

working class paid a high price. Reformism cannot improve the lot of the world’s working class, only communist revolution to smash capitalism. The view that only reforms were possible led to the crushing of the Haitian communist movements of the 1930’s and 1940’s. At the same time, neither the workers of Haiti nor those of the United States can win these changes alone. The working class needs to be part of an international communist movement, of one communist party that rejects nationalist and racist divisions within the working class.

Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapters xxxi and xxxii, quotation from chapter xxxii. Marx’s description of primitive accumulation is also the source of one of his most quoted statements: “Force is the midwife of every society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.” A discussion of how this worked and the money/ profits involved can be found in Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800.

1

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: the story of the Haitian Revolution, pp. 18-21.

2

Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, pp. 163-64.

3

4

Dubois, Avengers, chapter 4.

One of the most mythologized aspects of the first days of the 1791 uprising is the role of Boukman, a man who had worked as a driver and coachman who led a religious ceremony at a place called Bois-Caiman before the uprising. In fact there was probably more than one religious ceremony in this period. The Bois-Caiman ceremony was first described in 1814 by a white exile. Since then, it has taken on an important role in both religion and nationalism within Haiti. See Dubois, Avengers, pp. 99-102. For a discussion of the uses and interpretation of the Bois Caiman ceremony, see Dubois, “The Citizen’s Trance: The Haitian Revolution and the Motor of History,” in Magic and Modernity, ed. Birgit Meyers and Peter Pels. 5

6

Dubois, Avengers, pp. 155-65.

Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: the Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800-1802.

7

In the end, Jefferson and the British reneged on their promises of material support. They interpreted the size of the Leclerc expedition as a threat aimed at them rather than at the government of Toussaint. Jefferson, however, would use Napoleon’s losses in Saint-Domingue to acquire France’s claims in North America, i.e. the Louisiana Purchase. Quotation from Addington is in Dubois, Avengers, p 256. For quotations from Jefferson and a

8

At the same time, the history of Haiti illustrates the need for communists to be inside the mass movements of the working class. If communists were inside this mass movement that formed around Aristide, we could expose the limits and build a base for communist ideas and practice to expand the limits and move closer to revolution.

detailed (if somewhat apologetic account of Jefferson’s diplomacy) see Tim Matthewson, “Jefferson and Haiti,” Journal of Southern History, 62 (May1995): 209-248. Leclerc also encouraged divisions among the insurgent generals, many of whom were upset at the policies of Toussaint and others of whom were competing with him for wealth and power. Toussaint would die in prison in France. See Dubois, Avengers, 290-293; quotation on 290. Those who had served in revolutionary and republican army were denounced as “bandits” who couldn’t be forced to work [as slaves].

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In this period, the United States, with 900,000 slaves, was the largest slave-owning country. In 1808, the United States cut off importations of new slaves, in part to prevent importation of slaves from the Caribbean with memory or experience in struggles against slavery and those from Africa that might have experience in rebellion there. At this point, states such as Virginia became the suppliers of slaves to the new cotton plantations in what became an elaborate domestic US slave trade (See Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market). During the period 1815-1830, the international traffic in slaves to the Americas exceeded that of the period 1780-1800 (Blackburn, Overthrow, 322).

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11

Blackburn, Overthrow, 345-372.

Toussaint had been a slave. After becoming free, he had briefly owned a slave and had rented slaves. He joined the insurgency against slavery at the beginning, and was dedicated to the anti-slavery cause. For more on Toussaint see Dubois, Avengers of the New World, chapters 8-12; Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-184, chapters 5 & 6. These both add to the classic account of Toussaint, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, which was first published in 1938.

12

Robert K. Lacerte, “The evolution of land and labor in the Haitian Revolution,” The Americas, 34 (1978): 449-459. See also, Dubois, Avengers and Blackburn, Overthrow.

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THEcommunist

14

See PLP Racism pamphlet.

15

Dubois, Avengers.

As was mentioned in the text, Leclerc had quickly declared the war in Saint-Domingue to be a war of extermination. He had decided that men and women who had fought to eliminate slavery would probably never again be good workers. Instead they would be replaced by new slaves. After Leclerc died (as a result of disease), the French General Rochambeau replaced him. Rochambeau brought in attack dogs to assist in the battle to retake Haiti. At one point he organized a “circus” attended by many whites in which black prisoners were set at the mercy of attack dogs. Other black prisoners were burned alive, drowned, and asphyxiated by poisonous fumes. At this point Dessalines, who had been fighting the French under the French tri-colored flag, is said to have torn the white strip out of the flag. Whites, he said, had forfeited their right to be in the community as a result of their brutality. Dubois, Avengers, pp. 290-93, 298-301.

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Haiti would be expelled from the eastern half of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic) in 1844, but it had forced the end of slavery there. Haiti would send expeditions into Spanish Santo Domingo in 1849 and 1850; in 1861, Haiti aided some of the Dominican Republic’s independence fighters until threatened by Spain. The Dominican Republic would obtain its independence from Spain in 1865.

17

Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, p. 480, 540; Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S Imperialism, 1915-1940, pp.49-51.

18

Brenda Gayle Plummer, “The Metropolitan Connection: Foreign and Semi-foreign Elites in Haiti, 1900-1915,” Latin American Research Review 19(1984): 119-142. Of course the explanation of this instability offered to the US public was racist—something in the character of black people. In this period, Haiti became an object of cultural interest (for example the play Emperor Jones). In the 1930s, as a result of the efforts of communists, Haiti’s history became an example for many of anti-racist resistance.

19

Walter H. Posner, “American Marines in Haiti, 1915-1922,” The Americas 20(1964):231-266; Hans Schmidt, The U.S. Occupation of Haiti (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971, 1995). By 1914, the railroad company was bankrupt. Haiti however refused to pay off on its bonds because the promised railroad connections had not been completed. During the US occupation, this money would be paid in full.

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Roger L. Farnham, the National City Bank employee appointed to run the Haitian railroad was a key source of information to the Wilson administration. In 1915, he met with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (the former “Populist” and alleged opponent of banks). Farnham demanded that the US occupy Haiti and threatened that US business would pull out if it didn’t. (Renda, Taking Haiti, 10, 52, 98-99. See also Posner, “American Marines” and Schmidt, U.S. Occupation). The technique of taking control of a nation’s customs collection was known as a “customhouse receivership.” It was imposed on the Dominican Republic and other countries of the Caribbean in the imperialist technique known as “dollar diplomacy.” On this more broadly see, Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: the politics and culture of dollar diplomacy, 1900-1930 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). On the military tactics in a broader Caribbean context see, Lester D. Langley, The Banana Wars (Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resources, 2002 [first published 1985]).

21

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Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). The account that follows is based on this book.

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23 The term Caco came from the period of slave rebellion. Often these peasant rebels came from and were supported by their own communities, and some US observers noted this support. But the US military defined them as “professional” soldiers or as “bandits” or “soldiers of fortune” feared by peasants. Later some US officials admitted that cacos were not bandits but rather were “foraging revolutionists.” (Renda 141, 144)

Leon D. Pamphile, “The NAACP and the American Occupation of Haiti,” Phylon 47 (1986): 91-100; “The Truth about Haiti: An NAACP Investigation” @http://historymatters.gmuedu/d/5018. The NAACP investigations were led by James Weldon Johnson, who had served as a US consul in Venezuela and was active in the Republican Party.

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25

Plummer, 172-77.

The United States dumped Trujillo in 1960, when he no longer served their interests; ge was assassinated in 1961. In 1965, the US invaded and briefly occupied the Dominican Republic when it was unhappy with Trujillo’s successors.

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Lescot had long been a friend of the United States. He was a fervent anti-communist, who had sought out and expelled foreigners and others suspected of communist leanings when serving as Minister of the Interior in the early 1930s. Later he served as Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, and helped cover up Trujillo’s massacre of Haitian workers. During WWII, he participated in US-sponsored efforts to develop rubber plantations that led to the clearing of some 47,000 acres of peasant-cultivated land. The eventual cancelation of this project contributed to the post-war depression that undermined his political power.

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28 For a more detailed account, see Matthew J. Smith, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 19341957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

For a critique of popular front ideas and of the line of the international communist movement in the 1940s and 1950s that encouraged these positions, see PLP’s “Road to Revolution III” (1971) and its supporting articles.

29

“Unsporting Multinationals,” The Multinational Monitor (December 1985), @http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/ issues/1985/12/ebert.html. Accessed 13 March 2013.

30

In 1995, US AID offered loans for conferences to recruit business investments in Haiti but rejected an increase in the Haitian minimum wage because any increase would “jeopardize the ‘comparative advantage’ of ‘its highly productive, low-cost labor force.’”

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After the disbanding of the Army, the US furnished funds to train a new national police force. Many in the police force were former Tonton Macoutes, former army officers, and former members of FRAPH. DynCorp (often used as a CIA conduit) was hired to train this police force.

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THE LAND OF THE FEE AND THE HOME OF THE SLAVE:

MYTHS AND ILLUSIONS ABOUT U.S. CAPITALISM THAT KEEPS US ENSLAVED

Capitalism is a system in which a small minority of rich owners of industry and finance, called capitalists, maintain control over the lives of the great majority of people who have to work for a living. How can a small minority control a large majority? While the answer partly lies in the capitalists’ control over the means of force and violence (namely the police, courts, prisons, national guards, and the military), they could never keep their system running day to day without total chaos by these means alone. The capitalists require that the great majority, the working class, harbor stupendous illusions about how the system works. To do this they create countless myths and make them seem plausible by making grand claims, without ever comparing these to overall realities. The purpose of this article is to examine the myths in light of real conditions and to expose the most important of these myths – the belief in which keeps us enslaved by a system that does us, our families, and our class untold damage around the world. The key myths are freedom, democracy, and the alleged benefits of competition. Only by pulling our blinders off can we hope to free ourselves from capitalism, or even to hold that as a noble goal, indeed the greatest goal in life.

Proof that capitalism is harmful for most people is right under our noses, but we are often blinded by the propaganda that we are fed from the crib, through the news and entertainment media, politicians, and schools and universities. Human perception is not simply the taking in of things our senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste happen to pick up. Perception is much more than that. It involves a perceptual framework through which our senses filter the things all around us. Because of this, two different people can observe precisely the same phenomena and yet come away with completely different perceptions of what they just experienced. We each decide, whether we realize it or not, what things around us are important to see, hear, etc., and what things are not. For example, when talking with someone in a crowded room, we are able to listen to the person we are facing without letting the other talking interfere, unless it is so loud we cannot hear our friend. If we wanted to focus on what someone else is saying, we could do so if it were in hearing range, but then we would not be hearing what our friend was saying. This is a decision we make, usually consciously, but not always.

From birth we are taught that capitalism means freedom and democracy, and that it is the best possible political system for the most people. Or as Churchill has been variously paraphrased, it is the worst form of government except for all the rest, which amounts to the same thing. We are further taught that capitalist competition produces the best quality products for individual consumers, i.e., for all of us, and is therefore the best economic system for the most people. This is based on the claim that people are basically selfish and that the most important things to people are products for individual use, no matter how useless and no matter how much they substitute for things we really need.

The important thing about the framework through which we perceive various things is that it is not fixed throughout our lives. Indeed by learning a new outlook on what is important and what can be neglected, we change our perceptual frameworks all the time. The aim of this essay is precisely to change the reader’s perceptual framework about the nature of the system we live in. Nothing in this essay requires any remote research, but rather depends on our taking a new look at things that we experience all the time in our daily lives.

As it turns out, for a small class of capitalists, capitalism does offer freedom and democracy and is the best possible system, although competition causes many capitalists to lose out to their competitors, particularly internationally. But for the vast majority of humanity it means relentless horror, misery, and death.

So let’s examine what is meant by the words freedom, democracy, and competition and let’s examine what it is about capitalism that is said to benefit the vast majority of humanity.

Freedom What do we mean when we say that workers are free today or that one or another country is a free country?

THEcommunist

When slavery ruled the American South and the Caribbean from the early 1600’s through the mid 1800’s, as well as many other places and times, freedom could easily be understood as the opposite of the chains, whips, and guns that kept enslaved Africans bound to the plantations against their will and certainly not to their benefit. But when slavery in the U.S. was finally abolished in the mid-1800’s as a result of the Civil War, the problems of the former enslaved black workers did not end. Prison chain gangs fed by arbitrary arrests and convictions, Jim Crow laws cloaking these injustices in legal cover, and capitalist-inspired racist ideology continued to guarantee that black labor was employable by the few at a higher intensity of exploitation, and consequently greater level of misery, for black workers than for many other workers (Blackmon – see references at the end). The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution that purported to end slavery contains the following loophole: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States…[our emphasis]

“Crimes” used to justify imprisonment and enslavement after the formal end to slavery included vagrancy (essentially meaning unemployment), so vaguely defined as to permit the police and courts to convict any black man of it (Blackmon). It was generally understood in the South that white men were simply not subject to such arrest and conviction, though the law did not specifically spell that out. Much the same happens today with arrests and convictions for drug “crimes.” One of the key aspects was, and remains, that state legislatures and Congress define many things as crimes that have no victims – no victims, that is, other than the person arrested. Not much has changed since the Civil War in the U.S. in that regard, and in many ways this oppression and misery have actually intensified in more recent times (Alexander, Perkinson, Beckett and Sasson, Massey and Denton). Possession of drugs is a modern equivalent to vagrancy among victimless crimes. Black labor following the Civil War was termed “free,” only because the chains had been removed from many and the whips and guns were kept barely hidden, but still very much present in the hands of the police, militias, prison guards, and the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, with the recent skyrocketing of the U.S. prison population in the last couple of decades, begun with the political manipulation of “crime in the streets” by Johnson and Nixon, escalated with the “War on Drugs” under Reagan, and continued by every president since, Republican and Democrat alike, a huge proportion of black workers – particularly, but not solely, men – have become once again enslaved by the gun. In Chicago, for example, 55% of adult black men have felony records (Alexander, p. 184). Overall black men in the U.S. are incarcerated at a

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rate more than 6 times that of white men; they have a one in four chance of being jailed some time during their lives; and one in fourteen are at any one time in jail or prison (PLP pamphlet Prison Labor: Fascism U.S. Style). The U.S. not only has the largest prison population in the world, but it is 70% black in a nation in which black people represent only 13% of the population. The proportion of Latin workers is not far behind relative to their proportion of the population. The vast majority are imprisoned for non-violent violations of drug laws, designed deliberately to turn a medical problem into a criminal act, though the same percentage of blacks and whites deal in or use drugs, approximately 6-7% (Alexander, Perkinson). The false belief, on the part of most whites and many blacks, that a much greater proportion of blacks than whites are involved with drugs is the work of the capitalists’ propaganda machines – particularly news media and the entertainment industry. It is a lie to cover this re-enslavement of black workers, as are all other aspects of racist ideology. And more recently the brand of “drug criminal” is increasingly and falsely applied to Latino immigrants, the vast majority of whom come to the U.S. to find jobs that have been destroyed in their native countries by U.S. corporations. Corporate capital moves southward across the border without being declared illegal and dispossess millions of rural workers of their lands and livelihoods in order to force them into subservience to the profit needs of that capital. This includes the creation of an army of unemployed workers, available for the ever changing corporate needs due to the business cycle. In the U.S., many white workers, and some black and Latino workers who have not yet been imprisoned, harbor the illusion of freedom. What does the word “free” mean? It means unbound...to anything. But where are workers unbound to the necessity to have access to the means of survival, including food, water, clothing, or shelter? It is this necessity for access that binds us to the need under a capitalist system to work at whatever jobs can be found – no matter how unrewarding, backbreaking, unhealthy, or dangerous. Work in a truly free system would not be for the purpose of obtaining the means of survival as individuals. Rather work would be for the purpose of satisfying our psychological needs to be creative and productive and to contribute necessary labor to the general welfare of our class globally. Indeed, perhaps the most devastating thing about the capitalists’ control of most jobs is that the vast majority of us are prevented from contributing to the welfare of our class (Gomberg). But even in a system in which we were enabled to do so, we would not be free of those psychological needs. Because our lives are interdependent, regardless of system, we are never free in the sense that capitalism claims we are – again, unbound to anything, as though we were separate bouncing balls

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in a vibrating container. So far we have spoken only about individual freedom. But consider the idea of the freedom to organize labor unions or a communist party to overthrow the government or to advocate force and violence to end capitalist rule. These are group or class freedoms, not just individual freedoms, and they are only allowed by capitalist governments within strict limits and at specific times in the histories of various countries, but are not general freedoms under capitalism that are guaranteed under any and every circumstance. Alternatively consider individual freedoms that harm others, such as the freedom to drive drunk and risk killing others, or to smoke in public places and cause lung cancer in others from secondhand smoke, and so on. Are these freedoms really desirable from the point of view of the working class? Clearly not. So there are undesirable freedoms, as well as desirable ones. Karl Marx’s friend and frequent co-author, Friedrich Engels, wrote that freedom was the recognition of necessity. In other words, understanding how the world and society really work gives us the freedom to be able to accomplish our goals. But even that freedom is constrained by the way the world and society do, in fact, work. So there is no such thing as complete individual freedom in the sense meant by capitalists, nor would such isolation from each other be desirable. Recognition of that fact allows us to examine different degrees and kinds of freedom to enable us to choose what kind and degree we want to achieve, as well as the methods that are necessary to make that a reality. Other aspects of modern capitalist society that are touted as proof that we are free is that workers are free to change jobs, or free to move from one city to another, or free to choose whatever car we might want, or free to choose whatever we can afford to buy. But the latter is one of several stumbling blocks: whatever we can afford to buy. Apologists for capitalism don’t even try to claim that everyone is free to live in whatever neighborhood they choose, since most people are aware of the falsehood of that particular claim. Residential segregation is still very much a part of life in the U.S. and helps to enable virtually all other forms of racist discrimination (Massey and Denton). The current equivalent of chains, whips, and guns, for the freest workers among us, is the need for access to the means of survival, and that is controlled by the capitalists, who force the vast majority of us to work for them. Or, in some cases, to work for ourselves, which carries its own limitations of freedom, in the form of such things as greater taxes, the mercy of the marketplace, exchange of time off for income, and the out-of-pocket expenses of health care. Returning to the slavery-run plantation, if the system had permitted an enslaved worker to choose under which

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owner and on which plantation she or he wanted to submit to the slave-driver’s chain, whip, and gun, would the worker have been called “free”? Hardly. Then why is the worker called “free” who is permitted to choose at which factory, field, office, shop, or mine she or he wants to submit to the discipline of the foreman and the whim of the owners? Why is the worker called “free” who is forced by the threat of hunger and homelessness, or even starvation, to choose one or another capitalist-run establishment at which she or he is to be overworked and underpaid? But the capitalists and their ideologues tell us we are “free,” and we have, at one level, fallen for this sleight of hand. Ever since the victory by the North in the U.S. Civil War, an individual worker appears to be free to choose, but the threat of hunger and homelessness plays the role of the gun. The essential transformation after the Civil War, and after the chain gangs were abolished more than half a century later (Blackmon), was the change from the situation in which each individual enslaved worker was bound to one slave-owner/boss by the gun, to the situation in which the entire class of workers was, and remains to this day, bound to the entire class of capitalist bosses by the threat of hunger or starvation. But that change is enough to make it seem plausible to many workers that today, with the end of chattel slavery and chain gangs, we are free. Yet all that changed was the replacement of chattel slavery (chain, whip, and gun) with what is referred to by Marx as wage and debt slavery. The term “wage slavery” refers to workers’ being forced to work for wages in order to live, while the term “debt slavery” refers to our being bound to debt that often rises faster through interest than our ability to pay it off, so that we are never free from debt – a condition that is becoming even more common during the current economic crisis. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, black and white sharecroppers alike were primarily bound by debt slavery, but even today mortgages, rent, and credit card debt play a similar role. With the replacement of chattel slavery by wage and debt slavery, the threat of hunger and homelessness, and often starvation, remain every bit as effective as, if not more than, the slave-driver and the bounty hunter in forcing us to do the bidding of the capitalists. The further threat today of police, courts, and jail is more clearly equivalent to the guns and whips of the slavedrivers and bounty hunters. Those who have been, and remain, most targeted by these modern equivalents are of two kinds: 1) political actors who organize unions to fight collectively for improved conditions or who advocate the overthrow of the wage-slavery system, and 2) individuals whose actions or state of being are artificially declared or treated as crimes, though there are no victims, other perhaps than themselves, i.e., those who seek escape from misery in the form of drugs and/or who are merely black or, now, immigrant or Latino.

