workers vanguard no 717 - 06 august 1999

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 717 - 06 August 1999

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lltS""" ' l i l ) 0eNo. 717 .... 6 August 1999

Down With R e ~ r e s s i o n of Student Demonstr-ators!Iran ass ProtestsSha lamic R

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ditional base) in a countermobilization against the students. Facedwith a threat to the Islamic regime,Khatami quickly closed ranks withhis hardline rivals, denouncing thestudents as rioters with "devilishaims" who "intended to attack thefoundations of the system and leadthe country into anarchy" (NewYork Times, 14 July).

AUGUST 3-Shouting "death todictatorship," tens of thousands ofstudents across Iran took to thestreets for six days in early July inthe largest protests since theblood-drenched mullahs came to[lower in 1979. Teheran, asmany as 25,000 students faced theiron bars, chains, dubs and teargas volleys of the cops and thetruncheons and automatic gunfireof Islamic fundamentalist militias.Dozens of student activists wereinjured in the nationwide protests,some 1,400 arrested and many oth- .ers forced into hiding. Hundredsremain behind bars, some threatened with charges punishable bydeath. The international workersmovement must urgently demand:Free all student protesters now!The recent turmoil began withopen skirmishing within the theocratic regime between the hljIdline

APRiot police were unleashed against student protests in Teheran in July. Cops andfundamentalist thugs killed at least eight, while dozens were injured and 1,400 arrested.

The student demonstrations havetapped into widespread popularopposition to the theocracy. Abystander at the July 13 protestsaid, "I just want to get rid of thefilthy regime. Anything would bebetter than these clerics, even theworst criminals." Fed up with thedictates of the reactionary ulema(clergy), many students want theall-pervasive morals police to buttout of their lives and are demanding that draconian restrictions onwing under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the "moderate" wingunder President Mohammad Khatami. Hours after a July 8 protestby 200 Teheran University stu-dents against increased press censorship and the banning of the pro-Khataminewspaper Salam, police and fundamentalist Hezbollah thugs stormed a dormitory. As students were beaten in theirsleep or thrown from windows, as manyas eight were killed. The next day, 10,000students demonstrated in Teheran to de-

For Workers Revolution!mand the ouster of the national policechief and to appeal for support from Khatami, who was elected in 1997 largelythanks to the votes of youth and women.But the students' growing disillusionmentsoon became evident when they chanted,"Khatami, where are you? Your studentshave been killed."

Dissatisfied with the token dismissal oftwo senior police officials responsible forthe raid on the university, protesters triedto storm the interior ministry building onJuly 13. The following day, the mullahsbrought out tens of thousands of soldiers,government workers and bazaaris (thesmall merchants who are the clerics' tra-

SouthAlrican Workers BanleAusterity, Union-BustingJOHANNESBURG, August 3-Hundreds of thousands of hospital workers,teachers and government workers acrossSouth Africa poured into the streets lastweek in the first major strike against thegovernment ofAfrican National Congress(ANC) president Thabo Mbeki, who waselected in June to replace retiring ANCleader Nelson Mandela. Since the elections, massive retrenchments (layoffs)have been announced in almost every sector of the workforce. From Durban andCape Town to Bisho in the Eastern Capeto Pretoria and Johannesburg, the unionbusting "privatization" and "restructuring" policies of the Mbeki government

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are being challenged by thousands ofworkers whose very livelihoods and livesare at stake. Yesterday, union leadersagreed to new talks with the governmentbut threatened new strikes if the wageoffer is not improved.In terms of the number of workersinvolved, the two-day public sector walkout is the biggest labour action in SouthAfrica since the ANC replaced the w h i t ~ -supremacist regime five years ago. WhenMandela was elected the country's firstblack president in 1994, this was hailedas the end of the hated apartheid systemand the beginning of black majorityrule. However, the economic basis ofapartheid-the superexploitation of blacklabour by the white capitalist class andits senior partners on Wall Street and inthe City of London-remains. Whathad changed-and it was a significantchange-was that the bourgeois-nationalist leaders of the ANC were co-opted as

the black front men for the masters ofthe Jo'burg stock exchange. We wrote atthe time: "The rigid structures of apartheid may be gone, but white supremacyremains, and will remain until the racistcapitalist system is overthrown by theworking people who produce its superprofits" ("South Africa Powder Keg," WVNo. 603, 8 July 1994).That the conditions of the black massesremain as -desperate as ever was underscored by the industrial murder last weekof 18 miners in a methane gas explosionin a Carletonville mine shaft. Black life ischeap in the eyes of the mining magnates!Meanwhile, unemployment stands atnearly 40 per cent, and is far higher inblack townships like Soweto. Millionsmore are consigned to wretched povertyin the rural areas.Mbeki, Mandela's hand-picked successor, is even more blatant in his support to big business and hostility to the

sexual freedom and freedom ofexpression be lifted. After riding topower on a wave of protests againstthe hated tyranny of the Shah in1979, the Islamic hierarchy instituted an equally tyrannical regimewhich dealt out bloody repression againstworkers and leftists, enslaved womenin the stifling head-to-toe chador andperpetuated the murderous subjugationof Kurds, Arabs and other national andreligious minorities. The Islamic regimeused the squalid, nationalist war withcontinued on- page 12

ReutersPretoria, July 30: Hundreds ofthousands of public sector workersnationwide went on strike againstANC government. .black trade-union movement. Its rhetorical appeals to the masses notwithstanding, the ANC is a capitalist party external to the workers movement that wouldnot shrink, if necessary to defend itsclass interests, from seeking to smash thetrade unions. Trying to play the unemployed . off against the employed, ANCspokesmen blame "greedy," "oveJ:Paid"

continued on page 13


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Chanting "Navy-Murderers," some50,000 demonstrators marched on thehuge Roosevelt Roads Navy base inPuerto Rico on July 4. This was the largest in a series of protests demanding theremoval of the U.S. Navy bombing rangeon the Puerto Rican island of Vieques inthe wake of the April 19 practice bombing which killed a Puerto Rican security guard and seriously injured fourother people. The protests have continued, including one on July 17 againstthe presence of a U.S. guided missilecruiser in San Juan Bay. The protesterswere brptally attacked by baton-wieldingriot police and U.S. Navy sailors usingfire hoses.

Vieques. While U.S. imperialist chiefClinton suspended the bombing runs andordered a special commission on the status of he Vieques base, the U.S. has madeit clear that i t is not about to shut down thebombing range. Navy Secretary RichardDanzig insists that Vieques is "irreplaceable," calling it the Pentagon's "mostimportant center of military training."Appearing before Clinton's commission,a Navy spokesman prated, "We are veryproud of our legacy in Vieques" (Hoy,12 July). This legacy of U.S. colonialismin Puerto Rico is written in blood: itincludes the 1937 Ponce massacre and theassassination and imprisonment of countless independence fighters over the lastcentury.utrage against the bombing atrocity isso widespread that even New ProgressiveParty (PNP) governor Pedro Rosse1l6, apro-U.S. toady, was compelled to callfor shutting down the Navy complex on

The Navy presence in Vieques since1941 exemplifies U.S. imperialist arrogance and contempt for the Puerto Ricanmasses. Two-thirds of the tiny island is

Imperialist War andOpportunist "Socialism"The vote by the German Social Democracy on 4 August 1914 at the onset ofWorld War 1 for war credits fo r the German imperialist state signaled the definitivecollapse of the Second 1nternational intoopportunism. Denouncing this class treason,Russian Bolshevik leader V. 1. Lenin foughtto rally' those elements opposed to social-

TROTSKY chauvinism behind the call fo r a revolution- LENINary Third 1nternational, which came to frui-tion two years after the Russian October Revolution of 1917, the world's firstsuccessful workers revolution. This year, social-democratic parties actually led many ofthe West European governments prosecuting the V.S.INATO war of imperialist domination against Serbia, with the avid support of he reformist and centrist left. We fight tobuild the indispensable instrument needed to lead new October Revolutions internationally to defeat imperialism: a reforged Trotskyist Fourth 1nternational.The gravest feature of the present crisis is that the majority of official representatives of European socialism have succumbed to bourgeois nationalism, to chauvinism.It is with good reason that the bourgeois press of all countries writes of them now withderision, now with condescending praise. To anyone who wants to remain a socialistthere can be no more important duty than to reveal the causes of this crisis in socialismand analyse the tasks of the International....Advocacy of class collaboration; abandonment of the idea of socialist revolution andrevolutionary methods of struggle; adaptation to bourgeois nationalism; losing sight ofthe fact that the borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient; makinga fetish of bourgeois legality; renunciation of the class viewpoint and the class struggle,for fear of repelling the "broad masses of the population" (meaning the petty bourgeoi

sie)-such, doubtlessly, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. And it is fromsuch soil that the present chauvinist and patriotic frame of mind of most Second International leaders has developed. Observers representing the most various points of viewhave long noted that the opportunists are in fact prevalent in the Second International'sleadership. The war has merely brought out, rapidly and saliently, the true measure ofthis prevalence.... .The Second International diO its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarilyorganising the proletarian masses during the long, "peaceful" period of the most brutalcapitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenthand the beginning of the twentieth centuries. To the Third International falls the task oforganising the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalistgovernments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries for the capture ofpolitical power, for the triumph of socialism!

