workers vanguard no 745 - 03 november 2000

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 745 - 03 November 2000

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No. 745 .... 23 3 November 2000

Down WithZionist TerrorMachine!

AFPIsraeli troops fire on Palestinian youth in Gaza Strip. Amid mass slaughter of Palestinians, Zionist regime moves topermanently seal off and strangle Arab areas in Occupied Territories.

OCTOBER 30-0nly days after the U.S.. secured promises to "end the violence"from Israeli prime minister Ehud Barakand Palestinian Authority president YasirArafat, Zionist troops slaughtered ten Palestinians in one day. With the death tolltopping 140, more Palestinians have beenkilled in four weeks of the "AI Aksa Inti-fada" than in the first four months of theoriginal Intifada in 1988. That uprisingled to the 199'3 U.S.-sponsored "peace"accord between Israel and Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization ,(PLO)creating a sham Palestinian "autonomy."Today, Israel's rulers are dispensing even.with the rhetoric of "peace" and "autonomy" as they unleash U.S.-supplied helicopter gunships and tanks against Palestinians and order troops to shoot at theheads of children.As pogromist rampages by fascistic"settlers" target Palestinian farmers toprevent the reaping of crops and drivethem off the land, Israeli governmentspokesmen are mooting a plan for"unilateral separation." Israel would formally anne;, a huge part of the West Bank

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and Gaza Strip where the settlers are concentrated, while permanently sealing offthe Palestinian ghettos, even cutting offwater and electricity. Arab day laborerswhose wages account for one-fifth of allincome in the Occupied Territories wouldbe denied access to their jobs i n' Israel.This is a plan for strangulation and star-vation of the Palestinian population inthe Occupied Territories.While the Israeli bourgeoisie is rivenover how much access to its reservoir ofcheap labor in the Occupied Territories toretain, some such plan was Israel's aimin the "peace process" from the outset.Immediately following the seizure of.the territories in 1967, the (thoroughlybourgeois) "Labor" party, which preceded Barak's One Israel, proposed asimilar scheme called the "Allon plan."The Zionist rulers began "creating factson the ground," encouraging the. creationof militarized "settlements" by ultrachauvinist religious fanatics in strategicparts of the West Bank. Following the1993 accord, Labor prime ministerYitzhak Rabin escalated the development 'of the sett1ements and sped up the construction of "strategic" highways carvingup Palestinian areas. Gaza was sur--rounded by an electrified fence reminiscent of the walls built around the Jewishghettos in Nazi-occupied East Europe.The Israeli capitalists began importing

tens of thousands of "illegal" immigrantsfrom Southeast Asia and East Europe todo the low-paid, backbreaking jobs previously reserved for Arab laborers.It is urgently necessary for workingpeople and the oppressed around theworld to rally to the defense of the Palestinians. This is a particular responsibilityfor workers, black people and otherminorities in the U.S., the Zionist state'schief imperialist sponsor and the mostdeadly enemy of the world's peoples.U.S. imperialism continues to bomb andstarve the Iraqi people while plotting a

further terror strike against some Islamiccountry as "retaliation" for the attack onthe USS Cole in Yemen earlier thismonth. Down with the bombing and star-vation blockade of Iraq! U.S. out of theNear East! Al l Israeli troops, settlers outof all the Occupied Territories! Defendthe Palestinian people!Zionist Israel Founded ThroughAnti-Palestinian Terror

The potentially genocidal "final solution" Israel's capitalist rulers have incontinued on page 8


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Victory to the Summit Teamsters Strike!OAKLAND-Some 1,600 members ofTeamsters Local 439 walked out of thegiant Safeway distribution center run bySummit Logistics in Tracy on October 19in a critical fight against" vicious speedupand union-busting. In the strike's first twodays, hundreds of unionists clashed withscabs who were protected by the California Highway Patrol and local police.Nevertheless, the strikers successfully,stopped some scab trucks. Scab vehicles.gunned for the picketers, hitting one inthe knee. This is class war. Safeway hasschemed for years to weaken and destroythe unions in order to gouge increasedprofits out of the workers. But the Teamsters union, backed up by the strength ofCalifornia's multiracial working class,

has the power to crush this attack. Victoryto the Summit strike!The u n i o n s ~ power lies in their abilityto stop the flow, of profits by shuttingdown Safeway, beginning with the Tracyplant. But Teamsters officials capitulatedto the capitalist media's violence-baitingof the strikers by publicly echoing itthemselves and diverting the plant-gatepickets into leafletting Safeway storesto urge a consumer boycott. Teamstersspokesman Danny Beagle declared, "Thisstrike will be won or lost at the stores, notat the warehouse" (San Francisco Examiner, 19 October). Such "corpprate campaigns" are counterposed to the strategyneeded to win this strike. The Teamsters,the United Food and Commercial Work-

Communism.andPublic Education7 November 1917 marked the seizure ofpower by the working class of Russia underthe leadership of V. 1. Lenin and LeonTrotsky'S Bolsheviks. Even under the enormous poverty faced by the young workersstate, the 1919 program of he Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) mandated free public education for all. Despite subsequentTROTSKY Stalinist- betrayal, the tremendous achieve- LENINments in literacy and education in the SovietUnion before its counterrevolutionary destruction show that revolutionary transformation of society is the prerequisite to achieving education for the masses. For Marxists,knowledge is an essential weapon in the fight for social equality and for a classless,communist society in which the distinction between mental and manual labor will nolonger exist.

In the period of dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., in the period of preparation ofconditions suitable for the realization of communism, the school must be not only thebearer of communist principles in general but it must also become the bearer of theintellectual, organizational, and educational influences of the proletariat on the semiproletariat and the non-proletarian sections of the toiling masses, in order to educate ageneration definitely capable of establishing communism. The immediate task in thisdirection is at the present time the further development of the following principles ofschool and educational work, already established by the Soviet government:1) The introduction of free and compulsory general and poly echnical education(instruction in' the theory and practice of the principle branches of production) for allchildren of both sexes up to the age of 17.2) The establishment of a system of pre-school institutions: nurseries, kindergartens, homes, etc., to improve the social development of women and assist in theiremancipation.3) Full realization of the principle of a uniform industrial school with instruction inthe native language, with co-education for children of both sexes, uncondit!onally secular, i.e., free of any religious influence, a school where instruction is closely connected with socially useful labour and which turns out all-round mature members of thecommunist society.4) To provide all pupils with food, clothes, boots, and school supplies at the cost ofthe state ....9) Making all i n s t ~ t u t i o n s of higher learning accessible to all who desire to study, inthe first place to workers; attracting all people able to lecture to become instructors inthese universities; abolishing all artificial barriers standing in the way of young scientists reaching professional chairs; material support of students in oraer to offer the proletarians and the peasants a concrete opportunity to take advantage of the institutions ofhigher learning.

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- "Programme of the RKP(b )," March 1919, printed in Resolutions andDecisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Vol. 2 (1974)

! ~ ! ! ! ! ! . f . . 4 l ! ~ ! ! . ~ I ! l ! . . EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARi"ACUS PAGES: Anna Wood manPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Mara CadizEDITORIAL BOARD: Barry James (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Ray Bishop, Jon Brule,George Foster, Liz Gordon, 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 (ISSN 02760746) 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 Spartacist Publishing Co., 299 Broadway. Suite 318. New York. NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 7327862 (Editorial). (212) 7327861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 13n. GPO. New York. NY 10116. Email address: vanguard@liac,net.Domestic subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York. NY. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Workers Vanguard. Box 13n. GPO, New York. NY 10116.Opinions expressed n Signedarticles or etters do not necessarily express the editorial Viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is Octobet31.

No. 745 3 November 2000

ers union (UFCW) which representsSafeway supermarket workers, and otherBay Area unions must be mobilized tobuild mass picket lines around the Tracyplant that no one dare cross. The UFCWshould be on strike now as an elementaryact of class solidarity.Safeway bosses lyingly claim that thestrike has nothing to do with them, evendeclaring themselves to be "pro-union."This is the company which provoked a1995 strike by 18,000 UFCW clerks,baggers and butchers in a failed attemptto slash health benefits (see "CaliforniaSupermarket Strike Beats Back Attackon Health Benefits," WV No. 621, 21April 1995). Today, Safeway is splittingthe cost of scabherding with Summit.The union-busting attack at Summitis part of a broader capitalist offensiveagainst Bay Area warehouse unions,a strategic sector of the labor movement.Safeway {milt the Tracy warehouseone of the largest in the world, servingnearly 250 stores in Northern California,Nevada, Oregon and Hawaii-with thespecific aim of busting the union. Wl\enthe complex opened in 1992, a year aftera fire destroyed Safeway's Richmondwarehouse, Safeway transferred all workfrom its previous Bay Area locations tothe complex in the Central Valley townof Tracy in an attempt to weed out unionactivists. Turning the facility over to aseparate management firm, Safeway wasable to gut the previous union contract."We lost everything," one veteran warehouse worker said.When. Safeway brought in Summit, asubsidiary of the union-busting Britishfirm Tibbett and Britten, in 1997, the newmanagers imposed ruthless "productionstandards," i.e., piecework quotas, assoon as a new union contract was ratified.The spoils for Safeway have been immensely lucrative. "When we were inRichmond," one striker said, "we did 150,200 cases an hour. Now it's 300 to 400 .cases, and the shift runs until the job isdone" (San Francisco Examiner, 20October). This means lifting up to 5,000pounds of product in 35 minutes, forshifts of up to 12 hours under mandatoryovertime. "We lost a lot of people" whowere fired for not keeplhg up with the

S.F. ChronicleSummit strike picket lines were metwith attacks by scabs, cops.rate, one striker said. Workers in themammoth freezers say that pieceworkquotas force them to work for hours without a break in the sub-zero temperatures.Another Summit worker told the pressthat Latinos who got jobs there after doingstoop labor in Central Valley agriculturalfields say that "this work is for donkeys."Strikers are demanding lower quotasand longer breaks, as well as reducing thefive years it takes to reach top pay undera two-tier wage system. Truck drivers aredemanding to be paid by the hour insteadof by the load, the same elementary uniondemand which over-the-road Teamsterstruckers fought for in the 1930s. Driversfor Summit often have to work 13- to 15-hour days to make ends meet.