THEcommunist

And, of course, the American Indian (Native American) descendants of the small proportion of survivors of the concerted genocide are often not free to escape the concentration camps, called reservations, that were set up in the 1800’s in exchange for theft of their land, with all the diseases, unemployment, and hopelessness that is associated with this form of imprisonment. Another form of enslavement and lack of freedom for young working-class men and women is the option of military service, where the jobless young worker can, for the sake of survival, submit instead to the iron discipline of rank and to the threat of court martial and the stockade. With the reinstatement of a draft becoming more and more imminent as the overseas needs of the capitalists increase due to accelerating rivalry with other national imperialists, military service will become more obviously equivalent to the slave-driver/bounty hunter. Worse yet, with military service one is, in fact, forced by the gun to prey on other members of our class, whether in foreign countries or during urban rebellions at home. Yet the relentless capitalist propaganda machine, in order to lessen the popular resistance that would otherwise develop, mischaracterizes this form of imprisonment with the noble-sounding “service to your country” – in reality service to the needs of one’s national capitalists to control as much of the world’s resources, markets, and labor as possible. And once those lucky enough to survive modern genocidal imperialist warfare are released from this bondage, they are greeted by higher than average unemployment, an interruption in their careers, higher degrees of homelessness, and frequently broken relationships with their spouses, as well as psychological trauma that leads many to either murder others or commit suicide. Meanwhile the media, the politicians, and various businesses hypocritically pay homage and respect to “our veterans,” who are thanked in empty words but rarely in meaningful deeds. We are encouraged to overlook all these constraints by being led to concentrate on the freedom to vote (about which more in the section on Democracy below), or the freedom to change jobs (if and when jobs are available), or the freedom to move from one city to another (if we are not redlined by mortgage companies that prevent us from access to better housing or denied access to rental properties), or the freedom to choose whatever car we like (given that public transportation has in many places been kept so inadequate and expensive that cars become the only choice in the first place, to those who can afford one), or the freedom to buy what we like (ignoring the advertising and peer pressure that it fosters to acquire things that we really don’t need, while others have little or no access to the things they really do need, and ignoring the addictions that we or our children are encouraged to develop, to legal drugs such as cigarettes and alcohol, let alone to illegal drugs).

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Predominantly black workers who have been either convicted of drug possession, or have been threatened with much greater charges to extort plea bargains, are branded for life as felons (a deliberate upgrading by Congress of drug charges from misdemeanors), and therefore ineligible for the rest of their lives for food stamps, public housing, and in practice from most jobs (Alexander). This all but destroys the opportunity to ever have and love a family. It isn’t the time spent in jail that matters nearly so much as the lifetime brand of “felon” that ruins millions of lives. No other country in the world brands drug possessors “felons” or imprisons for victimless “crimes” at anywhere near the rate that the U.S. does. Those workers who are branded “felons” are also barred from voting for the rest of their lives, a mixed blessing for the working class (as explained in the democracy section below), but to the definite advantage of racist and opportunist politicians of all stripes, who manipulate different sections of the working class for their own career advancement. This and all other aspects of racism affect white workers as well, always to their detriment, whether it is those who are also caught up in the War Against Drugs, to cover the deliberately racist character of this assault on workers’ lives, or the fact that when white and black workers suffer different degrees of oppression it acts as a barrier to understanding that when one worker suffers, all workers suffer, whether to different degrees or not. A study by economist Michael Reich in the 1980’s showed that those places in the U.S. where the wage differentials are greatest between white and black workers are precisely the places where the wages for white workers, as well as black workers, are the lowest of anywhere in the country. Struggles in which black and white workers are united in a fight to get rid of those differentials are generally the ones that bring the most success for both, though all successful struggles under capitalism bring at best temporary gains, soon taken away again one way or another. But when one group of workers believes that the problems faced by another group of workers does not affect them – or worse yet that their own problems are to be blamed on another group of workers – both are weakened in their struggle against the capitalists for higher wages and better working and living conditions, let alone for the revolutionary destruction of capitalism altogether. This indeed is one of the major reasons that racism continues to exist more than 400 years after the first Africans were forcibly brought to the New World. The other major reason is that the resulting lowering of wages from racist wage differentials nets the capitalists much greater profits than they might otherwise be able to extract from the working class’s labor. For the most part, economics is taught in schools and

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universities as a study of consumerism – the supply and demand of goods and services – rather than the exploitative process of production. But as Marx put it in his masterful 19th century exposure of the hidden inner workings of capitalism, called simply Capital, it is in the production process that the underlying reality of capitalist slavery – wage slavery – is most clearly revealed. This reality is much less obvious on the consumer side of things, where poverty and consequent lack of access to the necessities of life are the main manifestations and can be blamed on the supposed weaknesses of the individual worker. But even in order to know where poverty comes from, one has to study the robbery of the working class inherent in the production process (see, for example, the PLP pamphlet Political Economy: A Communist Critique of the Wage System, 1998, www.plp.org).

Let’s face it, the “Land of the Free” is an illusion, pure and simple, even during times when a democratic façade hides the underlying capitalist rule. The reality is one of capitalist wage- and debt-slavery, at best, or drug addiction, prison, or military service, at worst. At such times, we only feel free, at best, when in the relative comfort of our homes, if we have homes, but rarely if ever at the assembly line, field, desk, or mine shaft, and rarely if ever at bill-paying time, with interest on our credit cards rising faster than our income to cover it (if we even can afford a credit card), or with increases in our rent (for those who are not homeless), or in our property taxes (for those lucky enough to be able to “own” a home). But during capitalist crises, either economic or political, fascism has been and will continue to be the order of the day.

The illusion of freedom, as we have been taught to understand and believe in it, simply melts away under close scrutiny. In the U.S., for example, one cannot acquire needed medical care for free, even if you have insurance, let alone acquire food, shelter, clothing, or transportation for free. The method for obtaining these necessities of life under capitalism makes this the “Land of the Fee,” not “… of the Free.”

Underlying all the obstacles to freedom for the working class under capitalism is the fundamental encouragement of individualism by bourgeois ideology. That is, bourgeois mythology holds that the individual is supreme and that only by cultivating the highest degree of individualism can one be really free. But this proves to be the exact opposite of the truth, since by oneself virtually nothing can be accomplished, other perhaps than breathing. By striving to improve our own income, wealth, or status as individuals we are necessarily forced to do so at the expense of other members of our class. This in turn separates us from the very class allies that we all need in order to free ourselves from exploitation, racism, sexism, poverty, and want. Individual freedom then is an oxymoron (logical self contradiction) of the highest order.

Evictions and layoffs are always just around the corner, and then we become even freer – free of a home and a job. This has been the fate of millions of farmers whom capitalism has thrown off their land in order to create a class of laborers that the capitalists could use to make their profits for them, as well as to seize their land – whether in England in the 18th and 19th centuries or with foreclosures on U.S. farms in the 20th century by the mortgage-holding banks. North American and European imperialists and local ruling classes continue this land theft in many parts of the world today. Such is the freedom that awaits many of us who haven’t already lost jobs or homes, or never had them. But even more serious than evictions and layoffs is the turn to a fascist police state that has happened before, particularly in 1920’s Italy under Mussolini and in 1930’s Germany under Hitler, as well as in other countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and will happen again in any country in which a mass working class movement challenges the capitalists for power. These fascist movements have been supported and fully funded by the capitalists, not only in those countries but from the U.S. For example, Henry Ford, Prescott Bush (the father and grandfather of the two Bush presidents), and many other individual capitalists as well as U.S. corporations contributed heavily – in money, factories, and propaganda support – to the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party (Black). This fate awaits workers in the U.S. if the capitalists ever feel it is necessary, and any challenge by a mass anticapitalist working class movement will make it necessary for them.

Democracy Democracy has been defined as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. However, this formulation fails to deal with methods for its achievement, which we discuss more near the end of this section. Nevertheless what we really have around the world is government of the working classes, by the politicians, and for the capitalists, and did have even 150 years ago when Lincoln was the main spokesperson. But the electoral system masks that reality by allowing us, on a regular basis, to choose our oppressors. Why do we say that politicians are among our oppressors? Skipping over more than two centuries of laws that limit the rights of workers to organize against oppressive working and living conditions, consider a group of federal laws in the latter part of the 20th century that label black and Latin, though rarely white, drug possessors (apart from distributors) as felons. These laws, among other things, mandate minimum sentences that remove all discretion from judges who might give lesser sentences. Beginning in the 1960’s with Lyndon Johnson’s self-promoting drive to concentrate on crime in the streets, the politicians of the executive branch have declared war

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on black, and increasingly Latino, workers in the name of a “war on drugs.” In fact, the drug laws have been so horrible that a number of judges (no friends of the working class) have actually resigned rather than administer these outrageously unjust sentences (Alexander). All politicians, under normal circumstances, ignore the much bigger crimes in the banks and corporate offices, as well as within their own successive warmongering presidential administrations, up to and including Obama. A drug addiction should be classed as a medical problem, as it is with nicotine or alcohol. The very transformation by Congress of drug possession, let alone addiction, into a criminal offense and a federal felony, is one modern extreme example of the way that U.S. politicians oppress the working class. And the Supreme Court has given police the go-ahead to selectively arrest and convict black and Latin workers. Furthermore the Court has given the police the right to keep any money or articles (not just drugs) seized in an arrest for a fictitious drug offense, even when the victim is not charged with a crime and is released. These seizures have helped to fund many a police department throughout the U.S. The Court has also protected prosecutors from being sued who arbitrarily threaten innocent arrestees with serious fake charges in order to extract a plea bargain for a lesser offense that then labels them felons for life. However, there is an even more fundamental reason to call politicians oppressors. First of all, a representative system is one in which we are asked to vote for either a self-selected or capitalist-selected person about whom the only thing we know is what that person chooses to tell us. Of course, their opponents also tell us things about them but these things are usually not really relevant and often false, as are the self-descriptions. There is no conscience among politicians when it comes to the difference between truth and falsehood, since conscience would stand in the way of winning an election. Indeed their self-interest may sooner or later stand in the way of their even recognizing the difference. When someone decides she or he wants to attain office for her/his own personal gain, she/he appears all at once in the public eye having done absolutely nothing to merit our approval previously, and begins to spin a tale of what she/he thinks the most voters want to hear. Once in office, winning the next election becomes the politicians’ main goal. When they claim to be servants of the public, they are lying, and instead they treat the public as servants of their own careers. Public servants would not hesitate to discuss or vote on a bill such as a $50 billion for job creation to repair the U.S. infrastructure, or to give the FDA more authority and funding to inspect food distribution facilities, or to provide better child nutrition (as Congress had recently done, in favor of a pre-election vacation, at the time of this writing). The reason the politicians of both parties refuse to even discuss such bills until after an election is because they are only interested in how the

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discussion affects their chances for re-election, not how the bills might help the working class, or, in their obscure terminology, the public, of whom the vast majority are members of the working class. Of course, they can always rationalize their voteseeking as serving the interests of their constituents against the supporters of their opponents, and hide even from themselves the self-building reality. The existence of two main political parties, or at least more than one, serves the function of blaming one section of (working class) voters for the problems of another section, in sort of a bad-cop/good-cop routine – “We may not do everything you want us to, but it will be worse if the other party wins.” And in some ways this may even sometimes be true in a narrow sense. Meanwhile the media plays the chorus, continually reminding everyone how stupid and selfish the voters for the other party are, thus dividing the working class even further, and even more importantly hiding from view the real enemy of the entire working class, namely the capitalists who fund both, or all, of the parties in order to continue this shell game. Given that their self-interest is their only, or main, interest, politicians are ripe pickings for any source of funding for their campaigns, and we all know that those most capable of funding these campaigns are those with the most money, namely the capitalists and their corporations. This is one of the mechanisms through which the system, far from being government by or for the people is really government by the politicians and for the capitalists. But an even more important mechanism of capitalist control of government is through the use of advisors to the Presidents and to members of Congress – advisors who are drawn from leading capitalist-funded think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations or the Trilateral Commission, set up by the oldest and most powerful members of the capitalist ruling class, led by the Rockefellers. Voting year after year for one politician after another, in the wild unfounded hope that things will get better, ignores this reality. Voting is doing nothing but chasing after candidates who are bought and advised by the capitalists and therefore represent only the interests of the capitalists. For if any candidate were to try to represent the interests of the working class, she or he would be labeled by the media as unfit for office and could never command the millions of dollars showered on the capitalists’ loyal servants. Basing a vote on what a politician says or promises, or how sincere she/he looks on TV, proves time after time to be a losing proposition. Look at the plummeting popularity of Obama, so soon after the early euphoria brought about by his election – a euphoria based on ever-present wishful thinking. One of his foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, let the cat out of the bag

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early in his 2008 campaign when she was asked whether Obama would really keep his promise to end the war in Iraq, and she replied, in essence, that such promises are empty talk because of the constraints put on presidents. She was fired from the campaign for that comment. Honesty, after all, is the worst policy for politicians and their campaign workers. But some of them seem so sincere, you say. All we can say is that long hard experience should be permitted to override such subjective impressions. Politicians are forced to lie, whether they want to or not, and they soon want to, even if at first they do not. They are good at sounding sincere. They are among the best actors in the world because they really believe in themselves. Even a politician who enters a race for the first time with the illusion that she or he can actually do something for the working class soon learns that she or he cannot. One telling example of this involved a Latino Congressman who was elected because of his past antiracist activities and who supported the Cuban revolution, and, when asked directly by us in 1964 why he didn’t stand up in Congress and denounce the U.S. blockade of Cuba, responded that if he did so he would never again be able to win a vote for any funding for his district. He knew by this time that he was forced to choose between an honest progressive political stance and being able to help his district and thereby gain re-election, and he chose the latter. Even if he had stood up and denounced the blockade, he would have been ignored, and probably ostracized by his colleagues and dragged through the mud by the capitalist-owned media. The system simply does not permit such actions to go unpunished. The terms “conservative” and “liberal” are meant to convey a real choice for the working class between those who would keep things as they are (conserve) and those who would make changes (liberals) that appear to benefit the working class. The fact is that both vote for wars on our class brothers and sisters of other nations; both try to outdo each other as tough on crime; both agree to imprison and blacklist communist workers who fight for the interests of the working class; and both raise taxes on the working class and cut taxes on the rich exploiters. One might say therefore that the difference is embodied in the following examples: Conservatives advocate that the government give special consideration to corporations to help the corporation owners, while Liberals advocate that the government give special consideration to the corporations to “help the workers.” Or Conservatives vote more money for the military to promote U.S. business hegemony and security, while Liberals vote more money for the military to “promote democracy abroad.” Or Conservatives oppose communism to protect the capitalists, while Liberals oppose communism to “protect the workers.” Regardless of the reasons they give, the outcome is the same. As one Marxist historian, after showing how Congresspersons and Senators are all (necessarily) rich, summarized it

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(paraphrasing), congressional bickering represents a battle between the haves and the haves (Parenti). Those who pose as friends of the workers, liberal Democrats, are our worst enemies, because they can fool a greater percent of the working class – even though the gap between “conservatives” and “liberals” is in fact quite narrow. Indeed, the primary use of the two major parties, Republicans and Democrats, is to manipulate working class sentiments historically through demagoguery – demagoguery that mainly centers around racism and that, through the use of the ruling-class-owned media, first creates the blowing winds of the time and then adjusts itself to them. One clear example of this demagoguery was the war on crime, discussed above, in the 1960’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s. Starting with Johnson’s public declaration that most Americans see crime in the streets as the single most serious problem, each successive president has brought about media concentrations on crime that changed the sentiments of voters, according to surveys at the time. It was not the other way around. That is, until these manipulative demagogic declarations created precisely the sentiment that they claimed already existed, the public in fact did not see crime in the streets as the most critical problem (Beckett and Sasson). Those of us old enough to remember will recall that in the 1988 presidential race Bush Sr. defeated his Democrat opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, in part by playing up the story of William (labeled Willie in the press and by Bush) Horton, a black man who, among many other prisoners, was let out of prison by Dukakis and ended up raping and murdering a woman. And Clinton, in turn, in the 1992 presidential race defeated Bush Sr., in part by interrupting his campaigning and running home to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man who was so mentally impaired that he reportedly asked that they save until tomorrow morning the dessert from his last dinner. Neither politician wanted his opponent to portray him as soft on crime, so they both unashamedly used prevalent racist sentiment to win those presidential elections. Such public manipulation by the leading electoral political parties is extremely useful to the ruling class behind the scenes, along with all the other means of deception that they wield. Therefore both parties are heavily supported by huge donations from the capitalists, since both are their servants against the interests of the working class. Similarly the visibility of newspaper columnists and talk show performers, with their frequent tirades against one or another politician, up to and including the president, reinforces the illusion that there is freedom of speech and of the press in particular, and that the U.S. differs from more obviously dictatorial societies in this respect. This freedom is tightly confined, however, to

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those writers and speakers who subscribe thoroughly to the basis of the capitalist system and to the cause of U.S. supremacy both militarily and economically in the interimperialist rivalry. No writer/speaker is permitted by either newspaper or radio/TV station owners to condemn capitalism everywhere and call for communist revolution. It is this ideological control, in the media, schools, universities, places of worship, and other institutions, that grants the ruling class almost complete immunity from working class rebellion most of the time.

their class interests, rather than a democracy. Madison explains that a democracy is “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” He further explains that a republic, in contrast to a democracy, is one in which the voters decide who will decide. That is, the voters will not themselves make important decisions about how the country should be run, but rather they will only be permitted to choose those who will in fact make those decisions.