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- V. I. Lenin, "The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International"(November 1914)

! ! { ~ ! ! ! ~ ' . . . 4 l ! ~ ! ~ l ! . ! EDITOR: Len M e y e ~ EDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Jacob ZornPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Mara CadizEDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Jon Brule, George Foster,Uz Gordon, Barry James, Walter Jennings, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour,Alison SpencerThe Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (FourthInternationalist).Workers vanguard (lSSN 0276-0746) published biweekly. except skipping three alternate Issues In June. July andAugust (beginning with omitting the second issue In June) and with a 3-week interval in December. by the Spartaclst Pub-lishing Co 299 Broadway. Suite 318. New York. NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 7327862 (Editorial). (212) 732-7881(BuSiness). Address all correspondence to: Box 13n. GPO. New York. NY 10116, E-mail address:[email protected] subscriptions: $10.00122 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York. NY. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Workers Vanguard. Box 13n. GPO. New York. NY 10116.Opinions expressed In signed IlIIicles or etters dO not necessarilyexpress the editorial vl6Wpolnt.The closing date for news in this issue is August 3.No. 717 6 August 1999

off limits to the 9,600 inhabitants. Withfarmers driven off the most fertile landand fishermen excluded from most ofthe island's fishing areas, nearly threequarters of the population lives in poverty. Navy jets carry out practice bombing runs with live ammunition. When thequestion of transferring these live bombing runs to an island in Chesapeake Baywas raised during 1981 Congressionalhearings, Admiral Keanny objectedbecause that island was "closed threemonths of the year to protect the migration of the geese that inhabit it." TheU.S. imperialists have no such concernsfor the welfare of the Puerto Rican people. With cancer rates on Vieques alreadyinexplicably high, last February Navypilots "accidentally" fired 263 shellstipped with depleted uranium .Now that the U.S. Southern Command-American imperialism's headquarters for military intervention in LatinAmerica-has moved from Panama toPuerto Rico, the imperialists are expanding the already huge military presencethere. The military controls 13 percent ofPuerto Rico's scarce land, including theRoosevelt Roads naval station, the hemisphere's largest. Puerto Rico has longbeen key to U.S. military designs, serving as a staging ground for U.S. aggression in the Caribbean, from the 1961 Bayof Pigs invasion of Cuba to SantoDomingo in 1965 to Grenada in 1983.The U.S. military presence in the regionis aimed at enforcing imperialist subjugation of the semicolonial peoplesthroughout Latin America and is adagger in particular against the Cubanbureaucratically deformed workers state.It has also served as a training baseto prepare for the terror bombing ofIraq in 1991 and of Serbia this year.U.S. miltary out of the Caribbean!For unconditional military defense ofCuba against imperialism and internalcounterrevolution!"CitiZens" of the U.S. with no right tovote in federal elections and no represen-

WVPhotoSL contingent at July 7 New YorkCity protest in defense of PuertoRican nationalist prisoners.tation in Congress, Puerto Ricans arepolitically dispossessed, discriminatedagainst economically, linguistically, racially and culturally. With more than halfthe population living below the U.S. poverty level, Puerto Rico's working peopleare exploited as a low-wage labor pool bycapitalists who invest in industry on theisland.The outrage over the Vieques bombingdemonstrates the Puerto Rican masses'deep resentment against their colonialoppression. But the petty-bourgeoisnationalist leaders of the protests overVieques have sought to use the demonstrations as a lever for pleading withWashington for a kinder, gentler colonialism. Even though Rosse1l6's PNP callsfor a greater U.S. military presence inPuerto Rico, according to Diario (26July) Puerto Rican Independence Party(PIP) leader Col6n Martinez "emphasizedthat even the annexationist governorcontinued on page 14

LetterOn the 'Iraqi Communist Party

Dear Comrades:

19 July 1999Chicago, ILThe article on Kurdistan in WV No.716 (9 July), "Trotskyism vs. PKKNationalism," refers to the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) of 1959 as ''this powerfulforce for social revolution." I assume thiswas the result of sloppy editing and thatthe quoted expression was meant to referto the IraqilKurdish working class.However, the rest of the paragraph thatfollows tends to support this misstatement. It is incredibly soft on the ICP,depicting it in terms applicable to theChinese Communist Party of Chen Duxiuinstead of a Stalinist formation steeped inclass collaborationism from its inception.There's no way this party could havemobilized "its working-class base to take

state power in its own name," nor did itneed any orders from Moscow to scuttlea revolution. The ICP did what its program said it should do, what it had beentrained to do for 25 years. The ICP was anobstacle to revolution, not its potentialleadership.It is moreover quite inappropriate totalk about the ICP's large Kurdish component without mentioning the party's lessthan stalwart defense of Kurdish nationalrights. The ICP did make a couple of formal statements supporting Kurdish selfdetermination: at its inception in 1935and in 1953, when it called for "the right

of self-determination, including that ofsecession, for the Kurdish people." Thoseare the only documented instances I knowof (though admittedly I'm no expert).Despite these isolated pronouncements,the ICP, according to Walter Laqueur(Communism and Nationalism in theMiddle East), generally attacked the goalof an independent Kurdish state, sayingthe Kurdish question was part of the Iraqiquestion. And in 1961 the CP at first supported Iraqi strongman Qassim's suppression of a Kurdish uprising before s w i n g ~ ing around to supporting some version of"autonomy" (Chaliand, ed., People Without a Country: the Kurds and Kurdistan).

WVRepliesComradely,Anderson

Anderson is quite right. For more onthe history of the Iraqi CP, see "IraqiRulers' Bloody Road to Power," (WVNo.511,5 October 1990).

Visitthe le I .

Mfeb Si t e lWWW.'C'-".org

WORKERS VANGUARD


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After Holding Out for 117 Days .racist Newport News management. Asone machinist commented, "Seventy percent of management decisions are racerelated." In a blow against younger workers, those hired after 1995 will lose twoand a half days' vacation per year. Furtherfostering divisions among union members, the USWA officials agreed to allowscabs to remain on the job while the company gets to recall workers over 28 days,meaning older and skilled workers willreturn first. As one worker said bitterly, "Idon't like the way we're going back intothe yard. We all walked out together, weshould go back together."Newport News StrikeScuttled by USWA Tops

After 17 weeks on the picket lines,membersofUnited Steelworkers (USWA)Local 8888 at Newport News Shipbuilding in the Virginia Tidewater area votedto return to work on July 30. In the midstof the U.S.-led NATO war of imperialistdomination against Serbia, the strike shutdown production at the only shipyard inthe country which builds and repairsnuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Thisintegrated, industrial union held finn inthe racist, "open shop" South in the faceof brazen company attempts to foster ascab back-to-work movement and an antiunion barrage by the local capitalistpress. The very length of the walkoutdemonstrated the strikers' detenninationto defend their union and win theirdemands. But this detennination wassquandered by the pro-capitalist USWAleaders, who refused to mobilize theworkers' power on the picket lines andinstead relied on appeals to capitalist politicians and the government, finally shoving a sellout settlement down the throatsof the workers.The anti-union media is pushing the liethat strikes don't pay, with the NewportNews-Hampton Daily Press (27 July)gloating that "striking workers will surelyask themselves whether the 16-week sacrifice was worth it." In fact, after 117days of struggle and sacrifice, with manyworkers forced to get by on the meagerstrike benefits provided by the USWAInternational tops, the sellout was metwith widespread opposition. Barely halfof the local's more than 8,000 membersbothered to vote on the settlement, and ofthose nearly 40 percent-some 1,700-voted to reject the contract and continuethe strike.The real lesson of this strike is theburning need to fight for a new labor leadership based on a program of class struggle, not class collaboration. From the outset, Workers Vanguard stressed the needfor mass, militant picket lines to shutdown the shipyard. We emphasized theimportance of taking up the fight againstracist discrimination, writing ("Victory toNewport News Shipyard Workers!" WVNo. 711, 16 April):"This discrimination has to be tackledhead-on if the union is to carry outa solid strike and defeat inevitableattempts by management' to divide theworkers. The USWA tops' failure to takeon these questions directly undercutsthe union's potential to galvanize tradeunionists and black people throughoutthe Tidewater area to join strikers in themass pickets needed to win. And workers must not be taken in by the 'Americafirst' flag-waving of the USWA International bureaucracy, which will leave themdisarmed as management and the government try to break the strike by appealing to the 'national interest'."The Navy shoveled millions of dollarsto the Newport News bosses during thestrike, including payments for strikebreaking security guards and for busingscabs into the yard. Several weeks beforethe strike ended, government mediators

CORRECTIONThe photo caption in the frontpage article "Iran: 20 Years ofIslamic Dictatorship" (WV No. 708,5 March) misidentified theprominent portrait carried by Iranianwomen in the photo. The portrait is

of leading clericalist hardlinerAyatollah Khamenei, not PresidentKhatami.

6 AUGUST 1999

moved in to make it clear that the walkout had to come to a halt. The aircraftcarrier USS Enterprise was scheduled tobegin repair work in August. The government wanted that work to go ahead,and the USWA tops saluted.The USWA misleaders did everythingto keep the picket lines small and weak,

the pension, everything else is like whatthe shipyard wanted." Meanwhile, unionmembers report that layoffs of l, l00workers are expected by this fall, as theDaily Press (25 July) crows that the settlement "will not derail a cost-cuttingagreement between Newport News Shipbuilding and the Navy."

.,a:;.!i;E:;.i';t :;l

A number of strikers stood outside -theentrance to the July 23 union meetingwith signs reading, "Vote No! Don't BeTricked!" One militant distributed a leaflet during the vote the following weekcondemning the tenns of the settlement.Proclaiming "'Vote No' to 3rd Class Contract," the leaflet concluded with theappeal: "Our livelihood deserves greatercompensation for continuous efforts thatwe put into building the greatest shipsand subs on the planet." Newport Newsworkers certainly deserve a much bettercontract for the arduous and skilled workthey do. But this statement in the leafletadopts the language the bureaucrats usedto push patriotic appeals to the government, thus acting to derail the strike. Aswe wrote in our initial article on thestrike, "The 'national interest' is the classinterest of the bourgeoisie."