In contrast to the strikers' determination, the Teamsters bureaucracy tried toobstruct the strike from the start, desperately seeking not to imperil the electoral fortunes of the capitalist Democratic Party, and in particular those ofTeamster-endorsed Al Gore in the pivotalstate of California. Summit began hiringmore than 1,600 scabs nationally a fullsix weeks before the union contractexpired, paying their meals and hotelbills and training them alongside unionmembers. Yet Local 439 and Teamsterscontinued on page 11

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"Market.Socialism" and the I.egacy of Maoit er ina?Defend China Against Imperialism, Counterrevolution!

Engels had become champions of colonial independence and recognized thatthe modernization of Asia, Africa andLatin America could take place onlywithin the context of a world socialistorder. Engels wrote to Karl Kautskyin 1882:For Workers Political Revolution!

We conclude below an article begun inWV No. 743 (6 October).In analyzing the transition from capitalism to socialism, Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Program and Leninin The State and Revolution assumed aninternational context in which prole ariim revolution had triumphed in all majorcapitalist countries. However, Soviet Russia and People's China from their inception had to engage in a life-and-deathstruggle against more powerful capitalist

imperialist states. The pressures of worldc a p i t a l i s m ~ c o n o m i c , military and political-have had a profound impact onevery aspect of post -1949 China (as they

PART TWO OF TWOdid on the former Soviet Union), fromthe top echelons of the officialdom to themost remote rural villages. It is impossible to understand the history of Chinaover the past half-century independentlyof the Cold War waged against it by theU.S. and its imperialist allies.Yet the Maoist Maurice Meisner writesabout China as if it were located on somedistant planet light years from the American imperialist state. During the KoreanWar of the early 1950s and again duringthe Taiwan Strait (Quemoy and Matsu)crisis in 1958, the U.S. threatened to useits nuclear weapons against China. Thethreat by the militarily most powerfulstate in the world to turn China into i r r a ~ diated rubble is for Meisner so trivial,so u n i m p o r t a ~ t that it is not even mentioned in his The Deng Xiaoping Era:An Inquiry into the Fate of ChineseSocialism, 1978-1994, a book of over500 pages. By contrast, page after pageis devoted to scrutinizing Mao's andDeng's ever-shifting economic policiesand "socialist" theorizing. For Meisner,the history of the People's Republic ofChina has been primarily determined bythe ideological concepts, attitudes andprejudices of Mao Zedong and DengXiaoping!The pressures of world capitalism onpost-1949 China have been compoundedby the country's economic backwardnessand the misrule of the Stalinist-Maoistbureaucracy with its anti-revolutionarydogma of "socialism in one country." Aproletarian political revolution oustingthe Beijing bureaucracy would install aregime committed to the goal of worldrevolution, providing a powerful impetusfor socialist revolution from Indonesia toJapan and the U.S.For the sake of theoretical clarity andgenerality, let us project the followinghistorical situation A workers revolutiontakes place in Japan. A planned, socialized economy is thus established in thismajor advanced industrial country undera government based on democraticallyelected workers councils and led by aLeninist-Trotskyist party. Furthermore,the Japanese revolution precipitates aproletarian political revolution in China,the revolutionary reunification of theKorean peninsula and also a proletarian. political revolution in Vietnam.' Therethus comes into existence a bloc of EastAsian workers states centered on anadvanced industrial country (Japan) and _governed by revolutionary Marxist (notStalinist) parties.Let us further assume that a proletar-3 NOVEMBER 2000

ian revolution does not occur at this timein the United States, which remains themilitary stronghold and dominant political power of world capitalism. Therewould thus be a new Cold War betweenan East Asian Communist bloc and anAmerican-led imperialist alliance. TheEast Asian workers states-their populations and economic resources-wouldhave to be fully mobilized to prevail in

tended more or less uniformly on aworldwide basis, but they later abandoned that view in light of subsequenthistorical experience. The founders ofscientific socialism were by no meansblind or indifferent to the monumentalcrimes committed by the Western colonial powers against the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas.But they initially considered such crimes

"India will perhaps, indeed very probably, make a revolution and as a proletariat in process of self-emancipationcannot conduct any colonial wars, itwould have to be allowed to run itscourse .... The same might also take placeelsewhere, e.g., in Algeria and Egypt,and would certainly be the best thing forus.... Once Europe is reorganized, andNorth America, that will furnish suchcolossal power and such an example thatthe semi-civilized countries will ofthem-

Storia lIIustrata Far Eastern Economic ReviewPeople's Liberation Army enters Beijing, 1949, heralding overthrow of capitalist class rule. Unemployed workers inGuangzhou today. "Market reforms" undermine gains of 1949 RevoJution, embolden counterrevolutionary forces.this global conflict. A large part of theeconomic surplus produced in Japanwould be expended on increasing andupgrading its military-industrial capacity.Another large part would be used foreconomic and military aid to China,Korea and Vietnam. Improving livingstandards and reducing the workweek inthe countries of the East Asian Communist bloc would be limited by the enormous expenditure of resources necessitated by the global Cold War. Obviously,there would be no possibility of the statewithering away in China or Japan in thisinternational context.In short, there can be no transition tosocialism for any workers state-whethereconomically advanced or backwardunless based on proletarian revolution inall major capitalist countries, centrallyand ultimately the U.S. As long as the"world's only superpower" is ruled by theWall Street banks and Fortune 500 corporations, humanity will be ever threatenedby nuclear holocaust.The Socialist Transformationof Backward Countries: 'From Marx to Trotsky

Just as Meisner falsifies through omission and selective quotations Marx'sviews on the relationship between capitalism and socialism in general, he likewise falsifies Marx's views on the socialist transformation of backward countries.He begins his book by insisting thatMarx held that socialism can be builtonly in an 'advanced industr ial societypreviously developed under capitalism.Marx and Engels initially did believethat industrial capitalism would be ex-

as a historical overhead cost for the modernization of these backward regions. Inan 1853 article, "The Future Results ofBritish Rule in India," Marx 'wrote:"England had to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the otherregenerating-the annihilation o( the oldAsiatic society, and the laying of thematerial foundations of Western societyin Asia ...."Modern industry, resulting from therailway system, will dissolve the hereditary division of labour, upon which restthe Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indianpower."This projection was not borne out bythe actual course of development. Whilethe Western bourgeoisies introduced certain elements of modern industrial technology (e.g., railroads) into their colonies and semicolonies, the overall effect

of capitalist imperialism was to arrestthe social and economic development ofbackward countries. Thus, British colonial rule deliberately perpetuated and utilized traditional reactionary institutionssuch as the caste system in India and tribalism in sub-Saharan Africa.Moreover, the economic developmentwhich was introduced under Europeancolonial rule had a deformed character.Thus, the British built the railways inIndia only from the hinterland to the portto facilitate trade with the imperialistmetropolis. The rail lines did not connectthe different regions of the Indian subcontinent. By contrast, railway construction in the United S t a t e ~ during this sameperiod was a prime factor in the economic and social integration of theAmerican nation-state.By the late 19th century, Marx and

selves follow in their wake: economicneeds, if anything, will see. to that. Butas to what social and political phasesthese countries will then have to passthrough before they likewise arrive atsocialist organization, I think we todaycan advance only rather idle hypotheses."Marx was still alive at this time andwas collaborating closely with Engels.So this represents their final, maturejudgment on the socialist transformation

of backward countries. Contrary to Meisner, Marx did not maintain that the backward countries had to go through a prolonged period of capitalist developmentemulating the experience of West Europeand North America.In the 1880s, at the beginning of theera of modern capitalist imperialism,it was understandable that Marx andEngels assumed that proletarian revolution would first take place in theadvanced capitalist countries and thatthe socialist transformation of the morebackward regions of the world wouldgradually follow in consequence. However, imperialist domination and exploitation strengthened the bourgeois orderin West Europe and North America,not least by i n f e c t i n ~ t h e working classof these countries with the ideology ofnational chauvinism and racism. AsLenin pointed out in his 1916 pamphlet,Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, superprofits derived from thecolonial and semicolonial countries madeit "economically possible to bribe theupper strata of the proletariat" in theimperialist countries.At the same time, imperialism tendedto destabilize the traditional social ordercontinued on page 4