Which leads to the final point: Democracy, or rule by the people as a whole, cannot exist in a divided society, whether divided by class interests or by sexism or racism. No people as a whole can rule themselves in their own interests when there is no commonality of interests.

Of course, in the early days of the republic, only a very small percentage of the population was even permitted to vote on their choice of who should make decisions for them. In the ensuing almost century and a half, the ruling class has discovered that, in conceding to the many struggles for expansion of eligibility to vote (suffrage), they actually derive benefit from letting the vast majority of the population vote on who will make the decisions, as that has successfully built the illusion that the “people” rule, without in any way interfering with the ability of the capitalists to be the sole exercisers of that rule.

Consider that under capitalist “democracy” – defined as our having the right to vote, but only on those things that the ruling class decides we are allowed to vote on – most votes come out nearly tied, with few exceptions. This means that almost always nearly half the voters have imposed on them something they don’t want. That’s because the things on which we are allowed to vote don’t really make as much difference to us as things that we are not allowed to vote on, such as whether layoffs should be illegal, whether racist or sexist discrimination should bring a heavy fine, whether pollution and CO2 emissions should be illegal, or whether the military should be allowed to invade other countries and soak up huge amounts of money that would otherwise go toward things we need such as health, education, or ending homelessness. In a society not divided by class interests but rather ruled by the working class, while we might or might not decide whether voting is the method we want to use for any particular decision, most votes would likely be overwhelming if not unanimous. And if the sentiment were not overwhelmingly in one direction or another, there would be more discussion until consensus, or near consensus, was reached. Which is one reason that voting would generally become superfluous, in favor of adequate discussion and consensus. Looked at in this light, voting under capitalism can be seen to be nothing but a deception by the ruling class to make us think we are in control. The fathers of the U.S. government were clear on their ideas of how to control the masses of working-class citizens. The Federalist Papers is a collection of writings designed to convince the wealthy classes, both landowners and owners of industry, of the need for a particular form of government. The three authors of the 85 papers in this collection were James Madison (the fourth president and lead author of the constitution, as well as a slave-owning Virginia planter), Alexander Hamilton (the first Secretary of the Treasury), and John Jay (son of a wealthy merchant and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court). In paper number 10, Madison argued that his class required a republic as the preferred form of government to serve

Furthermore, the relevance of who rules the government may be best grasped in the context of the daily lives of workers. At any particular point in time, for adults who are finished with school, each of us either has a job outside the home, or we don’t. It is the job, or its lack, and its insecurities that govern almost all our waking hours, either directly while we are at work or indirectly when we come home fatigued, discouraged, and, more often than not, unhappy with the meaningless of what we do. Weekends for many of us become escapes from an otherwise awful existence. At work, even if we enjoy what we do, the profit from our labor belongs not to us, but to our bosses. For black and Latino workers, things are even worse – much worse – than for white workers, as bad as those conditions are. The threat and widespread reality of imprisonment (described in the section above on freedom) – a systematic part of the so-called “war on drugs,” but really a war on black and Latino workers – is used to coerce workers to accept the worst working and living conditions and the lowest incomes. The brutal threats and attacks on immigrant workers by the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement cops coerce workers into acceptance of the most back-breaking and lowest-paying jobs, and force them to hide in fear from the authorities round the clock. The destruction of welfare by President Clinton forced millions of women into slavelabor situations with lower incomes and increased childcare expenses. Racism is an inherent part of capitalism and alone gives the lie to the concept of democracy, just as do exploitation, sexism, and all other aspects of capitalist oppression. Looked at in this way, with little to no control over the conditions that occupy almost all our waking hours, what

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can it possibly mean to say we live in a democracy? What can it possibly mean to say that “we the people” govern the conditions of our lives? What the ruling class calls “democracy” is clearly a scam. Patriotism, or nationalism, is another distraction that is offered to mask the absence of a commonality of interests between workers and bosses, and is inflicted on all workers around the world to enlist the loyalty of one nation’s workers, against their own class interests, in genocidal wars against workers of other nations for the gain of the imperialist ruling classes. Patriotism/nationalism, while appearing to unite “insiders,” is always directed against “outsiders.” Comedians Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, in their routine “The 2000-Year-Old Man,” has Reiner asking the Old Man if they had national anthems during the cave-dwelling era, to which Brooks replies that they did and sings an example of one anthem that captures the essence of patriotism/nationalism: “They can all go to hell except for cave number 76.” To the extent that patriotism/nationalism is accepted by the working class, it can only divide the workers of one nation from workers of other nations, creating an obstacle to the recognition of our common interests world over. Real democracy requires that everyone in the world share common interests, and that, in turn, requires a system that eliminates exploiting classes and is comprised only of workers, who labor freely (or as freely as possible) for each others’ well being. That system is called communism – a system run by the world’s workers, in which our common interests can be satisfied through a form of democracy, called democratic centralism, in which all workers collectively participate in society, together carrying out, those actions that will best serve the needs of all. The main task of the working class and its communist leadership is to overcome the many divisions and to build out of the massive working class of the world an army capable of forcibly taking power away from the small classes of capitalists everywhere and their political, military, and police vassals. And, as described in the previous section, that will require our ability to work under fascist, police state conditions, since that will be the condition to which the capitalist ruling class will turn when the power of their class is challenged.

Competition Lastly let’s examine what competition really means for the working class, as well as for the capitalists. As businesses compete with each other and try to beat each other to sell their products, some businesses will inevitably outdo others, and the others will be stuck with products that they can’t sell as quickly as they would like and are therefore threatened with a loss of

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some potential profits and, if bad enough, even absolute loss of their invested capital. Rather than lose profits when they can’t sell their products, they cut their costs by laying workers off, and even those capitalists who can sell their products are continually replacing many workers with machinery and speeding up the remaining workers. The latter process they refer to as increasing “productivity” and unashamedly claim that increasing productivity, despite the inevitable layoffs it causes, is good for both workers and capitalists. After all, they say, this represents progress. Progress for whom? – that they don’t say. In effect, the competition among capitalists is carried out over our sick, injured, and often dead bodies. Competition is all around us under capitalism, so that we often don’t even notice how harmful it is. In fact, capitalist ideologists tell us from the moment we understand language that this is a natural condition in human society. They train us to revel in competition through such things as sports and other contests. The following quote from the ex-president of Shell Oil Company is typical (Hofmeister): Why are the Olympic Games so eagerly anticipated? Why is the World Cup the most important event in the world every four years? Why do the World Series, Super Bowl, and Final Four matter in the United States? Why do political junkies like me stay up all night to watch election returns of races clear across the country? People love competition. It’s important to us. It’s a life force. It’s also fun, exciting, keeping us on the edges of our seats. It brings out the best in us and rewards those who win. There are intrinsic and extrinsic satisfactions to being or choosing a winner.

Indeed we have all been taught almost from birth to “love competition” and to find it “fun” and “exciting” and to believe that it “brings out the best in us.” But the “best” of what? And “fun” for everyone? After all, consider that while sportscasters and spectators as well as participants always concentrate on who is the winner, we are rarely reminded that for every winner there are one or more losers. Rarely, that is, unless we are among those losers. Hardly ever are we reminded that every sports event or contest produces people who will lose and who will be unfortunate at least psychologically and often monetarily. Competition inevitably produces an assault on well-being in some, and often in most, whether participants or fans. It fosters an individualist concentration on one’s own welfare, whether real or imagined, and works to destroy class solidarity. What is said by this major capitalist boss to be “the best in us” comes down to selfish, individual reward, when what all of us really need is selfless cooperation for the welfare of our entire class. Competition is not good for us therefore, and it is certainly not natural. In order to maximize profits, competition lies at the heart of the need of all capitalist businesses to enlarge their market share at the expense of their rivals.

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Therefore it becomes a life-and-death need under conditions of competition that each capitalist corporation has to maximize profits and expand the business. But the ironic aspect of competition among capitalist businesses is that winners buy up losers and become bigger and bigger until eventually there is monopoly, and competition is temporarily, at least in that line of business, ended. Ended, that is, until foreign capitalists move into their markets, as, for example, the Japanese auto manufacturers did to GM, Ford, and Chrysler in the early 1970’s. Capitalist competition, therefore, has the inherent tendency to abolish itself, even though international rivalries prolong and renew the process, and domestically from time to time new firms arise to challenge the monopolists, but, coming late as they do, they are at a distinct disadvantage. Capitalist competition, in short, is unstable, with amplifying feedback toward monopolistic self-destruction. Advocates of the free market pretend that this is not so, and claim that there are stabilizing forces within the market. But the only forces that have ever (temporarily) interrupted this internal destabilizing tendency toward monopoly are interventions from the government or other national capitalist classes, i.e., from outside the market. When considered on a national scale, with competition arising from capitalists of other nations, each nation’s capitalist class is forced, whether they want to or not, to fight in a different arena than simply trying to grab more market share. In short, they are forced to grab resources and cheap labor, as well as markets, wherever they exist in the world. In an age where there are no longer new lands to conquer, ever since the end of the 1800’s, this can only be done through war with competing capitalist nations. Under these conditions the capitalist nations are termed imperialists, and inter-imperialist rivalry in this day and age is the direct or indirect cause of absolutely every war in the world, whether a small local proxy war or a world war. War represents the greatest government subsidy to business, all at the expense of workers’ enforced contributions – through our deaths and taxes. While the capitalist governments always make up a fictional reason to go to war in order to gain the loyalty of the working class of that particular nation – such as “weapons of mass destruction,” “humanitarian reasons,” “we were attacked,” “if they take over that other country we will soon be conquered,” and scores of other pretexts – the real reason is always economic competition on an international level. On the other hand, the ruling classes would not be able to induce the working class to fight for them if they told the truth. So imperialist governments are absolutely forced to lie, continually. And, as the Nazis proved to the world, the bigger the lie the more workers will believe it – thinking falsely that, if it were not true, no one could get away with it – yet another illusion about those with the thinly veiled power to command the media and schools, both public and private.

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Inter-imperialist rivalry is why the U.S. ruling class, through their government, is sending working-class men and women (usually not their own sons and daughters) to kill other workers, and to risk death themselves, in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is why the U.S. fought in Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War. This is why World Wars I and II developed, first among European and Asian imperialist nations and later involving the U.S., and killed tens of millions of workers and others. Competition, with its inevitable outgrowths, is truly a death sentence for millions. But there is a second way that competition among capitalists, and their need to continually maximize their profits, constitutes a death sentence for millions of workers. That is through the depletion and waste of the world’s resources and the continual production of pollution of our air and water, as well as food. The main effect of this is not only the depletion of fresh water and arable land, but even more important in the long run, the filling of the atmosphere with oil, coal, and natural gasderived global warming, with the ruination of the glaciers that provide the water to drink, to wash in, and to grow food, and with the rise in sea level that will eventually force billions to move inland and create dislocations of populations that will have unimaginable consequences for the working class (see the article “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System – Only Communism Can Create a Better Sustainable World” in the Winter 2010 issue of The Communist magazine, also available on www.plp.org). Since competition manifestly has so many harmful effects on the working class around the world, again myths have to be built to create the illusion that competition is good for us. This is done in part through the myth that competition among capitalist businesses pushes them to improve the quality of their products, resulting in better products for the “consumer” – a catch-all word that, like the word “public,” is designed to hide the class nature of capitalist society. But instead of improving the quality of products, which could cost the capitalists more money, they reduce quality to the least they can get away with. Furthermore to divert our attention, they design newer and newer products that the advertising industry very successfully convinces us we really need, or at least want. The advertising industry is a massive waste of social resources that benefits only the capitalists and diverts our personal resources. Then there are products and services that we do really need, such as housing, vaccines, antibiotics, nutritious food, safety devices, real education, health care, clean sustainable energy – the list is almost endless – that don’t necessarily produce the best profits for the capitalists and may even cut into the profits of the most powerful ones. As a result, the working class is robbed of the opportunity to produce these things or to continually improve their quality.

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But perhaps the two most devastating immediate results of world wide capitalist competition are its continual inter-imperialist wars and unemployment. CHALLENGE (PLP’s newspaper) has written much about wars in virtually every issue. So here we examine unemployment. The underlying cause of the instability in employment is the instability in profits caused by competition among capitalists, combined with the control over employment by the capitalists. Competition, as we have said, is built into the system in a way that the capitalists cannot do away with it, even if they would want to do so. Unemployment denies access to the means of survival. It creates hopelessness and, in a few, a resignation to a life of what the capitalists hypocritically call crime – including drug dealing, robbery, and even murder. These are indeed crimes against the working class, but virtually everything the capitalists do legally is an even greater crime. Their politicians make the laws that arbitrarily define some actions as legal and others as illegal. Morality – however that might be defined in a class divided society – has nothing to do with legality, though equating the two is a secondary myth fostered by the ruling class. As one comrade once put it in a song many years ago: When some have lots of money And others haven’t a dime, That’s when law and order Is another word for crime.

And as another comrade put it in another song, about the massive Attica prison rebellion in 1971: Who are the criminals, And where do they dwell? Inside a prison cell block, Or in a plush hotel?

And as the early 20th century German communist poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht, put it: What is the crime of robbing a bank compared to the crime of owning one?

Still another example of legal crime is the profiteering by weapons manufacturers, derived from the killing of workers by the thousands on the streets – whether by cops, drug gangs, or accidents – and by the millions in war. Hundreds of other examples of crimes against the working class, that are declared legal by the lawmakers, could be given. But perhaps the greatest ongoing peacetime crime committed by all capitalists, in their quest to maximize their profits, is that not-so-silent killer, unemployment – the result of layoffs, firings, and discrimination in hiring. Unemployment causes deaths by stress, poverty, starvation, exposure, and sometimes by drug addiction and the resulting petty crime. An increase in the official unemployment rate by 1.4% leads to 30,000 additional deaths over the next five years, by all the above means and others, as CHALLENGE has many times reported

(from a 1971 Congressional report), most recently (as of this writing) in the 9/8/10 issue, p. 6. The misery caused by unemployment does not need to be compared with the misery brought about by imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other countries, with the deaths of over a million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Afghans, the maiming of one’s children and other relatives, and the deliberate bombing destruction of entire infrastructural aspects such as fresh water, hospitals, roads, and schools. All these crimes spell a degree of misery that cannot effectively be described in words, but are experienced by millions – all a result of inter-imperialist competition among capitalists for resources, markets, and cheap labor, with no international legal framework to declare these wars illegal or with the power to enforce penalties for violation. The misery caused by unemployment has its own character, well recognized by those victimized by it, and feared by those who have not yet felt its sting, though a diminishing segment of the working class comes under that category. Let’s examine what “unemployment” really means. Let’s start with the question: What is the opposite of unemployment? The answer depends on which economic system is considered. Under capitalism the opposite of unemployment is full employment, though, for reasons we will show below, full employment under capitalism is a figment of the imagination and can never occur in practice even momentarily, and certainly cannot occur over any significant span of time. On the other hand, under our future of communism – when the working class, rather than the then extinct capitalist class, will rule the world – the opposite of unemployment will not exist because there will be no such thing as employment, let alone unemployment. Yet every single one of us who is mentally and physically capable will be enabled to contribute to the well-being of our entire class through useful work organized by our class. That, however, will not be the same as the concept of employment under capitalism, let alone full employment. Why do we say there will be no such thing as employment under communism? Underlying the concept of employment is a hidden feature of capitalism that one doesn’t often think about, but becomes clear on reflection. Consider what employment literally means: think about what we mean when we say we “employ a hammer” or “employ a stove” or “employ a technique.” We mean “use a hammer,” etc. And that’s precisely what is meant under capitalism when we say a worker is “employed,” namely the worker is “used” – used by the capitalist owner of the business. And used for what? To make profit for the capitalist. So that when workers are employed under capitalism, the workers are being used for a purpose that is not under the control of the workers, and therefore also under

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conditions that are not under the control of the workers. In particular, as Marx showed in Capital, the capitalists’ profits are derived from the hidden underpayment of the workers for their labor time (see the PLP pamphlet Political Economy: A Communist Critique of the Wage System, available on our website www.plp.org). Why, when a job is even available, do we submit to being used for someone else’s purposes and gain? Because, as we have pointed out in the section on freedom above, that’s the only way under capitalism that we and our families can survive. If we are able to find a job, we strike a devil’s bargain because to refuse to do so spells our death and that of our families, from starvation and exposure. And when jobs are not available, capitalism forces workers to band together to demand jobs, which represents a hidden way of fighting to be exploited – an action that is called for by the need to survive in capitalist society. No good choices here. How did such a lack of choice for workers arise? The capitalists, through their control over the means of force and violence (the police, courts, prisons, and military), guard and prevent our access to the means of survival. This is nakedly true for immigrant workers who face the violent and racist Border Patrol in the Mexican border states, though far less so in the Canadian border states (a nakedly racist distinction). But this daily threat, if not reality, of official state violence is just as prevalent for all workers throughout all countries to varying degrees. This is most intensively so in urban areas, where the trained racism of police forces induces them to murder at will and where they are granted complete impunity by the ruling classes, with rare exceptions where workers collectively rise up to demand justice. Over the last several centuries the capitalists have literally stolen these means of survival – both the raw materials and the labor that turns these materials into usable products – our labor. They have done this by throwing peasants off their land and seizing the land for themselves, forcing the peasants to become workers for the capitalists – part of what forces Mexican and other Latin American workers to look for work in the U.S. even today – and by enslaving Africans, American Indians, and European indentured servants directly (see Political Economy: A Communist Critique of the Wage System, www.plp.org). While some workers are lucky enough to have jobs that seem satisfying for their own sake, most who even have jobs find that their jobs are at best unsatisfying and at worst extremely oppressive. In the first category are many teachers, health care workers, social workers, and other jobs that permit some level of serving the interests of our class, but even that is extremely limited under capitalism and often at best we find ourselves ignoring those limitations in favor of concentrating on what we are able to accomplish.

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Yet even if the job carries a level of satisfaction, we are almost always being used by capitalists, unless we are self-employed, a status associated with its own problems, such as paying both halves of the FICA tax in at least the U.S. and the significant chance of going bankrupt. And even if we are self-employed, we are often being indirectly used by the capitalists, as they don’t have to pay for whatever service we may provide. The most often cited and most glaring example of this type of self-employment is the category of “housewife” and parent, in which mainly women are forced to keep a household running and raise children to become future employees for the capitalists, and all for no direct pay from the future employers. Why is the concept of full employment a figment of the imagination under capitalism? Full employment is an imaginary condition in which every worker needing a job – which is the ticket to some limited access to the means of survival – has access to a job. This, however, even if possible for a brief time, would not be a stable condition because the needs of the capitalist employers are unstable, and they can hire and fire or layoff at will, hindered to some degree only by the united strength of workers in a local situation in unions. The instability can be traced to competition among capitalists, but results in forcing competition on the working class in the following way. The mere existence of an unemployed pool of workers aids the capitalists by enhancing the competition among workers for jobs and thereby permitting the lowering of wages – an example of supply outpacing demand. Worse yet, the capitalists use racism and sexism to prevent worker unity, dividing the working class into different categories by race, gender, or national origin in order to promote the idea that one or more groups of workers are the reason for the unemployment problems of other groups – whether causing men to blame women, white workers to blame black, Latin, or Native American workers, or citizen workers to blame immigrant workers. Oddly, and demonstrating the power of pervasive capitalist ideology to blind us to reality, white workers don’t generally blame other white workers for their problems, though it is just as much true that when jobs are scarce and any one worker is “lucky” enough to get a job, some other worker is blocked from that job. Again, competition, aided by racist/sexist/nationalist ideology, ends up harming the working class.