WV Photo NakamuraNirginian-Pilot

Militants who seek to cohere an alternative within the union to the USWA misleadership which sold them down theriver must understand that at the core ofthe union bureaucracy's treacherous policies is its class-collaborationist lie thatU.S. workers share common interestswith their capitalist exploiters againstworkers overseas. To prepare for thestruggles ahead, it is necessary to fight fora leadership based on the understandingthat the workers of all countries have thesame class interests, and that the American bourgeoisie is the greatest enemy ofthe working class the world over. Breakwith the Democrats! Join us in the fight toforge an internationalist, class-struggleworkers party committed to sweepingaway this profit system of union-busting,racist hell and imperialist war through asocialist revolution which places the multiracial proletariat in power

Newport News strike was derailed by. pro-capitalist USWA bureaucracy.Union militants protest sellout deal outside July 23 union meeting.allowing scabs, contractors and militarypersonnel to stroll into the yard. Insteadof organizing mass pickets to shut downevery gate, the union tops bused strikersto Washington to lobby capitalist Democratic Party politicians and Navy brassand sent them to Richmond to plead withcompany stockholders. One 36-year supply worker told WV, "A lot of people gotfed up."A victorious strike by this heavilyblack industrial union could have pavedthe way for union organizing throughoutthe racist "right to work" South. Thepotential to forge unity in strugglebetween black and white workers wasexpressed by a white machinist with 18years in the yard who said, "I f nothingelse comes out of this strike, I sawwhites and blacks come together, talkingand exchanging views. I never saw thisvery much before."At a raucous mass union meetingwhere the offer was a n ~ o u n c e d oneweek before the vote, International president George Becker was shouted downby angry workers yelling, "Let's talkmoney!" Local 8888 president ArnoldOutlaw tried to justify the contract offerwith the claim that "there was nothing leftto get out of Newport News Shipbuildingexcept their guts." In fact, Newport Newsis rolling in profits, pulling in over $66million last year, while workers' wageshave been frozen for the past six years.Against the initial union demand for a$1O-an-hour wage raise over three years,the contract provides for an average wageincrease of $3.10 spread out over fiveyears, amounting to a 28-cent-an-hoarincrease for each year from the timewages were frozen in 1993 until the endof the new 58-month contract. Meanwhile, workers will have to pay nearlytwice as much for health insurance asthey did before.To garner the support of older workersfor the contract, the union leadership gota gradual increase in the maximum pension from $506 to $900 a month for workers-who reach age 62 with 30 years on thejob. But as one rigger said, "Except for

Worse yet, the contract perpetuatesthe company's discriminatory practicesagainst blacks and women, as well asagainst younger and unskilled workers.Three new higher "specialist pay grades"have been created which, like the current "merit" pay raises, will be awardedto workers at the discretion of the

S p a r t a c i s t ~ ForumsMobilize Mass Labor Protest Against Racist Cop Terror!

No Illusions in Feds, Clvil ian Review Boards, Capitalist Courts!

Saturday, August7, 3 p.m.University of Illinois at ChicagoCircle Center Rm. 509, 750 S. Halsted

For more information: (312) [email protected]

Thursday, August 19, 7:30 p.m.322 W. 48th St., Club Room

(Take E or C train to 50th St., bet. 8th & 9th Ave.)For more information: (212) [email protected]

NEW YORK CITY25 Years After the Defeat of Busing:Boston Schools-Separate and Unequal

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!Sa.turday, August 7, 7 p.m.Central Square YWCA, 7 Temple Street, Cambridge

BOSTON For more information: (617) 666-9453U.S./UN/NATO Out of the Balkans Now!

Saturday, August 28Time and place to be announced.

For more information: (213) 380-8239LOS ANGELES

Thursday, September 2Time and place to be announced.For more information: (415) 395-9520 or(510) 839-0851BAY AREA

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Young Sparlaeus

Mexican GovernmentThreatens Crackdown AgainstMass Student Strikeing that the strike end by 7 Julyand ominously inviting the intervention of the police. What isurgently posed is the defense ofthe striking students by the organized workers movement.

JULY 30-The student strike atMexico City's National Autonomous University (UNAM)-withsome 270,000 students, the largestuniversity in the Western Hemisphere-has now gone on formore than a hundred days. Theirfight against the devastation ofpublic higher education by an austerity plan dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) haswon widespread support amongthe working class. Crucial in thisstrike has been the support of theSTUNAM campus workers unionand the powerful Union of Electrical Workers (SME), whose members have joined in guarding thebarricades of the striking students.On July 26, tens of thousandsof students and workers floodedMexico City's huge central square,the Z6calo, in a demonstrationof support for the UNAM strikeendorsed by 43 unions and socialorganizations.Our comrades of the GrupoEspartaquista de Mexico (GEM),section of the International Communist League, and its Juventud .Espartaquista (JE) youth group

Jose NunezMexico City, July 26: Tens of thousands of workers and students march in solidarity withUNAM student strike..

The bourgeois-nationalist PROis no less wedded to enforcingIMF austerity than the PRIor PAN[the right-wing National ActionParty]. Zedillo has openly railedagainst the student strike as "brutal aggression." While disguisingitself as a "friend" of the studentstrike, the PRD has used its influence over the newspapers La Jor-nada and Proceso to further thesinister campaign to smash thestrike, fingering student leaders as"ultras." Cardenas was also citedin La Jomada (23 June) as saying"the police of the Federal Districtwill not act against the universitystudents, because the UNAM isa federal institution and thereforeit should be the federal police"who smash the students. Thus,Cardenas is in no way opposed tostate repression. In fact, he hasshown his real face on severaloccasions, using his riot police torepress the teachers of the CNTEunion and striking students. On 3July, La Jomada reported that

have distributed thousands ofleaflets calling for workers defense ofthe UNAM strike, stressing theneed to go beyond the walls of thecampus and mobilize the active supportof the industrial proletariat in order forthis struggle to end in victory. Workers'defense based on the tremendous socialpower of labor is a key question today inthe strike. The bourgeois parties and themedia have been trying to jsolate thestrike, spreading rumors of impendingrepression and raising the spectre of thebloody 1968 massacre of student protesters. Ominously, the government hasdeployed 5,000 of the newly formedelite Federal Police in Mexico City, andstudents confront constant provocationsaround the campus.In advancing our revolutionary andinternationalist program to defend publiceducation and defeat the bourgeoisie'sattacks on the working class, our comrades have warned against illusions inthe current misleadership of the studentmovement and both the official tradeunions tied to the ruling InstitutionalRevolutionary Party (PRI) and the "independent" unions, and their subordinationto bourgeois nationalism. The chief representative of this nationalist ideologytoday is the "leftist" Party of the Demo-

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NOTICEWorkers Vanguard skipsalternate issues in June,July and August.

Our next issue willbe dated September 3.

cratic Revolution (PRD) of CuauhtemocCardenas, who is currently mayor ofMexico City. The bourgeois-nationalistPRD is no less committed than the PRIof President Ernesto Zedillo to imposingthe austerity plans dictated by the IMFand the Mexican ruling class, includingthrough bloody state repression.While our comrades fight to extendthe strike to the proletariat, the Morenoite Partido Obrero Socialista (PaS)has scandalously called to end the strike,arguing in a July 3 leaflet by its JuventudSocialista youth group: "After more than70 days the movement is worn out, tiredand weak. It is a fact that we cannotcount any more on the presence of contingents of the electrical workers in ourmobilizations." This despicable strikebreaking call was issued just as electricalworkers joined the student barricades!As our comrades pointed out in a July26 leaflet (which is excerpted page 10),iri attempting to sow demoralizationamong the students, the pas is doingthe bidding of UNAM rectQr FranciscoBarnes' campus administration and thestate.Posing an immediate danger to theUNAM students and the workers whohave joined them on the barricades are theAuxilio UNAM campus cops organizedin STUNAM. The Internationalist Group(lG) claims in print (and in English Internet postings for foreign consumption) tofight for cops out of the unions. Butwhere it counts, in the heat of this struggle at UNAM, the IG has taken a cowardly dive on this crucial question. Thus

at a July 6 assembly involving STUNAMworkers in the school of philosophy,an IG spokesman failed to say a wordabout the cops. It was the JE which raisedthe demand, "Auxilio UNAM out of theSTUNAM!" Thus the IG stands exposed(again) as cynical centrists whose onlyuse for Marxism is to camouflage theircapitulation to alien class forces.Mexican workers and youth committedto fighting against the whole system ofcapitalist austerity and injustice need anauthentic Leninist-Trotskyist party. Ourcomrades of the GEMIJE are dedicated tothe construction of such a party. Wereprint below a July 5 GEMIJE leaflet.

Joven EspartacoNo Illusions in the PRD-Forge aRevolutionary Workers Party!For Workers Defense ofthe UNAM Strike!

The strike by tens of thousands of students-supported on the picket lines bythe STUNAM workers-is entering itsthird month, the longest in the history ofthe university. Barnes & Co.'s attempt toput an end to the strike by piecing the students off with "voluntary" tuition failedmiserably. The solidarity shown by theSTUNAM workers as well as the supportfor the strike among broader layers of theproletariat have so far discouraged anopen show of force by the capitalist rul- .ers against the students. Now, however,Barnes has issueq an ultimatum demand-

Cardenas' Federal District government had warned that the administeringof the admission test for new applicantsto UNAM would be "carried out withoutincidents, and in the case that those takeplace they will 'act immediately in termsof the law'." Facing the presidential elections next year, the PRD would prefer tomaintain a base among those students andyouth who have illusions that it is somehow more "progressive" than the othercapitalist parties, but it must prove itselfcapable of administering the capitaliststate.

