workers vanguard no 773 - 25 january 2002

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 773 - 25 January 2002

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filS "N"'1I1) oC!:No. 773 ~ X . 5 2 3 25 January 2002

Jobs Slashed, Welfare Axed, Immigrants Targeted

"NalionaIUnily":Bosses Prolil, Workers. PayThe political parties of American

capitalism-Republicans and Democrats-seized on the killing of thousands of innocent people in theWorld Trade Center in order to reinforce their own class rule. SinceSeptember 11, the' population hasbeen bombarded with flag-wavingpropaganda proclaiming, "United

Expropriate the Bourgeoisie-For a Workers Party!For a Workers Government!We Stand." But what unity is therebetween those who stand outsidesoup kitchens hoping -for somescraps for themselves and their children-or who may be a paycheck

Auto worker leaves Ford p l a n ~ after company announced 20,000 North American jobcuts. Hotel workers who lost jobs when Marriott World Trade Center was destroyedprotest company's refusal to rehire them, January16.. . .away from that fate-and the capitalists who ostentatiously gorge on thewealth gleaned from the misery of themasses?Some 800,000 jobs were axed in October and November, coming on top .otthe1.5 million people thrown out of workin the previous year. Now Ford hasannounced 20,000 more job cuts. Andthe postal bosses who forced workers tostay on the job with no protection fromanthrax infection, callously aIlowing several to die, are threatening to layoff15,000 workers. As the unemployment .rolls sweII, three in five workers whoapply for unemployment insurance arerejected because they have been buffetedfrom one transitory McJob to another.This has all coincided with the "end ofwelfare as we know it," to use the wordsof former Democratic president BillClinton, as the five-year limit imposedunder his 1996 law kicked in.

In New York City, many forced toslave in "workfare" schemes in transit

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and the parks are now faced with havingneither their meager welfare paymentsnor the fuII-time jobs they had beenpromised. Today, 1.5 million people inNew York City alone rely on charity foodpantries in order to eat. And, in everymajor city across the ~ o u n t r y , the ranksof the homeless are burgeoning.The overlay to all of this has been adramatic intensification of state repression, as the government uses its "war onterrorism" to push through laws markinga qualitative diminution of qemocraticrights. In the wake of the racist roundupand detention of hundreds of people ofNear Eastern origin, a fonner JusticeDepartment official declared, "Profilingis not a four-letter word." While the government took first aim at immigrants, thepurpose of the "anti-terror" drive is tosanction police intimidation, harassmentand terror in the ghettos and barrios. Thismonth, the New Jersey state trooperswho fired a barrage of buIIets into a Nan

carrying four unarmed black and Hispanic youth four years ago-triggeringmass outrage over "racial profiling"walked out of a courtroom without even aprobationary sentence.The Enron "Scandal"

Thousands of Enron workers have justseen their jobs, life savings and pensionsdisappear into a sinkhole while a handfulof top executives amassed a cool $1.1billion in the 18 months before Enroncollapsed by selling off shares that theiremployees were forced to retain. Thecollapse of the Houston-based conglomerate is a fitting coda to the lucre-grabbing orgy of the late 1990s. Enron Was atthe cutting edge of the deregulationfrenzy that was a hallmark of the '90sbo.om, seeing its profits multiply threeor four-fold during the California energyfiasco.

But what has made Enron into a scandal is that this gang of corrupt capitalists

seemed to have a corporate subsidiary in the White House. The president is a bosom buddy of EnronCEO Kenneth Lay, and "KennyBoy" virtually scripted Bush's statements on energy deregulation; VicePresident Cheney effectively servedas the company's emissary in strongarming India to accept an Enron deal;and the wife of leading Senate Republican Phil Gramm was on the corporate board of directors: Arrogantlydismissing the plight of those victimized by the Enron collapse, TreasurySecretary Paul O'Neill blithely de-claimed, "Companies come and go. Part

of the genius of capitalism is people getto make good decisions, or bad decisions,and they get to pay the consequence or toenjoy the fruits of their decisions."Touting this flagrant rip- off as evidence of the "genius of capitalism" ishardly designed to enhance public confidence in big business. Liberal Paul Krugman titled a column in the New YorkTimes (15 January) on the Enron debacle"Crony Capitalism, U.S.A." and noted ina subsequent article (18 January), "It'snot just a matter of the utter unfairness ofit all-employees lose their life savingswhile crooked executives walk away rich.It's also a matter of what it takes to makecapitalism work." It is indeed a problemfor the ruling class to have its governmentso openly identified with the rich grindingtheir heels in the faces of those theyexploit. But what makes "capitalismwork" is the exploitation of the workingcontinued on page 4


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Marxism vs.Trade Union OpportunismWe print, the following . etter as we

received it bye-mail . Originally dated 19November 2001, the letter was resentwith one sentence slightly reworded.

was not a mass rally of longshore workers as some readers of WV might mistakenly imagine. Rather it was a smallpublic forum at Local 10 that was unfortunately attended by only 50 people, halfof whom were longshoremen. Apparently, Ken Riley, president of the Charleston longshore union, who was initiallyscheduled to speak was unable to attend,which may in part account for the lowturnout. If the SL had any influence inthe longshore union, it was used to discourage a couple ofmembers from attending the forum.

Dec. 25, 2001To the editor ofWorkers Vanguard:

In your front page article "No toBosses' "National Unity"! For ClassStruggle at Home! (WV No. 768, 9 November 2001) you fraudulently claim tobe fighting "on the ground", i.e. withinthe trade unions for a revolutionary internationalist perspective. Your sole exam- _pIe is a "rally" at ILWU Local 10 indefense of the Charleston 5. First of all, it As chair of the meeting, I called onthe SL supporter who uninspiringly read

TROTSKY

For the Communism of Lenin,Liebknecht and Luxemburg!Upholding communist tradition, we honorthis month Bolshevik leader V. 1. Lenin, whodied in January 1924, and Karl Liebknechtand Rosa Luxemburg, founding leaders ofthe German Communist Party who wereassassinated in January 1919. The followingappreciation of Lenin is excerpted from oneof a series of articles honoring the "Three

L's" published by the Trotskyist CommunistLeague ofAmeri ca in January 1930. LENINForemost in Lenin was his unswerving confidence in the victory of the proletariat,organized and led by its most conscious and d e t e r m ~ n e d section, the revolutionaryparty. For more than twenty years he devoted himself to the formation, clarificationand strengthening of the principal arm of the Russian working class, the BolshevikParty. He persistently pointed o ut that the working class as grouped together by capital

ist production, without organization, or even with the elementary organization of tradeunions, cooperative groups, etc. could carryon a defensive struggle against the dailyencroachments of the capitalist class, but never the successful struggle for power. Itwas a cardinal point in his work, tested and proved in life in 1917, that only by possessing an organized political vanguard, a party embracing the most active, devoted and .clearest elements of the class, embodying and crystallizing all the experiences of thestruggle, serving as a guide and leader, could the working class rise to the position ofthe ruling class and free itself from exploitation. With Lenin, the revolutionary proletarian party was the only door through which the working class might enter the realm ofpower and maintain itself there ...The essence of Leninism is the application of the teachings of Marx and Engels tothe period of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. The theories of Lenin are just aslittle "Russian" as those of Marx were "German." The favorite argument of the socialreformists and revisionists in past decades-and even now-has been that while Marxism might be applicable to Europe, or to Europe of the last century; it did not apply tothe United States, fo r example, or to Europe today. The argument of all national andsocial reformists today, of those to whom the name of socialist or revolutionary stillapplies only because of past associations, is that Leninism might be suitable for "back.ward Russia" but that it does not apply to highly developed industrial countries ....The man who stands out in his work is not so much Lenin the Russian Bolshevik, butLenin the international revolutionist who led the. Left wing in the Second International,who laid the foundation stone for the Third; who poured out his vitriolic denunciationupon the heads of traitors who gave lip-service to "internationalism" and sent their followers into the trenches in order to defend their "national interests"; Lenin the internationalist, who considered the Russian revolution as a temporary outpost of the world'sworking class, a fortress to be defended at all costs until the workers of other countriescould save it for socialism by overthrowing their own bourgeoisie.