Communism is the only antidote to these capitalist evils The opposite of competition is cooperation, and while there are many occurrences of cooperation even under capitalism, only the complete absence of competition can produce general well-being. Only cooperation can produce winners with no losers. Why should we settle for a system that always produces losers? Particularly when losing under capitalism often spells death. Capitalism is like a

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gigantic gladiator sport, in which only some of those who enter the ring will leave it alive, and even the survivors suffer varying degrees of misery. Communism will bring about cooperation without necessitating the production of losers. It will do so by permitting everyone to contribute to the general welfare through our work, and participation in sporting events can then be for exercise and fun without the necessity of keeping score. Capitalism generally means that the economic winners will always be found among the capitalists, while all workers are losers. Let’s face it, this death-dealing system needs to be destroyed and replaced by communism. A communist system is one run by the world’s working class under the leadership of its communist party for the benefit of our entire class around the world. In such a system, work is for the purpose of contributing to the welfare of our class, not just ourselves and our families. All our needs will then be able to be distributed without money, and based on need. We will only produce those things we need instead of the continuing proliferation of unnecessary products whose only purpose is to make profit for capitalists. Then we will be able to do away with wasteful use of resources and the pervasive pollution that sickens and kills millions. But even when the necessities of life are distributed in the future without money, they will not be free, since each of us will have to work in order to contribute to their production. In that communist future, however, collective work will be seen and felt as liberating, while money, rather than having been a liberator under capitalism,

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will be seen to have been an obstacle to freedom – by having been the only available pathway to acquiring our individual survival needs and subjecting us to use by the capitalists as wage slaves. Perhaps most important in the immediate future, then and only then will we be able to do away with wars – wars that derive only from competition between capitalists for markets, labor, and resources, and that kill millions of workers while capitalists sit home counting their shares of the “root of evil.” And most important for our long-term future, the current capitalism-caused climate change can then and only then be brought under control, though it has already started on a course that will be very difficult to reverse. Global warming already causes, and threatens to accelerate, violent weather events that kill hundreds of thousands, as well as the twin water disorders of drought and flooding. Such deaths will become preventable under communism, even in the face of such events, and they will become rarer once we find ways to reverse the warming. Only through an organized, communist-led armed revolution by millions of workers around the world, that overthrows the power of the capitalists, destroys their murderous exploitative system, and replaces it with a communist-led working class cooperative system, can an end be put to the Land of the Fee and the Home of the Slave. Join and build the PLP to hasten the day that this noble goal is reached around the world. Help throw off the myths and illusions that confuse and blind us. We and our children and grandchildren need and deserve no less.

References Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press, NY, 2010. Beckett, Katherine, and Sasson, Theodore, The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2004. Black, Edwin, Nazi Nexus: American’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust, Dialog Press, Washington, DC, 2009. Blackmon, Douglas, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Doubleday, NY, 2008. Gomberg, Paul, How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2007. Hofmeister, John, Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk From an Energy Insider, Palgrave Macmillan, NY, NY, 2010. Massey, Douglas S., and Denton, Nancy A., American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993. Parenti, Michael, Democracy for the Few, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1995. Perkinson, Robert, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, Metropolitan Books, NY, 2010. “Global Warming Driven by the Profit System – Only Communism Can Create a Better Sustainable World,” The Communist, Winter 2010 issue, www.plp.org. Political Economy: A Communist Critique of the Wage System, PLP pamphlet 1998, www.plp.org Prison Labor: Fascism U.S. Style, PLP pamphlet, www.plp.org

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Editor’s Note: This pamphlet, which was published over 45 years ago, continues to be an important tool for communists today. As we struggle to win workers to fight for communism and the dictatorship of the working class, we inevitably face the same contradiction that the old movement had to deal with – Reform and Revolution. Right opportunism, making reform politics primary, was the main weakness of the old communist movement and a weakness within our Party today. However, our practice of criticism and self-criticism allows us to learn and correct these practices. There are also many parts of our line that has changed since this document came out. For example, we no longer believe in winning people to groups like WAM (Workers Action Movement), but instead winning them straight to PLP. We no longer advocate “30 for 40” instead we fight to win workers to abolish the wage system. Nonetheless, we still feel as though this is an important document and urge all members to discuss it with other comrades and friends as we continue to analyze our work in the fight towards communist revolution.

REFORM AND REVOLUTION (1976)

Ever since the founding of our Party, PLP has put forward communist revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the working class – led by a communist party – seizing state power. There have been many changes in our line over the years. While the line has constantly moved to the Left, we have found ourselves applying far too much of our time and thinking to building militant reform struggle rather than revolution. The roots of this contradictory development will be traced shortly, but it should be stated now that unless we fit the reform struggle into revolutionary politics and not vice-versa, no matter what we say, we will become a revisionist party, that is, a party that accommodates itself to – and works within the framework of – the capitalist system. Pursuing reform or revolution involves two totally different tasks. Reform builds the system (tries to make it work better); revolution  destroys  it. Therefore, the theory and action of trying to win immediate reform demands can never, in and of itself, lead to a revolution. By definition, it is not designed to do that. We participate in reform struggles in order to get the opportunity to put forward communist ideas and goals. These communist ideas cannot be drawn from the reform struggle itself. Workers do not come to Marxist-Leninist conclusions merely from working on the assembly line.

These ideas must come from outside the reform struggle and are directly opposed to reformist goals or working within and building capitalism. Communist ideas have always been brought to workers from outside the reform struggle itself, from Marx to Stalin to the present day. The Party’s role, therefore, is to make a revolution that destroys the system, not to make reforms and build it. The Party leads people in reform struggle to the goal of a better union or of rank-and-file power. Building the Party is primary, not building the union, although a by-product of building the Party, of building for a revolution, can be, and often is, a better union. Obviously we have improved in trying to put forward revolution rather than reform, compared to years ago. Yet as the line moves to the Left, our practice tends to trail this movement, tends to move more in the direction of primarily fighting militantly in the union to throw out the sellouts, to run for elections, to go into a strike with the main idea of “winning the strike,” or building militant picket lines, etc. And correspondingly, we judge “victory” or “defeat” based on whether or not we achieve these reform goals. We tend far less to think in terms of how well Challenge-Desafio was sold, how many subscriptions were bought, how much anti-racist struggle was organized, how much workers were pointed in the direction of seeing the necessity to take state power, how many workers and

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others were recruited to the Party on the understanding of the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Our main goal in going into virtually every strike has been building the strike and a militant, democratic union, not building the Party and revolutionary ideas. Thus, we tend to spread the illusion – and are victims of it ourselves – that to build a militant reform struggle, a democratic union or strike is to be Left (revolutionary). But militant reform struggle does not lead to revolution. It didn’t in the 1930’s when communists organized 5,000,000 workers into the CIO; it didn’t in the 1960’s in the civil rights movement and the ghetto rebellions; and it didn’t during the anti-Vietnam war movement which involved millions in militant action against U.S. imperialist war. Even insurrectionary armed struggle does not spontaneously lead to communist class consciousness and the establishment of socialism.

Reform and Revolution Reform, militant or otherwise, is not revolution. The movement for reform and revolution are two parallel movements. Fighting to reform the system will not lead to its overthrow, to revolution. In the sense that fighting strictly, or even mainly, to reform – patch up – the system spreads illusions that capitalism can be reformed. In this sense, reform politics are completely divorced from revolutionary politics. In this sense, fighting for reforms will never lead to revolution. Of course, if communists fight in, and even lead, the reform struggle with the idea of tying that struggle to revolutionary ideas, of showing how merely fighting for reforms is a dead end, that it will never change our lives for the better because capitalism will always take back any gains in another form – if we do that in the reform struggle, we will be concentrating on the main function of a communist: winning workers directly to revolutionary ideology, to joining the party, to fighting for state power for the working class. Yet, for the most part, we have ended up concentrating on trying to lead the reform struggle to victory under capitalism. We haven’t participated in the reform struggle as one tactic in the revolutionary process. Most of the time it has become our all-consuming passion, with the tacking on – virtually as an afterthought – the necessity to destroy, not reform, the system, to make a revolution. Because of that, we rarely go into a reform struggle with the main instrument with which the working class will make a revolution. Therefore, the implied conclusion is that somehow a revolutionary struggle will grow out of militant reform battles. It won’t. (See Lenin: What Is To Be Done, Chapter III, Section A).

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Revolution and Reform: Two Sides of a Contradiction To better understand how and why we in PLP have allowed reformism to dominate our actions, we should look at revolution and reform more dialectically, as two sides of a contradiction. In every contradiction there is a unity of opposites. In this instance, we would agree that, on the one hand, we can’t just shout revolution at workers and expect one to happen. We must participate in the reform struggle. On the other hand, we also agree that we can’t simply participate in reform struggle limiting ourselves to reform goals; we must raise the need for revolution, the need for the working class to take state power, and therefore the need to build a party. So here, in the necessity to fight for revolution while we also work in the reform movement, there is a unity of opposites. Yet, in every contradiction there is a primary aspect and a secondary aspect. The primary aspect determines the essence of a thing. For instance, in bourgeois or capitalist society, the main contradiction is between two classes, the bosses and the workers. But the primary aspect of that contradiction is that the bosses hold state power and control all production and distribution of all value created by the workers. It is this primary aspect that determines this society to be a bourgeois or capitalist society. Similarly, as regards to building a revolutionary movement: although there are two aspects to this – reform and revolution – one is primary and will determine the essence of what we are building. Too often we view both aspects as equal, and that therefore if we “do both” (the unity indicated above), we will achieve our goal of revolution. This belies material reality. When our anti-communist enemies accuse us of not really being interested in the immediate reform (“you just want to use the reform struggle for your `ulterior motive’ of building your party”)! they are actually saying that revolution and reform are contradictory. We have been trained to resolve that contradiction in a reformist way, by saying, “No, the two aspects are compatible; in fact, if we have a strong revolutionary Party we are more likely to win the reform.” Yes, while revolution and reform do – in one sense – go hand-in-hand, they are also contradictory. One, if pursued to its inherent logical conclusion, would destroy capitalism and build socialism; the other, if pursued to its inherent logical conclusion, maintains capitalism. If we must do both, revolution and reform, which is primary in our work? Again, the primary aspect determines the essence of what our Party is building, a revolutionary movement or a reformist movement. This essence came out sharply in the old Communist

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Party during the late 1940’s. When the ruling class mounted a ferocious anti-communist offensive, they forced all union officials by law (the fascist Taft-Hartley law) to sign non-communist affidavits if they were to remain as union officials. The C.P. leaders of unions virtually all decided to resign from the party, sign the affidavits and continue as union officials, on the “theory” that they must sacrifice politics to “save the union” (“but in our hearts we’re still communists”). We’d characterize this as an abject sellout of principle. But when we’re faced with essentially the same choice, although on a lower level, we act to prove ourselves in the reform struggle as real militants, “win the respect of the workers as fighters” (for reform), and then introduce our revolutionary politics, later. We therefore build a good base for reformism, and when the struggle gets sharp (in a strike, etc.), it is our friends (not our anti-communist enemies) who say to us, “don’t sell C-D” “don’t raise your Party”, etc. In life, by concentrating on reform work in a reformist way, we have made reform the principal aspect of the contradiction. The working class has recognized this and acted accordingly. And, just as happened with the old C.P., we will end up with a revisionist, sellout party if we pursue this path to its ultimate conclusion. We cannot win workers to communist ideology if we come off to them, in practice as “better reformers,” as promisers of reform victory. First, if we do win an immediate reform gain without the main idea of tying reform struggle to the necessity to make a revolution – to take state power – then it will only reinforce the idea among the rank and file participating in the reform struggle that you can win under capitalism – therefore, why do you need a communist revolution? Secondly, whatever gain might be won will always be reversed by the capitalist class because it has state power and can always take back the gain in another form. Thirdly, with communists in leadership the bosses might deliberately take a harder line and refuse to grant anything just to “prove” to workers they can do better without communist leadership. And they have the power and resources in this period to outlast workers, if they deem it better for them in the long run. Finally, we will not be able to lead a revolution for state power based on “first” winning power in the unions through militant reform struggle and “then” launching the struggle for state power. First of all, the ruling class will never let revolutionary communists get to the top of the labor movement, and possibly not even to head a big local in steel, auto etc.; they will pull out all necessary stops, including plenty of force and violence to prevent it. Therefore, to prepare workers for that inevitable ruling

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class reaction, we would have to raise the need to seize state power right from the beginning of building our base with a group of workers. Here in the U.S. we often follow a reformist line in opposing the revisionists. We usually center our attack around how they sabotage the reform struggle. This is not the essence of our ideological differences with them; this is not necessarily how they are leading the workers into the bosses’ arms. In fact, at times the revisionists themselves criticize the union leaders; some are militant and even build a base. Here again: Oppose the revisionists on revolutionary grounds, not reform ones; show that they put forward sharing power with the “good” bosses, that they believe the ruling class will give up its rule peacefully, while revolutionaries understand that there are no “good” bosses (only bad ones with different tactics on how to exploit workers); that no ruling class ever gave up its power peacefully, and that therefore we must destroy what is essentially a dictatorship of the bosses and replace it with a dictatorship of the working class, of the proletariat; furthermore, that the revisionists are nationalists and in practice oppose the time honored internationalist slogan of “workers of the world unite!” It is on these and similar grounds that we should oppose the revisionists, not on who does better in the reform struggle.

Recruit to Revolution, Not to a Reformist Line Even recruiting to the Party is not necessarily a measure of whether or not we are pursuing a correct, revolutionary course since we can – and do – easily recruit workers and others on a reformist basis. Two million workers belong to the Italian C.P.; they have been recruited on the basis that the “communists” will bring them more under capitalism. Recruiting by itself doesn’t mean building the Party. Recruiting on a revolutionary political line means building the Party. The further danger of recruiting people on a militant reform line is that once the ruling class succeeds in reversing the gains won through the militant reform, once the first dip in the reform struggle comes along, this new recruit winds up leaving the Party. They do not have the staying power of revolutionary ideas and commitment to a long-range, protracted revolutionary struggle for the seizure of power. But, if we have already recruited people on a reform basis, we shouldn’t now ask them to leave; we should attempt to consolidate them on the basis of revolutionary ideas and struggle. All this does not mean we get out of the reform struggle.

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It does not mean we don’t go to union meetings, that we don’t run for union election, etc. It  does mean that we pursue these activities and others in the reform struggle with the eye to building the party, with the goal of how do we use the union – as one aspect of the fight for revolution – to recruit to the Party and to the idea of the working class seizure of state power. We advocate, participate and even initiate struggle in the reform movement, but within the context of building for a revolution (which means building the Party). It is necessary not just to win reforms (which, by itself builds capitalist ideology, that you can reform the system), but to move masses to revolution. We are using the reform struggle as a tactic in building a revolutionary movement that will not stop at the useless and impossible aim of reforming capitalism but will enable the working class and its allies to use the party to make a revolution. Communists want workers to use their strength as a class to overthrow their oppressors, and that can only be accomplished by building a revolutionary party – which they must join – and has that as its only goal. The fact is that our Party has made its biggest advances when we have raised our revolutionary politics front and center as our main activity. This was true in raising the anti-Vietnam war movement to an anti-imperialist level. It was certainly true in organizing and carrying out our May Day action in Boston in 1975. It was then and around other May Days that the largest number of workers have seen the need to join the Party and build for a revolution, not simple stick to reforms. If we just put forward our revolutionary politics for a few weeks before May Day, the workers view us as militant reformers the rest of the year and then it is harder to understand the major political issues raised around May Day – the fight for Communism, internationalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. Putting revolution primary and reform struggle secondary means building for something like May Day all year round. It means building a communist base who we can go to about participating in such an important Party activity. Otherwise May Day will get smaller and smaller.

Our Paper Spreads Our Ideas If winning workers to revolution is primary, then nowhere are these ideas spread more widely than through the pages of Challenge-Desafio. Increasing the sale of, and subscriptions to, C-D, is not just some numbers game but part and parcel of the fight to win thousands of workers and others to the Party’s ideas. It should lead us to many new recruits, workers thirsting for the real

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solutions to their problems It can provoke discussions about revolutionary ideas among thousands and tens of thousands, if they are given the opportunity by us to read the paper regularly. One reason we often view the reform struggle as primary is because we believe the revolutionary struggle is either too distant or impossible. Often we tend to see the objective situation in a limited and static sense. For example, some of us do not believe the ruling class is in a state of accelerated decline. Therefore, it is very hard for us to accept the Party’s line on war and fascism. Sometimes we are frustrated because the class struggle appears to be quiet. It seems that the working class will always submit to the dictates of the ruling class. Consequently, if our thinking is dominated by the fact that the bosses are on top, and that this is permanent reality, then our attention must turn from a revolution to reform. If we believe reality to be a passive working class that won’t fight back, then we will abandon a revolutionary perspective. At “best,” we will stay in the reform struggle. And, if we don’t accept the Party line about war and fascism, don’t understand that the only way to defeat these capitalist developments is by revolution, we will never see the urgency of building our Party. These weaknesses occur in all of us because we don’t have an historical basis and historical information about the inevitability of change and the inevitability of the revolutionary process. Particularly unfortunate is the fact that we don’t draw the proper conclusion from recent important political events. For example, while it’s true that the anti-Vietnam war movement and the black rebellions were not revolutionary, the fact is that both these developments shook the ruling class to its heels. These were two major upheavals in our short lifetime, both shook the ruling class badly. But the fact is that these upheavals did happen! The other reality is that without a revolutionary party in the leadership of these movements they will peter out. We should encourage insurrection; every upheaval should see our party grow, leading to faster and continuous struggle in which we and the working class move to the left and to revolution. Strikes, or even general strikes – both of which are goals we seek – are not the quintessence of the struggle. We must learn how to direct these struggles into open rebellion against the ruling class, challenging them for state power. More and more workers must be won to the outlook of state power. If our revolutionary outlook were staunch, then our revolutionary will would grow. Our problem, as stated, is that our revolutionary outlook

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has been limited in the first place. But our illusions in reformism have persisted or even grown. So what often seems to be a weakening of revolutionary will, is in fact our loss of reformist will. This loss can and must be replaced by revolutionary consciousness. Historical examples, as well as more recent ones should give us overwhelming confidence that the workers can ultimately play their revolutionary role.