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China...(continued from page 3)in backward countries, generating contradictions which Leon Trotsky termed"combined and uneven development." Asizable industrial proletariat, workingwith modern technology, emerged alongside the mass of impoverished peasantsstill subject to feudal-derived and otherpre-capitalist forms of exploitation. Theday-to-day struggle against capitalist andprecapitalist forms of exploitation wasorganically intertwined with, and reinforced by, the struggle for nationalindependence.Rec.ognizing the international contradietions in the era of modern imperialism,Trotsky in his theory of permanent revolution challenged the hitherto acceptedsequencing of the world socialist revolution from the advanced to backwardcountries. It was now possible that theproletariat of a backward country, leadingthe peasant masses in the struggle againstfeudal-derived exploitation and foreignimperialist domination, could come topower in advance of the workers of WestEurope and North America. Such revolutions would severely weaken the bourgeois order in the imperialist centerswhile giving a powerful impetus to therevolutionary consciousness of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries.Drawing on the understanding first laidout by Marx and Engels in their 1850"Address of the Central Committee to theCommunist League," Trotsky developedthis concept of permanent revolutionat the beginning of the 20th century specifically with regard to t s a r i s ~ Russia,and it was validated by life itself inthe Bolshevik-led October Revolution of1917. In the late 1920s, in light of theexperience of the defeated Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, Trotsky generalizedthe theory and program of permanent revolution to what is now called the "ThirdWorld." Trotsky recognized that while thesocialist revolution could well begin in abackward country oppressed by imperialism, it could be completed only by proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries:"The socialist revolution begins on thenational arena, it unfolds on the international arena, .and is completed on theworld arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in anewer and broader sense of the word; it-attains completion only in the final vic-tory of the new society on our entireplanet...."In a country where the proletariat haspower in its hands as the result of thedemocratic revolution, the subsequentfate of the dictatorship and socialismdepends in the last analysis not only andnot so much upon the national productive forces as upon the development of

the international socialist revolution."-The Permanent Revolution(1929); reprinted in ThePermanent Revolution andResults and Prospects (1969)China and thePermanent Revolution

The Bolshevik Revolution issued outof World War I, which also transformedChina into a classic case of combined anduneven development. The war choked offthe supply of consumer goods and capitalto China from the West European powers,giving a powerful impetus to local capitalist industry. Both Chinese- and Japaneseowned enterprises burgeoned during thewar, supplying the huge domestic market.By 1919 there were some 1.5 millionindustrial workers in China, most of themnewly urbanized and retaining stronglinks with the countryside.At the same t i l I l ~ the Bolshevik Revolution profoundly affected this new proletariat and the left wing of the Chineseintelligentsia, exemplified by Chen Duxiuand Li Dazhao, who now saw in communism the road forward to the national liberation and social and economic modernization of China. Within five years of itsformation in 1920, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had grown from a smallcircle of left-wing intellectuals into amass workers party.But by then the Soviet Union and the4

Labor Defender RTsKhIDNI1922 Hong Kong seamen's strike against British colonialists. Inspired by 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, early CCP led byChen Duxiu quickly developed into mass party of Chinese proletariat.Communist International (CI) had comeunder the control of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Reviving the Menshevik notion of"two-stage revolution" and thus insisting that the coming revolution in semicolonial China would be limited to a"national-democratic revolution" placingthe national bourgeoisie in power, the CIunder Stalin and Bukharin instructed theChinese Communists, despite repeatedobjections from CCP leaders, to liquidate into Chiang Kai-shek's bourgeoisnationalist Guomindang (KMT). Thisclass-collaborationist strategy led to thebloody defeat of the Chinese Revolutionof 1925-27.As Chiang's army approached Shanghai in early 1927, over 500,000 workersstaged a general strike which turned intoan insurrection. But the Shanghai proletariat had been disarmed both politicallyand militarily as a result of Stalin'streacherous policy. Shortly after enteringthe city, Chiang staged a bloody coupthat beheaded the Chinese proletariat, astens of thousands of Communists andtrade unionists were slaughtered.Trotsky had fought against Stalin andBukharin's disastrous policies. A significant section Qf the CCP cadre, includingChen Duxiu as well as younger partyleaders like Peng Shuzhi (Peng Shu-tse),now adhered to the Trotskyist Lef t Opposition. But after the proletariat wassmashed, the CCP leadership, soon takenover by Mao, abandoned the cities altogether in favor of peasant-based ruralguerrilla warfare. The CCP was thustransformed from a proletarian into apetty-bourgeois nationalist party. Commenting on this in his 1932 document"Peasant War in China and the Proletariat," Trotsky w(ote:"Had the Chinese Communist Party con

centrated its efforts for the last few yearsin the cities, in industry, on the railroads;had it sustained the trade unions, theeducational clubs and circles; had it,without breaking off from the workers,taught them to understand what wasoccurring in the villages-the share ofthe proletariat in the general correlationof forces would have been incomparablymore favorable today."The party actually tore itself away fromits class. Thereby in the last analysis it

Trotsky in prison after 1905 RussianRevolution. In his 1906 Resultsand Prospects (1921 Cominternedition above) laying out theoryof permanent revolution, Trotskyexplained that resolving democratictasks in backward Russia requiredproletarian revolution.

csClc

can cause injury to the peasantry as well.For should the proletariat continue toremain on the sidelines, without organization, without leadership, then the peasant war even if fully victorious will inevitably arrive in a blind alley."It was left to the Chinese Trotskyists torebuild a proletarian revolutionary party.But they were not able to do so given the

effectiveness and intensity of state repression directed against them under theKMT white terror and Japanese occupation. Even basic trade-union struggleswere suppressed. Furthermore, the international depression of the 1930s sharplyreduced China's export markets, leadingto a contraction of the industrial laborforce. The Japanese invasion and occupation further devastated Chinese industry.At bottom, the problem faced by the Chin ~ s e Trotskyists in this period, aboveand beyond fierce repression, was thatthere was very little in the way of a proletariat to organize for socialist revolution; the Chinese working class was not,as it had been in the 1920s, a contender for political power (see "TheOrigins of Chinese Trotskyism," Sparta-cist [English-language edition} No. 53,Summer 1997).The disintegration of Chiang's KMTregime in the aftermath of World War IIopened the way for the victory of Mao'speasant-guerrilla army. While Mao hadcalled for a coalition with Chiang under the formula of "New Democracy,"the 1949 Revolution was itself a refutation of the "two-stage revolution" sinceit resulted not in a bourgeois "newdemocracy" but in a bureaucraticallydeformed workers state. M ~ i s n e r simultaneously falsely ascribes Stalin's positions to Lenin while painting as Mao'sinnovations the politics which Maoinherited from Stalin. "New Democracy"was simply another term for the classcollaborationist Stalinist program whichled to the liquidation of the CCP and thedefeat of the Second Chinese Revolution.Wei, Soviet Stalinismand Maoism

Trotsky'S concept of permanent revolution directly addresses one of the central

themes of Meisner's book: social revolution in backward countries and theirsocialist transformation. Yet there isno mention of Trotsky at all in thislengthy work. As a veteran Americanacademic of leftist sympathies, Meisneris certainly aware of Trotsky'S views.Indeed,1n his earlier book Mao's China:A History of the People's Republic(1977), Meisner not only correctly outlines Trotsky's theory but takes pains todescribe the entirely different mean-ing "permanent revolution" had for Mao,who turned it into a recipe for insane economic adventurism (e.g., the "Great LeapForward") and intrabureaucratic factionalwarfare (the "Cultural Revolution"). Onerecalls that during the "ideological"conflict between the Mao regime andthe Kremlin leadership under NikitaKhrushchev in the late 1950s and early'60s, both sides denounced the other for"Trotskyite deviationism." Meisner's failure to consider Trotsky's views in themore recent book is a deliberate act ofintellectual dishonesty.