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-"Leninism Lives!" (Militant, 25 January 1930)

! . ~ ! ! ! ! ! o f . . ~ ! ! ~ ! ~ ! ! . 1 ! EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Michael DavissonPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Irene GardnerEDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Jon Brule, George Foster,Liz Gordon, Walter Jennings, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour, Alison Spencer,Alan Wilde .The Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League(Fourth Internationalist).Workers Vanguard (ISSN 0276-0746) published biweekly. except skipping three alternate issues in June, July andAugust (beginning with omitting the second issue in June) and w ~ h a 3-week interval in December, by the SpartacistPublishing Co., 299 Broadway, Suite 318, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861(Business) . Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:[email protected] subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid'at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.Opinions expressed in si gned articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is 22 January. -

No.n3 25 January 2002

from a prepared text. It unimaginablewhy those who claim to fight for revolutionary politics "on the ground" can'tthink on their feet. I notified her whenher alloted three minutes were up, butallowed her another minute extension tofinish reading.Being '''on the ground" of the classstruggle means not shirking one's proletarian duty even in the face of capitalistrepression. ILWU expressed solidaritywith the embattled Charleston longshoreunions early on by sending a financialcontribution and two representatives tojoin them on the picke t line. I was one ofthem. SL supporter Gene Herson showedup in Charleston to give a check' andmake "solidarity" remarks to some members at the union hall. When the Nordanaship appeared the next day, he conspicuously disappeared into thin air and wasnowhere to be seen when the picketing resumed despite the massive policemobilization. Was this another exampleof Spartacist League/ICL abstentionismlike instructing your then-trade unionsupporters in Brazil to "pull their handsfrom the boiling water" of the struggle tokeep police ou.! of their union as you dida few years ago?This is consistent with your refusal to march in the 25,000-strong April1999 San Francisco mobilization forMumia which occurred simultaneouslywith a coastwide longshore union shutdown of all U.S. ports from Mexico toCanada. Your initial reporting disparagedthis racially-integrated industrial action,like PMA, the employers' association,although your more recent articles haveadmitted that this was a step in the rightdirection-without mentioning that thisis a change in your line.All of this smacks of your sectarianismand absteritionism in the now-historic1984 San Francisco longshore antiapartheid action. First you opposed theII-day action, then in midstream changedcourse and gave it critical supportfrom the sidelines without ever joiningthe union-supported picket line and, ofcourse, never acknowledging your scandalous about-face. Given your record isthere any wonder why longshore workerswould say that SL stands for "sidelines"?Finally, in the midst of the present warhysteria, revolutiOriary Marxists don'tconvince workers to break the chains ofcapital's' "national unity';'by uncriticallyquoting black Democrat Jesse Jackson,Jr.'s patriotic remarks about the terroristattacks. Rather yours is the centristmethod of social chauvinist opportunism

Letterlooking for cover in the heat of an intensifying capitalist repression.Jack HeymanWV replies: Jack Heyman's open h o s ~ tility toward. the Spartacist League andour spokesman at the s u p p o ~ t rally forthe Charleston Fi'\'e held at the International Longshore and Warehouse Union(ILWU) Local 10 hall in San Franciscolast October 10 may come as a surpriseto some of the many longshoremen whoattended that rally and who applaudedour spokesman following her remarksfrom the floor. They also stopped Heyman, who was chairing the meeting,from cutting her off. Heyman's letterdoes everything possible to disparage herintervention, and for that matter the rallyitself, which he considers too small tohave been important. However, what hedoesn't do-and this is very revealingis say one single word about the contentof her speech.Against the union officials' talk at themeeting of "going to the polls" to voteDemocrat, our spokesman clearly advocated a political fight within the unions toforge a new, class-struggle leadership,against the existing labor bureaucratswho deceive American workers and blackpeople by pushing the illusion that thecapitalist .Democratic Party defends theinterests of labor and minorities. Sheargued for the political independence ofthe working class from all capitalist parties arid institutions and for building aworkers party, a party capable of leadingthe working class in the fight to throw outthe capitalist order of exploitation andracism and to create a new socialist society, where those who labor rule.For the Spartacist League, this is a perspective of bringing revolutionary consciousness to the working class, which isnecessary if the working class is to freeitself from capitalist exploitation, wageslavery and racism. For Heyman, wholong ago offered up his services to thepro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, leadership means making occasional "progressive" noises while helping the labor fakers keep the workers firmly within thebounds of the capitalist system. For him,to become an officer of the union is moreimportant than making a political fightwithin the unions against the misleaderswho tie labor to the class enemy throughthe Democratic Party.The Local 10 rally in San Franciscoincluded a showing of video excerptsof the 9 June 2001 marc h in Columbia,continued on page 9

Several thousandturned out for June2001 labor protestin Columbia, SouthCarolina in defenseof Charleston Five,longshoremenvictimized for'defense of theirunion againstJanuary 2000 policeassault (below).

WORKERS VANGUARD


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Unions Brotest Murder of Catholic Bostal WorkerNorthern Ireland: Imperialist "Peace"

Fraud Fuels Loyalist Terror

Faith/PA Hugh Russell/Irish NewsPostal workers at funeral for Catholic co-worker Daniel McColgan, whose assassination by Loyalist paramilitaries sparked five-day postal strike. Right: Postalworkers union contingent at January 18 Belfast protest.DUBLIN, January 19-The killing of20-year-old Catholic postal worker Daniel McColgan by Protestant Loyalistparamilitaries in Belfast has provokeda rare d isplay of. united protest actionby Catholic and Protestant workers inNorthern Ireland. McColgan's murder bythe Ulster Defence Association (UDA)as he arrived at work in the early morning of January 12 is the latest incidentin a dramatic upsurge of Loyalist terror against Catholics in the context ofthe imperialist-imposed "peace process."The Red Hand Defenders, a cover nameoften used by the UDA, subsequentlythreatened to kill Catholics working inProtestant areas including postal workers, teachers and transit workers.

British Troops Out Now!

When they heard about McColgan'smurder, postal workers organised by theCommunication Workers Union (CWU)walked off the job across NorthernIreland, refusing to return to work forfive days in response to the threatsagainst Catholic workers. Trade unionsrepresenting both Catholic and Protestant workers condemned the murder andthreats. Yesterday, the Irish Congressof Trade Unions (ICTU) called a halfday public sector strike against sectarianattacks and organised mass rallies in Belfast, Derry and several other cities.'Upwards of 15,000 attended the rallyin Belfast and thousands more demonstrated elsewhere. Trade-union contingents included the CWU, NASUWT andINTO teachers unions, National Unionof Journalists, AMICUS (rail, aerospaceand other workers), UNISON (hospital

a

and school workers) and Northern IrelandPublic Servants Association. The rallyrepresented a broad swathe of NorthernIrish society. Protestant and Catholic, oldand young, men and women showed upto express their revulsion at the murderof McColgan and the upsurge in antiCatholic terror.The proletarian responses to the Loyalist murder campaign showed that it isthe integrated working class that has boththe interest in combating sectarian terrorand the social power to do so. However,the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucratsworked to divert the justified outrage ofthe workers into support for the imperialist "peace" fraud, which has in factresulted in an escalation of anti-Catholicviolence. The bureaucrats also tied workers to their own eapitalist exploiters. TheICTU sought and received the endorsement of the rallies from the bosses association, the CBI, and the British imperialist Secretary of State for NorthernIreland, John Reid.Obscenely, the Belfast rally wasaddressed by Northern Ireland First Minister David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). David Ervine of theProgressive Unionist Party (PUP), whichis a front for the notorious anti-CatholicUlster Volunteer Force (UVF), was alsopresent. While embracing the likes of

-September 2001: Catholic families in Belfast faced Loyalist blockade andpolice lines while trying to take children to school.25 JANUARY 2002

Trimble, Ervine and the murderous British imperialist state, the ICTU organisersemphasised that "militant Republicans"were not welcome at the rallies, thoughEducation Minister Martin McGuinnessof Sinn Fein, which supports the "peaceprocess," was there. ICTU AssistantGeneral Secretary Peter Bunting called"on all paramilitary groups to dissolve,"but predictably said not a word againstthe anti-Catholic killers of the Britisharmy and the Royal Ulster Constabulary(RUC), now renamed the Police Serviceof Northern Ireland (PSNI). The ICTUbureaucrats even ensured that there wereno pictures at the rally of McColgan orother recent victims of sectarian tyrror.The class collaboration pushed by thetrade-union tops is a deadly danger to theworking class and an obstacle to fighting against Loyalist terror. Oppression ofthe Catholic minority in Northern Irelandis the very foundation of the Orange(Protestant-dominated) statelet and isreinforced by British imperialism. Sectarianism serves the interests of the capitalist exploiters by keeping the workingclass divided. To be effective, any fightagainst Loyalist terror must confront thecapitalist system that breeds it as wellas the state forces which back the Loyalists-the British Army and PSNI. Keyin making workers conscious of this factand in breaking them from illusionsin the imperialist "peace" fraud is theintervention of revolutionary proletarianinternationalists.Comrades from the Dublin SpartacistGroup went to the rally in Belfast and distributed Workers Vanguard and the Spartacist League/Britain's Workers Hammer.The workers that our comrades spoketo, including construction, rail and postal workers, generally saw. the imperialist "peace" as better than-and the onlyalternative to-a return to the widespreadcommunalist violence of the 1970s and, 80s. On the other hand, there was universal acknowledgement that things haverecently gotten worse. One rail workernoted that when the Good Friday Agreement was signed there were a lot of hopesthat things would get better, especially forthe youth, but with the upsurge in sectar-

ian attacks he was thinking that his teenage son should leave Northern Ireland.Our comrades called for the withdrawal of the British Army; one construction worker replied, "They shouldall get out, what we need is a workersarmy!" We explained our perspective ofprogrammatically based workers militiasto combat Loyalist thuggery and all sectarian terror. We also argued that a justsolution to the situation in Northern Ireland will only come about through workers revolution throughout Ireland andBritain.The following article is reprinted fromWorkers Hammer No. 179 (Winter 2001-2002).