Can We Fight in a Revolutionary Way? The question of fighting in the reform movement in a revolutionary way – for revolutionary ideas – rather than in a reformist way (that maintains and even builds the system and its ideology), is no academic question. In fact it goes right to the heart of why we’re fighting for socialism and on what basis we recruit someone to that fight and to the Party. If we fight in the reform movement in a reformist way, and tag on the necessity to fight for communism as the way to win the reforms we can’t win under capitalism, we will be planting the seeds of the reversal of Communism once we were to win it. If the reason we fight for Communism is only to win material gains, then what would happen if workers were won to the Party solely on these grounds and did make a revolution? Once the working class has destroyed the capitalists and their ability to reap surplus value (profit) from the labor power of the working class, it does not necessarily mean that each individual worker under Socialism would get the full value of his/her labor power in his/her paycheck, to do with what they will. Where, then, would the social value come from to build whatever workers need in common – hospitals, dams to prevent floods or more factories and machinery to produce whatever the working class decides it needs? Still further, where would the value come from to help revolutionaries elsewhere in the world to take state power, to overthrow the ruling class that not only oppresses them but also has as its aim to destroy Communism where it has already been achieved? The fact is, under Communism, with the working class in control of the state, it would decide collectively how to apportion the value it produces. It might not mean that every reform demand fought for under capitalism would be met right away, because other social and political needs might be more pressing. But if Socialism were won mainly on the basis of material incentives, rather than the ideological level of preserving and spreading the revolution to make it worldwide, then working class rule would eventually be destroyed, as has happened in the Soviet Union and China.

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First, if all Socialism meant was more goods in more hands, we would have had it in the U.S., since the most goods in the hands of the most people exists right here. Secondly, “goulash communism” means forsaking revolutionaries elsewhere, since you’re committed to producing the most for yourself. This creates the basis for your own destruction, since it leads to (1) more powerful bosses outside the Communist state being allowed to exist and aim their guns at you; (2) the drive to produce for the individual rather than for the social good of all; and (3) the opposite of proletarian internationalism, imperialist expansion, where the Soviet revisionist leadership expands its tentacles around the world on the grounds of feathering its own material nest and power. Still further, winning workers to Socialism based mainly on material incentives (fulfilling the economic reforms not realizable under capitalism), leaves aside the whole superstructure of culture, relations between people, the question of family life, of what values will govern the society – communist or bourgeois values. It leaves aside the whole question of politics. Lenin said, “The economy is primary, but in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat, politics must take absolute priority over economy. “To give first importance to politics does not mean to replace the economy with politics and to neglect the economy, allegedly for the sake of politics, but means that each economic problem and the whole development of the economy must be seen through political eyes and be carried out in the direction defined by the proletarian politics...” What we are mainly fighting for in the reform battles under capitalism – material gain or building a revolutionary party with a revolutionary ideology – will determine on what basis we recruit to the Party, on why we’re fighting for Socialism, and ultimately on whether ideological incentives will overrun, preserve and spread that Socialism or whether material incentives will plant the seeds of its destruction and the restoration of capitalism based on capitalist ideas.

Examples of Reformist Line in Our Practice In the recent NYC hospital strike (Local 1199), the plan was to build the Party (recruit) and contrast the “demand” of arbitration with the necessity to win through violence, raising the whole communist concept of the need to seize state power. Now, there was improvement in this strike. PLP leaflets did come out putting forward revolutionary ideas as primary. Some workers were recruited to the Party.

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However, the Party leadership spent entirely too much time giving leadership to the reform struggle (exposing the sellout, organizing stronger picket lines, etc.) and far less time to plans for the two goals mentioned above. Therefore, too little political discussion took place in the clubs. Thus, the larger fraction meetings achieved during the strike became little more than left-wing caucuses. Thus, recruiting would tend to be on a reform, “we’re the good guys” WAM-type basis. In the 38-day San Francisco city workers strike the Party leadership planned a focus on three points: (1) racism; (2) who controls the city government; and (3) exposing the union leaders as sellouts. The idea was to build the Party around these points. In practice, fighting racism and linking the strike to the broad political point of how capitalism uses racism to stay afloat (and therefore, why it can only be smashed with a revolution) became a very secondary thing. The question of who controls the city government – basically a question of state power – was nonexistent. This left the exposure of the sellout union leaders as the main point and led to the Party forces trying to become – and sometimes achieving – the tactical leadership of the strike. By not teaching the lesson of the capitalist government – in this particular case, the actual boss – smashing the working class with its state power, and by concentrating on the union sellout issue, even though we led hundreds in militant struggle, the net result was that no city workers were won to the Party. Still another example is the recent strike by AFSCME Local 1006 in Chicago against racist layoffs and led by the Party. Two Party members were elected to the 1006 executive board, the recording secretary of the local and the chief shop steward. In addition, the editor of the local union paper is a PLP member. Three Party goals should have been: (1) since the strike was a Party-led action against racist layoffs (120 minority workers were axed), a good issue, to broaden this out to oppose the Nazi racist attacks and general ruling class offensive in the city of Chicago; (2) defeat the revisionists ideologically in the union; and (3) recruit to the Party on the above basis. (1) No fight was made to expand the strike to oppose the broader manifestations of racism, thereby failing to politicize many in a mass way, to understand the relation of the strike to Mayor Daley and the whole ruling class, etc. The strike was restricted to the fight inside the union against layoffs, (2) We allowed the revisionists to run us over ideologically. We backed off selling C-D as “divisive” (it was done, but weakly), when we should have thrown the revisionists out of the union and explained why, (3) When we met with the strike leaders we discussed mainly

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how to build the picket lines, not how to build the Party. All this happened after conducting a long and positive fight in 1006 to actually go on strike, and against layoffs. When it happened and with Party members in leadership, it appears we felt impelled to “win” the strike to show how good the Party members were (“better reformers”), rather than really winning by recruiting to the Party based on revolutionary ideas, at the same time as we participate in a militant strike, using the latter opportunity to make the points we had planned to. Finally the government/boss fired 300 strikers who were protesting these racist layoffs. Then the AFSCME International sellout Jerry Wurf came down, put the local in receivership, declared the strike over, and connived with the bosses to split the strikers, maintaining the firing of 33 (PLPers and other militants). The communists who, in attempting to carry out the political fight against racism and thereby organized the strike, were virtually all fired, without, so far, having recruited any workers to the Party out of this struggle. There is no PLP fraction there. Therefore, not only was the revolutionary movement not built, but the bosses, having accomplished their most important aim – lessening communist influence – can now go about driving the workers down still further, with far less communist leadership to contend with. The entire line of putting reform before revolution has been reflected in our leaflets and C-D articles. We have spent most of the leaflet discussing the ins and outs of the reform struggle, giving good advice on how to militantly overturn the union sellouts’ tactics, and ending up with “PLP fights for communism and workers power; for more information, call us.” While this may sound too crude, it is essentially what most of us have done. And this is the way our activities have been described in C-D articles. We do that instead of starting out with revolutionary politics, why we are involved in this reform struggle, in what way does it show the need for overthrowing capitalism, in what way does it show capitalism as the cause of the problem, etc., and then spending some time on tactics, growing out of this communist analysis which would imply sharper class struggle and an understanding to act against capitalism. How did all this happen? Is it wrong to be active in the union, to run for union leadership, to be militant, to immerse one’s self in the working class at the point of production, etc.? Definitely not, but certainly we shouldn’t do it in the one-sided, reform-over-revolution way we’ve done it. The reformist errors described did not result from Party members not carrying out the Party line. It was

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the Party leadership who allowed the line to develop in a one-sided way. The fact is the Party membership followed the example set by the leadership. When the articles appeared in C-D in the fashion described, members could only conclude that this was desirable and followed suit. When the leadership concentrated on the reform struggle, making it primary in practice, the membership followed suit, “carrying out the line.” Now, based on a review of our practice and where it has gotten us, we are trying to correct these mistakes and develop the line in such a way that it isn’t practiced one-sidedly, so that the advances made each step of the way are not undercut. Advancing our theory and practice is a protracted process, not an all-or-nothing affair. It is a painstaking struggle to constantly test it, evaluate the results, make necessary changes and then test it again, always using the mooring of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessity for the working class to seize state power, and the need for a communist party to lead that goal. At this point it might be helpful to examine the development of our line, especially in the labor movement.

Move Towards the Working Class When the PLM (Progressive Labor Movement) was first formed in 1962, it was based on the fact that the working class was the key class historically in making a revolution and that it needed a communist party to lead to the smashing of bourgeois state power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was the answer to the old C.P.’s total abandonment of the fight for Socialism. The PLM period (1962-1965) re-asserted the public role of communists (“out in the open, on the streets”), laying the basis for the formation of a party. There was plenty of “reporting” on the role of workers and class struggle but absolutely no communist base-building (there were very few Party members who were workers; at the founding convention of PLP we had one “trade union club” with four members out of 200 people at the convention). From `65 and the establishment of PLP to around `68, we attempted to move members to work and into the unions, mostly to try to establish a base within the working class at the point of production and secondarily to get some stability. Since most of our members were students or ex-students, these were the people who “entered” the working class to carry out the line. The main emphasis was to “get our feet wet” in what Lenin referred as the “muck and mire” of trade unionism. We were going to try to build a rank-and-file movement, caucuses, a left-center coalition, learn trade union and

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strike tactics and organize struggle so “Marxist-Leninist conclusions could come out of the struggle.” For students and ex-students to stick in the working class – given many romantic notions of workers – and therefore to avoid adventurism, we opted for opportunism and downplaying the open Party role at the expense of avoiding sectarianism (and getting fired immediately). This meant little putting forward of the Party in the here and now. Most members were not known as PLers by their co-workers.

Developing the Idea of Base-Building Although the Party was buried for the most part because of this, one important advance in this period was the development of the basebuilding concept which became the main speech at the 1968 party convention. While this was the height of the period of the ghetto rebellions and the anti-war movement, there was very little relation between our activities in those two movements and our work in the labor movement, partly because of the lack of a communist base among workers. As we began to see that putting students in the “front lines” wouldn’t work and that they either left the Party or they buried themselves at work (and left the Party behind), we pulled many of them out of the industrial working class and put them in situations more related to their backgrounds, some still in unions, others in situations where they could more naturally win their peers to a pro-working class stance. This period, from `69 to `71, was characterized by the more mass putting forward of the Party, especially through the mass sale of CD. Members were encouraged to sell the paper in front of their plants, to tell workers about the Party right at the beginning, etc. Sales of the monthly C-D reached 100,000 in the summer of 1970. Sellers’ collectives of Party and non-Party were formed. With the start of the recession 1970, Workers Councils and Unemployment Councils were formed to try to win workers directly to the Party, although done essentially away from the point of production. In `71, with the advent of a big wave of wildcat strikes and general working-class unrest, we suddenly realized we were outside this movement. Members organizing sellers collectives, Unemployment Councils, selling the paper outside plants, etc., were not even attending union meetings and participating in the main mass organization of the working class. They were therefore unable to put forward politics in that struggle. So `71-72 marked a return to unions, slates, caucuses, union activity (both by members in unions in which ex-students were naturally accepted on the job, and by those industrial workers

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recruited out of the Councils’ work), but this time on the basis of telling co-workers about the Party and the intention to recruit “out of the struggle.” In the beginning of `72, the Workers Action Movement (WAM) was formed to organize a mass-based Left organization around a major issue – 30 for 40. To WAM we would win the most advanced workers who we would then recruit to the Party. Party members would be open in WAM. It would unite the working class, engage in strike support, and fight racism. But the intention was for it to be a single-issue organization, to re-develop the Left inside the labor movement. Actually, WAM developed as a militant, class-solidarity group, with an everything-butthe-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat program. This led to the idea it was “unnecessary to join the Party because it is no different than WAM” and the Party was generally buried in WAM activities (reform work), although some workers were recruited to the Party through WAM. Yet, it was generally on a militant WAM line, not on a revolutionary line.

Fractions, Caucuses and a Mass Party The period from Dec. `74 to the present was marked by a drive for a mass Party, to recruit those who were hidden from the Party by WAM, etc. Party membership jumped. WAM was dissolved, having outlived any usefulness it might have had, to be replaced by communist fractions (a line which began in Aug. `75). The idea was, and is, to win workers ready to function directly under the leadership and line of the Party, and from there to recruit them. Still ready to join caucuses, we now distinguish between them and fractions – the caucus is not set up to build the Party, although workers could and should be recruited to the Party or fraction out of caucus work. Fractions were formed on the basis of “linking reform to revolution,” seeing that the working class won’t get Marxism-Leninism simply by working on the job, nor simply from class struggle at the point of production. The fraction, and the Party members in it, must run the whole gamut of political ideas and events, on and away from the job, since (1) a communist outlook goes far beyond the point of production, and (2) the battle for state power is one that occurs away from the factories, although occupying factories could be one aspect of a revolution. The ability to “take over” production is really dependent upon having state power and outlawing private property. As long as the ruling class has state power, it can use it to prevent workers’ control over production. However, while putting forward communist fractions and the above ideas, we have still managed to organize

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fractions that are essentially reformist in nature. That is in “linking reform to revolution,” we still use reform struggle as “the basis” of winning workers to the Party, which also means they can be won to the Party on a militant reform line, not on a revolutionary line. We are now coming to the conclusion that fighting for reforms without the main content being to tie the fight to the communist idea of overthrowing the system (i.e., fighting in the mass movement in a reformist way), is contradictory to the fight for revolution. Winning workers to see the need to take state power, and therefore to join and build the Party to lead to that goal, does not grow out of the simple fight for reforms. Therefore, it is only capitalism that can be built by fighting in the reform movement in a reformist way. Yet we can see from tracing our history in this very cursory fashion, that there was both a good side and a weak side – a revolutionary side and a reform side – to our work. There was always a concentration on the working class as the revolutionary class, and, after `68, an attempt to win workers directly to the Party. Within that we developed the concept of building a communist base in the working class. We always put forward the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessity of the working class to seize power and smash the bourgeois state. We always put forward the need to fight racism as necessary to unite the working class to a point where it could move for state power. This central anti-racist thread, along with the analysis of the decline of U.S. imperialism, has laid the basis for the development of the line on fascism. Each advance in the line produced something positive which we still incorporate into our current work: the working class is the revolutionary class; do communist work in the unions, lead class struggle at the point of production; build a personal/political communist base among workers; tell workers about the Party; put forward the Party in a mass way; mass sale of C-D; boldly put forward the Party at plant gates; intensify work in the unions on the basis of talking about the party and recruiting to it; putting forward 30 for 40 and anti-racism to the whole working class; uniting the working class through these issues; fractions, not caucuses, as Party units; winning workers to communist ideas beyond just the momentary boss-worker relationship; seeing that revolution will occur away from (although sometimes including) the factories.

The Road to Revolution We published Road to Revolution I, a reassertion of the

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dictatorship of the proletariat after its abandonment by most of the world communist movement at that time. In Road to Revolution II we corrected errors on the question of nationalism, seeing that this is a ruling class ideology and cannot lead to socialism but leads to the maintenance of capitalism. In Road to Revolution III we attacked the two-stage theory of revolution, declaring that workers, peasants and others can be won directly to fighting for Socialism. However, our practice has tended to tail this progression in our line. Part of what we have been doing is a reflection of winning workers on a two-stage basis – first to militant reform and then to revolution. We have rejected this in theory. We must reject it in practice. The fact is that when we win workers to militant reform first, it can and does just as easily turn into its opposite and away from revolution and joining PLP. This happened because (1) of many early subjective weaknesses; (2) when it comes to a choice of pursuing a revolutionary path or a reform road, a reform fight will always meet with a lesser resistance from the ruling class; therefore, without revolutionary politics being foremost in our minds, we are most likely to pursue a reformist road; and (3) we haven’t understood the Leninist thesis that the reform struggle is just one tactic in the revolutionary process. Therefore, we haven’t entered the reform struggle with a communist understanding, with the primary goal of building the Party, but rather from the point of view that the working class is the revolutionary class and that “therefore” out of the class struggle will grow MarxismLeninism. Our practice has taught us that this is simply not true. So somewhat inherent in the way we have developed the various changes and advances in our line over the years – and there was always a positive and more advanced concept in each successive change, growing out of practice – there has also been a one-sidedness that allowed reformism to override revolution. It is this weakness that must be reversed. We can no longer have the idea, present in many past trade union programs, that we will take over the unions and from that vantage point launch a fight for state power. The ruling class will opt for violent struggle to save their system long before we “take over” the unions. Therefore, we must, right from the beginning, win workers to the concept of state power, not to the idea that they will win through rank-and-file power first and revolution later. Sure, we should and must be active in the unions, run for office, participate in the fight for rank-and file power against the sellouts. But only from the point of view of fitting that struggle into one for revolution,

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not from the point of view that this reform of the unions precedes the fight for revolution. The concept of making the primary fight one of fighting for revolution, and therefore of building the Party, and the fight for reforms secondary should not view recruiting to the Party in a narrow or limited way. Winning someone to join the Party is not simply meeting some numerical quota, and after we’ve won 51% of the working class, we’ll simply “have Socialism.” Winning someone to join the Party around a revolutionary line means winning that person to go back into the reform movement, into the mass movement, participate in the class struggle in a way that sharpens the fight against the ruling class as a class, tie the reform struggle to capitalism and why and how it must be overthrown, and in that way recruit still more workers to the Party. Winning someone to join the Party is not merely an intellectual exercise; it is winning them to be active in leading and initiating class struggle around a revolutionary line, rather than just being a militant fighter for reforms.