I t is in the interest of he working classand all of the oppressed to mobilize indefense of the UNAM strike! Organizedcontingents of trade unionists could pre-vent the forces of the state from carryingout brutal repression against the stu-dents! On 2 July, members of the SITUAM campus workers union at Metropolitan University staged a one-day strikein solidarity with the UNAM strike. Themobilization of key industrial unionssuch as the SUTERM and SME electricalworkers along with transport and communication workers in defense of the strikewould be a powerful display of workerspower in the face of austerity, privatizations and the general assault by the rulingclass at the behest of their U.S. imperialist masters and the International Monetary Fund on the living conditions of the, working people.The present attack on public educationcentered at UNAM is part of this broaderruling-class assault. At the same time thatit seeks to further restricJ access to highereducation for the sons and daughters of

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,the proletariat, the bourgeoisie is seekingto privatize the electricity companies,leading to mass layoffs and the weakening of the SME and SUTERM unions.The potential for a social explosion inMexico against the dictates ofIMF austerity has not been lost on the bourgeoisieinternationally. Thus, the New York Times(25 June) carried a major article on thestrike, noting that it reflected resistance to"Mexico's decade-old shift away from acostly welfare state toward lean government and private enterprise." I f it is ableto isolate the students and use staterepression to defeat the strike, the rulerswill have made an example to broadersections of the working class and oppressed: this is what is in store for you ifyou fight.

APPRO leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas (above, right)with PRI president Ernesto Zedillo. As MexicoCity mayor, Cardenas has mobilized riot policeagainst striking teachers, protesters, streetvendors.halcones (hawks). But pressuring thePRD is at the center of the strategy of thefake-left. In an interview in Proceso (27June), Partido Obrero Socialista (POS)leader Cuauhtemoc Rufz stated: "TheCardenas government must understandthat it needs to be more flexible in theway of implementing the law." The POScan certainly not be trusted to advance theinterests of t h ~ working class: while itcapitulates to the national bourgeoisie "athome"-even calling for state intervention in the unions and for unionizationof the cops-abroad it has proven itselfto be a group of "Pentagon socialists."Thus, the POS' international Morenoitetendency (LIT) lined up with the Vaticanand CIA in supporting anti-Semitic PolishSolidamosc, just as in Afghanistan itsupported the imperialist-backed muja-hedin-notorious for killing teachers whoinstructed women to read and writeagainst the Soviet intervention. In sharpcontrast to this rabid anti-Soviet organization our international tendency, guidedby the authentic program of Trotskyism,stood for the unconditional military defenseof the USSR when it existed. Today, we

defend the eXlstmg deformed workersstates-Cuba, China, Vietnam and NorthKorea-against imperialist attack andinternal counterrevolution. We call for aproletarian political revolution against theStalinist bureaucracies and a return to theroad of Lenin.Recently, during the Balkans war, thePOS and the centrist Liga de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (LTS), a splitfrom the POS, lined up with Clinton& Co.'s rallying cry over "poor littleKosovo," which was the imperial ist coverfor their massacre against the Yugoslavworkers. Comrades of the JuventudEspartaquista intervened in the forumscalled by the POS during the strike toexpose their pro-imperialist policy. During the UNAM strike, the LTS and itsfront group Contracorriente have explicitly echoed the United Nations and itsUNESCO arm in advising the Mexicanbourgeois state on its investment policy,advocating that 8 percent of the GNP bedevoted to education (Estrategia Obrera,9 June)! It should not be forgotten that itwas under the fig leaf of the UN that U.S.continued on page 11

We in the Juventud Espartaquista, youthgroup of the Grupo Espartaquista deMexico (GEM), have participated in theprotests, including building occupations,barricading and guarding occupied buildings, spreading the strike in its initialdays to the Universum Museum, wherethe director and the university lawyerstried to intimidate and force the museumguides to scab on the strike. Here theactive support of the STUNAM workers was decisive.in shutting down themuseum. We have also fought to win students in the course of this strike to a revolutionary, internationalist, proletarianperspective. During the U.S.INATO warin the Balkans, we gave the workers and.students at the UNAM a concrete way tosolidarize with Yugoslav workers underimperialist a ttack, collecting monC)' fromthe STUNAM workers and students forthe workers of the bombed Zastava autoplant iIi Serbia as part of the ICL'sparticipation internationally in a funddrive initiated by the Italian COBAStrade union. On May 18, comrades of theJuventud Espartaquista addressed-andreceived support from-the GeneralCouncil of Delegates (CGR) of the STUNAM about the campaign for materialaid. We called for the defeat of imperialism through workers revolution and forthe military defense of Serbia while giving not one iota of political support to thebutcher Milosevic.The pseudo-left tails of the bourgeoisnationalist PRD have actively opposedlinking the students' s truggle to the socialpower of the working class. This wasclear when the student misleaders ofthe General Council of the Strike madea meaningless paper endorsement andthen consciously refused to mobilize themasses of striking students to join withthe workers at the huge May Day march.It is clear as well in their pushing of utopian schemes to tum the university intoan institution for social progress-a "liberated zone" in the midst of misery andrepression-and of the myth of studentsas a "vanguard," which serves to isolatethe students. Such fatuous student vanguardism also reflects petty-bourgeoiscontempt for the working class.

geois society and that its primary functionis to train the future administrative, technical and cultural personnel for the capitalist system. (The universities are by nomeans essential . When it has to, the bourgeoisie can do without universities or students. That's why during the SecondWorld War the universities of the combatant countries were shelved while the warwas being prosecuted from 1939-45. Forall intents and purposes, there were noschools, no students and nobody noticed.)The democratic demands we advance foreducation are inextricably linked with theunderstanding that only when the systemof capital ism is destroyed through the seizure of state power by the working classled by a revolutionary party will the basisbe laid for genuine equality in all spheresof society. We call for full open admissions made economically meaningful byproviding all students with a living stipend! While defending against furtherattacks on access to higher education, weare not for upholding the status. quoof automatic entry to UNAM only by aselect number of relatively privilegedhigh schools. For every 10,000 studentsentering UNAM each year, more than90,000 are rejected, while the courses, theworkrooms, the books and other materialsare so expensive that it is practicallyimpossible for working-class youth toenter. We are opposed as well to groveling appeals for "dialogue" with therectory [administration]. Abolish the rectory! Nationalize all the private universities under teacher-student-campusworker control!

SYC Statement of Solidaritywith UNAM Strikers

As Marxists, we understand that theuniversity is an important pillar of bour-

The question for militant students is:with whom will you ally-the workingclass or the bourgeoisie in the form ofthe nationalist PRD? Our answer is: forthe proletariat! The other self-proclaimedMarxist organizations have taken theother side.The PRO's Fake-Socialist Tails

It is suicidal to believe that the bourgeois PRD will prevent a repeat of thebloody massacre of hundreds of studentsin 1968 by the joint efforts of the citypolice and Mexican army or the shootingand killing of tens of students during the"Jueves de Corpus" on 10 July 1971 bythe government death squads known as

Mexico City, October 1968: Troops were called out against student demonstrators as hundreds were massacred.6 AUGUST 1999

The following is a July 31 state-ment by the Spar tacus Youth Clubs.The Spartacus Youth Clubs (SYC)-youth clubs of the revolutionaryTrotskyist Spartacist League, U.S.section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)-stand in solidarity with yourfight against attacks on public education at VNAM. We pledge in advanceto mobilize protest here should theMexican government follow throughon its threats of brutal police and military repression of the student strikersand their working-class defenders.Over the last few years, the racistU.S. ruling class has carried outa concerted purge of working-class,black, Latino and immigrant youthfrom university campuses throughexponential increases in tuition costsand the abolition of affirmative actionand other programs that offered limited access to "higher education" byblack and minority youth. Againstthese attacks the Spartacus YouthClubs have fought for free, integratededucation for all, raising the demandsfor open admissions, no tuition anda state-paid stipend for all students. Struggles against the attacks onaccess to university education havebeen met with repression and arrestsby campus administrations, demonstrating their role as the representatives of the bourgeoisie. The SYCssay: Abolish the campus administration! The universities should be runby those who work and study there!

Like our comrades at UNAM of theJuventud Espartaquista, youth groupof the Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico, Mexican section of the ICL, wehave emphasized the necessity forstudents to ally with the social powerof the multiracial proletariat in thefight against attacks on education. Wesalute the mobilization of the campusworkers and the powerful electricalworkers unions, among others, indefense of the student strikers. Thiswill be a powerful lesson to bring tothe unions and student protesters inthe U.S.

The attempts to eliminate freeaccess to UNAM for many more thousands of youth is part of the intensification of the exploitation of the Mexican working class and oppressedimplemented by the Mexican bourgeoisie in line with the dictates of itsU.S. imperialist masters through theIMF and NAFTA. As revolutionaryinternationalists we fight for commonclass struggle by U.S. and Mexicanworkers against the U.S. imperialistbeast and its PRI, PRD and PANlackeys in Mexico. We fight to winstudents and young workers to theperspective of building the revolutionary workers party necessary for thevictory of socialist revolution whichalone can lay the material basis forsecuring, an education and future forthe children of the working class andoppressed. As part of this fight, westand in solidarity with your struggles.Victory to the UNAM strike! .