There is also no mention of Trotsky inneo-Maoist Wei Wei's lengthy article inthe Chinese journal Central Current, "Atthe Doorstep of a New Century," a polemical overview of 20th-century historymainly focusing on Soviet Russia andpost-1949 China. Wei contends thatLenin was the first Marxist to maintainthat a successful proletarian revolutionwas possible in a relatively backwardcountry. In fact, prior to 1917, the Bolshevik leader believed that a revolution in.Russia in itself would lead to a very radical form of bourgeois democracy whichhe termed "the democratic dictatorship ofthe proletariat and peasantry." Despitethis limitation, Lenin's views were diametrically opposed to those of the Mensheviks, who propounded that the coming"democratic revolution" would necessarily place power in the hands of the Russian bourgeoisie and argued that the roleof the workers party was to be a loyalopposition, not an active contender forpower.It was only with the February Revolution of 1917 that Lenin came to understand that the overthrow of the tsaristautocracy could bring the workers directly to power, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. At'thesame time, Trotsky came over to Lenin'sconception of a hardened, democraticcentralist vanguard party. On the basis ofthis convergence, in 1917 Trotsky joinedthe Bolshevik Party, thereby enabling himto playa central role alongside Lenin inleading the first and to date only successful proletarian revolution in history.

Wei's knowledge of Bolshevism, theOctober Revolution and 'Soviet Russia isclearly fragmentary as well as deeply distorted by his Stalinist-Maoist outlook.Thus he attributes the perspective of"building socialism in one country" toLenin, asserting that the Bolshevik leadermaintained that "the working class canrely on their political power, togetherwith all the laboring people, to overcomethe economic and cultural backwardnessin their own countries." In reality, Lenin,no less than Trotsky, insisted on the inter-WORKERS VANGUARD


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national character of the so.cialist revolution. Speaking a year after the Bolshevikscame to power, Lenin stated:"Comrades, from the very beginning ofthe October Revolution, foreign policy andinternational relations have been the mainquestions facing us. Not merely becausefrom now on all the states in the worldare being firmly linked by imperialisminto a single system, or rather, into onedirty, bloody mass, but because the complete victory of the socialist revolution inone country alone is inconceivable anddemands the most active co-operationof at least several advanced countries,which do not include Russia. Hence one'o(the main problems of the revolution isnow the extent to which we succeed inbroadening the revolution in other countries too."-"Speech on the InternationalSituation" (November 1918)This was the Bolshevik view until thetriumph of the political counterrevolutionin early 1924. Later that year, Stalinrevised his own earlier statement thatsocialism could be victorious only on thebasis of proletarian state power in at leasta number of the most advanced countriesand propounded the anti-Marxist dogma

of "socialism in one country," which corresponded to the narrow, nationalistperspective of the bureaucratic caste forwhich he was chief s p o k e s m ~ n . Thisnationalist outlook was also promoted bythe Stalinized CCP under Mao.Interestingly, Wei's ideological outlook is much closer to Soviet Stalinismthan to Maoism, despite his exaltation ofthe latter. This is most evident in his attitude toward the former Soviet Union,which he describes as a "communist fortress" right up to the moment it wasdestroyed by capitalist counterrevolutionin 1991-92. That's a far cry from orthodox Maoism.Mao contended that capitalism hadbeen r-estored in the Soviet Union becauseof the "revisionism" of the Kremlin leadership under Nikita Khrushchev. By thishe meant in particular Khrushchev's 1956denunciation of Stalin's crimes and hissubsequent denunciation of Mao and thecutting off of Soviet military and economic aid to China in the late 1950s. Bythe late'60s, Mao went further, brandingthe USSR a "social imperialist" s tate evenmore dangerous to China than Americanimperialism. As we pointed out earlier,this was the ideological justification forChina's criminal alliance with the U.S.against the Soviet Union beginning in theearly 1970s.Despite the Maoists ' denunciations ofSoviet "revisionism," at no time didthe CCP attempt to set up a new, "antirevisionist" international. No less thanMoscow's, Beijing's brand of "socialismin one country" meant betraying revolutionary opportunities abroad. The fruitsof this policy were seen in Indonesiain 1965, when the pro-Beijing Communist Party, the largest in the c'apitalistworld, subordinated its mass working- .class and peasant base to the bourgeoisnationalist Sukarno regime. Thus theIndonesian Stalinists disarmed the workers, both politically and militarily, leaving them defenseless when GeneralSuharto, backed by the CIA and Islamic fundamentalists, launched an antiCommunist military coup which resultedin the slaughter of hundreds of thousands(see "Lessons of Indonesia 1965," Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55,Autumn 1999).Wei argues that Khrushchev's "revisionism" merely set into motion politicaldevelopments which, three decades later,led to the restoration of capitalism. Hethus presents a revision, so to speak, ofMao's position on Soviet "revisionism":"Although Khrushchev was holding thecommunist flag on the surface, in factwhat he carried out was a revisionistline and a series of revisionist policies.Mao said that quantitative change contains partial qualitative change. Becausequantitative change leads to qualitativechange, in the end after 30 years the heirsof Khrushchev-Gerbachev, etc.--compie ted this dramatic change, rendering theovernight destruction of the communistfortress which Hitler's million-man armyfailed to break through."Obviously, we don't know whether Weiis consciously falsifying Mao's position or genuinely thinks this is a correct3 NOVEMBER 2000

interpretation of Mao Zedong Thought.That is not, in any case, an importantquestion.But why a Chinese leftist intellectualtoday should differ with Mao on the classnature of the former Soviet Union is aquestion of some political import. Theanswer lies not in what'happened in Russia in the past but in what is happening inChina now. Here it is clarifying to contrast Wei with Meisner. Meisner emphasizes that during the Cultural Revolution,Mao denounced the Chinese Communistofficialdom as a "bureaucratic class"whose members were becoming "bourgeois elements sucking the blood of the.workers." In this way Meisner claimsMao's authority for his own positionthat under Deng-one of the main targetsof the Cultural Revolution-the Chineseeconomy became one of "bureaucraticcapitalism."Now, however, there have arisenpowerful forces in China-Western and'Japanese investors, the offshore Chin,ese bourgeoisie, top officials and their"princeling" sons, wealthy farmers, smalland n o t - s o ~ s m a l l entrepreneurs, manyintellectuals-who really are driving torestore capItalism, that is, private property in the means of production. And theChinese workers want to defend "socialism" as they understand it; they are resisting the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the accompanying attacks onthe "iron rice bowl." Thus the realities ofthe class struggle are forcing leftist intellectuals like Wei to abandon Mao's idealist version of capitalist restoration andthe reactionary notion that the SovietUnion was "bureaucratic capitalist" or"state capitalist."While Wei's views on the Soviet Unionare far less reactionary than those of Mao,they are still fundamentally distorted byhis adherence to the dogma of "buildingsocialism in one country." He, too, resortsto subjectivist idealism to explain (thoughnot to define) the restoration of capitalismin East Europe and the former USSR.In the mid-1980s-it is not explainedwhy-the Soviet government and the ruling Communist Party were taken over bya man, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was evenmoreof a "revisionist," much more, thanKhrushchev had been. Wei emphasizesthat in Gorbachev's memoirs, "He franklyadmitted that he started doubting communism since his college years," as if oneman's intellectual outlook was a decisivecause of capitalist counterrevolution.The counterrevolutionary destructionof the Soviet Union-a world-historicdefeat for the international proletariatcannot be explained 'by the ideological

Workers militia inShanghai during1925-27 Revolution.CCP's liquidation intobourgeois-nationalistGuomindang underStalin's orders pavedway for antiCommunist slaughter,as in Canton(Guangzhou).

attitudes of the Kremlin leadership. It canbe explained only in terms of the deepgoing social and economic contradictionswithin the Soviet Union as a bureaucratically degenerated workers state under therelentless and all-sided pressure of worldimperialism.The Illusion of "BuildingSocialism in One Country"

In marked contrast to "Cultural Revolution': Maoism, Wei's defense of socialism rests heavily on the superior economic performance of Soviet Russiaunder Stalin and in the immediate postStalin period (and also in China underMao). He writes: "The growth rate forthe USSR from 1928 to 1958 was 54 percent (44 percent per capita) per decade."He then points out that this was notonly higher than the growth rate of anycapitalist country during this periodbut also higher than any capitalist countryhad experienced historically over a comparable period. Thus, in Wei's view, theSoviet Union was succes.sfully "buildingsocialism" and was well on its way to overtaking Western capitalism economically.Ironically, the same argument wasmade at the time by that arch-"revisionist"Nikita Khrushchev. In 1960, the Kremlinleader captured world attention when hedeclared that 20 years hence the SovietUnion would not only overtake theUnited States in economic production butwould achieve full communism. Whilethe latter claim was manifestly utopian,the former was simply a projection of the

I S P A R T A C J S T I ~

SpartacistAn organ of revolutionaryMarxism of the InternationalCommunist League(English-language Edition)No. 53, Summer 1997