Our Communist Line in Practice In the recent NYC Local 420 hospital strike, a leaflet was distributed which put forward the Party’s revolutionary line and explained how capitalism has caused the strikers’ problems, therefore why a Party and Socialism was needed. An expanded Party meeting was called on the first day of the strike and 16 non-Party workers came. It was announced at the start of the meeting that, while it was important to discuss strike tactics, it was more important to discuss the overall ravages of the system, of racism, etc., and why it was necessary to build the Party in this strike. The sharpness of the revolutionary line during the August 28 Detroit auto march helped recruit five workers to the Party. Many workers who have been around the Party for some time were recruited simply by asking them in a serious way to join. They had been ready for some time but had never been asked or followed up seriously. The Party’s leadership of the wildcat strike at NYC’s Montefiore Hospital involved anti-racism (uniting white professionals with black and Latin non-professionals), pointing out the class nature of the system, and pointing out the necessity to join the Party and build for a revolution as the only way out. Four workers joined who participated in the struggle. Now a shop paper is being distributed there among Local 1199 members entitled, “We Tried Arbitration; Look What We Got – Revolution is the Only Solution.” The bosses in one shop posted an order requiring workers

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to submit to lunchbox inspections “because supplies were being stolen.” Black workers were singled out for special harassment. The Party put out a leaflet asking “Who is stealing from whom?” and went on to explain the robbery of surplus value by the bosses off the workers’ labor, and show how Socialism will stop the biggest thievery of all, tying the racist nature of the attack into this explanation. There have been similar attempts elsewhere at fitting the reform struggle into the revolutionary goal. Some of this has been more reflected in the kinds of articles now being written in C-D. These are good beginnings. As we attempt to change our approach, we will no doubt make, mistakes. But we must make decisive changes in the work. One way to do it is the following: Instead of beginning by becoming active in any reform struggle that is occurring in our area of work, begin with studying the problems in an industry (or elsewhere) from a communist point of view: what are the main reflections of capitalism in that area (unemployment? racism? high accident rate? etc.). Then develop an explanation of how these problems result from capitalism, and therefore why we need socialism and how socialism would solve those problems. The idea is to explain why the problems exist in such a way that it would impel workers to act in a way to destroy the system, not to merely oppose the sellouts and fight for rank-and-file power. Acting in the direction of destroying the system means joining a fraction or the Party, spreading revolutionary ideas, recruiting others to the fraction and the Party, as well as participating in the reform struggle to get the opportunity to do the above. Leaflets, C-D articles, and other written material should start with the concepts of revolution, not dwell on reform. This means that the political goals set forward, for instance, in the plans as outlined previously in the NYC Hospital strike, the S.F. city workers strike, the AFSCME

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1006 strike, should be the bulk of the leaflet or article, with a much lesser amount devoted to the ins and outs of the reform struggle, and then mainly as they fit into the revolutionary struggle. In other words, we shouldn’t merely reverse the present content, putting the present last sentence or paragraph about PLP and revolution at the beginning and then just proceed with our usual concentration on reform. We must really think out how the main problems in the struggle reflect capitalism and therefore win workers to the necessity to get rid of capitalism, not merely change the union. Finally, if we are elected to union office, we should: (1) tie every grievance to capitalism, which should make us a fighting grievance person (do not feed the illusion that a communist, or communist-led union, can make things better under capitalism; use the grievance to win workers closer to the idea of destroying capitalism and therefore joining the Party or Party fraction); (2) use the union office to conduct political discussion, at union meetings, in union committees, at shop steward meetings, etc.; (3) use the union office to win workers to join the Party. If using our union position to build the Party in this way leads to a sharp struggle and even ouster from the position, this would be a victory if it meant that we had recruited workers to the Party, to seeing the need to destroy capitalism and take state power. That is the barometer of winning or losing, not the votes in the election or the ability to hang onto the office. Comrades and friends: a future of revolution was never brighter. The objective situation is worsening; the bosses’ economy is headed for another slump. This will mean new attacks on the working class and increased imperialist meddling abroad, pointing to war and fascism. Against all this the working class can take the offensive, if led by a communist party that follows a line of putting revolution first, that bursts the chains of capitalist reformist ideology. This is our historic task; let’s get to it!

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ZIZEK:

“Marxist” Loyally “Opposed” to Capitalism

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the “Left” critiques of US power previously offered by leftists like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, reformists who fell within the bosses’ frame of “acceptable debate,” couldn’t explain with any detail the economic aspects of the current crisis. The bosses needed a perspective that was more convincing. A theory that could take into account the growing concerns many students and workers had (and still have) about capitalism and growing class inequality. They chose to sell a version of Marxism. A Marxism that could deliver revolutionary language with one hand and take it away with the other. “Marxist” and self-proclaimed “communist” philosopher Slovoj Zizek has filled this void. The Slovenian philosopher has emerged as one of the leading “Marxist” scholars of the 21st century. His political rants combine “Marxism” with Lacanian psychoanalysis1 in an attempt to explain what he calls the many “paradoxes” of contemporary capitalism. The bankruptcy of his particular version of Marxism was displayed quite vividly at the Marxism 2009 conference, which discussed the idea of “What Does it Mean to Be a Revolutionary Today?” At the end of his lecture, Zizek closed with a tirade blaming anti-immigrant racism on the working class, arguing that the intellectuals in the room should not be fooled: the working class is often the most reactionary, racist element in society. Only a “Marxist” favored by the ruling class could claim to be a revolutionary on the one hand and then use the other hand to smash the working class. He is the face of the bosses’ anti-working class ideology in the 21st century. Zizek entered the Western scene in 1989 and has since acquired a cult-like following among many cultural theorists and academic leftists. His charismatic speaking style has earned him the title “Elvis of cultural theory” and “The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West.” There are at least 14 books that provide a “critical” introduction to Zizek’s ideas. He has become required reading for many college courses and he has since become well known to students on college campuses across the country. He has published a dozen books, written numerous articles,

starred in several documentaries, and frequently speaks or makes appearances on TV, radio and college campuses.2 His ubiquity has put the word “communism” on the tips of many college students’ tongues. But, as will be shown, his new and stylized version of “communism” is in fact a sophisticated attack against true communism.

Situating Zizek The introduction of Zizek to the West and to the world stage occurred in the context of three much larger phenomena: declining class consciousness of the global working class, the rise of eastern European nationalism that followed the break up of the former Soviet Union and the subsequent scramble by imperialist nations for access to oil and gas pipelines. It is in this context that Zizek became a notable intellectual and was able to spread his revisionist, anti-communist ideas. In the late 60’s the working class brought class struggle in the US and in many countries around the world to a head: the fight against US imperialism in Vietnam and the anti-war protest movement in the US, the Cultural Revolution in China, and the student-worker general strike in France. However, within a few years, the internal contradictions of these movements, rooted in revisionism, led to their demise. Capitalism returned to countries like Russia, China, and Vietnam that had thought socialism could be a stage to communism. The illusions of liberalism—the belief that capitalism could be reformed for the benefit of workers – disarmed a militant working class in the US and Europe, and led workers down the road to reform instead of revolution. Around the world, cynicism in the working class began to replace class-consciousness. Détente signaled that the rulers no longer feared the threat of worldwide communism coming from the Soviet Union. The rise of imperialist rivals to US power set the stage for new period of intensified imperialist division of the world. While PLP recognizes that by the 1950’s the limits of socialism had turned attempts at a workers state in the Soviet Union and other eastern European countries back

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to capitalism, for much of the world 1989 marked the official “death of communism.” It was in this context of the break up of the former Soviet Union that European and Russian imperialists began a scramble for access to the natural resources and strategic pipeline routes of the Caspian Sea region. The promotion of nationalism and ethnic separatism proved an effective divide and conquer strategy for these imperialists. The effects of this strategy were most pronounced in the republics of the former Yugoslavia.3 The republic of Slovenia, with its close proximity to the capitalist nations of Italy and Austria was the first of the Yugoslav republics to push for independence by aligning itself with Western European capitalism. For supporters of Slovene separatism, leaving Yugoslavia was a way for Slovenia to enter the “rich man’s club” of Western Europe and NATO. Liberal reformers inside Slovenia built a reform movement through NGO (non-governmental organization) “networking” with Western European imperialists. Slovenian intellectuals were often the public face of these networks. In the late 80’s, many of these intellectuals wrote for the “dissident” magazine Mladina, which served as the main voice of Slovenian separatism. Its staff columnists included Slovoj Zizek and other intellectuals who aligned themselves with Western European imperialists. These columnists pushed a hardline Slovenian nationalism. Mladina also served as a base for the Slovenian intellectuals who would go on to build a case for war against Serbia. These intellectuals got their chance to further spread their ideology in the late 80’s when Mladina writer and ranking member of “Alliance of Socialist Youth of Slovenia” Janez Jansa was arrested over the theft of secret military documents. As representatives of Jansa’s defense, several young Slovenian intellectuals toured the Western “networks.” Throughout the capitals of Western Europe they spread anti-communism and lies about the dangers of Yugoslav militarism. Zizek’s ascendance into the Western academic scene was no doubt made possible from his ability to make use of these established “networks.”4 Along with his credentials as a founding member of the Slovenia’s Liberal Democratic Party, 1990 Slovene Presidential candidate, and Ambassador of Science for the Republic of Slovenia in 1991, Zizek had proved to the ruling class of the US and Western Europe his ability to mislead the working class into the dead end of nationalism and electoral politics and had helped open up Slovenia to imperialist competition.5 Zizek would soon find his niche in American academia as a Lacanian Marxist breathing fresh life into “old” Marxist ideas.

Erasing Class Through Ideology As the class-consciousness of workers began to decline on the world stage in the late 1960’s, and inter-

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imperialist rivalries began to heat up, on the academic front, “Marxist” theories about the making change were being rewritten to exclude the role of labor. In the wake of the French general strike and the Chinese cultural revolution, “Marxist” intellectuals and other academic leftists began pursuing “postmodern” and “post-Marxist” theories, which unlike traditional Marxist theories, no longer called for a key role played by the working class. These theories allowed intellectuals to cast themselves as being the agents of change rather than the working class whom they claim failed to make revolution. “Culture” replaced “class,” opening the door for a whole range of identity politics rooted in idealism and subjectivity. In these new theories, the struggle over culture and ideology replaced the class struggle. One of the most influential of these “Marxists” was Louis Althusser. For “Marxists” like Althusser, the Chinese Cultural revolution proved that the political struggle of the “masses” decisive but it could be conceived as almost being independent of any material basis rooted in political economy. The “masses” and the “people” began to replace the working class as a transformative force. An emphasis on political economy was cast as crude Marxist “economism” and an emphasis on the political along with the ideological and cultural emerged as the primary factors in determining the possibility of revolution. Eventually this theory displaced even the idea that the “people” could make revolution, leaving only a role for the intellectual in creating such a change. PL also argues that politics is primary. Like Marx said, “theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.” But it is the ideology of the working class that is decisive. This ideology must be rooted in an understanding of political economy. Its bedrock is the fact that the working class is the source of all value and has the only real material power to stop capitalist profit accumulation at the point of production. It is in the workers’ understanding of their own power based on an understanding of political economy that true working class consciousness can emerge. Althusser and others have attempted to displace political economy with ideology and have thus attempted to destroy any basis for working class consciousness to develop. Further, they look uncritically at the internal dynamics of socialism and its concessions to capitalism in China and instead blame the working class for the failure to make communist revolution. For Marx the function of ideology under capitalism is not separate from economics but woven into the very fabric of political economy. In the Capital Vol. I in the chapter “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” Marx contends that capitalist social relations are concealed through the very structure of capitalism itself. According to Marx, the capitalist world presents itself as a world of things (commodities) instead of a world of social relations. These commodities appear to have

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value in and of themselves and the fact that their value is derived from the labor performed by workers is what is concealed from the working class. This is the key that unlocks the power of the working class—the fact that all value is created by the working class but is expropriated by the bosses. For Marx, this reality behind the illusion is what must be demystified for workers in order for them to see that they are the true creators of all value. For Marx, capitalist ideology acts to conceal the true power of the working class. It is only through an understanding of Marx’s political economy that the working class can fully understand its true potential. For many Marxists and students today, after swimming in a sea of idealist “postmodern” and “postmarxist” theory that has followed Althusser’s thinking, Slovoj Zizek appears to be a breath of fresh air. Zizek claims that “postmarxist” and “postmodern” theories are insufficient in describing modern day capitalism. In a supposed rejection of the idealism of these theories, Zizek has called for a return to dialectical materialism and Marxism—but with a Lacanian twist. Zizek’s career as a philosopher in the West began with his first English translated book The Sublime Object of Ideology. In it Zizek sets out to explain his view of how ideology functions under contemporary capitalism. He argues that unlike pervious periods (and traditional Marxist theories) where capitalism simply concealed the structures of exploitation from the workers, today workers are in fact aware that they are being exploited but go on about their daily lives in a pragmatic yet cynical way.6 For Zizek, ideology functions not by concealing reality with an illusion but by functioning as the reality in illusion itself. For him, behind the illusion of ideology is not reality, but a reality that is itself also an illusion. He claims that this illusion substitute of reality is a projection of workers desires and fantasies. Zizek claims that workers aren’t simply fooled into being exploited, but actively participate in their exploitation through the fulfillment of their desires and fantasies. In other words, workers fantasize about their own oppression and thus don’t fight back. Following Lacanian psychoanalysis, Zizek maintains that the workers’ fantasy tries to bridge the gap between the reality that people experience and true reality beyond our ability to comprehend through language called the “Real.” For Zizek and other Lacanians, the “Real” is the “objective” world stripped of all the symbolic representations of it—language, etc. We can only truly experience the “Real” when we are in an infant state and have not yet been taught language. Once we are brought into the “symbolic universe” of language, then we are no longer aware of this true “Real” reality. Because our language and symbols fail to ever fully explain this “Real” there exists a “lacking” in society. According to Zizek, we attempt to overcome this “lacking” through the creation of ideological fantasies. It is worth noting that for Zizek this “lacking” stems not from capitalist exploitation and

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unequal class relations, but from something eternal and ahistorical. In his literature, Zizek often makes use of the words “class” and “capitalism” as he contextualizes and explains world affairs with popular culture references. But his understanding of class in a Marxist sense is in reality extremely limited and highly problematic. The objective inequality between classes in the traditional Marxist sense, the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class and the expropriation of value from the workers by the bosses, for Zizek, is really a manifestation of the “lacking” of the “Real.” He claims that the subject (the worker) is alienated, not because of class exploitation, but because of a lack of access to the “Real.” Class struggle is just the synonym for the “Real.” Going further, Zizek claims that a proletarian is not someone who works for a wage and is robbed of their value, but is someone who risks everything because he is the pure subject deprived of roots. Like Althusser and other “postmarxists” before him, Zizek abandons political economy and Marxism in favor of Lacanian psychoanalysis and in the process purges the working class from its central role in making revolution. Ultimately, for Zizek, the roots of ideology are psychoanalytic and not linked to class societies, exploitation or history. He frames class in the Lacanian triad of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. The “symbolic” class is bankers and managers. The social “real” consists of the underclass, homeless, etc. The imaginary is the “middle class”. For Zizek, each of these classes has its own world-view that it seeks to promote and realize. However, Zizek is inconsistent in the use of his own framework, in some accounts referring to America as a whole as “Capital” and countries like China as a “working class state”.7 Missing from this analysis is even a remotely Marxist understanding of class, much less a theory that could take into account inter-imperialist rivalries or other concepts vital to understanding contemporary capitalism. A truly Marxist understanding of ideology and ideological fantasizes must take into account their materialist roots. It is what Marx called the “alienation” of the working class from their labor and from each other that provides that raw material for the ideological fantasizes that Zizek is obsessed over. The illusions produced by movies, advertisements, brands, etc have such a strong influence not because of some “lacking” of the “Real” produced by language, but because of a structural lacking created by capitalism between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Fantasies are illusions that promise to cure alienation, a promise that can be kept only with the demise of capitalism. Zizek claims to be a materialist, but this theory of ideology is steeped in psychoanalytic and Hegelian idealism. His “materialism” is more interested in surface appearances than in deep realities. Substituting Hegelian

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idealism for a Marxist historical-materialism is his way of rejecting the analysis that the working class, because it is the source of all value, is the key to changing the system. Zizek practices what Lenin has called “objective idealism.” He is an idealist masquerading as a materialist who believes that ideology is not how the bosses conceal their exploitation of the working class, but a fantasy produced both by capitalism and workers themselves to reconcile the “Real.” Zizek’s theory of ideology is anti-working class garbage dressed up in a new Lacanian garb. Zizek, rather that helping to bring Marxist and communist ideas to workers and students, is in fact peddling a dangerous form of 21st century anti-communism.

Zizek on Racism and Imperialism Just as Zizek claims to be a breath of fresh air in an age of “postmodern” fluff, he also claims to offer his readers a fresh take on modern day racism—one that reveals the true function of “postmodern” multicultural forms of racism. Many readers of Zizek point to his view that racism today is manifest not just in overt forms of discrimination and exploitation, but through the inclusion of those same racial groups in mainstream society but “at a distance.” He points out the ways in which cultural attire and cuisine of various ethnic groups are incorporated into the capitalist fold while the people that produced those cultural forms continue to be exploited. And it is true that this is one of the ways that racism continues to adapt and thrive in an age of multiculturalism and “tolerance.” With the election of Barak Obama, there has been an intensification of racism and racist slaughter of workers around the world. On his watch workers have witnessed widening imperialist war and slaughter in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and others; the deportation of over one million immigrants; a widening the police state apparatus in the US targeting black, Arab and Latino workers; and the delivering of an unprecedented bailout gift to the major auto companies and banks and the subsequent slashing of workers wages and benefits. In this way Obama is truly the embodiment of “postmodern” racism: a person of color at the helm of the racist US imperialist system. However, Zizek’s view of “postmodern” racism, like his view of class, is inconsistent and stops short of being applied in any meaningful way. During the 2008 Presidential election, many cynical leftists like Chomsky, Zizek argued, supported Obama but “without illusions” that he would significantly improve the system. Zizek, however, claims to have taken the much more “radical” position, arguing that Obama’s election was “a sign of hope in our otherwise dark times” and was a significant rupture from the past that “widens our freedom and thereby the scope of our decisions.”8 Here Zizek provides the legitimation of the ruling class by the left that the bosses hoped for. Not only does Zizek embrace Obama along with all his policies, but he does so

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as a “radical” act. This is a truly dangerous path for the working class. While appearing to advance a sophisticated analysis of nationalism and racism in today’s “postmodern” capitalism, the essence of Zizek’s analysis, rooted in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian idealism, is an anti-working class view that is itself racist and blames the roots of racism on the working class and not capitalism. Zizek’s background as a columnist for the Slovene nationalist magazine Mladina in the 1990’s gives some context to his position on race. In general the magazine promoted a line of anti-Serbian racism as a way to justify breaking away from the “poor, shiftless, criminal South” of Yugoslavia. It was through the established NGO “networks” mentioned earlier that the image of Serbia as a dictatorship ruled by a man akin to Hitler (Milosevic) was transmitted to Western European human rights groups. It was this image that eventually served as justification for the 1999 Kosovo “humanitarian” war.9 In an article circulated on the internet following the 1999 NATO Kosovo bombing, Zizek argued that the Serbian people were not merely manipulated by Milosevic but “let themselves be manipulated with (an) obscene pleasure” of racist nationalism. Again, Zizek blames the roots of racism on the fantasies of the working class. Not only does Zizek argue here that racism against ethnic Albanians emanated from the Serbian working class but that the amount of NATO bombs dropped on Serbia at the time was “not yet ENOUGH bombs.” For Zizek, the only way to rid the Serbian workers of the racism that supposedly emanated from them was by continuing the racist NATO slaughter.10 In all, Zizek’s analysis erases the role the bosses play in creating racism and pins it to the fantasies of the working class who “let themselves be manipulated.” Where many “postmarxists” simply ignore or deny the revolutionary role of the working class after 1968, this type of analysis pegs the creation of capitalism’s most violent ideological weapon, racism, onto the working class. Ultimately Zizek’s commentary on race has proven effective for the bosses in many ways, the least of which is the justification of expanding imperialist war. In the case of Kosovo, Zizek’s writings gave Western capitalists the racist ammunition they needed to justify the slaughter of Serbian workers for oil pipelines. However, the bosses’ need for this type of ammunition is ongoing and Zizek has proven to be someone who can sell war to a cynical public while masquerading his justification for war as a radical “critique.” In his book Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek argues that imperialism is a political matter about choices and not rooted in the drive of capitalist accumulation of surplus value. In a video appearance called “Living in the End Times” Zizek unleashes a critique of the anti-war Left. He illustrates his take on US imperialism with a joke. Zizek

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tells the story of a man looking for his lost key under a street lamp and not in a dark corner where he actually lost it because, the man claims, “the light is here and not over there.” He uses this story to argue that the US is in Afghanistan because it cannot attack its ally countries where Al Qaeda really is: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. He gives no facts or evidence to support his claim. He makes no mention of Afghanistan’s strategic location on the Chinese border or potential gas pipelines. All he gives is a joke and his assertion that it must be so. Further, he appears to be making the case that the US should in fact eventually attack Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. This analysis of war is echoed throughout his work. The capitalist processes, the law of overproduction and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, that have driven US imperialism into Afghanistan are erased and presented instead as merely choices made by greedy individuals. In his video appearance he goes on to say that for the US to simply leave Afghanistan is “too easy.” He claims to take an even more radical position. He argues that the US must stay and clean up the mess they created. It is clear, for Zizek the “radical” position is not to oppose war or oppose the racist bosses. The only “radical” thing to do is to embrace them. In an age of expanding imperialist war, the working class needs a true explanation of why imperialist wars occur, an understanding rooted in an analysis of inter-imperialist rivalries that are driven by the laws of capitalism. Zizek provides no such analysis and is helping the bosses lead the working class further into a dark night.