WORKERSllAMMER'tThe 11 September attack on the WorldTrade Center was a gift to Tony Blairin several ways, not least that theIRA announced. on 23 October thatthey had begun to decommission their

weapons. The British government claimsto be waging a "war against terrorism" inthe interests of "democracy" and the"civilised world" against religious fanatics. Terrorism anyone? How about theterrorism of the British state, such as themassive bombing of Afghanistan, andbefore this Serbia, in which this bloodthirsty Labour government took centrestage? What about British imperialism'sdomination of Ireland, which lasted forcenturies and created a militarised garrison state in the North where the facadeof democracy was never much in evidence and where no one had any reasonto believe in such myths as "unarmedBobbies." As for religious zealots, thereare very few Muslims in Northern Ireland but British rule there rests on collaboration with a gang of crazed fundamentalist Protestant bigots.We said in 1993 that "Any imperialist'deal' will be bloody and brutal and willnecessarily be at the expense of theoppressed Catholic minority. And itwould not do .anyg ood for working-classProtestants either" (Workers HammerNo. 138, November/December 1993).This has been borne out: Loyalistviolence against Catholics has continued, firebombings and pipe bombings arecommonplace. There were 220 Loyalistcontinued on page 10

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Bosses Profit,Workers Pay...(continued from page 1)class froni whose labor the capitalistsderive their profits. Mass unemploymentand recurrent crises-as well as episodicswindles and financial chicanery-areendemic to capitalism. When the capitalists can no longer secure a desirable rateof profit froIl! increased prQduction, theyslash production-and jobs-and boomturns to bust.Moreover, while much is made ofthe con,nections between the RepublicanWhite House and Enron (which alsodoled out money to Democratic candidates), the fact' of the matter is that thecapitalist stl\te is not some kind of "neutral" agency that somehow represents the"will of the people." Rather, in the wordsof Karl Marx, "The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managingthe common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." And these affairs are equallyrepresented by the other party of American capitalism-the Democrats.Break with the Democrats-Build a Workers Party!

In an interview with the Los AngelesTimes (9 December 2001), AFL-CIOpresident John Sweeney boasted, "Wesupported the president and his administration in the war on terrorism fromthe very first day." He then went on tocomplain that "the people who are suffering the most-the hundreds of thousandsof laid-off workers-have not had theirissues of unemployment insurance and

health-care coverage addressed," whilepromoting the Democrats for "trying theirdamnedest to get worker protections."As Leon Trotsky, co-leader with v.1.Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution,observed, "The labor bureaucrats . dotheir level best in words and deeds todemonstrate to the 'democratic' statehow reliable and indispensable they arein peacetime and especially in time ofwar" ("Trade Unions in the Epoch ofImperialist Decay" [1940]). SupportingBush's war against Afghanistan, at homethese labor lieutenants of the capitalistclass serve to police the unions and

channel the workers' anger into Democratic Party bourgeois electoral sm.In New York City, the municipal labortops banked on getting a Democratelected mayor and kept their membersworking without a contract, in some casesfor up to two years. Now, with a recessionand another Republican in City Hall,

the United Federation of Teachers hasdropped its earlier demand for a 23 percent pay raise and sent a letter to its membership saying it will merely try to "ekeout more" than Giuliani's original offerof8 percent over two years .. The Democrats Sweeney praises fordoing their "damnedest" for workingpeople oversaw the "welfare reform" thathas condemned millions to homelessnessand hunger and pushed through a seriesof attacks on immigrants and civil liberties that paved the way for the Bushadministration's repressive legislation.That the union tops continue to be able

Agins/NY TimesNYC: Former welfare recipients hired last year by Parks Department as part ofcynical "welfare to work" scheme now face layoffs.4

Spartacist contingentat February 2000protest againstacquittal ofNYPD killers ofAfrican immigrantAmadou Diallo.

to sell the Democrats as the "friends" oflabor and blacks is simply a statement ofhow openly vicious and pro-big businessthe RepUblicans are.Commenti!lg on the huge and growing chasm between rich and poor in theU.S.-the widest in the industrializedworld-Paul Krugman noted, "You mighthave expected the concentration of income at the top to provoke populistdemands to soa k the rich. But... theDemocrats haven't moved left, the Republicans have moved right" (New YorkTimes, 4 January). At the same time,fearful that the glaring inequality couldspark social conflagration, the Democrats and RepUblicans have joined invastly increasing the powers of staterepression.The boom of the last decade, with itsfree-wheeling profit-gouging, was hailedas definitive proof of the superiority ofthe capitalist "free market" and the "failure of Marxism." Emboldened by capitalist counterrevolution in the SovietUnion and East Europe, the Americanimperialists have perpetrated one military. adventure after another againstdefenseless peoples abroad '


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YODDg SparlaeDSUCLA Students ProtestRacist Ideologues for U.S. Imperialism

Right-wing demagogue David Horowitz, notorious apologist for Americanslavery, was recently joined in his "Battlefor America's Youth" by the equally siriister Dinesh D'Souza, whose motto asone-time editor of the Dartmouth Reviewwas "Genocide is never having to sayyou're sorry." A more accurate name forthis affair would be the "Battle to SilenceAmerica's Youth." On January 14, thesetwo racist ideologues descended on theUCLA campus in a speaking engagement to whip up pro-war patriotism andadvance the capitalist rulers' "anti-terror"crackdown that immediately targets foreign students and immigrants but also hasblack people, labor, leftists and antiwaryouth squarely in its cross hairs.Much to the chagrin of Horowitz andD'Souza, there were more balloons thansupporters at their outdoor "Rally forAmerica," where the two were met withscornful jeers from individual studentsand a defiant protest we Marxists of theSpartacus Youth Club initiated, whichwas later accompanied by a sizable contingent of black and minority students organized by the UCLA African Student Union(ASU). Our united-front call was issuedaround the slogans: "Protest David Horowitz and Dinesh D'Souza; Racist Ideologues of U.S. Imperialism! U.S'/UNINATO Out of Afghanistan, Central Asia,the Persian Gulf, and the Near East! DownWith the Racist Anti-Immigrant Witch-hunt! Defend Black RightS!" In our signs,chants and speeches, we sought to drivehome the understanding that racist reaction and anti-immigrant witchhunts arethe domestic component of U.S. imperialism's wars abroad.An obviously humiliated Horowitzpredictably resorted to his Big Lie smearsand slandered us Marxist protesters as"fascists." In a whining letter to the UCLADaily Bruin (17 January), Horowitz bemoans the unfavorable coverage of hisright-wing rally and ludicrously claimsthat the SYC "had obviously come to prevent anyone from hearing what DineshD'Souza and I had to say." In fact, the aimof Horowitz and D'Souza's speaking touris to intimidate and muzzle all anti-racistand antiwar voices on college campuses.We protested these apologists for racistreaction and slavery, exposing theirattempts to provide the ideological justification for nidal oppression and imperialist war. It's not our problem if Horowitz occasionally choked on his wordswhen hearing such chants as "Horowitz,D'Souza : What do we see? Racist tools ofthe bourgeoisie!", "Horowitz, D'Souza:dogs of war! Workers revolution is whatwe're for!" and "Black rights, immigrantrights-Same struggle, same fight!"

Our spirited demonstration stands instark contrast to the conspicuous inactionof the reformist groups Socialist Actionand Spark and the liberal Student Coalition Against the War (SCAW)-backedby the fake socialists on campus-whichwere all absent that day. The InternationalSocialist Organization (ISO) showed upwith an unsigned flyer but never evenput up their placards and, refusing aninvitation to join with and speak at ourdemonstration, quickly moved their tablecloser to the fringe of the pro-Horowitzrally with its huge American flag. The"socialist" anti-Communists of the ISOpreferred to peddle their wares in the25 JANUARY 2002

Young SpartacusJanuary 14: SYC-initiated protest against Horowitz and D'Sou za at UCLA.shadow of Horowitz rather than risk anyassociation with us Marxists.Horowitz expects black youth to act asthe reformists on campus did and silentlytolerate his racist provocations. Whatreally enraged him was the sight of 60or more black students who marchedthrough the plaza and protested alongsideour demonstration, holding signs saying"We Owe America Nothing!" and "Education for All!" The racist pigs Horowitzand D'Souza have opined that slavery leftno enduring legacy on American societyand that racism no longer exists (exceptagainst "Whitey"). Last spring, Horowitz. orchestra ted a national ad campaign oncollege campuses that attacked reparations for black people on the grotesquebasis that slavery actually "created wealthfor black Americans." D' Souza likewiseis a notorious racist bigot who deridesblacks as "destructive and pathological," blaming poverty among blacks andLatinos on "shocking moral behavior"and the lack of a "work ethic." These arerevolting lies! A m ~ r i c a is a racist hellholefor black people and other minorities!

While opposing the racist agenda ofHorowitz and D'Souza, the ASUdid notendorse our united-front call and insteadheld its own rally at a more remote loca-. tion before marching through the proHorowitz rally and assembling nextto ourprotest site. In calling their separate demonstration, the ASU leadership consciously sought to disappear any opposition toU.S. imperialism's war in Afghanistan.The ASU refused to allow us a speaker attheir rally because of our vocal oppositionto U.S. imperialism. An unsigned flyerdistributed at the ASU rally characterizedthe bombing of devastated Afghanistan asa fight "for the protection of human life." .This is a grotesque alibi for racist American capitalism. U.S. imperialist militarymobilizations are always accompanied bydomestic repression, particularly targetiQglabor, black people and immigrants. Thefight for black freedom is integrally linkedto the struggle against U.S. imperialism.It's no accident that Horowitz andD'Souza combine racist demagogy withpro-imperialist flag-waving in agitatingfor state repression against any and alldissent or social struggle. The two havelaunched a neo-McCarthyite campaign onthe campuses to brand all who oppose. U.S. imperialism's war on Afghanistan orthe bosses' "national unity" front at homeas traitors. Horowitz put an advertisementin 15 campus newspapers in late Septem-

ber entitled "An Open Letter to the 'AntiWar' Demonstrators: Think Twice BeforeYou Bring the War Home," in which hecomplains that during the Vietnam War"this country was too tolerant towards thetreason of its enemies within."Horowitz named everyone from leftliberals like Noam Chomsky, to blackDemocrats like Barbara Lee, to everysingle antiwar student as "The EnemyWithin ... A shameful roster of traitors,cowards, defeatists and fifth-columnistsflourishing in America's heartland." Ingoing after academics and students,Horowitz is carrying out the same workas the sinister American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by thesecond lady of U.S. imperialism, LynneCheney. Two months ago, ACTA releaseda report including a blacklist of 40 collegeprofessors "short on patriotism." Theirintent is a chilling suppression of anycampus political activity that isn:t hand inhand with "Big Brother" Ashcroft. .'Much of Horowitz's fire is directed atliberals, who in fact think peace is patrioticand war is just a bad policy. As Marxists,

, BOSTONThursday, 6:30 p.m.