(56 pages)$1.50

relatively higher Soviet growth rate during the 1950s over the next two decades.However, in the 1970s the. Soviet economy lost its former dynamism as the rateof growth declined sharply and steadily.The underlying cause of the Sovieteconomic malaise was actually predicteddecades before by Trotsky in his classicstudy of Stalinist Russia, The RevolutionBetrayed (!936). He explained that theexceptionally high rate of industrialgrowth achieved during the early fiveyear plans, which were based on constructing factories modeled on onesalready built in the West and manned bysurplus labor from the countryside, couldnot be sustained at a higher level of economic development:"The progressive role of the Sovietbureaucracy coincides with the perioddevoted to introducing into the SovietUnion the most important elements ofcapitalist technique. The rough workof borrowing, imitating, transplantingand grafting, was accomplished on thebasis laid down by the revolution. Therewas, thus far, no question of any newword in the sphere of technique, scienceor art. It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made West-'em pattern by bureaucratic commandalthough, to be sure, at triple the normalcost. But the farther you go, the morethe economy runs into the problem ofquality, which slips out of the hands of

a bureaucracy like a shadow ... Under anationalized economy, quality demands ademocracy of producers and consumers,freedom of criticism and initiative--conditions incompatible with a totalitarianregime of fear, lies and flattery." .These contradictions came to the forein the 1970s when continuing quantitativeexpansion of industrial capacity and output by the old methods was blocked by anincreasing shortage of labor. The SovietUnion now had to switch from extensiveto intensive economic growth, a goal proclaimed by the Kremlin leadership. underLeonid Brezhnev. This entailed introducing a new, higher overall level of technology and a corresponding increase in thetechnological capacity of the workingpopulation. To maximize labor productivity also required a qualitative raising ofmanagerial efficiency. But the Stalinistbureaucracy-increasingly corrupt, politically cynical and self-interested-wasorganically incapable of a dynamic modernization of the Soviet economy.When Gorbachev came to power, hedenounced the last years of the Brezhnev regime as an "era of -stagnation."He offered market-oriented "reforms,"dubbed perestroika (restructuring), as theonly means of transforming the USSRinto an "intensive, highly developed economy," enabling "her to enter the nextmillennium with dignity as a great andflourishing power" (quoted in AndersAslund, How Russia Became a MarketEconomy [1995]). We wrote at the 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 thecontinued on page 10

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Not One Man, Not One Penny for the Imperialist Military!Smash Imperialism Through Socialist Revolution!Military Recruiters Off Campusl

NEW YORK CITY-On October 16,recruiters for the Army's Judge AdvocateGeneral (JAG), the legal arm of the mili- .tary, came to, the NYU Law School torecruit students to serve the bloody interests of U.S. imperialism. The JAGrecruiters were met with protest by members of SQUAD (Straights and QueersUnited Against Discrimination), an NYULaw School student group. The attemptof military recruiters to extend their tentacles back into campuses across thenation, after being kicked off by massprotests by students against U.S. imperialism's dirty war against the Vietnameseworkers and peasants, must be opposed.The Spartacus Youth Club says: Militaryrecruiters of f campus! Our opposition tomilitary recruiters on campus is derivedfrom our opposition to imperialist militarism in general. Not one man, not onepenny for the imperialist military!The military forces are the iron fist ofthe U.S. imperialist state, used to protectthe profits and possessions of the capitalist ruling class, both at home and abroad.The American imperialists are engagedin a ruthless struggle to improve theircompetitive position by increasing therate of exploitation of the domesticworking class, plundering the colonialand semicolonial world and seizing markets at the expense of their rivals. Thisstruggle is the natural outgrowth of thecapitalist system and its need for everincreasing profits gained through theconquest of new markets; it inevitablyleads to wars to redivide the conqueredmarkets.

Bengiveno/NY TimesNYU Law School students protested a military recruiter on campus onOctober 16, the first such visit in 22 years.

The NYU administration postures as a"progressive institution" for gay rightsand against military recruiters coming tocampus. The university had banned military recruiters for 22 years because theDefense Department will not hire peoplewho. are openly gay. But NYU receivesmore than $200 million in Defense

Department research funds, and after theDefense Department issued regulationssaying that it would withdraw allresearch funds if any division of a university barred recruiters, the administration reversed its policy. An editorial inWashington Square News (17 October),the campus newspaper, wrote: "NewYork University is a progressive institution .... It was pleasing to. see studentsand institution both fighting side-by-sidefor something they believe in." Don'tbe fooled! The university administration is the representative of the rulingclass on campus. For example, the NYUadministration is hell-bent on seeingthat the graduate s tudent s' do not forma union. Only- social protest got thearmy recruiters off campus in the firstplace, not reliance on the "benevolence" of the administration. In fact,universities serve as the training ground

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for the next generation of the bourgeoisie and those who serve it, in and out ofuniform.SQUAD has protested the pervasivepersecution of homosexuals in the military, which has, if anything, been worsened by Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell"policy. The SYC solidarizes with theprotesters agains t the very real anti-gaydiscrimination in the military, which hasled to the purging and even murder of.gay soldiers and sailors. However, wealso understand that "democratization"of the imperialist army is impossible. Aswe stated in "Right-Wing Bigots Mobilize Against Gays in the Military": "Evenif the formal ban [on gays in the military] is dropped, gays will still faceharassment and violence at the hands ofbigoted officers and fellow soldiers inthis bigoted society ... Gay oppression isrooted in the ideology of the family, aninstitution which is a bedrock of capitalism" (Workers Vanguard No. 569, 12February 1993). As Leon Trotsky, coleader with V.I. Lenin of the Bolsl,tevikRevolution and founder of the RedArmy, noted in his History of the Rus-sian Revolution (1930): "An army isalways a copY' of the society itserves-with this difference, that it givessocial relations a concentrated character,carrying both their positive and negativefeatures to an extreme."The U.S. imperialist rulers perpetratevicious exploitation of the Americanworking class, driving down wages andattacking working conditions, andattempting to smash unions. This isaccompanied by the increasingly hideousoppression and degradation of the blackand Latino masses in the inner cities. Thefight for the liberation of the Americanblack population, which is forcibly segregated at the bottom of society but is integrated into the working class, is central tothe destruction ofAmerican imperialism.The bloody history of U.S. imperialism spans a century of butchery: fromthe war against Filipino insurgents in the1890s, through two imperialist worldwars, the failed attempt to drown theVietnamese soCial revolution in blood,

and most recently NATO's assaultagainst Serbia and continual bombingsof Iraq. The U.S. imperialists are theonly ones to have used atomic weapons,incinerating some 200,000 Japanesecivilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Currently, P&lestinians are being gunneddown by U.S.-supplied tanks and Apachehelicopters of the Israeli state. As revolutionaries, we oppose our "own" bourgeoisie wherever it rears its head. Wecall to defeat u.s. imperialism throughworkers revolution! The main enemy isat home!We do not believe that U.S. imperialism can be a force for human rights inthe world, contrary to what the bulk ofthe IMFIWTO protesters in Seattle andelsewhere might think. When the U.S.!NATO forces launched their bombingcampaign against Serbia, we stood forthrightly for the military defense of Serbia,without giving one iota of politicalsupport to Milosevic;, and for workersrevolution to defeat the imperialists. Incontrast, the nominally "socialist" International Socialist Organization (ISO),which has a group at NYU, limplypleaded with the imperialists, "NATOBombs Won't Stop the Killing," buyinginto the imperialists' lie that this was awar in "defense" of Kosovar Albanians.The ISO is now in the midst of a fervent campaign in support of the capitalistcandidate of the Green Party, RalphNader, for president. Hardly opposed toeither the imperialist military or its use,Nader simply states that if he were president he could use the army better, cuttingdown the military budget in order toobtain a lean, mean, fighting machinewhich can continue to protect "Americansovereignty." As he states on his Website, "I t is important to have a leandefense; a wasteful defense is a weakdefense." Nader's patriotic defense of"American sovereignty" has at its corethe anti-communism central to his antiChina policies. He campaigned heavilyagainst Congressional passage of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR)with China, saying that "passage ofPNTR will also eliminate a crucial lever'in the advancement of democracy andhuman rights in China." We oppose theentry of imperialism into China!"Democracy" and "human rights" 'arecode words for capitalist counterrevolu-tion in China. The SYC stands for theunconditional military defense of theChinese deformed workers state. We callfor a proletarian political revolution tooust the Stalinist bureaucracy, in order topreserve and extend the gains of the1949 Revolution. Similarly, we Trotskyists defended the former Soviet Union,which long served as a bulwark againstthe predations of U.S. imperialism.What we need is a conscious revolutionary leadership of the working classbased on the understanding that societyis divided between two classes, workersand capitalists, whose interests are irre1:-oncilably counterposed. We fight for amultiracial revolutionary workers partyto lead a socialist revolution tt> emancipate all those ground under the boot ofU.S. imperialism

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SYC Defends MumiaAgainstReactionary Smear CampaignUCBerkeley

As the following article explains, sinister forces at UC Berkeley invited Accuracy in Academia's (AlA) Dan Flynn tospeak on campus on September 27 in avicious smear campaign against MumiaAbu-Jamal. Flynn was met with protestsby outraged students, who burned his lite r a ~ u r e and shouted Flynn down. As aresult, there has been a huge hue and cryon campus about "free speech." The BayArea SYC submitted a shorter version ofthis article as a letter in defense ofMumia to the Daily Californian, the student paper at ut Berkeley, but i t waspolitically censored by the editors. Theversion they printed on October 19attempted to transform our revolutionaryunderstanding of the need to link thefight for Mumia's freedom to the fightagainst capitalism as a whole into liberal "fight the right" mush. Not Ortly didthey omit all mention of Clinton, but theyeven took out our forthright assertion ofMumia's innocence!