Zizek and Communist Practice Ultimately Zizek’s work, despite its Marxist trappings, is an assault on the very idea of communist practice. Like his “postmarxist” predecessors, he rejects the agency of the working class in favor of the agency of the intellectuals and the individual. While he frequently makes reference to the need for “revolution,” the core of his thinking leaves little to no room for a revolution led by the working class. In his book Revolution at the Gates, Zizek sounds almost as if he advocates a Leninist party to lead a revolution. He makes the case that we should in fact emulate Lenin. He claims we must become intolerant in our thinking in the way Lenin was of capitalist ideology. However, this shocking embrace of Leninism proves to be nothing more than a strategy to rewrite Lenin as a slave to spontaneity. Lenin is not presented as a leader of the working class who learned from practice and then applied Marxism to the situation in Russia. Instead, Lenin is presented as a situationist – someone who acted not on a real principle but only according to a strategy that changed as the situation changed. The essence of Lenin as a disciplined revolutionary leader is replaced with a depoliticized Lenin who relies on spontaneity and strategy. Zizek forgets that

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Lenin said that spontaneity always leads back to capitalist ideology. The party must be intolerant of capitalist ideas because of their ubiquity. Any concession to capitalism is an attack on communism. Zizek’s caricature of Lenin is an attack on the foundation of Leninist thought and its roots in Marxist ideology and historical practice. Again, the appearance of Marxist language is nothing more than a cover for bankrupt capitalist ideology.11 Zizek’s view of Lenin is that of the modern day academic leftist. It completely undermines the need for and the very notion of a communist party. His attack on communist practice is taken further in his writings on Stalin. In the documentary Zizek!, he is asked to explain why he has a picture of Stalin hanging in his home. His explanation leads the viewer to believe that he has a more sophisticated and perhaps positive view of Stalin than most anti-Stalin accounts. However, after reading his writings on Stalin, it is clear that this self-proclaimed “communist” has the most sophisticated anti-communist and anti-Stalinist view to date. In a 2004 interview, Zizek claims that “Stalinism” was in fact more perverse than Nazism. Zizek argues that even though the Nazi’s killed people for being Jewish, “Stalinism” was more perverse in the way it supposedly forced innocent people confess to crimes they did not commit. For Zizek the Nazi’s were more honest and open about their atrocities. Unlike the anti-Stalin lies of Robert Conquest who claim Stalin killed millions of people, Zizek’s approach attacks Stalin and the practice of socialism/communism in a way that is much more dangerous. Not only is he attacking socialism/communism in the past, but he is setting up an argument that the very notion of an organized party is deceptive and perverse.12 In a New York Times piece “20 Years of Collapse” Zizek takes this anti-communism further and elevates anti-communist crusader and Soviet Union defector Victor Kravchenko to the status of hero. Kravchenko, whose memoir “I Chose Freedom” details his anti-Stalin lies and lies about famine in the Ukraine proved to be primary source for spreading anti-communism for the bosses. For Zizek, Kravchenko is a model we should follow. Eventually Kravchenko was so disillusioned with capitalism that he shot himself. Zizek argues that we need new Kravchenkos—those who both realize the deception of 20th century communism and are disillusioned with modern day capitalism. According to Zizek, these new Kravchenkos will have to start from scratch in their search for justice and create their own ideologies.13 It is around the idea of putting communism into practice that Zizek’s reliance on idealism, psychoanalysis, and spontaneity coalesce in the most dangerous way. Instead of a prescription for how the working class might put Marxist ideas into practice based on an understanding of their own power through history and political economy, we are told to invent a solution to the problems of capitalism by relying on individualism, spontaneity and idealism.

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In his book, Living in the End Times, Zizek argues that global capitalism is reaching a terminal crisis, a zero point. In his conclusion he argues we have three options on what is to be done: 1) Do nothing, 2) prepare for revolution, 3) engage in local pragmatic interventions. He argues that because the power of the elite is maintained not only thorough physical coercion, but through the “libidinal investment” in power by the ruled, the masses should first stop dreaming and fantasizing about being exploited. The next step is then, instead of actively resisting power, do nothing. By first doing nothing, Zizek claims, the masses suspend their “libidinal investment” in power. Again, Zizek blames the working class for its own exploitation and further, he rejects the Marxist materialist notion that the working class learns to fight capitalism through collective practice. Instead, the power of the collective is inverted and “emancipation” becomes a narcissistic game of passivity. After first answering the question of “what is to be done?” with “nothing,” he then goes on to propose option two. In the book’s final sentence, Zizek tells an old Bolshevik joke where a communist sent to hell makes his way to heaven and convinces god that god does not exist and that he should in fact become a communist. Zizek then concludes that the true radical act is an act of erasure, where one denies one’s existence and passes over “entirely into the love…of the Party or emancipatory collective.” Here Zizek, like so many times before, posits a Marxist and revolutionary sounding position of creating

Jacques Lacan combined Freudian psychoanalysis with linguistics.

1

2

0ver 550 lecture appearances in 25 years, mostly in the west

Johnstone, Diana. Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusion. As early as 1882 Hungarian aristocrat, Benjamin von Kallay, an authority on Serbia and Bosnia, recognized the utility in promoting ethnic nationalism in the region. “His job was to exacerbate the social and religious divisions introduced by the Turks, the better to divide and rule.”

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4

Fools’ Crusade

Other positions include: Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana (founder and President); International director of Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities; and he wanted to become Minister of the Interior, or Head of secret service

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“The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask.” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/ articles/cynicism-as-a-form-of-ideology/

6

Robinson, Andrew and Tormey, Simon. “Zizˇek’s Marx: ‘Sublime Object’ or a ‘Plague of Fantasies’?”

7

8

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4039/

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a Party or collective, only to rip out any materialist base. By “erasing” one’s self like god is “erased” and convinced he does not exist, the material reality of the working class and the material roots of exploitation that provide the very basis for the need to overthrow capitalism are replaced with some idealistic notion of “love.” Students, intellectuals, and the working class need a real analysis of global capitalism rooted in Marxist materialism. “Marxist” theories rooted in idealism and psychoanalysis are just a new form of anti-communism repackaged for a new generation. Currently U.S. capitalism is facing more and more competition from its imperialist rivals in China and around the world. The possibility of future imperialist conflict is becoming more intensified so the bosses are desperate to win the allegiance of all workers and students while their attacks on the working class are also intensifying. Zizek’s work provides a Marxist cover for capitalist ideas. His words work in a way that both win workers to US capitalism and imperialism as a “radical” act and away from any truly Marxist or communist analysis of world events. Workers need a fighting party that advocates struggle over passivity and that learns from the material struggle and experience of the working class. They need the revolutionary communist party found in the PLP that puts the fight against racism and capitalism front and center and that relies on the working class as the true agent of revolutionary change.

9

Fool’s Crusade.

Slovene anti-communism reached it’s logical ends in 2000 when heads of Slovenia held a commemoration for the “victims of communism” where speakers ridiculed anti-Nazi fighters and praised Slovenians who had collaborated with the Nazis.

10

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Zizek and the End of Knowledge.” Chicago Journals

11

http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman/Books/595515/The_ Truth_of_Zizek

12

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_ zizek

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html

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NOTES FOR STRIKE TALK

Unions are not revolutionary communist organizations. In today’s world, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is that organization. Unions, no matter how united, wellorganized, or militant, are severely limited by their reformist nature. At best, they are fighting for small improvements for the workers—improvements that can be and are, soon taken away when the capitalists use their power. The strike led by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in September, 2012, is a perfect example of a strong reform activity that leaves the capitalist system intact. The role of the PLP within that strike illustrates both the possibilities and limitations of building for communist revolution in the current period. The strike occurred during a time of steady decline of the labor movement and increased attacks from the ruling class. It was fully supported by CTU members, (there were fewer than 25 scabs out of 24,000 strikers) as well as parents, students, and other working class people throughout Chicago and the world. In spite of CTU’s tremendous victory in leading a strike that mobilized, unified, and politicized its participants, the gains accomplished by the strike were necessarily limited by the nature of capitalism. Because the capitalists own and control the labor of every worker and also control education, health care, transportation and other needed services, the lives of working class people as a whole cannot improve under capitalism. In fact, the evidence indicates that fascism is developing and things are likely to get much worse before the working class destroys capitalism once and for all and establishes an egalitarian communist society. Furthermore, the working class can never win what it needs through a strike, no matter how militant and wellsupported. Winning what workers need—fulfilling lives in a society that provides education, health care, housing, human services, and an opportunity to participate in and contribute to the building of egalitarianism—will take a communist revolution. However, strikes are a great opportunity for workers

to see both the potential power of the working class and the limitations of that power under the capitalist system. Although the capitalists have tried to convince many that communism is “dead” or “unworkable” or “dictatorial”, Progressive Labor Party can effectively challenge those ideas within the context of class struggle. That is why PLP members internationally organized letters of support from their unions, came to Chicago to participate in the strike, organized fellow Chicago workers to distribute PLP leaflets and Challenge newspaper to strikers, and developed discussion/study groups about communism.

Inter-imperialist Rivalry and Growing Fascism: the Context of the Strike The strike was largely a response to the intensification of racist attacks on the education of working class students and their teachers. These attacks are taking place because of capitalism and its primary aspect in this era: inter-imperialist rivalry. As the number of countries with a developed capitalist class has grown, competition among these capitalists has increased. That competition drives down wages to the lowest common denominator. If the Chinese capitalists can pay slave labor wages, U.S. capitalists must come close to doing the same, or China will increase their share of the market and eventually drive many U. S. companies out of business. Part of the “wages” paid to the working class comes in the form of health care and education. The workers pay for these themselves, partly through taxation, but, because of imperialist rivalry, the capitalists need a bigger portion of city, state, and federal money to go to profits. Even though governments always claim poverty when it comes to services for the working class, money to bail out failing businesses or go to war is seldom in short supply. Also, to the extent that services are provided, their purpose is to benefit the profit system. Buses, hospitals, and schools are built because companies need workers to be able to get to their jobs, be healthy enough to work, and have a certain level of education. These “services” do not serve

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LETTER from Red Chicago Teacher I continue to participate in my first strike as a worker and as a teacher. I have gone to show solidarity to other workers’ struggles in the past, but now I am in the midst of my own. The first day there was a sense of the unknown felt by others at my school. People were posted in different locations around the building in five different groups. Some were well acquainted while others had only seen each other in passing. As we spend more time on the picket line, we as a staff have grown closer. With the staff being split into two buildings, the time to bond is extremely limited, especially with the extended day. We have begun to exchange our feelings about everything on the line. Veteran teachers have shared some of their experiences from being in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) with new teachers. The first day CHALLENGE was distributed, teachers showed interest. They liked the leaflet that accompanied it as well. Little by little, we have begun to have conversations about what CPS schools are like for children from working-class neighborhoods. We have spoken about how capitalism and racism affects what children bring into the classroom that impact not only their academic performance but their life altogether. We all agreed that we needed more nurses, social workers, psychologists, and overall support to assist our students in being successful in the world that surrounds them. It was also mentioned time and time again how these school closings were aimed at the children of the working-class. This angers me in particular because I take it as the Board of Education seeing our students as disposable objects that shouldn’t be taken into consideration. This reveals how the Board is trying to separate teachers from the environment in which he/she teaches and how it directly affects a student’s performance. There is no mention of this when the talk is raised of teacher’s evaluations, which are based on students’ test scores. Comrades from Chicago and New York City have come out to show support at my school. They are participating in these conversations as well as explaining that the only way to change all of this is to fight for communism. Many of my school’s staff were really open to these discussions. I thought that perhaps they would hear the word communism and dismiss everything. But it has been the opposite. People have been reading the leaflets brought by comrades and discussing how it is time for a change. It was easier to point out the false hopes the Democratic Party gives to workers when Romney showed support for what Mayor Rahm Emmanuel was doing. I remember asking one colleague if she still was going to vote for Obama. She said yes. I asked her what was the difference between the Democrats and Republicans if Rahm Emmanuel was behaving like a Republican. She stood quiet and said, “That’s a really good point…” Ever since Romney’s support for Rahm came out, the line between a Democrat and Republican has been blurred. I see this as a great opportunity to continue these conversations about what is wrong with the public school system that only a communist revolution can change. This is only the beginning of our struggle. That is why it’s critical for those in the Chicago area to make the effort to win teachers to PLP. The potential is too great for us not to act on it. This strike has set a foundation for the workers of the world to unite. Red Teacher

the interests of the working class.

The Latest Education “Reforms”

There is a new wrinkle to allocation of government money for education or other services. The ruling class has figured out how, in addition to supporting failing businesses and fighting wars, this money can go directly into profits. By diverting much of the $500 billion in the education sector away from workers’ salaries and into direct profits for education companies, the capitalists grab a bigger portion of the resources that belong to the working class. Charter school proliferation is one example of this: teachers get paid less while Charter Management Operators thrive. Online learning, which is the “next big thing” in education, is hugely profitable and increases the teacher-student ratio to about 100 to 1.

The U.S ruling class is brutal, profit-driven, and committed to capitalism no matter the human cost, so of course lying is an everyday thing for them. Instead of announcing their desire to grab a bigger piece of the education market and more directly control what students learn, the ruling class propaganda machine has relentlessly pushed a false version of reality. In this version, poverty and racism have no impact on student learning, bad teachers are the main problem in education, charter schools are wonderful, class size is unimportant, and monetary incentives for a few along with pay cuts for most will greatly improve education. The fact that none of this is true is irrelevant to the rulers’ mouthpieces.

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Arne Duncan, the current U.S. Secretary of Education, was CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 through 2008. During that time, he initiated the Renaissance 2010 (“Ren10”) plan, originally proposed by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an institution of the city’s ruling class. Under Ren10, 100 new schools were opened, most of them charter schools. Another 60 schools were shut down or “turned around” (by firing all the staff), almost all in African American neighborhoods. Under the guise of “providing better educational opportunities”, CPS disrupted tens of thousands of students and families, eliminated the jobs of 2000 Black teachers, and fattened the pockets of “edupreneurs”. These policies have led to no overall improvement in students’ education, yet CPS is planning to do more of the same! It was during this period that the seeds of what was to become the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) were sown. Union members at schools under attack started publicizing the Ren10 plan and pushing the CTU to oppose it. At the time, the CTU was led by the typical union hacks, mostly in it for the money and prestige, with little knowledge of or interest in class struggle. Still, so as not to look totally useless in the eyes of the members, they did agree to set up a Ren10 committee. Early in 2008, some of the members of the now defunct Ren10 committee decided to start a caucus, CORE, within the CTU, to more effectively work inside the union and organize opposition to attacks on students and teachers. Many (but not most) of those attracted to the caucus were formerly or currently loosely connected to various “leftwing” groups. Unlike those in other groups, Progressive Labor Party (PLP, or “the Party”) does not view militant struggle, in and of itself, as a building block towards communist revolution. Only if the priority of PLP within every struggle is communist revolution will the working class will move in that direction. The Party rejects the theory that the movement for communism must be built in stages: first get people to oppose capitalism, then get them to fight for socialism, and then after years of socialism, move on to communism. That was more or less the theory of the founding communists like Karl Marx, in the 1850’s, but the history of revolution in both Russia and China clearly shows that “stages” don’t get the working class to communism. (For a more detailed analysis, read Road to Revolution 4, available at plp.org.) The heart of CORE’s analysis of the education “reform” movement is that the ruling class wants to impose a business model on education, break the unions, pay teachers less, and use standardized test scores as a battering ram against students and teachers. As a group, one of the first things CORE did was read and discuss The Shock Doctrine. The theme of this book is that the ruling class uses crises, manufactured or real, to demobilize workers and rapidly implant right wing policies as the “solution” to the crisis. One of the many things wrong

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with this analysis is that it minimizes the important part ideology plays in the dominancy of capitalism. That aspect of the attacks on education is downplayed by CORE and others as well. Capitalist education “reform” is not just about transferring “public” money to the capitalist class, it is also about shoring up the role of the schools in building ideological unity for racist, individualist, imperialist ideas. The imposition of national standards, which came under the guise of states’ “voluntarily” agreeing to Common Core State Standards if they wanted to get federal education dollars, is the basis for more effective promotion of capitalist ideology. The capitalists plan ahead. They know that world war is in the future and that a draft will be necessary. They do not want a repeat of the Vietnam War, where soldiers deserted, killed officers, and became revolutionaries. The ruling class knows they need to win young people to think the next war is in their own interests. Setting up a system whereby the curriculum is more tightly controlled gives the ruling class a better organized mechanism for promoting their ideology within the schools. The tests that are tied to the standards are meant to determine what students learn and teachers teach. That is why tying teacher pay and job security to “evaluation” based on these tests is so important to the ruling class. Teacher evaluation is also important to the capitalists because they want to break the bonds between teachers and students and force teachers to think of their job in terms of “outputs” (test scores). This enables the ruling class to directly push their ideology onto students by having student success in school and teachers’ jobs depend on learning this capitalist ideology, as evidenced by standardized test scores. While the ideology embedded in these tests is in many cases subtle at this point, the tests will undoubtedly move in a more ideological direction as the U.S. imperialists move towards World War and need more committed soldiers. The May, 2014, Rialto, California eighth-grade test question that asked eighth-grade students to argue whether the Holocaust was an “actual event in history” or a “political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth,” is an example of the way tests can be used to promote capitalist ideology.  Even now, the emphasis on standardized tests pushes teachers away from developing conceptual understanding, clear communication, creativity, and other behaviors that help students think deeply. Whereas communists want students to learn about the world in order to change it, capitalists want students to learn about a narrow slice of the world, in a shallow way—just enough to be productive workers and be susceptible to capitalist propaganda.