January 31:Marxism: A Guide to ActionBoston UniversityCollege of Arts and Sciences725 Commonwealth Ave.Room information and readings:(617) 666-9453

CHICAGOAlternate Tuesdays, 6 p.m.

February 5:The Capitalist State-An Instrumentof Organized TerrorUniversity of Illinois at ChicagoBehavioral Sciences Bldg.,1007 West Harrison Str-eetRoom information and readings:(312) 563-0441

LOS ANGELESAlternate Saturdays, 2 p.m.February 2:Economics of Communism and theTransition Period3806 Beverly Blvd., Suite 215Information and readings: (213) 3f!.0-8239

we understand that war is inherent to capitalism. Bu t whoever is his target of themoment, Horowitz's talk of "treason" isnothing but a thinly veiled justification for government repression of antiwaractivism and comes at a time when immigrants are facing government persecution.Foreign students already are afraidto attend college in the U.S., and thosealready here live in fear of being rounded'up and held for "voluntary questioning;'not knowing whether they will join morethan one thousand who have already beenrounded up. Over 200 campus administrations have handed over the names of foreign students to the FBI or INS. At UCLA,students ofNear Eastern and Muslim backgrounds, in particular those associated withthe Muslim student newspaper, have beentargeted as objects of special scrutiny.D'Souza at UCLA denounced protesters as "homegrown Taliban." This takessome chutzpah. As a former Reagan administration "policy analyst," D'Souzawould certainly know something aboutU.S. imperialism arming and bankrollingIslamic reactionaries in Afghanistan. Horowitz and D'Souza have the vile distinction of being apologists for siavery on twocontinents: black chattel slavery in America and the enslavement of women in Afghanistan. In contrast to our left opponentswho cheered the anti-Soviet crusade, wesaid in 1979: "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend the social gains of the Russian Revolution to the Afghan peoples!"The fight against racism, poverty andwar has to be linked to the struggle againstthe entire capitalist system. We seek to winradical youth to the understanding thatwhat is needed is a revolutionary workersparty that champions the cause of all theoppressed in the fight for socialist revolution. It is by joining such a struggle thatradical-minded students and youth canhelp to unify the working class to overthrow this whole rotten capitalist systemand open the door to human freedom.

NEW YORK CITYAlternate Tuesdays, 7 p.m.

January 29:Marxism: For the InternationalRule of the Working Class!Columbia University (116th and Broadway)Room information and readings:(212) 267-1025

TORONTOWednesday, 5:30 p.m.

January 30: Live From Death Row:This is Mumia Abu-JamalVideo showing and discussionYork University Student Ctr., Room 307Information: (416) [email protected]

VANCOUVERAlternate Wednesdays, 6 p.m.

January 30:For Unc6nditional Military Defenseof China Against Imperialism andInternal Counterrevolution!University of British ColumbiaStudent Union Bldg., Room 21;3Information and readings: (604)[email protected]

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- ~ ~ - - - - - - - - - - - - ~ ~ ~ - - - - - - -

From Korea Through the Vietnam WarThe"Am

We print below the first part of an edu-cational on the American left given overtwo days by Spartacist League CentralCommittee member Joseph Seymour toa gathering of Spartacus Youth Clubmembers and youth from throughout theInternational, Communist League in NewYork last summer.

theury"nationalism, he argued in effect that theinterests of a black steel worker in theU.S. were fundamentally closer to thoseof a Brazilian peasant than to those of awhite steel worker in the U.S.

Spartacist

Let me begin by asking and answeringtwo questions \Yhich may have occurredto some of you. Why did I want to givean educational on this particular subject,the history of the American left from theend of the Korean War in 1953 throughthe end of the Vietnam War in 1975?And why this particular periodization?Part One: liberalism and the Crisis

The absence of a visible left wing ofthe labor movement shaped especiallythe early New Left in another importantway. The only left critics of Americansociety which liberal youth encounteredor knew were intellectuals. Consider aleft-liberal high school student in 1960in New York City who attended a rallyfor nuclear disarmament-one of themain fashionable liberal causes of theday. He's addressed by the head of thePhysics department of the City Collegeof New Yock, by the pastor of the Riverside Church, by the nationally knownpediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. But heis not addressed by a representative ofthe New York City Central Labor Councilor one of the major NYC unions.

of American StalinismI'll address the second question first.This period corresponds to the , d e v e l o p ~ ment of a distinct generation ofAmericanleftists, one whose experience and corresponding outlook was quite differentfrom the preceding generation of leftistswhose main formative experience wasthe mass militant labor struggles duringthe Great Depression of the 1930s. In the1960s, young leftist radicals called themselves the New Left as opposed to the"old left," which had been dominatedby Jhe pro-Moscow Stalinist CommunistParty.What I'l l call the New Left generation,

of which I'm a member, makes up amajority of the present SL leadership andcadre. And this is also the case for ourleft opponents-the International Socialist Organization, Progressive Labor (PL),Workers World et a1.This generation of future leftist radicals acquired. their first fragments ofpolitical consciousness in the intenselyanti-Communist climate of the postKorean War period. I first started readingthe newspaper at the age of ten in 1954.One of the stories I remember readingwas about the execution of Juliu,s andEthel Rosenberg, who were Jewish American Communists convicted of betrayingthe "secret" of the atomic bomb to SovietRussia. The new generation of young liberal idealists first entered the politicalscene during the Southern-centered civilrights movement of the late'50s and early'60s. During the '60s they were propelledleftward by the combined impact of the

Cuban Revolution, the Northern blackghetto rebellions and, above all, the Vietnam War.By the early 1970s, the most serious and left-wing elements of the NewLeft joined or formed organizationswhich claimed to be or claimed tobe building the "Marxist-Leninist" vanguard party of the American proletariat. As such, they went into factoriesand engaged in trade-union left oppositional activity. For example, there werehalf a dozen or more different "MarxistLeninist" groups operating in the Fremont General Motors plant in the BayArea in California in this period. Oneof them was us. I f you want a firsthandaccount, talk to comrades Joan andDarlene.Another reason for beginning with theKorean War period is that the development and outlook of the New Left was'decisively conditioned by the collapse ofthe old left under the pressure of ColdWar anti-Communism. In the mid 1950s,the Communist Party (CP) and also theTrotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP)suffered massive rightward defections.In 1953, in the Cochran-Clarke fight, theSWP lost 20 percent of its members.In 1956-57, the CP lost three-quarters ofits members. Furthermore these losseswere heavily concentrated among the parties' active trade unionists. Workers whowhen they were younger had joined thecommunist movement during the leftward radicalization of the 1930s or during

TWUAmid Cold War witchhunt in 1948, union chief and onetime CP supporterMike Quill (center) led vicious red purge of Transport Workers Union.6

World War II, when the U.S. was alliedwith Soviet Russia against Nazi Germany, now left it en masse.The defections of the mid 1950s werealso concentrated in the middle generation of the CP and SWP, people betweentheir mid 30s and late 50s. A few yearslater, when young leftist radicals spokedisparagingly of the old left, they meantthis in a biological as well as an ideological sense. In 1963, I was briefly in theProgressive Labor youth group, and Iwas selling Chinese, Maoist pamphletsto a CP May Day rally. Most of the people who bought them were over 70. Ofcourse, now my attitude toward 70-yearold communists is very different-muchless disrespectful--:-than when I was abrash 19-year-old.The purging and self-purging of redsfrom the labor movem,ent during thefirst decade of the Cold War was byfar the single most important nega-tive factor shaping the outlook ,of whatwould become the New Left. Becausewhen young liberal activists-black andwhite-entered the political scene duringthe civil rights movement, they encountered a labor movement which had nosignificant (or even insignificant) leftwing that shared their own views towardracial oppression and Cold War militarism. And for them, these were the keyquestions of the day.All wings of the labor bureaucracy were militantly anti-Communist andstaunch anti-Soviet Cold Warriors. Allwings defended the racist status quo inthe North and only paid lip service,to opposing legalized racial segregationand supporting the democratic rights ofblacks in the South. The head of the AFLCIO, George Meany, was directly andpersonally based on the white labor aristocracy of the construction trades, inwhich jobs were handed down fromfather to son and uncle to nephew. Andeven the racially integrated industrialunions, like the United Auto Workers(UAW), were pervaded by racist practices. For example, the UAW skilledtrades section iil this period was almostexclusively white.Under these conditions, there developed the view that would become a cen,tral premise of New Left ideology: thefundamental division within Americansociety and also the world at large wasthat of race and not class. When in thelate '60s Stokely Carmichael expoundedthe doctrine of "revolutionary" black