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Capitalist Russia in the"New World Order"Part One of this' article appeared inWV No. 716 (9 July).The October Revolution of 1917created in Russia a workers state governed by soviet democracy and led bya communist vanguard party. The Bolsheviks understood that an isolated workers

state-moreover, an economically weakand backward one like Russia-couldonly survive for any length of time byspreading the revolution internationally.Revulsion to the mass slaughter ofthe first imperialist world war combinedwith the inspiration of the BolshevikRevolution produced revolutionary turmoil throughout Europe, centrally Germany, between 1918 and 1923. However,the kind of steeled proletarian vanguardparty which Lenin had built in tsaristRussia did not exist elsewhere in Europe.Given the weakness and inexperienceof the Communist parties, the Europeanbourgeoisies were able to restore order-

PART TWOwith the indispensable aid of the socialdemocratic parties.Thus Soviet Russia emerged fromthe Civil War bled white, its industry inshambles, internationally isolated andbesieged by world imperialism. Not onlythe Bolshevik leadership but the massof Soviet workers understood that extension of the revolution was critical, particularly the seizure of power by the German proletariat. The definitive defeat ofthe anticipated German revolution in1923, due to the conscious counterrevolutionary policies of the Social Democracy and the incapacity of the Communist leadership, led directly to theascendancy of a conservative and nationalistic bureaucracy in the Soviet workersstate. Trotsky later explained in his 1940"Letter to the Workers of the USSR":"The October Revolution was accom-plished for the sake of the toilers andnot for the sake of new parasites. Butdue to the lag of the world revolution,due to the fatigue and, to a large meas-ure, the backwardness of the Russianworkers and especially the Russian peas-

ants, there raised itself over the SovietRepublic and against its peoples a newoppressive caste, whose leader is Stalin."The nationally limited interests of thisnew parasitic caste were encapsulatedthe utopian nationalist slogan of "building socialism in one country," whichtransformed the Communist Internationalfrom an instrument for world socialistrevolution into an obstacle to that goal. Inopposition to Stalin, Trotsky insisted onthe Marxist understanding that the creation of a socialist society entails a level ofeconomic productivity higher than that ofeven the most advanced capitalist economies. That requires an internationallyplanned economy, since the seizure ofpower by the proletariat in one countrycould not eliminate the pressures of theworld capitalist market.In 1938, the Transitional Program,the founding document of the TrotskyistFourth International, stated:"The USSR thus embodies terrific con-tradictions. But it still remains a degen-erated workers' state. Such is the socialdiagnosis. The political prognosis has analternative character: either the bureauc-racy, becoming ever more the organ ofthe world bourgeoisie in the workers'state, will overthrow the new forms ofproperty and plunge the country backinto capitalism; or the working class will .crush the bureaucracy and open the wayto socialism."Trotsky believed that the contradictions embodied in the Soviet Union wereso intense that they would be resolved,6

one way or another, in the historic shortrun. Yet the Stalinized USSR would survive for another five decades-a significant and momentous period in modern world history. What accounted forthe unexpected longevity of the Sovietbureaucratically degenerated workersstate? And why in the end did capitalistcounterrevolution triumph, not proletarian political revolution?The heroic and successful defenseagainst the Nazi German invasion bythe workers and collective farmers ofthe USSR-at a cost of some 27 millionlives-generated a deep and broad senseof Soviet patriotism, albeit infected withthe Russian nationalism promoted by the

orbital flight by the cosmonauts demonstrated that 'Soviet science and technology had attained world-class levels inkey fields. Third World colonial revolutions-in particular the Cuban revolutionof 1959-60--vastly enhanced the prestigeof the Soviet Union in world politics tothe detriment of U.S. imperialism.In 1960, Khrushchev challenged thecapitalist West, "We will bury you," proclaiming that the USSR would not onlyachieve global dominance over Westerncapitalism but also "full communism" in20 years. He was here expressing thefalse consciousness of the Kremlin oligarchy. Such views also had a resonancein Soviet society, where wide layers of

VAAPAbove: Young workers at May Day demonstration in Petrograd, 1917. Below:Members of Trotskyist Left Opposition forced into Siberian exile by Stalincommemorate anniversary of October Revolution in late 1920s. .

Kremlin bureaucracy. The Stalin regimeacquired a national legitimacy it had notpreviously possessed. In the late 1940s,the spirit of patriotism, self-sacrifice andworking for the common good animatedthe reconstruction of the war-devastatedeconomy.After Stalin's death in 1953, his successors, principally Nikita Khrushchev,ended and denounced the worst excessesof Stalin's mass terror and promised thathenceforth the Soviet state would be governed by "socialist legality." The Khrushchev years, from the mid-1950s throughthe early '60s, marked the last period ofofficial "social ist" idealism in the USSR.The country experienced exceptionallyhigh rates of economic growth and a corresponding improvement in living standards. The Soviet launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, and the first manned

Basil Blackwell Inc.

the population maintained socialist aspirations, while believing the bureaucracy'slie that a classless society of abundancecould be constructed in the USSR without overthrowing capitalism in the advanced industrial countries. Decades ofStalinist betrayal of revolutionary opportunities abroad had served to reinforce thelie of "socialism in one country," inculcating in the Soviet proletariat the viewthat socialist revolution in the U.S. andother imperialist countries was a utopia.Over time, the continuing gul f betweenthe official "socialist" character of theSoviet state and the actual conditionsof Soviet society would produce a profound political disillusionment among theworking masses. And a new generation of .bureaucrats and intellectuals would cometo envy and then seek to emulate the capitalist West, which they viewed as the

embodiment of economic affluence andmodernity.Behind the Disintegration ofthe Kremlin Bureaucracy

In 1964, the often impulsive Khrushchev was ousted in a Kremlin coup by amore conservative faction led by LeonidBrezhnev. The 18-year Brezhnev reignwas one of unusual stability followingthe tumultuous Khrushchev period andthe cataclysmic upheavals of the Stalinera. Yet beneath the surface immobilityof Soviet society, pressures were building which would shatter the Kremlinbureaucracy a few years after Brezhnev'sdeath.The first half of the Brezhnev periodsaw both a decline in Soviet economicdynamism and an increase in Moscow's standing in the international political arena. With American imperialismbogged down in the long, losing counterrevolutionary war in Vietnam, the USSRwas able to achieve strategic nuclear parity in the early 1970s. The effects of theVietnam War, including Washington'shope of using Moscow to broker a sellout by the North Vietnamese Stalinistregime, led to the short-lived triumph ofBrezhnev's "detente" policies.However, the rough military paritywhich the USSR achieved vis-a-visthe United States in this period did notcorrespond to its underlying economicstrength. In fact, the country was experiencing a slowdown in the growth of totaloutput and labor productivity. In 1971,a young but influential intellectual withthe prestigious Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow gave a lecture in which he arguedthat the Soviet Union was not goingto economically overtake the capitalistWest in any politically meaningful timeperiod. The intellectual who debunkedthe then official ideological line was untilrecently Russia's prime minister, YevgenyPrimakov.The young Primakov was merely voicing what his political masters were thinking. The Brezhnevite bureaucracy-corrupt, complacent, cynical-had ceased toseriously promote the prospect of "building socialism" in the USSR. While continuing to pay lip service to the Stalinizedversion of "Marxism-Leninism," its real,functional ideology was "superpower"nationalism. The Kremlin leaders' ultimate goal was to achieve mutually recognized spheres of influence and friendlycollaboration with Washington in determining the course of global politics.But as the Soviet Union came to beVIewed merely as a contending worldpower, "Soviet patriotism" increasinglycame to be identified with Great Russiannationalism, reinforcing the line pushedby Stalin already during World War II.This, in turn, strengthened tendenciestoward anti-Soviet nationalism in thenon-Russian republics of the USSR, notleast among the bureaucracies administering those republics.The Brezhnevite notion of a SovietAmerican global co-dominion was inits own way just as illusory as the oldStalinist dogma of "building socialismin one country." Shortly after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, American imperialism launched a new Cold War offen,sive against the Soviet Union. It wasbegun by Democratic president JimmyCarter under the slogan of "humanrights," brought to fever pitch afterthe Soviet military intervention againstCIA-sponsored Islamic'reactionaries inAfghanistan in December 1979, and

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escalated by his right-wing Republicansuccessor, Ronald Reagan.Dimitri Simes, an ant i-Communist -intellectual who emigrated from theSoviet Union to the U.S. in the 1970s,recently summarized American policyin Cold War II:"The combination of American supportfor anti-Communist insurgents fromAfghanistan to Nicaragua, steady increases in the u.s. defense budget, andthe successful deployment of Americanintermediate-range nuclear missiles inEurope-notw ithstandi ng a major Soviet'peace offensive' ~ e m o n s t r a t e d to theKremlin that the USSR had to deal withan adversary of renewed determinationand power."-After the Collapse: RussiaSeeks Its Place as a GreatPower (1999)

The Kremlin leadership thus facedgreatly increased military and politicalpressure from American imperialism ata time when the inner weaknesses of theSoviet economy, governed and defonnedby bureaucratic commandism, were becoming more acute. For decades, Sovietindustrial development had been basedon extensive growth, basically the construction of new factories drawing upon surplus labor from the countryside.By the early 1970s, the Slavic core ofthe USSR was fast exhausting the basicresource for extensive growth, namely,surplus labor. Further economic development became critically dependent uponintensive growth, i:e., raising the productivity of the existing labor force.A shift from extensive to intensivegrowth would have required massive investment not only in new industrial technology but also in training and retrainingthe workforce to utilize the new technology. At the same time, Washington's ColdWar II offensive was forcing the Kiemlinleaders to substantially increase militaryexpenditure lest the Soviet Union becomevulnerable to an American nuclear firststrike. In order to avoid provoking popular unrest, the Brezhnev regime wasunwilling to cut consumption. What it cutinstead was investment in new plant andequipment. In the last Brezhnev years,Soviet economic growth slowed to acrawl.Looking at the world in the early1980s, more critical and generally younger elements of the bureaucracy andintelligentsia judged that the USSR hadbecome dangerously overextended inseeking to be a global "superpower" on apar with the United States. In response,the new leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev which took over the Kremlin in1985 introduced market mechanisms intothe collectivized economy-a programdubbed perestroika (restructuring)-andpursued a policy of all-round conciliationof Western imperialism and retreat in theinternational arena.Gorbachev's Perestroika:Prelude to CapitalistCounterrevolution