* * *Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent mansitting on death row. Targeted by thestate because he is a fighter for black lib

eration, he was framed up on charges ofkilling a cop and then sentenced to deathexpressly for his political views. OnSept. 27, the Berkeley College Republicans (BCR) and the Berkeley Conservative Foundation (BCF) invited Accuracyin Academia's Dan Flynn, author of thescurrilous "Cop Killer: How Mumia AbuJamal Conned Millions Into BelievingHe Was Framed," to propagate the Philadelphia police lies which framed Mumia.The only weapon Mumia ever used was .his pen and his voice! It is obscene thatthe BCF, whose supercilious campusorgan The Patriot runs the bloodthirstyheadline "Fry Mumia," has been able toposture as a defender of "free speech"against the outraged students who protested Flynn's talk. It is even moreobscene that last week the ASUC [Associated Students of the University of California, the student government] joinedthe chorus, passing a bill condemningthe protesters.Targeting campus leftists is modusoperandi for the AlA, who in the 1980scompiled a list of 10,000 alleged Marxists and 35,000 liberal professors on campuses around the country to harass anddrive out of public life. In 1986 these sinister junior McCarthyites targeted theMarxist Spartacist League (SL) with theBig Lie slander that the publications ofthe Spartacist tendency, including Workers Vanguard, "urge .. the killing of policeofficers." The SL sued arid forced them toretract this purposefully deadly slander.The AlA is still at it. Besides lusting afterMumia's execution, Dan Flynn's othercentral activity is seeking to rehabilitateJoe McCarthy! Now on the Internet and inthe pages of the Moonie-owned Washington Times AlA is seeking to slander.Mumia's defenders as violators of freespeech. It's too bad that the Berkeley protesters fell into Flynn's trap. It wouldhave been much more effective to exposeAlA's smear campaign against Mumia forwhat it is: a bunch of lies. We in the Spartacus Youth Club believe in refuting theviews of right-wing ideologues.The evidence that Mumia was framedis overwhelming. The police's murder3 NOVEMBER 2000

Young SpartacusRevolutionary Contingent at May 13 San Francisco ral ly called for mobilizinglabor's social power in fight to free Mumia, opposed reliance on racistcapitalist courts and politicians.scenario contradicted autopsy results andthere is no evidence that the supposedmurder weapon was even fired. Mumia'salleged "confession" was not reporteduntil two months after the fact and the copwho was withMumia after the shootingoriginally reported that "during this timethe negro male made no comment."Mumia was stripped of his right to represent himself and removed from the courtroom for much of his triai. In a 1995 hearing, witnesses testified that they had beencoerced and pressured by police intochanging their testimony in order toimplicate Mumia at the original trial. Atthe sentencing hearing the prosecutionintroduced the Panthers' use of the Maoistslogan, "political power grows out of the

barrel of a gun," to paint Mumia as a convinced cop killer who deserved to die.Mumia had no criminal record beforebeing arrested and framed in 1981, butthe FBI had amassed an 800-page file onhim starting from the time he joined theBlack Panther Party at age 15. Mumiawas a defender of the MOVE organization, against which the Philly policewaged a vicious ~ e n d e t t a which resultedin 1985 in the firebombing of a MOVEhouse, the incineration of eleven people,including five children, and the destruction of an entire city neighborhood. Whilethe frame-up system is standard operatingprocedure across this country, thePhillypolice department is particularly notorious for it. Since 1995 more than 300 peo-

T h e ~ ' N a d e r Challenge":Getting Gore ElectedFrom the outset, we have opposed theGreen Party's Ralph Nader on principleas a capitalist candidate who is, moreover, a shill for the Democratic Party ofwar and racism. In contrast, the socialdemocratic International Socialist Organization (ISO) has energetically boostedNader's campaign as a challenge to "thetwo parties of big business," even trumpeting "The Nader Challenge" on thecover of International Socialist Review(OctoberlNovember 2000).But with Democrat Al Gore increasingly looking like a loser in the weeks. before the election, the real c h a l l ~ n g e faCing Nader supporters is to convincevoters that Gore will win. A leafletissued in Boston, reproduced at right,avers: "George Bush will NEVER winin Massachusetts, so HAVE NO FEAR."(Notably, this leaflet asserting Nader'sstand for "strong unions" was printedwith no union bug-i.e., by non-unionlabor.) The same message was featuredin a full-page ad ill the Village Voice (31- October): "Do n't worry, you're not giving New York to Bush."As the ISO's more "mainstream"

social-democratic cousins readily admit, Nader's supposedly "independent,""pro-labor" campaign was alwaysaimed at pressuring Clinton/Gore's"New Democrats" and refurbishing.illusions among radical youth in capitalist electoral politics. In a recent piecein the New York Times (26 October),Democratic Socialists of Americaspokesman Barbara Evrenreich wrote:"I see the Nader campaign as a chanceto prod the Democratic Party to the leftand, beyond that, to re-energize American democracy." Similarly, Committeesof Correspondence co-chairman Manning Marable says, "Gore d oesn't needyour vote, and by supporting Nader, wecan send a powerful, progressive protestmessage to the Democrats" (Along theColor Line, October 2000). The message of revolutionary Marxists is thatthe power of labor will continue to beshackled until the working class breakswith the Democratic Party-and allbourgeois parties-and forges a revolutionary workers party committed tosweeping away the capitalist profit system through socialist revolution .

pIe falsely convicted by the lying testimony of cops from Philadelphia's 39thPrecinct have been freed from prisonhellholes.In their adamant efforts to uphold theracist capitalist order the wannabe capitalist politicians of the BCF groove onthe thought of consummating the legallynching of Mumia. Clinton took timeout of his 1992 campaign to preside overthe execution of a brain-damaged blackman, Ricky Ray Rector, while Bush runsthe high-volume death machine of Texas.The concern of the anti-Mumia bigotsfor truth and freedom is just about asgreat as that of the 1857 Dred Scott

Supreme Court, which ruled that blacks"had no rights which a white man wasbound to respect." They raise no hooplaabout the FBI's COINTELPRO murdersof 38 Black Panthers, but yelp about"free speech" when they see obstacles inthe way of Mumia's legal murder. Whathypocrisy!

The Spartacist League/Spartacus YouthClubs have been active in the fight forMumia's freedom since 1988. We understand that Mumia's case provides a comprehensive picture of the institutionalizedbarbarism of the death penalty whichstands at the pinnacle of a legal apparatusof racist repression in the United States.It underlines the fact that there is no justice in the capitalist courts, which, alongwith the. cops and prisons, exist as thebourgeoisie's machinery of repressionagainst the working class and oppressed.Mumia spoke, and speaks, forcefullyagainst this reality of black oppression,the cornerstone of American capitalism.This is precisely why groups like theBCF, BCR, and the AlA, who strive topreserve what they can of the legacy'ofslavery, would like to see Mumia dead assoon as possible. Abolish the racist deathpenalty! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!.

IF YOU'RE WORRIEDA VOTE FOR RALPH NADERWILL HELP ELECT BUSH,Read This:

AI Gore is going to win Massaclnascas by aHUGE margin overo.o.ge Buob.That's why it's COMPLETELY SAFE toVOll: for Nader ll. . . . . . . eua. Even if Nadergets a 101 ofvOfCSo Gore will winMassachusetts by a IaDdsJdc. Your vote has NO INFLUENCEon the outcome orany otherstale.George Bush wiDNEVER. win in Massachusetts. so

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Zionist Terror ..(continued from page 1)store for the dispossessed PalestinianArab people underscores the inherentlychauvinist character of the Zionist state,which was founded upon the brutal suppression of Palestinian national rights. Inthe course of the 1948 "War of Independence," 800,000 Arabs were driven out ofPalestine-their land stolen, their homesdemolished, their lives destroyed-to bewarehoused in s q u ~ l i d refugee campsthroughout the region, where theirchildren and grandchildren were bornand remain to this day. Only 150,000remained in Israel, with the Palestinianpopulation of cities like Jerusalem andHaifa reduced from over 70,000 each tobarely 3,000.These remnants of the Palestiniannation within the 1948 borders, todaynumbering a million, were nominallymade "citizens," forced to live in exclusively Arab towns and villages-oftenlacking even sewage systems-in threesmall parts of the country which remained under military administrationuntil 1966. Today only 8 percent of allIsraeli Arabs live in "mixed" cities likeHaifa and Tel Aviv. Over the years, some80 percent of remaining Arab-owned landhas been .expropriated by the regime.A 1976 general strike against such landconfiscations led to the massacre ofsix Israeli Arabs by police, which is annually commemorated by Palestinians asLand Day.Denied participation in the military anduntil 1960 in the Histadrut-the corpor- .atist "labor" federation founded on theprogram of "Hebrew only" labor-thesePalestinian "citizens" were thereby denied a whole range of social benefits andexcluded from a whole range of jobs.Many of those who have work are con-