So there developed the view thatamong the white population only students and ,other intellectuals could bemobilized as a social group against racialoppression and Cold War militarism. In1966, Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky's biographer, who considered himself an oldfashioned classical Marxist, toured theU.S., speaking at Vietnam antiwar protests and other left events. He was bothsurprised and disturbed by the intellectualelitism among young radicals who considered themselves opponents of American capitalism and imperialism. Andat the Socialist Scholars Conference,Deutscher lashed out at his audience:"Do you really take such a contemptuousview of your working classes that youthiflk that you alone are so sensitive orso noble as to be dissatisfied with thisdegrading society and that they cannotfind it in themselves to be dissatisfied?Do you really believe that they are somuch more prone, and by nature conditioned, to be corrupted by the meretricioug. advantages of this war-flourishingcapitalism than you are?"Much of. the audience did think exactlythat at that time.A few years later things changed.Many of these same people went intothe factories, ran for union office and-

10 and behold-they became workerists.In some cases, they capitulated to thebackward prejudices of white workerswhom they had previously disdained forhaving those prejudices. Guys who had aPhD in classics, who could read Homerin the original archaic Greek, talked likeMarlon Brando in the film On the Water-front. You know: "Us woikers gotta fightback against da bosses."A personal anecdote in this regard. In1970-71, we did an entry into the PL-ledStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS)after the original broad umbrella SDShad split. For a time our relations withProgressive Labor were not that bad-nothostile-because we helped legitimizetheir SDS operation. They could say,"SDS is not a PL front group. Look, weeven have counterrevolutionary Trotskyites in it."One of the heads of the PL-SDS fraction was a guy called Bob Leonhardt,who, like a lot of PL male honchos, cultivated this Brandoesque speaking style-

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no words over three syllables. I learnedhe had a PhD in classics. Since he wasn'ta bad guy, one day I decided to play abenign trick on him. I went up to himand said, "Bob, I heard you majoredin classics. -Which, do you think is abetter translation of the Iliad, the Richmond Lattimore or the Robert Fitzgerald?" He thought a few seconds and saidhe thought the Lattimore was better. Hemomentaril y forgot he wa sn't supposedto know or. Care about such highfalutinintellectual matters.The American Left andAmerican Liberalism

So why do I want to discuss the American left in this period apart from indulging in personal nostalgia? As we frequently emphasize, the United States isthe only advanced capitalist country inwhich the working class lacks any political class consciousness, even in a reform- ,ist, social-democratic form. The mainreason for this is the deep racial divisionin the working class and society at large.A consequence of this is the ideological and political hegemony of liberalism-organizationally represented by theDemocratic Party-in the labor movement, the organizations of the oppressedethnic minoritie's and all "progressive"movements.American leftists-Stalinists and Trotskyists in the 1930s, New Left Maoistsand Spartacists in the early '70s, yourselves and -our left opponents today""':""operate in an environment dominated byliberalism, whether in the trade. unions,

In the black and Latino communitiesor on the campuses. Most of the people you seek to influence and recruitwhether on the picket line of a -laborstrike or at a campus protest for, affirmative action-will subscribe to llberalideas in some form.Here it's important to emphasize thatliberalism is not a single, logically coherent doctrine. It' s not the political equivalent of Euclidean geometry in whicheverything follows logically from a fewbasic premises. Liberalism is a complexof different and contradictory ideas,attitudes and values. The liberalism ofa black local union president is not thesame as the liberalism of a white woman college professor. On many importantissues they'll be opposed to one another,even hostile to one another. It's preciselybecause a liberal outlook consists of different and contradictory elements that liberals can evolve into revolutionary socialists and then devolve back again intoliberals.

The American left is constantly interacting with American liberalism. Andthis interaction is a two-way, not a oneway, street. You seek to recruit and influence liberals. But they also, often unconsciously, seek to influence you, to winyou to their outlook.In 1940, Trotsky, in discussions withthe SWP leadership, expressed seriousconcern that the party trade unionistswere too sOft, too conciliatory towardso-called "progressive," pro-DemocraticParty workers with whom they collabo-25 JANUARY 2002

rated on shopfloor and union issues. Hesaid:"We are in a bloc with so-called p r o ~ gressives-not only fakers but honestrank and file. Yes,_ they are honest andprogressive but from time to time theyvote for Roosevelt-once in four years.This -is decisive ... . The danger-a terrible danger:---is adaptation to the proRooseveltian trade unionists.". And he went on to generalize. Partytrade unionists, he emphasized,

"deal with the class, the backwardelements; they are the party vanguard in theworking class. The necessary field ofadaptation is among the trade unions.The people who have this adaptation astheir job are those in the trade unions.That is why the pressure of the backwardelements is always reflected throughthe trade union comrades. It is a healthypressure; but it can also break themfrom the historic class interests-theycan become opportunists."- "Discussions with Trotsky"(June 1940), reprinted.inWritings 1939-40

It was precisely 'this layer of SWP tradeunionists, about whom Trotsky expressedconcern, who 13 years later left the partyen bloc in the Cochran-Clarke fight.At the beginning of 1956, the American Communist Party had an estimated20,000 members. By the end of 1957,it had perhaps 5,000 members. Whathappened to the 15,000 people who leftthe CP? Most became independent leftliberal activists working in and aroundthe Democratic Party.The same pattern repeated itself in thenext generation of American leftist radicals. In 1968 or 169, I and a few other

Communist Partycartoon eulogizedDemocraticpresidentRoosevelt.

comrades-in those days there were onlya few other comrades-were sellingSpartacist at a rally in Harlem jointlysponsored by theBlack Panther Party andSDS. The featured speaker was the Panther chief of staff, David Hilliard, whou ~ e d the occasion to expound on Marxistdialectics; a subject of which he waseffectively ignorant. But to his credit, Hilliard was trying to educate black ghettoyouth and white student radicals in Marxism as he understood it. A few years ago,Hilliard ran for Oakland city council as amember of the Democratic Party.In 1972, iIi the heyday of New Left

Stewart/BethelMany NElw Left radicals later turned intoliberal activists. David Hilliard (right), formerBlack Panther Party leader, announces hisDemocratic Party candidacy for Oakland citycouncil, 1999.Maoism, I would estimate there mayhave been as many as 40,000 1 ftwing activists in this' country who weremembers of groups claiming to bethe "Marxist-Leninist" vanguard of theAmerican proJetariat. Ten years later, Idoubt if there were 5,000. So what happened to these tens of thousands ofex-"Marxist-Leninists"? Most droppedout of politics, and those who didn't weremainly involved in fashionable liberalcauses like feminism and environmentalism. People who in the late '60s wereinvolved in defending the Black Panthersagainst murderous state repression wereten years later defending fish, amphibians and raptors supposedly threatenedby government and corporate policies.Young women college students who inthe late '60s were marching and takingover campus buildings to demand freedom for Huey Newton and other impris- ,oned Panther leaders ten years later werebourgeois feminists quite hostile to youngblack lumpen males.The basic point is that we are constantly in battle with liberalism, whichuses -different weapons, strategies andtactics against the left in different periods.Sometimes it's repression, sometimesco-optation, sometimes both simultaneously. Liberals can denounce Americanimperialism when they want. to appearvery left in order to appeal to young radicals. We have no copyright on that term.We can't sue them for misusing Leninist terminology for their own purposes.When young black radicals raised the slogan of "black power" in the mid-l ate' 60s,the demagogic black Democratic Congressman from Harlem, Adam ClaytonPowell, began using it, too. "You wantblack power," he said, "well, here I am!"To better fight liberalism in the presentand future, it's useful to analyze the battles of the past.The Korean War and theAnti-Communist Witchhunt

Today, when most Americans think ofthe Korean War, they think of the TVprogram M.A.S.H. But the Korean Warwas an event of no little importance in

_ Xinhua

DaSilva/NY Timesmodern world history, and it had animportant effect on the American left notonly in its immediate aftermath but inthe longer term as well.