Shortly before he was named generalsecretary of the Conununist Party of theSoviet Union, Gorbachev stated: "Onlyan intensive, highly developed economycan safeguard a reinforcement of [our]country's position on the internationalstage and allow her to enter the next millennium with dignity as a great and flour-

Spartacist pamphletHow the Soviet WorkersState Was StrangledAlso includes:Stalin Drowned theCommunist Party of Leninand Trotsky In Blood$2 (64 pages)Order fromlmake checks payable to:Spartacist Publishing Co. .Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116

6 AUGUST 1999

ishing power" (quoted in Anders Aslund,How Russia Became a Market Economy[1995)). Gorbachev's initial response towhat he later described as "the era ofstagnation" under Brezhnev was the 1987plan for "Fundamentally RestructuringManagement of the Economy." Individualenterprises (except in the military sector)were allowed to decide what to produceand in what quantities; managers weregiven the power to cut wages and bonusesand to fire "redundant" workers; the subsidization of consumer goods and services was largely eliminated. We wrote atthe time:"Within the framework of Stalinismthere is an inherent tendency toward economic decentralization as an alternativeto workers democracy. Since managersand workers are not subject to the discipline of soviet democracy, a sectionof the bureaucracy sees subjecting theeconomic actors to the discipline of themarket as the only answer to the SovietUnion's serious economic problems."[emphasis in original]-"Where Is Gorbachev's RussiaGoing?" Spartacist (Englishlanguage edition) No. 41-42,Winter 1987-88Gorbachev's initial economic programcould be tenned neo-Bukharinism. Nikolai Bukharin was the principal leader andtheoretician of the Right Opposition toStalin within the Kremlin bureaucracy

in the mid-late 1920s. Bukharin and Stalin transfonned the New Economic Policy (NEP)-which had been initiated byLenin as an expedient measure following the dislocations of the Civil Warand which the Bolshevik leader franklydescribed as a necessary retreat-into thesine qua non of their domestic policy.Thus Bukharin advocated a "socialistmixed economy," promoting agriculturaldevelopment based on the kulaks, relatively well-to-do peasant proprietors. Thenationalized industrial enterprises were tobe governed by market relations and cal-

adulated Bukharin, we noted (Spartacist[English-language edition] No. 43-44,Summer 1989): ."Gorbachev's USSR is in economicdevelopment a far cry from the SovietUnion of 1928-29. But if the Bukharinites had prevailed and the NEP had continued, it is an open question whetherthere would even be a Soviet Uniontoday. The policies of the Gorbachevitespose the question of whether there willbe a Soviet Union tomorrow."

There is no reason to doubt that Gorbachev genuinely believed that the combination of market-oriented economicmeasures, political liberalization (called

PBSSoviet military parade in Moscow. While falsely claiming heritage of Marx andLenin, Kremlin bureaucracy's real ideology was "superpower" nationalism.culations of profitability. These policiesemooldened the kulaks, leading to a grainstrike which threatened the cities withstarvation. It was this crisis which ultimately led Stalin to break with Bukharinand embark on the forced collectivizationof agriculture and forced-march industrialization in the late 19208.In writing of the Gorbachevite intelligentsia which openly identified with and

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juhdFh@h ij@iiij@ffiM/!.!.il- t S P A R T A C J ~ - - . s m a I i 3 i .m!!,iUiidlhmHOWlbeSov'el Workers SialeWas Sirangled

glasnost [openness)) and a conciliatoryforeign policy vis-a-vis the West would intime strengthen the USSR internally andtherefore enhance its standing in worldpolitics. Yet seven years after he tookpower, capitalist counterrevolution wastriumphant and the Soviet Union was nomore.Western imperialist spokesmen claimthat once Gorbachev allowed freedom ofexpression and more or less free elections the mass of Soviet society rejectedcommunism in favor of Western-stylecapitalism as the only proven system ofeconomic efficiency and growth. Alternatively, the Russian Stalinist "patriots"and their ultranationalist and fascistallies of the so-called ' ' 'red'-brown coalition" contended that Gorbachev, his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze and,of course, Yeltsin were paid agents of theCIA who had managed to infiltrate thehighest echelons of the Communist Partyand the Soviet government.A more sophisticated explanation wasgiven by the prominent British left-wing,historian Eric Hobsbawm in his The Ageof Extremes: A History of the World,1914-1991 (1994). A fonner member ofthe British Communist Party, Hobsbawmis now basically a left social democrat,but one who retains a certain sympathy

Democratic presidentKennedy greeted by Cubancounterrevolutionary twoyears after launching failed1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.In 1962, Kennedy provokeddangerous confrontationwith Soviet Union duringCuban missile crisis.

for the Soviet "experiment" derived fromhis Stalinist past. He is quite favorabletoward Gorbachev, whose general political outlook he shares.Hobsbawm implies that perestroikamight have achieved its stated goals ifGorbachev's political and economic policies had been implemented and orchestrated in a more orderly way:"What drove the Soviet Union withaccelerating speed towards the precipice.was the combination of glasnost thatamounted to the disintegration of authority, with a perestroika that amounted tothe destruction of the oid mechanismsthat made the economy work, withoutproviding any alternatives; and consequently the increasingly dramatic collapse of the citizens' standard of living.The country moved towards a pluralistelectoral politics at the very moment thatit subsided into economic anarchy."

This is an accurate capsule description of conditions in the Soviet Union,centrally Russia, in the final years ofthe Gorbachev regime (1989-91). But itdoes not explain why these conditionsresulted in capitalist counterrevolution.Why didn't the combination of gravelyweakened governmental authority andworsening economic conditions lead tothe overthrow of the Kremlin bureaucracy by the working class, followedby the restoration of the soviet democracy (based on workers councils) whichexisted in the first years after the revolution and the re-establishment of centralized economic planning on a rationalbasis?Hobsbawm, predictably, does not evenconsider this as a possible alternative.But for revolutionaries the failure of theSoviet proletariat to act independently inits own interests at this critical momentin modem world history is a decisivequestion. Six decades of bureaucraticmisrule in the name of "building socialism in one country" had produced a deeppolitical cynicism among the workingmasses of the Soviet Union. As we wrotein late 1992 after the counterrevolutionary regime in Russia was consolidated:"Atomized and bereft of any anti-capitalist leadership, lacking any coherentand consistent socialist class consciousness, skeptical about the possibility ofclass struggle in the capitalist countries,the Soviet working class did not rally inresistance against the encroaching capitalist counterrevolution."-How the Soviet Workers StateWas Strangled (August 1993)Trotskyists Said: DefeatYeltsin-Bush C ~ u n t e r r e v o l u t i o n !

The potential for such resistance couldbe seen in the huge spontaneous strikesagainst the effects of perestroika whicherupted in the summer of 1989 in the strategic Ukrainian Donbass and RussianKuzbaS'S coal fields, marked by the emergence .of elected strike committees andmass workers assemblies. But jn the



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Russia.-..(continued from page 7)aftermath of the strikes, pro-imperialistelements moved in to take advantage ofthe vacuum of leadership and gainedinfluence for Yeltsin among a minority ofminers, while the bulk of the Sovietworking class remained passive as theforces of counterrevolution surged ahead.Two years later, in August 1991, Yeltsin seized on an abortive coup attemptby the "gang of eight" former Gorbachevlieutenants to launch an openly counterrevolutionarycountercoup with thebacking of the Western imperialists. The"gang of eight," whose pathetic "coup"crumbled within three days, sought not toreverse the drive toward capitalist restoration but rather to more tightly control itand to maintain the USSR as a. unitarystate. But it was the ascendant Yeltsinite forces who represented the immediatedanger of imperialist-backed counterrevolution. In a statement distributed bythe tens of thousands in the Soviet Union,the International Communist League proclaimed, "Soviet Workers: Defeat YeltsinBush Counterrevolution!" (reprinted inHow the Soviet Workers State WasStrangled). With a new, capitalist stateapparatus not yet consolidated, we Trotskyists called for a proletarian politicalrevolution to sweep away the capitalistrestorationist Yeltsin regime and institutea government based on soviet democracyand Bolshevik internationalism.In contrast, the pseudo-socialists whowho had capitulated to imperialist antiSovietism throughout Cold War II inthe 1980s embraced the forces of "democratic" counterrevolution arrayed behindYeltsin. Openly proclaiming its place onthe barricades of counterrevolution, thecentrist British Workers Power (WP)declared: "No matter what the sociallycounterrevolutionary nature of Yeltsin'sprogramme, no matter how many spivsand racketeers joined the barricades todefend the Russian parliamen,t, it wouldbe revolutionary suicide to back the coupmongers and support the crushing ofdemocratic rights" (Workers Power, September 1991). Chief among the "democratic rights" WP was defending here wasthe right to capitalist exploitation!Labour-loyal to the core, at bottomWP opposed the Stalinist bureaucracyfrom the standpoint of parliamentary(i.e., bourgeois) democracy, albeit witha veneer of working-class rhetoric. Tojustify this social-democratic line, WPcharacterized the bureaucracy as seamlessly reactionary, rejecting the Trotskyistunderstanding that this was a brittle, contradictory caste resting parasitically atopthe socialized foundations of the workersstate, which it was at times compelledto defend. This C9ntradictory characterwas evident even in the last yearsof he' Brezhnev regime, with the Sovietmilitary intervention into Afghanistanagainst a CIA-backed insurgency bywoman-hating Islautic reactionaries. Itwas reflected as well over the questionof Soviet support to the 1984-85 Britishminers strike, which was backed by oldtime Stalinists like then Soviet foreignminister Andrei Gromyko and opposedby younger elements around Gorbachev,

8

Rabid Cold WarriorRonald Reagantoasted by Sovietleader MikhailGorbachev, whopursued policy ofall-round retreatbefore U.S.imperialism.