Palestinian protesters in Jordan burn Israeli flag, October 24. Arab bourgeoisregimes are no less oppressors of Palestinians, as over three million languishfor decades in squalid refugee camps in Baqa'a, Jordan and elsewhere.centrated in unskilled construction, service arid agricultural jobs along withlaborers from the Occupied Territoriesand, increasingly, "illegal" immigrants. Itwas such conditions, as well as nationalsolidarity with their compatriots underIsraeli occupation, which fueled therecent protests by Israeli Arabs. As theircommunities were completely sealed of fby Israeli police, 13 were killed. Now aleading police commander threatens to"settle accounts" with Israeli Arabs.Conditions within the Occupied Territories are immeasurably worse. Averageannual income has plunged from $2,500in 1987 to $1,500 (compared to $17,000in Israel), while unemployment rangesup to 40 percent. As a result of the"peace process," wrote correspondentAmira Hass in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz

(18 October), Israel has been able to"double the number of settlers in 10years, to enlarge the settlements, to continue its discriminatory policy of cuttingback wlJter quotas for three million Palestinians, to prevent Palestinian development in most of the area of the WestBank, and to seal an entire nation intorestricted areas, imprisoned in a networkof bypass roads meant for Jews only.""Transfer"- the forced populationtransfer of all Arabs from the OccupiedTerritories, and perhaps from withinIsrael itself-has long been the rallyingcry of the Zionist right. But it originatedwith tht( Zionist "founding fathers." Thehead of the Jewish Agency's ColonizationDepartment, Joseph Weitz, wrote in 1940:

11311i jtl -.pn fBi tilSpartacist Youth Addresses. NYC Palestinian Rally

"Between ourselves it must be clear thatthere is no room for both peoples togetherin this country.... And there is no otherway but to transfer the Arabs from hereto the neighboring countries; to transferall of them; not one village, not one tribeshould be left."-quoted in introduction toMaxime Rodinson, Israel: AColonial-Settler State? (1973)Under capitalism, there is no "room"for two peoples in this small country.To secure the national rights of theoppressed Palestinian people-withQutthereby denying the national existence ofthe Hebrew-speaking people-the Zionist garrison-state must be shattered fromwithin through Arab/Hebrew workersrevolution. Only within the framework ofa socialist federation of the Near East canthe right of national self-determination of both the Palestinian Arab and Hebrewspeaking peoples and the many otherminority peoples of the region be equitably realized.

The following is a speech given bySYCer Quincy Levinson at a protest inNew York on October 20 against Israelistate terror.I'm here on behalf of the SpartacistLeaguefU.S., a Marxist organization. Weare here to express our solidarity withthe oppressed Palestinian masses. Wefeel that all working people andoppressed throughout the world must

rally to the Palestinians in the face ofZionist terror. The Israeli rulers areentirely capable of carrying out a massa-'cre of Palestinian Arabs on a truly geno-cidal scale. We in the Spartacist Leaguesay: Defend the Palestinian people! AllIsraeli troops and settlers out of theOccupied Territories now!Behind the Israeli capitalist government stands American imperialism. Clinton is using the deaths in Yemen of 17sailors on the USS Cole as a chauvinistwar cry to provoke imperialist retaliation. American imperialism is the mostdangerous enemy of workers andoppressed. Likewise, the United Nationssince the outset has been involved up toits neck in the repression of Palestinianpeople.One should have no illusions in thecapitalist rulers of the Arab nations. Wemust remember Black September of 1970when 10,000 Palestinians were massacred by the government of King Husseinof Jordan. We say: Down with the starvation blockade ofIraq! U.S.fUN troops outof the Near East now!We have long warned that the peaceaccords signed by Arafat would not endthe national oppression of Palestinians,but merely cede the job of administeringthat oppression over to the PLO. It is anindictment of the PLO's petty-bourgeoisnationalism which relied on the good8

Young Spartacusgraces first of the Arab capitalist regimesand then of U.S. imperialism that manyPalestinian workers and intellectuals havebeen driven into the arms of Hamas, aviolently anti-Semitic and anti-womanIslamic fundamentalist group. lNow the Zionist rulers have not yettaken on the myriad peoples of the regionin a nuclear Armageddon, but it couldwell happen. The Hebrew-speakingworkers must place themselves againstthe prison of chauvinism and become asone with their class brothers. They mustjoin in building a revolutionary Leninistworkers party of both the Arab andHebrew-speaking people to fight for asocialist federation of the Near Eastwhere all people can have their nationalrights. For a socialist federation of theNear East!.

This elementary truth, denied by muchof the opportunist left, is formallyacknow edged by the fake-TrotskyistCommittee for a Workers International(CWI, represented by Socialist Alternative in the U.S.) in an October Web sitestatement by its Israeli group, MaavakSozialisti (Socialist Struggle), whichargues regarding Israel that "it is impossible to genuinely solve the national question under capitalism." The statementissues the following appeal:"A class socialist leadership of IsraeliPalestinians could make an appeal toJewish workers to struggle together withthem in order to overthrow the hatedBarak government, and for the overthrowof the corrupt capitalist system ..."This could be achieved because inIsrael the capitalists and their servants ingovernment continually attack Israeliworkers and youth by means of privatization' unemployment and attacks onwages and work conditions, and the dismantling of the welfare state."This is a flagrant capitulation to Zionist "laborism." The statement despicablyfails to raise even the simple. unambiguous demand for defense of the Palestinianpeople against Zionist terror and for allIsraeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories, calling only "for-theimmediate withdrawal of the Israeli armyfrom Gaza, Hebron and Bethlehem." Thisis not surprising. The CWI's Britishmainstay, Peter Taaffe's Socialist Party,

is notorious for its refusal to call for British troops out of Northern Ireland andits capitulation to anti-Catholic Loyalistreaction, even regularly providing a platform for a fascistic Loyalist killer.The Hebrew-speaking proletariat isindeed no less exploited by its "own"ruling class than are workers elsewhere.In recent years, there have been a seriesof militant strikes and protests againstausterity and privatization. Secular Israelis are suffocated by a semi-theocraticstate in which even basic questions likemarriage and divorce are determined bythe whims of ultra-Orthodox rabbis. TheAskhenazi (European-derived) elite lordsit over the Sephardic (Near Eastern) Jewish population, many of whom live inconditions of poverty not qualitativelybetter than those of Israeli Arabs.But ArablHebrew class unity willnot be forged on the basis of reformisteconomism, as the .cWI believes. The

Hebrew-speaking workers, not least theSephardic Jews who form the base of theright-wing and religious parties, are saturated with anti-Palestinian chauvinism,which has only intensified in recentweeks. If they are to be won to revolutionary class struggle against the Israeliexploiters, the Hebrew-speaking workersmust be broken from the stranglehold ofZionist chauvinism and won to internationalist defense of the Palestinian people. For their part, the militant Palestinianworkers and youth who courageouslydefy the Zionist military juggernaut mustbe won from petty-bourgeois Palestiniannationalism and anti-Semitic Islamic fundamentalists like Hamas, who are deadlyenemies ofArab women and workers.For a Socialist Federationof the Near East!

While the CWI capitulates to thechauvinist backwardness of the Hebrewspeaking working class, most otherreformist groups offer nothing morethan a "leftist" gloss on the treacherousPLO policies which have brought thePalestinian masses to the current bloodyimpasse. Even as it acknowledges that

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WORKERS VANGUARD


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the Arab regimes have suppressed proPalestinian protests, the Workers WorldParty (WWP) enthuses: ''This strong progressive Arab nationalism and inter-Arabsolidarity has not been seen since the1960s .... The wave of demonstrations hasalready swept away the wedge ha t Washington drove between Arab governmentsduring the 1991 Gulf War" (WorkersWorld, 26 October).