Objectively, the Korean War endedin a stalemate. The armistice agreementrestored the division of Korea as it waswhen the war had begun. North Korearemained a deformed workers state alliedwith the Soviet Union and China; SouthKorea remained a capitalist state and apuppet regime of the U.S.Subjectively, however, the Americanpeople regarded the Korean War as adefeat. The greatest military power onearth had been fought to a standstill byCommunist China and North Korea. Thatwasn't supposed to happen. Malcolm Xlater commented on the Korean War withhis usual perceptive wit. He said if youget into the ring with Joe Louis-thegreat black heavyweight boxing champion of the 1930s and'40s-and the fightends in a draw, you've won. Well, theAmerican people thought that Red Chinahad won the Korean War because ithadn't lost. Also during the Korean War,the Soviet Union successfully tested itsown hydrogen bomb. So the U.S. nolonger had a monopoly on this supposedultimate weapon of mass destruction.Under these conditions the U.S. government incited and orchestrated an antiCommunist witchhunt throughout American society, including especially the labormovement. Liberal Democnltic politicians like Hubert Humphrey and unionbureaucrats mobilized backward workersto purge and terrorize reds. The bourgeoismedia depicted world Communism as apowerful, red-armored giant on the marchstriving to conquer the world and turn itinto a global version of a Stalinist gulag.At the same time, the American peoplesaid to themselves: never again shouldthe U.S. fight a war like that in Korea, awar of attrition with Asian Communist _countries.Thus, the longer-term impact of theKorean War on the American left wasquite different from its immediate effect.The immediate effect was to intensify theanti-Communist witchhunt. However, inthe 1960s the memory of the Korean Warwas one of the important factors in therapid erosion of p09ular support forthe Vietnam War, long before the levelof casualties in Vietnam reached thosein Korea.The introduction to American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon's Speechesto the Party documenting the 1952-53Cochran-Clarke fight describes quite wellthe often violent" anti-Communism, evenin sections of the unionized working classin which the left had previously beeninfluential. It cites the situation of Sol andGenora Dollinger, the leaders of theSWP's Flint, Michigan branch. Genorahad been a leader of the famous sitdownin the mid 1930s which established theUAW union in the Flint GM plant. But

Winter 1950: U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. continued on page 87


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New Left...(continued from page 7)now Sol, who worked there, was drivenout of the plant every day by a mob ofright-wing workers. And the same thingwas happening across .the country at thetime to the far more numerous Communist Party trade unionists.It was this a n t i - C o ~ r i l U n i s m at thebase of American society rather thangovernment persecution that demoralizedmuch of the ranks and cadre of the CPand SWP. This demoralization foundorganized expression in large right-wingfactions and then splits in these parties.After the Cochranites split from theSWP, they published for a short time amagazine called the American Socialist.They were desperate to overcome theiralienation from the mass of the Americanworking class caused by the Cold Warwith the Sino-Soviet states. Similarly, a .main slogan of the CP right-wingers wasreturning to the "mainstream of American political life."The Collapse ofAmerican Stalinism

Since the pro-Moscow CommunistParty was the' dominant force on theAmerican left until the crisis of 1956, Iwant to discuss the state of the party leading up to this crisis. There's a saying thatif you wear a mask long enough your facechanges to fit it. By the early 1950s, Ibelieve the faces of the ranks and cadre ofthe CP had changed to fit the mask of proDemocratic Party liberalism.When the American CP first supportedand worked in Roosevelt's DemocraticParty in the mid 1930s, as part of the turnof the world Stalinist movement towardpopular-frontism, its members consideredthis quite cynically as a tactical maneuver. Just a few years earlier, the CP haddenounced Roosevelt as a "social fascist.". But by the early 1950s, I think mostCPers had ceased entirely to believe intheir own formal ideology. They no longer believed there would be an Americanproletarian revolution like the RussianOctober Revolution led by an AmericanMarxist-Leninist vanguard party like theBolsheviks. They now really believedthat political and social progress in theU.S. would come about through reformsenacted by the' Democratic Party, with theCP acting as its left pressure group.A personal anecdote in this regard. In1964, I was arrested along with dozensof others in a major civil rights protestat the opening of the World's Fair inQueens. We were taken out to RikersIsland and put in holding pens for a dayor so. I was one of the last to be bailedout, around midnight. B.ailed out at thesame time was a girl I knew from CityCollege who was a member of the Communist Party youth group. Her parents,who were veteran CPers, picked her upand gave me a lift back to Manhattan.They asked us what exactly we haddone to get ourselves arrested. We ex-

WV PhotoMuch of the U.S. left today openlyaccommodates liberalism, like theISO in a December 1998 NYC demoagainst the bombing of Iraq.8

denounced our past history as one ofslavishly clinging to imported doctrines,the bankruptcy of which was now beingproven. Under the guise of 'fighting dog-matism' inherited from the era of the'cult of personality,' the Gates crowd [e pright wing represented by John Gates]concluded that Leninism was nothingmore than Marxism applied to the pecu-liar, backward condition of Russia-apurely 'Russian social phenomenon'and therefore not applicable in the U.S.They found Lenin's theories of the bour-geois state as an instrument of classrule to be particularly outmoded underU.S. conditions."

APBudapest workers topple statue of Stalin during 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

As I've previously indicated, mostof those who left the CP remained politically active as independent left liberals. In a sense, American liberalism nowacquired a cadre, people experiencedin building large-scale, popular-frontistprotest movements. This legion of exCPers played an important role in organizing all the main left-liberal and radicalmovements of the late' 50s and'60s-themovement for nuclear disarmament, thecivil rights movement in the North, thesupport groups for the Cuban Revolutionand the Vietnam antiwar movement.

plained that there were a number of different protest activities. Some of us haddisrupted the Budweiser beer exl,libit toprotest the fact that Budweiser had segregated operations in the South. Othershad attempted to shout down the Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, whowas addressing the opening of the Fair.When they heard that, they said: "Oh,that's very bad, they should have listenedto what he had to say." These weredecades-long members of the CP talkingin private to their daughter and a left radical acquaintance of hers.I believe this same attitude was prevalent or at least common among the members of the CP in the early '50s as well.There was also a relatively small minority of left CPers at this time who viewedthemselves as hard Bolsheviks. They, too,favored electoral support to the Democratic Party but considered this a reversible tactic.One such left CPer was Harry Haywood, one of the party's leading blackspokesmen. Comrade Emily tells me thatduring the 1920s Haywood was for a timea member of the Cannon faction in theCP. In the 1970s, Haywood, who had predictablybecome a Maoist, published anautobiography titled Black Bolshevik inwhich he recounted in great detail the bitter, decades-long animosity between leftwingers like himself and what he calledthe "right opportunist" forces who dominated the American Communist Party.The effect of the Cold War on leftCPers like Haywood, Milt Rosen, NelsonPeery was to deepen their commitment toStalinism and to Stalin. Why was that? Inthe late'40s ana early'50s, if you were a .known CP member, supporter or sympathizer and you wanted to keep your j ob-whether as a union official, a Hollywoodscreenwriter or college or high schoolteacher-you had to d e n ~ : l U n c e Stalin asthe bloody-handed dictator of a totalitarian police state. Since Stalin really wasthe bloody-handed dictator of a totalitarian police state, this made it easier to do.You could be an ex-Communist opportunist with a good conscience.But in reaction to this, left CPers likeHaywood locked on to the position thatthe Soviet Union was "building socialism" under the great, wise and benevolent leadership of comrade Stalin asa kind of talisman against opportunism.They brandished the portrait of Stalin asif it were a cross to ward off the liberalvampires who were sucking the lifebloodout of the Communist Party. lIn 1956, the world Communist movement was deeply shaken by what wascalled the "crisis of de-Stalinization." Itbegan in February when Soviet leaderNikita Khrushchev made a supposedly"secret" speech to the Soviet party congressdenouncing the crimes of Stalin,especially his crimes against Soviet Communists. This turned out to be one ofthe most publicized speeches in the history of the world. The ensuing relaxationof harsh Stalinist rule in East Europe ledin Hungary in October to a proletarian

political revolution, which was then suppressed by the Soviet Army.In some countries, notably Britain andJapan, the combined impact of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and theHungarian Revolution propelled a significant number of CP cadre to t ~ e left. Theyjoined the Trotskyist movement or whatthey thought was the Trotskyist movement. It was at this time that Trotskyismbecame a major factor on the British andJapanese far left.For the reasons I've been discussing,this did not happen in the United States.

Of the estimated 15,000 people who leftthe CP, only a relatively small handful joined the SWP. Incidentally, twoof these-Geoff White (who had beena second-level CP leader) and HarryTurner-later joined the RevolutionaryTendency in the SWP and went on to

Most of these ex-CPers did not becomeanti-Communists. They themselves hadbeen the victims of anti-Communism.They did not become anti-Soviet ColdWarriors but favored "peaceful coexistence" between the U.S. and the SovietUnion. Thus the main body of politicalactivists who had split from the CP to theright in 1956 or earlier came to occupy aposition on the American political spectrum intermediate between Cold War liberalism and traditional Moscow-line Stalinism. This was the same position thatthe early New Left would occupy in themid 1960s. In a sense, the ex-right-wingCPers were the political and in morethan a few cases biological parents of theNew Left.

WV PhotoSan Francisco: SL/SYC contingent in October antiwar protest raises call tobreak from Democratic Party.become founding members of the Spartacist League. Almost all the CP leftwingers remained in the party, defending the heritage of Stalin and supportingthe Soviet suppression of the HungarianRevolution. In his autobiography, HarryHaywood describes, from his own ideological vantage point, how the "crisis ofde-Stalinization" impacted on the fac.tional alignment and balance of forces inthe American Communist Party:. "Rather than finding a source of support.in the Soviet Union, we on the left werethrown completely off balance by thenew 'revelations.' At first we couldn'tbelieve Khrushchev made such a speech,thinking it must be some imperialistpropaganda stunt. When this initial reac-tion passed we tended to give the newSoviet leadership the benefit of the doubtand failed to grasp the full implicationsof this attack on Stalin."Theliquidationist right used this as anexcuse to attack proletarian internationalism in general, calling for a sweep-ing reevaluation of our line. They bitterly

The hardline left Stalinists who remained in the CP in '56 would also influence the New Left in a later period and ina different way. In the late 1950s, the disintegration of the world Stalinist movement reached a new, more advanced levelwith the Sino-Soviet split. At bottom, thisreflected the conflicting national inter-ests of the Russian and Chinese Stalinistbureaucracies. But at the time and for thenext several years, Mao's China adopteda more left-wing posture, denouncing theSoviet leaders for "revisionism" and forcollaborating with American imperialism.In the late 1950s and early' 60s, almostall the left Stalinists in the American CPleft to (orm an American Maoist movement, which was never unified but alwaysdivided into competing groups. As theNew Left radicals moved left in the midlate ;60s, .they thus encountered Stalinismin its then more attractive Maoist form.