Heikes/U.S. News &World Reportthen number two in the Kremlin regime.Stalinophobes like WP invested thecall for political revolution with a meaning diametrically counterposed to therevolutionary-internationalist program ad-vanced by Trotsky for defense and exten-sion of the socialized foundations of theSoviet workers state. Polemicizing in1939 against a petty-bourgeois opposition-which had reneged on unconditionalmilitary defense of the Soviet Unionwithin the then-Trotskyist U.S. SocialistWorkers Party, Trotsky stressed:"We must not lose sight for a singlemoment of the fact that the question ofoverthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy isfor us subordinate to the question of preserving state property in the means ofproduction in the USSR; that the question of preserving state property in themeans of production in the USSR is sub-ordinate for us to the question of theworld proletarian revolution."-Leon Trotsky, In Defense ofMarxism (1973)

For WP, conversely, the preservation ofthe collectivized economy was decidedlysubordinate to the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Thus, in the name of"anti-Stalinism" WP embraced the forcesof pro-imperialist counterrevolution.The Stalinist Bureaucracy andCapitalist Restoration

The passivity of the Soviet workingclass in the face of encroaching capitalistcounterrevolution allowed the intelligentsia to occupy the center of the politicalstage. Hobsbawm, like many other Western commentators, attaches great importance to the "free market" dogmatismwhich swept up young Russian intellectuals in the last Gorbachev years: "Theappeal of the ultra-radical Thatcherite orReaganite free-market ideology to theyoung intellectual reformers was that itpromised to provide a drastic but also anautomatic solution" to the prevailing economic problems. This is true only in themost superficial and academic sense.Hobsbawm appears to have forgotten thebasic Marxist precept that being deter-mines consciousness, including the falseconsciousness which serves as an ideological mask and self-justification forclass exploitation and oppression.A classic example of false consciousness was the role of Calvinist Protestantism irr the early development of capitalism in West Europe. Calvinist doctrinemaintained that some men are predestined from birth to be saved, others tobe damned. But how could one identifygod's chosen.few-the elect-this side ofthe grave? Calvinist doctrine answered:by their worldly success. Rich English,

Scottish and Dutch merchants did not seethemselves motivated by greed and adesire for a luxurious life. In amassingwealth, they believed they were doinggod's work and demonstrating they weremembers of the elect.Young intellectuals and apparatchiks inGorbachev's Russia wanted to lead thegood life like their Western social counterparts who drove BMWs, wore Armanisuits and took winter vacations in the Caribbean. These appetites generated a corresponding false consciousness, in thiscase the idealization of a capitalist marketeconomy as one maximizing efficiencyand productivity.The "fr ee market" intellectuals served

as the ideological shock troops of thecounterrevolution. The commanding offi-

Massive 1989Soviet miners strikeagainst effectsof Gorbachev'smarket-oriented"reforms" demonstratedpotential for proletarianresistance toencroaching capitalistcounterrevolution.

cers came from a different but relatedin many cases biologically-social stratum. Looking back at the Gorbachevperiod from the vantage point of Yeltsin's Russia, the British journalist BruceClark points out that the "democratic"opposition w a ~ more complex and selfinterested than was depicted by the Western media at the time:

"Right from the start, the devotees of liberal democracy were only one part of the

Yeltsin'scounterreVOlutionarybarricades inMoscow, August1991 included racistswine carryingConfederate flag.Russian-languageICL statementafter Yeltsin's coupproclaimed,"Soviet Workers:Defeat Yeltsin-BushCounterrevolution!"

anti-communist movement. There werefactory bosses who had grown tiredof taking daily instructions from Partyapparatchiks, and sensed they couldretain and even improve their own statusunder another system."-A n Empire's New Clothes

Long before, in his 1936 book The Revo-lution Betrayed, Trotsky had noted theappetites of Stalinist industrial managersto become capitalist proprietors: "It is not/ enough to be the director of a trust; it isnecessary to be a stockholder."In the final Gorbachev period, theWestern bourgeois media depicted politics in Russia as a deepening conflictbetween "radical reformers" and old-lineStalinis ts who now call ed t hemsel ves"patriots." In reality, the decisive political actors came from the large and wellentrenched body of bureaucrats whooccupied a middle ground between the"democrats" and the "patriots," but whoin the end supported the Western-backedcounterrevolutionaries led by Yeltsin.This development can be seen clearly in the 1990 election for chairman ofthe Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) citycouncil, which pitted leading "democrat"Anatoly Sobchak, a former professor oflaw and key Yeltsin ally, against Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, a retired Soviet admiral and former submarine commander. Atfirst, the election appeared to be a c1earcut contest between "radical reformers"and defenders of the old Sovie t order. Butin the middle of the campaign Shcherba-

kov dropped out and cut a deal with Sobchak,to become his deputy!Commenting in retrospect on this incident, Bruce Clark writes that "Shcherbakov represented a part of the Soviet elitewhich was badly disillusioned with bothdoctrinaire Marxism and the self-servingParty machine; he spoke for the hightechnology sector of the defense i n d u s ~ try." But why would top administratorsin the Soviet military-industrial complexmake common cause with pro-Westernelements like Sobchak and Yeltsin?There's a cynical American saying: " Ifyou can't beat 'em, join 'em. " In a sense,the restoration of capitalism in Russiawas a logical outcome of the Stalinistdoctrine and policy of "peaceful coexistence" with capitalist imperialism. By thelate -1980s, substantial and influential elements of the bureaucracy had come to theconclusion that the planned economy-asmismanaged by them-was inherentlyinferior to capitalism. These bureaucratsdecided that their best interests lay inbecoming partners with Western, centrally American, imperialism. Thus it wasthat veteran Soviet military men supported or at least accepted not only thedismantling of the collectivized economybut also the breakup of the USSR.

[TO BE CONTINUED]WORKERS VANGUARD


9/16

Union T o ~ s Agree to Give Away' the Store for Willie BrownSmash Racist, Union-BustingAttacks on S.F. Transit Workers!SAN FRANCISCO-Muni cipal Railway(MUNI) transit workers are the targets ofa vicious racist, union-busting mobilization orchestrated by the Bay Area rulers.The decades-long campaign against themajority-black MUNI drivers has beenheated white-hot as the capitalists havemade it a central issue in the upcomingmayoral elections. Eager to enhance there-election prospects of black Democratic mayor Willie Brown, the officialsat the head of the drivers' TransportWorkers Union (TWU) Local 250A havenow "reopened" the union's contract ayear early and agreed to hand the bosseson a platter many of their key unionbusting demands.The capitalist media has been whipping up a lynch-mob atmosphere aimedat isolating and' demoralizing the union,with such screaming headlines as "Muni's236 Crash-Prone Drivers" (San FranciscoChronicle, 16 June) and "SF WorkersRake in Fat-Cat Wages" (Chronicle, 29May). Drivers who are subjected to highrates of on-the-job injuries from thedecayed equipment are scapegoated forthe shoddy state of a transit systemstarved by the capitalists of funding,maintenance, equipment, personnel andtraining for over 20 years.

Break With the Democrats!Forge a Class-Struggle Workers Party!tract, it turns out that TWU officials hadagreed to introduce some of RescueMuni's worst demands in the union contract themselves.According to the Chronicle (27 July),this includes heightened discipline for socalled "missouts," which the bourgeoisiein its anti-union propaganda has lyinglyportrayed as a cushy union "perk." Missouts typically occur when drivers can'tmake it in time to the minute to pick uptheir "outfit"-route, transfers, etc. Theseunpaid absences are subject under thecurrent contract to progressive discipline,from a warning the first time in an eightmonth period to a five-day suspension thethird time and so on. Now the union topshave agreed to a two-day suspension the

become a target of the capitalists nationwide. Last year, Philadelphia transit workers struck against a full-scale unionbusting offensive by the SEPTA bosses,holding solid for 40 days before thestrike was scuttled by the TWU Local234 leadership (see "Philly TWU TopsScuttle SEPTA Strike," WV No. 694, 31July 1998). The new head of San Francisco MUNI, Michael Burns, was imported by Brown fresh from strikebreaking duty as a'leading boss at SEPTA.Capitalist Vendetta Agains tMUNI Drivers

The 1934 San Francisco General Strikethat resulted in the unionization of longshoremen on the West Coast also estab-

MuniReformersBlastUnionsPetition 0allege intuiiidatiol,,--_., ..._ ......

or 9 percent. This is broadly the background of the intense hostility directed atthe integrated, unionized MUNI transitworkforce.In going after the transit workers, thebourgeoisie is taking aim at all unionizedmunicipal employees. The transit unionis a particular target of the SF rulers forits history of militancy during a wave ofcity workers strikes in 1974-76. In 1974,a near-general strike of city workersbegan with the SEIU service employees,then spread to the hospitals and closedthe sewage treatment plant. At the heightof the strike, MUNI, BART and ACTransit workers shut down all publictransit in and to the city. The capitalists'response was Prop. L, which attemptedto ban strikes by city workers, known asthe "Feinstein amendment" after DianneFeinstein, then president of the Board ofSupervisors who went on to becomemayor and is now a U.S. Senator. At thattime, the Spartacist League initiated a

Racist abuse from hostile petty-bourgeois passengers is pervasive. It is common for black women drivers to haveepithets like "black b----" hurled at them.'Drivers face assaults not only fromlumpen elements but from the cops: weremember how black MUNI driver GregWiggins was crippled by a beating fromthe SF cops in 1988 while driving hisbus.