Free Mordechai Vanunu!WWP's line is a rehash of the mythical, trans-class "Arab Revolution" pushedby many opportunist leftists in the 1960sand '70s to justify tailing pe.tty-bourgeoisPalestinian nationalism and the "progressive" Arab bourgeoisies (see "Near East,1950s: Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Nationalism," WV Nos. 740 and741, 25 August and 8 September). Until1967, it was Egypt in Gaza and Jordan inthe West Bank which subjugated andoppressed the Palestinians there. Ip"Black September" 1970, Jordan's KingHussein, father of the current monarch,ordered the massacre of 10,000 Pales-. tin an fighters. Twenty years later, afterthe imperialist war against Iraq, the emir

of Kuwait expelled 200,000 Palestinianworkers whose labor in the oil fieldshelped make his billions of dollars. Yetfor decades Arafat's PLO relied on the"good offices" of these bonapartist andfeudalist regimes, finally embracing U.S.imperialism follQwing the 1991 Gulf Warand the collapse of the Soviet Union,which had backed the PLO.Over three million "stateless" Palestinians continue to languish in refugeecamps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordanwhich is historically majority Palestinian-'-subsisting on little more than UnitedNations food parcels. While spoutingoff against Zionism in order to divert theanger of the poverty-stricken masses theyexploit, the Arab capitalist regimes areenemies of the Palestinian people and ofindigenous religious, ethnic and nationalminorities in their own countries: Shi'iteMuslims, Coptic Christians in Egypt,Berbers in Algeria, the Kurdish nation inSyria, Iraq, as well as Iran and Turkey. Wefight for the revolutionary overthrow ofall the murderous capitalist states in theNear East and for aSocialist Republic ofUnited Kurdistan.The British Socialist Workers Party(SWP), which remains nominally alliedwith the Internatienal Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S., likewise borrowsfrom the petty-bourgeois nationalism ofthe PLO. According to the British Socialist Worker (14 October):"Socialists argue for a democratic secularstate in Palestine where Jews and Arabshave equal rights ...."A longer term alternative in the MiddleEast is revolution across the region tooverthrow the corrupt regimes which livein wealth while their populations live ingrinding poverty."In the mouths of Palestinian nationalists like Arafat, who for years called for a"democratic secular state," it meant denying the right to self-determination forthe Hebrew-speaking nation, which wasdeemed to be simply a religious minority.The Stalinophobic SWP apes the "twostage revolution" dogma of the Stalin-

Joining some 2,000 Palestinian fighters locked away in Israeli prisons, thereis also an Israeli of Jewish origin,Mordechai Vanunu. In the eyes of theZionist rulers, Vanunu is a "race traitor" for revealing to the world the scaleof the Israeli nuclear arsenal. For this"crime," . Vanunu has languished in adungeon in the Negev desert for 14years-all but the last two in solitaryconfinement, denied any human contact except with the guards who fed'him and his two brothers who wereallowed to visit every other week.Based on his experience as a technicianat the top-secret Dimona nuclear facility, in 1986 Vanunu told the LondonTimes that the war-crazed Zionist rulershad produced and stockpiled upwardsof 200 nuclear warheads, making Israelthe sixth-largest nuclear power in theworld at the time. Lured to Italy byan Israeli Mossad secret police agent,Vanunu was then abducted by theMossad and whisked off to the desertprison in Ashkelon where he remainsto this day.As a Sephardic Jew whose familyhad emigrated from Morocco, it wasVanunu's own experience of discrimination at the hands of the Europeanderived Ashkenazi Israeli ruling estab-

ists-"democracy" first and socialistrevolution later-which has alwaysmeant that the "second stage" consists ofthe massacre of Communists. In the caseof IsraellPalestine, any talk of a "democratic" capitalist stage is a cruel hoaxfrom the get-go.The right to self-determination is ademocratic question. But in situations ofinterpenetrated peoples-as in IsraeliPalestine, Cyprus and Nortbern Irelandit cannot be equitably resolved under capitalism. The capitalist nation-state ispremised on the domination of one nationand the suppression or expUlsion of theother. Where two peoples lay claim to thesame land, the national rights of both canonly be secured through the overthrow ofcapitalism. And in the case of the Palestinian people, this requires socialist revolutions in at least Israel, Jordan and Lebanon (which has a sizable Palestinianminority), as well as its patron Syria.Smash Imperialism ThroughWorkers Revolution!

In an informed 26 October piece on theIndependent Media Center Web site outlining the background to the Barak planfor "unilateral separation," left-liberalacademic Noam Chomsky cites a Briti ~ h article comparing U.S.-backed Zionist Israel to apartheid South Africa andcomments:"Such conclusions wili come as no surprise to those whose vision has not beenconstrained by the doctrinal blinders imposed for many years. It remains a majortask to remove them in the most impor-

1993 "peace" accord meant walled Palestinian ghettos policed by YasirArafat's Palestinian Authority.3 NOVEMBER 2000

MordechaiVanunuprotesting forPalestinian rightsone year beforehis 1986 arrestfor revealingextent of Israelinuclear arsenal.

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lishment that led to his alienation fromZionism. This impelled him to take upthe cause of Palestinian rights. As astudent at Beersheba's Ben-GurionUniversity, Vanunu befriended Bedouinand Palestinian students and fought fortheir rights when he served as a representative in the student government. Hewas instrumental in helping these students gain equal access to universityhousing and participated in protests forPalestinian equality and against the1982 Lebanon war.Vanunu's revelations made it clearthat Israel's capitalist rulers had

tant country. That is a prerequisite to anyconstructive reaction to the mountingchaos and destruction."As usual, behind Chomsky's seeming"anti-imperialist" rhetoric is an appeal forU.S. imperiaFsm to adopt a more "constructive," humane and rational foreignpolicy. During the Gulf War, Chomskycalled for the imperialist embargo ofIraq-which has since killed well over amillion people-as a "peaceful" alternative to war (Z Magazine, February 1991).

U.S. support for Israel is not the resultof "doctrinal blinders" but of its ownimperialist interests in the strategic, oilrich Near East. While far from simply apuppet of Washington, Zionist Israelserves as a bastion for imperialist orderand stability in this volatile region, forwhich it is lavishly rewarded to the tuneof some $5 billion in aid annually. We donot look to the American imperialiststate, the most rapacious' and deadliestnuclear power on the planet, to chastiseits Israeli junior partners or otherwise

enough nuclear weapons-and missiledelivery systems developed with U.S.aid-not only to incinerate every Arabcapital, but to bomb major cities in theSoviet Union as well. As we wroteshortly after his arrest, "For his courageous act, the working people, indeedall of humanity, owe Vanunu a tremendous debt of gratitude ... Vanunu actedin the cause of humanity. Now theinternational working class must champion his cause" (WV No. 429, 29 May1987). Free all Palestinian politicalprisoners! Freedom now for MordechaiVanunu!

intervene in the Near East. Like countless charlatans before him, Chomskyseeks to obscure the fact that imperialismis not a doctrine or policy which can be,reformed but a system-the highest stageof capitalism. In this, Chomsky aims todeflect radical youth from the struggleagainst the capitalist syStem.The International Communist Leagueseeks to forge internationalist proletarianvanguard parties bringing together Arab,Kurdish, Persian and Hebrew-speakingworkers to overthrow all the Zionistbutchers, sheiks, mullahs and militarystrongmen and create a socialist federation of the Near East. In the U.S., theSpartacist League fights to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party, section of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International, to sweep away bloody Americanimperialism through proletarian revolution. That would be a huge step towardending the genocidal terror and nationalist fratricide which is endemic to the capitalist system in its epoch of decay

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China...(continued from page 5)

market 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 perestroika generated economic chaos and greatly strengthenedthe internal forces of capitalist restoration tnroughout the USSR. Within a fewyears, those forces-actively supportedby Western, centrally American, imperialism-would triumph under Gorbachev's one-time lieutenant and successor,Bons Yeltsin.From Mao to Deng:The Economic Dimension

The People's Republic of China demonstrates the superiority of a planned,collectivized economy, even with bureaucratic parasitism and mismanagement,over a backward capitalist country. Butit also demonstrates the impossibility ofan economically backward workers statecatching up with, much less overtaking,an advanced capitalist country.The Chinese Revolution occurredabout the same time that India achievedits independence from British colonialism. For the' next several decades, thisSouth Asian country-the most populousin the world after China-was governedby Nehru's bourgeois-nationalist Congress Party. The economic conditionswhich Nehru & Co. inherited from theBritish Raj (colonial administration)were, on balance, more favorable (or lessunfavorable) than those which confrontedMao and his colleagues in 1949. The Chinese economy-the agricultural as wellas industrial sector-had been devastatedby decades of war and civil war.

XinhuaMao (left) with Stalin and Khrushchev (right) during 1949 visit to USSR. Asnationalist Moscow and Beijing bureaucracies fell out in late 1950s, Maodenounced Khrushchev as "revisionist," later forged criminal anti-Sovietalliance with U.S. imperialism.wardness and the "great power" nationalism of its bureaucratic rulers whichimpelled Deng & Co. down the road ofmarket-based "reforms." The neo-Maoistpublicist Wei Wei is organically incapableof understanding the social and economicfactors underlying Deng's policies. Indefending the achievements of the Maoera, he writes: "In Mao's China, from1952 to 1972, the growth rate [perdecade] was as high as 64.5 percent (34percent per capita). The economic development of China was not 'moving forward at a snail's pace,' as many Westernreporters erroneously told their readers."It is true that many Western ideologues aswell as the propagandists of the Dengregime deliberately understated the substantial economic gains China made during the Mao era. However, Wei is blind tothe contradictions and extreme unevenness of China's economic developmentduring this period.

starvation in the countryside severelydamaged Mao's hitherto unchallengedauthority among the upper and middlelevels of the bureaucracy. This situationunderlay the outbreak of violent factional warfare in the mid-late 1960sknown as the "Great Proletarian Cul

workers vanguard no 745 - 03 november 2000

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