[TO BE CONTINUED]WORKERS VANGUARD


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Letter...(continued from page 2)South Carolina organiied by the stateAFL-CIO, where thousands of tradeunionists from throughout the Southshowed up to demand freedom for theCharleston Five: Ever since picketingCharleston longshoremen, members ofthe International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), shut down a union-bustingstevedoring outfit and defied a viciousattack by 600 cops on 20 January 2000-a courageous stand that inspired workers through-out the region and the worldthe AFL-CIO union tops have carefullysought to diminish the real story of whathappened that day. After all, the job of thelabor bureaucracy is to prevent that kind .of class struggle.The union tops who spoke at theColumbia rally bragged that they hadhelped bring the Democratic Party backinto office in South Carolina. For his part,Heyman, in response to a floor speakerat the October Local 10 rally, prettifiedthe pro-capitalist labor leadership underJohn Sweeney, stating without blinkingan eye that the AFL-CIO sees Charlestonas the beginning of a drive to organizethe South. In fact, the struggle to organizethe "open shop" South requires a fight tobreak labor's ties to the Democratic Party,which for decades enforced Jim Crowsegregation with the help of its KKKauxiliaries and worked to ensure that integrated unions were kept out. Heymanended his speech with a call for a laborparty. Led by whom, John Sweeney?In his letter, Heyman saves his fire fora spurious attack on Gene Herson, thelabor coordinator of the Partisan' DefenseCommittee, which issued a protest letterto the South Carolina attorney general thevery day of the cop attack on the Charleston longshoremen and called for contributions in defense of the arrested ILA

Mobilize ...(continued from page 12)cops in 1969, got a full blast of whatbeing labeled a "terrorist" in capitalistAmerica means. Coordinating these repressive measures is Tom Ridge, the manwho signed two death warrants againstformer Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, aninnocent man framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia cop, who was sentenced to death for his political views.Free Mumia now! Abolish the racistdeath penalty!On the docks, largel immigrant porttruckers are already being harassed byarmed cops and federal agents. The Maritime Security Act-authored by a,Democratic Party Senator from "open shop"South Carolina-calls f'Or "backgroundchecks" under which waterfront workerscan be fired for any conviction in the past10 years on any of 20 felony offenses,including minor drug charges. Thisdirectly threatens the jobs of black andLatino longshoremen who have been onthe receiving end of the racist cop harass-

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$.50 (32 pages)Order from/pay to:Partisan Defense Committee, P.O. Box 99Caonal Street Station, Ne w York, NY 10013

25 JANUARY 2002

members to be sent to ILA Local 1422.The PDC is known and respected bythe Charleston longshore unions. WhenHerson hand-delivered a check from thePDC, he was warmly greeted and askedto address the members in the CharlestonILA hall. Heyman uses quote marksaround the word "solidarity" in order tosneer at Herson's remarks, the core ofwhich were repeated in a speech from thepodium at the start of the Columbiamarch last June (reprinted in WVNo. 761,6 July 2001). At that rally, in oppositionto the pleas by the labor tops to elect moreDemocrats, Herson raised the call forindependent class struggle, linking this tothe fight to free death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal:

"We must use our power here, our independent power: No reliance on Democratic or Republican politicians! Theyhave lied to us and they have oppressedus. This whole issue is about the powerused on the picket line on the docks ofCharleston. That power must be used todefend the Charleston Five. That powermust be used to free Mumia Abu-Jamal!Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Workers topower!"I f it were not so ludicrous, it wouldreally be annoying to be accused byHeyman of "the centrist method of socialchauvinist opportunism" for supposedlyuncritically quoting Jesse Jackson Jf. in

the article Heyman criticizes in theopening sentence of his letter. Heymanchooses to attack us for noting that thisblack Democratic Congressman reflectedjustifiable apprehensions among blackpeople over the government's shreddingof democratic rights. Jackson pointed outthat it was not "the terrorists" but "thesupporters of this bill [USA-Patriot Act]who are really attacking American liberties." The indifference to black oppression Heyman here unwittingly manifestsis a hallmark of the U.S. labor bureaucracy. Thus, in their statements against thePort, Maritime and Rail Security Act now

ment in the ghettos and barrios under theso-called "war on drugs."Just as the fight for black freedomis central to the liberation of all working people, the labor movement canonly defend itself if it defends the rightsof immigrants. In this country, the rawexploitation of labor has always comewrapped in the envelope of racial andethnic-religious hostilities fomented bythe capitalist rulers. Black oppression isthe cornerstone of American capitalism.But black and immigrant workers arenot helpless victims; they're a vital component of the multiracial working class.Armed with the militant traditions of theirhomelands, iml1ligrant workers have beena key part of labor battles in this country,from the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strikein the Massachusetts textile mills to theJustice for Janitors organizing drive inL.A. Together with black workers, theycan help spark a working-class offensiveagainst racial oppression and capitalistexploitation.From the Chinese exclusion acts over acentury ago to Mexican workers deportedduring the Great Depression and theinternment of Japanese Americans duringWorld War II, assaults on the immigrantworkforce have always gone hand in handwith stepped-up oppression of blacksand the persecution of the most militantworkers. Don't forget-here in Califor- .nia the anti-immigrant Proposition 187led directly to the racist, anti-affirmativeaction Proposition 209 two years later.We demand: Full citizenship rightsfQrallimmigrants! We must fight against deportations, for unionizing the unorganizedand for a shorter workweek with no lossin pay in order to spread t h ~ availablework. Let our motto be class struggle-joining forces against our commonenemy, the capitalist ruling class!The labor bureaucracy's commitmentto the capitalist system leads them todenounce Mexican truckers and ourdowntrodden working-class brothers and"sisters throughout Latin America andAsia for "stealing American jobs." Thisis a convenient fraud which promotes

before Congress, the ILWU brass haveignored the racist content of the bosses'current attacks (including this bill) targeting black and Latino longshoremen andimmigrant port truckers.We have also noted Oakland blackDemocratic Congresswoman BarbaraLee's courage in voting against unlimitedwar powers, which earned her right-wingdeath threats. At the same time, as readers of WV are well aware, we have consistently warned that black Democratslike Jackson and Lee are positioningthemselves to get ahead of and containincreasing discontent in the black population at intensifying racist repression andthe deepening effects of the recession.In sharp contrast, in a 22 September 200 1Internet posting ("Longshore Unionsand the 'War Against Terrorism"'), Heyman approvingly notes that Local 10voted overwhelmingly to send Lee a letter "commending her for her courageoussale vote against the war. In a sense, itwas a workers' referendum on the undefined, unlimited 'war against terrorism'"(our emphasis). No mention by Heymanthat Lee's Democrats, like the Republicans, represent the interests of the classenemy, or that they have been virtuallyin lockstep alliance with Bush nationally over Afghanistan. Far from seekingto break workers from illusions in theDemocrats, Heyman is happy to reinforcethem.Heyman's reference to the International Communist League's supposed"abstentionism" in Brazil further illustrates how his "militant" rhetoric servesto deflect from the necessary politicalstruggle against the misleaders of theworking class. We did not have "tradeunion supporters" in Brazil; we did havefraternal relations with a group thencalled Luta Metalurgica, which claimedthat it agreed with our program. We brokerelations with this group after a longpolitical struggle because they proved to

antl-lmmigrant bigotry at home and isdirectly opposed to our fighting unity as aclass against the bosses' "divide and rule"schemes. Peddling the lie that the interests of the workers and their exploitersare compatible, AFL-CIO head JohnSweeney says that "no sacrifice is 'toogreat" for workers to make for the reactionary "war on terror." Opposition to thewar on labor, blacks and immigrants athome means opposition to the wars ofAmerican capitalism abroad. All U.S.!UNINATO troops out of Afghanistan, theNear East and Central Asia! \"Instead of mobilizing uniOl) powerto defend their members and all theoppressed, the labor tops sell the Democratic Party as the "friend of labor." Butthe Democrats, like the Republicans, represent the interests of the class enemy.The only difference is that the Republicans openly revel in attacking the working people and oppressed; the Democrats lie and do the same thing. BlackDemocrats like Barbara Lee, with hershow of opposition-however superficial-to Bush's war powers, are positioning themselves to contain and head offincreasing discontent as the recessionand racist repression bite. Democrat BillClinton declared, "I feel your pain" whilehe axed welfare and spearheaded ananti-immigrant crackdown. Here in theBay Area, "liberal" Democratic mayorJerry Brown's gentrification plan forOakland encouraged rampages through

be trade-union opportunists, more concerned with becoming the leadership ofa op-riddled municipal union than withbuilding a revolutionary party. Showinga complete disregard for working-classprinciples, they have since dragged theunion into the capitalist courts three timesin a squalid fight to retain their unionpositions (for details, see "IG's BrazilCover-Up: Dirty Hands, Cynical Lies,"WVNo. 671, 11 July 1997). Heyman proclaims his opposItion to suing unions inthe bosses' courts. But his defense ofthese unprincipled trade-union hustlersreveals his own appetites for labor opportunism-including leaving open the possibility of supporting anti-union lawsuits,which unfortunately is not uncommon inthe American labor movement.Heyman seeks to cover his opportunism by "chicken"-baiting our organization, a posture also assumed by centristoutfits like the Internationalist Group(10) and the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT), whose arguments he borrows from wholesale. His defense of theBrazilian trade-union oppottunists is adirect echo of the IG, which maintainsthis group as a section of its fraudulent"League for the Fourth International."Similaily, on the question of the Democratic Party, Heyman echoes not only theIG but the BT's cynical declarations thatthe Spartacist League is "soft" on theDemocrats. This is particularly rich coming from the BT which, in concert withHeyman's maneuvers inside the ILWU,did its level best to turn the April 1999labor action for Mumia into a platformfor liberal Democrats (see "Labor Opportunism, the Democratic Party and theDefense of Mumia Abu-Jamal," WV No.714,28 May 1999). . ..-.Despite Heyman's ability to throw leftist phrases around, class-conscious workers will recognize him as a phony and alabor careerist whose real role is deceiving the workers .