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Racist Attacks on Teachers and Students Capitalists in all countries rely on racism to divide the working class but the U.S. is a world leader in this regard. Some of the worst promoters of racism have learned to do so without uttering an epithet, without keeping Black people out of the expensive country clubs, and without segregation by law. In a much more insidious way, the racist capitalists and their politicians (including Blacks and Latinos) institute racist practices which are inseparably intertwined with capitalist practices. In education, this means segregated schools in segregated neighborhoods, lower pay and higher unemployment for parents of Black and Latino working class students, predominantly white teaching staffs (the result of massive layoffs of Black teachers and barriers such as discriminatory “Basic Skills Tests”) and huge disparities in funding and resources, particularly in segregated African American schools. The ideology comes in when the capitalists win working class people (of all “races”) to see segregation as “voluntary”, to think the “achievement gap” is about students’ race and not the continuing legacy of racist, inadequate schooling, to think poverty has nothing to do with education, and to think the school system is set up to give everyone equal opportunity. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is only 8% white, reflecting years of botched integration plans in what has long been the most segregated city in the U.S., “white flight”, and the city’s large number of private/parochial schools. Nearly 70% of Black students in CPS attend schools that are so racially segregated that fewer than 10% of students are non-Black. An equally segregated situation exists for 40% of Latino students. Although Black male students are about a quarter of the CPS population, they were the majority of suspensions and ¾ of the in-school arrests. CPS has closed over 100 schools in Chicago, replacing them with charter schools. Most of the closed schools were predominantly Black. Most CPS students (75%) live in poverty. In line with their need to maintain racism that produces superprofits, the ruling class does not want to spend money on educating poor, working-class Black and Latino students. They want to turn teaching into a revolving-door, lowerpaid job, and use teachers to prepare students for lowwage jobs, mass unemployment or the military, to kill sister and brother workers in imperialist wars. PLP members have exposed this racism publicly and in private conversations. For example, at a school board meeting in July, 2010, A PLP member underscored that racism continues to be perpetuated by Board policies. She pointed out that there are 2,100 fewer AfricanAmerican teachers now than in 2002, a drop from 40 to 30 percent of the total teaching force. White students are disproportionately enrolled in selective enrollment high schools and Black students are disproportionately enrolled in schools that CPS closes or “turns around”

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(replacing the whole staff). The PLP member concluded by stating, “The Board runs a racist school system that provides separate and unequal education for over 70 percent of the system’s African-American students. In addition, it is decimating the system’s African-American teaching force.” She was met with loud applause and handshakes from the audience, and frozen, stony faces from the Board. In an era where many think the U.S. has moved “past racism,” it is incumbent on communists and others to expose it at every opportunity. Capitalism will not be destroyed unless anti-racism leads the fight. Throughout the four years that the Party has been working in CORE and CTU, we have put forward that the fight against racism must be central to all campaigns. Capitalism and racism are deeply intertwined, and as long as capitalism still exists, so will racism. Integral to every anti-student, anti-parent action taken by CPS is racism. Building anti-racist unity among parents, students, and teachers, therefore, is a necessary part of the fight against CPS, just as it is a necessary part of the fight for an egalitarian, communist society. To a certain extent, CTU and CORE did adopt antiracist positions. CTU used the term “education apartheid” to describe the conditions of segregation, lack of needed services and well-rounded curricula, school closings, and test-based schooling prevalent in Black and Latino schools. On the other hand, during the strike CTU formed an alliance with the police union and many in CORE believed that was a good thing. PLP members opposed alliances with the police, pointing to their racist policies of stopping Black workers without cause, brutalizing many of our students, and in general being the armed guards of the ruling class. Because CTU does not attack the basis of racism, the capitalist system, nor advocate for its overthrow, they ally with working class enemies such as the police and politicians.

The Work of PLP in Mass Organizations The work of Progressive Labor Party members within CORE (or similar “reform” organizations, whose goal is improving conditions, not destroying capitalism) is complex. Winning large numbers within the working class to decide to fight for communist revolution is a longterm, uneven process with many ups and downs. The work is complex, because it is necessary to both play a very active role in the reform organization and promote communist revolution and a communist analysis within that context. Communists cannot be disrespectful of the opinions of those we are trying to win but at the same time cannot opportunistically refrain from fighting for our positions. The work of Party members is subject to unevenness as well, and the Party’s activity in CORE suffers from inconsistency. After the formation of CORE in 2008, the caucus grew rapidly. Members were attracted by CORE’s bold

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opposition to school closings, by the wide variety of activities, including leading fights in their schools against abusive principals or CPS actions adversely affecting students and organizing against school closings. CORE filed an EEOC complaint against the disparate impact of turnaround schools on African American teachers, had regular meetings, social events, fundraising events, built the membership, and played an active role in the CTU House of Delegates meetings. In the spring of 2009, the caucus decided it was important to run a slate in the 2010 union election and attempt to unseat the opportunists running the CTU. Throughout this process, the Party played an active role in CORE, including struggles within schools, speaking at school board meetings, and working to help CORE win the CTU election. Within the context of this work, PLP members discussed the Party’s ideas with our new friends, distributed and discussed Party literature, particularly Challenge newspaper, and to a certain extent, involved them in PLP activities such as the May Day Dinner. The contradiction between a reform outlook vs. a revolutionary one became apparent in this work. Many friends saw the immediate necessity of being deeply involved in fighting the assault on education, but did not feel the same urgency to learn more about and/or advocate for communism. There is another argument that some union leaders and members make, even though they say that capitalism needs to end. They say that right now the revolutionary movement is too small and therefore, all that can be done now is to work within the system, work with people where they’re at, and be militant reformists. This strategy is very different from that of PLP, although some may see superficial similarities. PLP does recognize that we are small now, but also sees that for communist revolution to happen there must be a growing group of committed Party members who consciously learn the lessons of history and, to the best of their collective ability, apply dialectical materialism to current situations, recruit more members, and attempt to move masses toward a communist future. To that end, we do work with people “where they’re at” and within organizations like unions whose purpose is at best militant reformism. However, the strategy of doing this mass work is to build deep relationships within the working class and win our friends away from reliance on capitalist thinking and towards seeing the nature of state power, imperialism, racism, and the need for a communist party to lead the working class to power. Our goal is not to “win” the reform per se. The issue of anti-communism came up when CORE ran for CTU office. The incumbents in the election ran a nasty campaign based on lies and red-baiting. One campaign flier threatened that the “militant idealist socialist” CORE would go on strike immediately and the union would be destroyed. Because CORE had organized

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alliances with parents, students, and community groups, the incumbents claimed that if CORE won, they would turn the union into a community organization. Interestingly, the red-baiting was countered by many members who thought the union would be better off if led by militants. This is not to say that a sophisticated red-baiting campaign could not be successful, but it does indicate a potential openness to communist ideas. The conviction that large numbers of people can be won to these ideas underlies PLP’s strategy of advocating for communism consistently and openly. This strategy sets us apart from other groups calling themselves left-wingers.

State Power: How the Bosses Use their “Legal” System to Control the Working Class Because the capitalists control state power, they determine what they will allow the workers to gain temporarily. They do have disagreements, but they are united on exploitation of the working class. It is not true, as believed by many in CTU leadership and in CORE, that if workers just fight hard enough, involve enough people, and are tactically smart, they can push back the tide of capitalist attacks on students and education workers. The only way to do that is to build a movement for communist revolution to destroy capitalism and set up an egalitarian system. The fight against the capitalists is important, not for what might temporarily be gained, but for the experience it gives the workers in class struggle and the opportunity to learn first hand about the need to smash the whole system. Because they don’t have this perspective, the CTU leadership chose to participate in electoral politics. In November of 2010, CTU supported the Democrat Quinn over the “greater evil” Republican Bill Brady in the gubernatorial election. Even though there are virtually no differences between the Democrats’ and Republicans’ education policy, without a revolutionary communist perspective, the cynical choice is to support the Democrats. In addition to participating in elections, CTU also “had a seat at the table” during negotiations with Illinois state legislators over Senate Bill 7. This bill was proposed by the infamous Stand for Children (called “Stand ON Children” by their opposition), who showed up in Illinois for the first time during the November, 2010, elections, and gave unprecedented amounts of money to politicians they backed. In December, their boughtand-paid-for legislators convened hearings on education, whose purpose was to ram through significant changes in education law in a short period of time. They wanted to replace teacher tenure with “performance ratings” in the state, make strikes illegal in Chicago, allow CPS to change the length of the school day without union bargaining, and make it easier to fire teachers in the state. While the argument was made that

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the final legislation was not as bad as it would have been without the participation of union leaders (although it included much of what was in the original draft), that argument is short-sighted. First of all, under capitalism, any gains workers make are temporary. It is a stretch to call “not as bad as it could have been” a gain, but the argument made by proponents of “being at the table” is that it is a win that strikes were not made totally illegal, as the ruling class wanted. The main problem with this approach is it replaces reliance on the working class with reliance on politicians and laws. The working class needs to learn to fight for what they need; ultimately that means making a communist revolution. Strikes are often illegal, but workers have struck in spite of their illegality. Revolution is certainly an illegal activity! The important thing in these struggles is what workers learn about what it will take to actually beat the capitalists. To the extent that unions lead workers to think that change will come via the Democratic Party, they are undermining the fight to end capitalism.

Lead up to the Strike From the beginning of their term in July, 2010, the new CTU leaders developed the goal of being “strike ready” after the expiration of the contract in June 2012. Accomplishing this meant changing the way most members thought about the union. The process of being “strike ready” required members to learn to be activists, see themselves as “the union” and move CTU from a service to an organizing model. The underlying assumption of the leadership’s approach is that if the union fights hard enough, in a principled manner that engages “allies” as well as members, they can win significant reforms and beat back the attacks on education. Although there is value to the type of organizing implemented by CTU and the working class struggles that resulted, the value is not in what those struggles do or do not “win”. The value is that the workers learn how to organize themselves, how to push fellow workers to do the right thing, and how to stand up to the bosses. These are important lessons for the fight to take power away from the capitalists. At the same time, it is misleading to put forward the idea that if we fight hard for reforms we will win them. The capitalists hold state power—they own and control the means of production (the factories), they control the laws and the courts, they decide the quantity, the quality, and the type of transportation, health care, education and housing they will make available to the working class. They set racist policies in place that determine how many and who will be incarcerated: More than 2 million adults and 70,000 children are in prison, with another 5 million on probation or parole. 40% of prisoners are Black and 35% are Latino. Ruling class policies determine

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unemployment: Blacks have had twice the unemployment rate of whites for many years. Capitalist policies also determine who will be forced to fight for the imperialists-a number that will increase rapidly when the next world war begins. Reform struggle will not take state power away from the bosses. Capitalist policies anger people. This anger is one of the reasons PLP is able to recruit members to join the fight to end capitalism once and for all. It is also the basis for leaders of reform movements, such as CTU, to organize members to fight back. CPS had been angering school workers, students, and parents for quite a while. The policies enacted by Rahm Emanuel, who had become mayor of Chicago in spring of 2011, were in many ways the last straw and played a role in helping CTU organize members. In September, 2011, principals all over the city were asking teachers to take a “waiver vote” that would extend the school day past the hours stated in the contract. In exchange, schools would get a sum of money to be used for additional student programs. In the end, only 13 schools agreed to the waiver. However, this was a tremendous organizing opportunity for CTU. Meetings were held at hundreds of schools, delegates were elected in schools with no delegate, members turned out and made their voices heard, and new school leaders emerged. The CTU organized many exciting and powerful actions leading up to the strike. Because the union movement as a whole is so bankrupt, these actions stand out. CTU organized contract committees in every school, trained delegates to be school leaders, and led 10,000 teachers and supporters to march in the streets wearing CTU red, in a show of great unity and strength. These were exciting and important accomplishments. It is important for workers to learn to organize themselves and to directly take on fighting the bosses. However, fighting without a plan to eventually take over the whole system can lead to cynicism or false ideas about being able to change the ever-more exploitative nature of capitalism through petitions, voting, and militant actions. Because CTU is a union and not a revolutionary communist party, it is limited to organizing for the purpose of trying to improve capitalism or to ameliorate its horrors. Things are not going to get better under capitalism, no matter how powerful or militant the struggles. If workers view the purpose of their struggles as winning smaller classes or enough social workers, or sufficient pay, they will ultimately be disappointed. But if the goal of the struggle is to build a movement that can eventually be strong enough to take power from the capitalists, that goal will eventually be met (although it may take longer than we would like). In many instances, educators felt let down after the strike, because when they went back to work, conditions were still bad and school bosses were still attacking.

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The Strike The CTU strike was powerful in that it fought around issues important to students and their education and not issues narrowly pertaining to union members. For that reason, the strike had the support of parents, students, and community members. Every picket line had a constant parade of honking cars going past. In spite of the inconveniences associated with the 7-day strike, close to 70% of CPS parents said they supported the strike, an unprecedented number. The strike raised issues of smaller class sizes, no merit pay, fair health care costs, and a full curriculum for students. Some minor gains were made as a result. The new contract included a 3% salary increase, maintenance of health insurance costs, minor positive changes to working conditions (such as availability of books on the first day of classes, locked cabinets and a private space for social workers), defeat of merit pay, holding the line on class size, and postponement of evaluation for tenured teachers. Teacher evaluation and merit pay had been major issues in contract talks. There is a big national push to tie teacher’s jobs and pay to a rating based on test scores, and doing so will not be beneficial to students. Although CTU was able to push back on the percentage of teacher evaluation based on test scores (30%, instead of the typical 50%), they were not able to completely stop implementation of this ruling class initiative. It is important to remember that a contract is an agreement between workers and bosses about the terms of the workers’ exploitation. It is not possible to have a “good” contract. The state of Illinois had passed a law in 1995 which established mayoral control of the schools and narrowly defined what CTU could bargain over. Basically, it limited bargaining to pay and procedures. Therefore, it was difficult to win non-economic demands through contract negotiations. This illustrates once again the way the capitalist system uses its laws to control the working class. It also illustrates the need for the workers to break the bosses’ laws and overthrow the system. The strike ended seven school days after it began. Members on the picket line spent the last two days of the strike reading and discussing the proposed contract and their delegates voted by a strong majority to suspend the strike. Later, about 80% of CTU members voted in favor of the contract. Many of those who opposed the contract ratification argued that the demands seen as most student-centered, for a wider curriculum, more social supports, and smaller classes, were not sufficiently addressed. Although minor gains were made in these areas, no one argued that those issues were sufficiently dealt with by the contract. The fight continues. CTU members are currently organizing against school closings and standardized test mania. Some wondered, what did the strike win

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for the workers? The main thing the strike won was not in the contract. It was way people were changed by their participation in this massive event. For example, teachers in better resourced schools with more middle class students joined in the fight against school closings of segregated Black schools. Teachers in some schools went as a group to the principal to stand up against abuse. In general, those involved in the strike learned (to varying degrees) that the working class could fight back against the capitalists. Fighting is good, but the working class needs an offensive strategy to take power away from the capitalists. PLP has collectively studied and learned from the successes and mistakes of past communist movements and is currently leading the fight for an egalitarian society. History as well as current events show us that the ruling class will to continue to escalate their attacks. Educators had to go on strike for seven days, just to get a little teeny bit of improvement, which the bosses are already plotting to take away. The capitalists have shown time and again that they have no intention of educating working class students for anything but low-wage jobs and the army. The communist view of education, on the other hand, is one of arming every student with the knowledge they need to help make the world a better place. For example, imagine how much further along humanity would be in the development of a cure for cancer if every student were educated in science and a cure was worked on collectively instead of fueled by drug company competition over profits. Capitalism wastes the minds of millions of working class students, who they have no interest in educating, other than to the extent necessary to make them efficient workers and soldiers. They would just as soon replace most teachers with computers and are moving quickly in that direction.

The Growth of Fascism and the Future for the Working Class One thing the CTU strike demonstrated is that workers are hungry for fight back. Right now, that fight back is mostly confined within the system. However, things can change quickly. In September, 2011, most CTU members did not favor going on strike. By September, 2012, they were ready, and virtually every member participated in vibrant school picket lines and downtown or neighborhood rallies by the tens of thousands. Right now, the numbers of workers participating in PLP events is far smaller than it needs to be. However, things can change quickly. When workers fight back, the bosses’ usual response is to attack harder. Many educators are experiencing this in their schools, as some principals have gone out of their way to make life difficult for active union members. Undoubtedly, the ruling class is planning to destroy the CTU, or at least destroy it as a fighting union. Because

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the union leaders do not take fully into account the viciousness of the ruling class, they have not prepared the members to withstand attacks. In May of 2013, CPS closed 50 schools. Thousands of education workers, students, and parents had marched, rallied, petitioned, and in many other ways expressed their outrage at the CPS plan to close so many schools, most of them serving African American students. When CPS closed them anyway, some wondered if the strike had been worth it. Instead of feeling powerful, as they had during the strike, the inability to stop the school closings made many feel discouraged. PLP members were involved in many of the anti-closing activities. The Party encouraged those angry about the closings to see that the capitalists would always take whatever they could from the working class; the solution is to fight for communist revolution. CTU leaders put forward a different solution: electoral politics. Because the ability to close schools is a power granted Chicago’s Mayor and his hand-picked school board by the state legislature, they reasoned that the only way to stop closings in the future would be through legislative action. The CTU was heavily involved in a March, 2014, campaign for two state legislative candidates. They formed an Independent Political Organization (IPO) with other unions and community organizations. The purpose of the IPO is to advocate for certain agreed-upon issues among political candidates. Union leaders and members who support this approach see it as the only way to bring about systemic change. Instead of a communist revolution to end capitalism once and for all, they envision changing capitalism one legislator at a time. These ideas are commonplace in this era, due to the demise of the world-wide communist

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movement (see the PLP document “Dark Night Shall Have its End”, available at plp.org). The CTU still advocates for direct action, such as the refusal of about 30 teachers to give the state standardized test last March. However, it is a move in the wrong direction for the union to promote political campaigns. The more reliant workers are on the political system, the less likely they are to seek other ways to fight. While the strike was a strengthening action, political involvement weakens union members by giving them false hope that the capitalist system can be reformed to a point where workers’ needs will be met. Internationally, the U.S. capitalists have their back up against a wall. Their power is threatened from many corners, and they have no choice but to tighten control over the working class in order to maintain their economic and military prominence. However, tightening control over the working class involves instituting fascist measures, such as making unions illegal, forcing workers to work in unsafe conditions for less than a living wage, locking up millions, pushing racism to divide the working class, forcing young people into the military, and winning a large core of anti-communist patriots. The bosses will continue to step up their vigorous attack on workers and students. Some of our class will continue to look for ways within the system to fight back, but others will see that capitalism has nothing to offer the working class. They will see that the only solution is to join PLP in building the revolutionary communist movement. That movement will and must grow and it is the responsibility of everyone reading this article to be part of the collective that will make the inevitable seizure of power by the working class for communism happen sooner rather than later. We can and must do this!

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