Supervisors Call forInspection of Muni DriversI

In this inflamed atmosphere, MayorBrown, the financial district capitalistsand a mob of enraged yuppies called"Rescue Muni" joined together in June toput a union-busting amendment to thecity charter on the November ballot. I fpassed, it would create a new TransitAuthority to clear the road for a crackdown on the union and to increasemanagement's power to discipline workers. Goals for "on-time performance" and"service delivery," along with incentivebonuses and merit pay, would undermineseniority and open the door to furtherspeedup, harassment and favoritism targeting militants, minorities and womenfor discrimination.

$4 millionsettlementupsets bo Muni's 236 Crash-Prone DriversHafalia/S.F. ChronicleDemocratic Party mayor Willie Brown with newlyappointed MUNI chief Michael Burns (right) in March.Anti-union media blitz fuels crackdown on transit workers.Despite being at fault in multiple crashes. ahnost allstill driving F__

"_-:I __ i

The bureaucrats at the head of theTWU, far from seeking to mobilize theworkers to fight this assault, initiallyembraced the union-busting initiative onthe grounds that it was not as bad as Rescue Muni's original draconian proposal.Now, with the "reopening" of the con-

tirst time, ten days the second and tiringthe third.Additional provisions will reportedlyforce drivers to accept route changes during their shift and institutionalize asystem called "proof of payment" (POP),which eliminates the second driver (whocollects fares) from MUNI light railtrains. A 250-strong enforcement agencyis being set up to roam the trains issuing$76 tickets and harassing black andimmigrant youth. Drivers are supposed toswallow this major weakening of theunion in exchange for a small wageincrease which would bring the annualraise in the four-year contract up to amodest 3.4 percent.Transit unions in urban centers have

SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORYNational Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 (212) 732-7860

BostonBox 390840, Central Sta.Cambridge, MA 02139(617) 666-9453ChicagoBox 6441, Main POChicago, IL 60680(312) 454-4930

Los AngelesBox 29574, Los Feliz Sta.Los Angeles, CA 90029(213) 380-8239New YorkBox 3381, Church St. Sta.New York, NY 10008(212) 267-1025

OaklandBox 29497Oakland, CA 94604(510) 839-0851San FranciscoBox 77494San Francisco, CA 94107(415) 395-9520

TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA/LiGUE TROTSKYSTE DU CANADATorontoBox 7198, Station AToronto, ON M5W 1X8(416) 593-4138

6 AUGUST 1999

VancouverBox 2717, Main P.O.Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2(604) 687-0353

.. -.. . ,.,....~ -lished San Francisco as a "labor town"and the Bay Area as the pro-union centerof political culture in California; "BloodyThursday," commemorating the strikerswho were shot to death by strikebreakingcops in that struggle, is still observedannually by the International Longshoreand Warehouse Union (ILWU). But following the capitulation by longtimeILWU head Harry Bridges to the introduction of containerized shipping andhandling in 1961, San Francisco ceasedto be a historic port city with its unionized working-class character. All thelongshore work now takes place acrossSan Francisco Bay in the Port of Oakland,which has the storage space and railroadconnections for speedy transshipment.San Francisco has become little morethan a commercial, financial, and hightech/communications mecca crawlingwith money-grubbing stock-market speculating yuppies who view Bill Gates asrole model and demigod. With their arrogant petty-bourgeois outlook, they resentand despise the unionized municipalworkers, whose wages remain relativelyhigher than for workers in the private sector, where unions have been decimatedand low wages and high productivity helpfuel the economy and the yuppies' jobs.As their disposable income drives upthe price of housing beyond the reach ofworking people who are being forcedout, these anti-working-class yuppies andtheir employers have come to view SanFrancisco as their city, and city workersas overpaid menials. It is also a citywhere historic hostility to black peoplehas kept the black population down to 8

Labor Action Committee calling formass labor action to stop Prop. L.MUNI workers were also central inthe subsequent 1976 city craft workersstrike, when the drivers went out in solidarity. After the craft workers weredefeated with the connivance of the Central Labor Council-which had endorsedDemocratic mayor George MosconeCity Hall moved on the transit workers.The president of Local 250A at the time,Larry Martin, acquiesced to a packagewith a small wage increase but big cutsin benefits, while a massive array of antiunion propositions were passed. The citywas unable to crush the union. But in thewake of those powerful strikes, the unionleadership was broken and tamed by theblowback from succeeding DemocraticParty administrations.It was largely to bring down the publicemployee unions that the city's businessand financial establishment backedBrown as mayor in 1995, after term limits forced him to leave his former job asspeaker of the state assembly. The capitalist clout behind Rescue Muni is the Committee on Jobs (COJ), which donatednearly $30,000 to get their amendment onthe ballot, and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association(SPUR). Both COJ and SPUR were majormovers in the anti-union charter amendments. of 1976, and SPUR boasts thatthere has been only one city workersstrike since. COJ is the political armof capitalist San Francisco, representingthe city's 30 biggest corporations, likethe Bank of America, Pacific- Gas and



10/16

To Mobilize the Power of the Working Class:Break with Bourgeois Nationalism!For Joint Strike Action byWorkers and Students!

We translate below the concludingsection of a GEM/JE leaflet issued onJuly 26.its struggles is counterposed to the poison pushed by the union bureaucracy,which sells the false ideology of unity ofthe workers and the bosses. The waythat nationalism ties workers and theoppressed to their exploiters becomesvery clear when one glances at the SMEofficial journal Lux; we find call after callto fight for the "fatherland" alongside thecapitalist masters. In issue 481-482, wefind an article, "Massive 'No!' to the Privatization of Electricity," which says:"Overflowing the Z6calo, United AgainstTuitions at UNAM. They Shouted Until

ing it under tight control, a control that isnow beginning to break.The entire campaign of the SMEagainst privatization has been based onbourgeois nationalism and has been consciously planned by the union's leadership to avoid a class-struggle mobilization. Thus, the SME called a strikeseveral months ago demanding a salaryincrease. But the bureaucracy acceptedthe crumbs offered by the company andwithdrew the call for a strike, accordingto Lux, so as. "not to mix this conflictwith the actions undertaken by the union

The main obstacle to the fight forsocialism in Mexico today is bourgeoisnationalist ideology and illusions in itsmain representative: the bourgeois PRDof Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. This ideologypretends to disappear all class lines andpaint everyone simply as "Mexicans"through pseudo-populist rhetoric aboutthe "people," "civil society," etc. We frequently encounter the belief that there isno class struggle north of the Rio Bravo.This type of lie is pushed by the bourgeoisie and its lieutenants in the workers movement to maintain the divisionswithin the world proletariat. In fact, theMexican proletariat has a most powerfulally in the North American workingclass, and the destiny of this country isindissolubly linked to that of the U.S. Infact, the U.S. working class' has recentlywaged key struggles, like the UPS strikealmost two years ago and at GeneralMotors last year. These strikes marked abreak in the series of defeats the American workers had suffered since the Reagan years, a change to a favorable moodin the proletariat. Now there is a veryimportant strike in the Virginia shipyardwhere submarines and aircraft carriers ofthe U.S. imperialist navy are built andrepaired. This strike exploded in themidst of the imperialist massacre againstSerbia and in the center of the racist"open shop" American South.Most countries of South America havebeen shaken by convulsive struggles ofthe working class. Bolivian workers arestruggling against IMF-imposed austerityand face brutal repression by the police.Ecuador was recently paralyzed for 12days by a strike by transport workers andother sectors which succeeded in turningback a gas price increase. On July 14,thousands demonstrated in Chile againstprivatization of the docks in the portof Valparaiso. Workers in Mexico andinternationally will remain shackled totheir "own" bourgeoisies until they breakfrom nationalist ideology and see clearlythe division of society into antagonisticclasses and who their real allies are.

APWorkers protest anti-union privatization of electricity companies. Procapitalist union leaders derail class struggle through nationalist politics tyingworkers to Mexican bourgeoisie.

We oppose the imperialist plunder ofNAFfA and privatization plans which arean attempt to increase the rate of exploitation of the workers and the profits of thecapitalists. Our revolutionary and internationalist defense of the working class and

Their Voices Became Raucous: 'TheFatherland Cannot Be Sold!'" We communists declare: proletarians have nofatherland! Proletarians of all countries,unite!Among those who "overflowed" theZ6calo, Lux mentions some top SME,STUNAM and CNTE union leaders,together with the cream of the crop of thePRD, like Munoz Ledo and Felix Salgado, who "join their voices in the warcry: 'They shall not pass .. !'" The Luxarticle ends by saying that this massivedemonstration recalled the years 1938and 1960. That's the dream of the unionbureaucracy: return to the golden years ofthe state populism of the PRMlPRI underLazaro Cardenas, who succeeded in coopting the workers movement and keep-

Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Sp

workers vanguard no 717 - 06 august 1999

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