black West Oakland by the police gangwho took the name "Riders" from thenightriders of the KKK. On the other sideof the Bay Bridge, mayor Willie Brownhas launched a new war on the homelessof San Francisco while 16,000 laid-offworkers in low-wage industries face homeless ness, and those still employed are onlya paycheck away from the same fate.To fight for its interests the workingclass must stand independent of allagencies and parties of the class enemy.The trade-union misleaders who haveshackled labor's power to support for theDemocrats now offer to help implement "security" on the docks and elsewhere. It is not the job of the workers toenforce the laws, "security" or otherwise,that will be used against them: cops andsecurity guards have no place in the unionmovement!There must be a political strugglewithin the trade unions, the only significant racially integrated institutions insegregation America, to break from theDemocrats and build a class-struggleleadership which will champion thecause of black freedom and the defenseof immigrant rights: The working classneeds its own party-one that fights foraworkers government. Those who labormust rule!Mobilize Multiracial Union Power ina Mass Labor-Centered Protest! DefimdImmigrants, Blacks, Labor Targeted byAnti-Terrorist Laws!.

Anti-Terrorist Laws Target Immigrants,Blacks, Labor-No to the USA-Patriot Actand Maritime Security Act!

BAY AREAFor more information: (510) 839-0851

Thursday, January 31, 7 p.m.Stephens Room, M.L.K. Student UnionUC Berkeley9


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Ireland ...(continued from page 3)attacks recorded in 213 days to Augustthis year, including 75 bombings and 20gun attacks (An Phoblacht, 9 August2001). In the last week of October alonethere were 12 bomb attacks against Catholics in North Belfast. There have beena number of murders of Catholics, including that of 19-year-old Ciaran Cummings,killed in a drive-by shooting in Antrim inJuly, and Qavin Brett, an 18-year-oldProtestant killed by Loyalist gunmen whomistook him for a Catholic. On 28 October Colin Foy was killed in Tyrone by am e m b ~ r of the British Army's Royal IrishRegiment.The Catholics are an oppressed minority living under permanent siege. Theplight of working-class Catholic familieshit international headlines this summeras schoolgirls in Ardoyne, North Belfasttrying to walk to Holy Cross school withtheir parents were shown daily on television confronting a Loyalist mob howlingvile anti-Catholic and anti-woman slursand throwing pipebombs, bags of .excrement and balloons filled with urine. TheBritish Army and RUC-now re-namedthe Police Service of Northern ,Ireland(PSNI)-lined the streets and tried to lookas if they were making an honest effort to"keep the peace." On the day of theirname change, the PSNI escorted leadersof the Orange Order down the CatholicGarvaghy Road. Catholics know theyhave as much to fear from the police andarmy as they do from the Loyalist deathsquads; indeed IRA decommissioningleaves sections of the Catholic p0pulationfeeling defenceless against these forces.The scenes at Holy Cross school are amicrocosm of Northern Ireland whichshow the bitter reality of Labour's imperialist "peace" deal. The fact that Catholic parents refused to meekly accept theirstatus as second-class citizens broughtout blatant anti-Irish prejUdice from British journalists who would often reportwith amazement that the situation is likethe segregated American South in the1950s prior to the civil rights struggles;in the. next breath they would ask Catholic parents why they don't use a backentrance to the school! The Irish bourgeois press, which has the same contempt for working-class Catholics in theNorth as for those in the South, echoedLoyalist lies that the exercise was just apublicity stunt for Sinn Fein (SF). But,with or without decommissioning, SinnFein manifestly cannot offer a way forward to the beleaguered Catholics.Sinn Fein has been organising protests'against particular military installationsand complaining that the imperialistshave not lived up to the " ' p r o g r a m m ~ fordemilitarisation' that was promised in theGood Friday Agreement" (An Phoblacht,1 November 2001). But while the Britishmay agree to scale down the army presence to cut their costs, the Good FridayAgreement is premised on troops remaining in Northern Ireland.We fight for the immediate uncondi-tional withdrawal of British troops, notmerely because no good can come of theBritish military presence there, but also

Marxist newspaper of theSpartacist League/Britain3/1 yearInternational rate: 7 $10-AirmailEurope outside Britain and Ireland: 4Order from/make checks payable to:Spartacist Publications

Alan Lewis/PholopressBelfast, August 2001: 15,000 UOA paramilitaries march in ominous display ofanti-Catholic terror.because we agree with Karl Marx that theBritish working Class cannot make a revolution against their "own" capitalist rulers if they accept imperialist oppressionin Ireland. It is in the direct interests ofthe working class to oppose repressivemeasures in Northern Ireland, which areoften subsequently imposed on workersand minorities in Britain. After II September, Jack Straw pledged Britain wouldsee "security of a kind people in Northern Ireland have had to live with fordecades." Sure enough; immigrants suspected of "terrorism" are being roundedup and interned without trial.Withdrawal of the British Army doesnot in itself automatically ensure advancein a revolutionary direction, but it is thenecessary starting point for a proletarianrevolutionary perspective. We seek tobreak workers from illusions in Labour,wnich has loyally served racist, chauvinist British imperialism and the monarchy.The Spartacist League/Britain and Dublin Spartacist Group, sections of the International Communist League, fight tobuild revolutionary internationalist workers parties to put an end to capitalist ruleand to establish a workers republic inIreland as part of a federation of workersrepublics in the British Isles. Our framework is internationalist and is basedon the necessity to link the struggles ofthe working class of Ireland, North andSouth, with those of the workers in England, Scotland and Wales.In Northern Ireland divisions betweenCatholics and Protestants have deepened,which means the prospect of united struggle by Protestant and Catholic workersfor their common class interests 'appearsremote. Although Protestant workers areonly marginally bette r off than their Catholic counterparts, the view is pervasivethat improvements in the position of onecommunity will necessarily be at theexpense of the other. This indeed is true,unless such struggles challenge theframework of capitalist rule. A proletarianrevolutionary perspective is the only wayforward. There can be no just solution tothe communal conflict in Northern Ireland short of proletarian rule in all of Ireland and in Britain.Labourite "Socialists"Push Imperialist "Peace"

The Labour-loyal fake left have shamelessly touted British imperialism, in the

! r O ~ R S I f A M ! ! ~ I ! . 1 i US/British/UN/NATO troopsout of Afghanistan andCentral Asia now!

guise of Blair and the Labour government, as the agency to bring peace andequality to the North. In the last Britishelection, . he Socialist Alliance-whichat the time consisted of the SocialistWorkers Party (SWP.), Socialist Party,Workers Power and others-supportedthe re-election of Labour and removed thecall for troops out of Northern Irelandfrom their manifesto before launching itto the bourgeois press. We said, "No voteto Labour, imperialist butchers" and "Novote to Socialist Alliance, lackeys ofLabour."The SWP is silent about the BritishArmy, but gushing about the "tremendous hopes for peace in Northern Irelandfollowing the IRA's announcement that itwill destroy its weapons." They cravenlyclaim Labour's "peace" process provides"space" for united struggle of the working class. Socialist Worker (3 November2001) says:"That process is about reaching anaccommodation between politiciansrepresenting Catholic and Protestant'communities.'"It can reproduce the sectarian divisionthat is built into the Northern Irelandstate. But it does provide a space forworking class people, Catholic and Protestant, to fight for their interests andagainst sectarianism."This is almost exactly what the SWP saidwhen they supported British troops beingsent to Northern Ireland in 1969 (by aLabour government, of course), whichthey claimed would provide a "breathingspace" for the Catholics. They wrote:"The breathing space provided by thepresence of British troops is short butvital. Those who call for the immediatewithdrawal of the troops before the menbehind the barricades can defend themselves are inviting a pogrom which willhit first and hardest at socialists."

-Socialist Worker, ,11 September 1969Less than three years later "their" BritishArmy shot down 14 defenceless Catholics in cold blood in Derry on BloodySunday.

PO Box 1041, London NW5 3EU, England _

The sectarian Orange statelet was created by British imperialism's partition ofIreland as a police state based on subjugation of the Catholic minority. Its backbone is the RUC and, since 1969, thearmy; both work in t a n d ~ m with the Loyalist paramilitary killers. Recent historyis littered with scandals about collusionbetween Loyalist murderers and theRUCIPSNI and British Army, and there'sno "breathing space" for anyone whotries to expose this to the outside world.Thus on 28 September, Martin O'Hagan,a journalist with the Dublin-based Sun-day World, who researched the collusionbetween the British Army, the RUC, leading Unionist politicians and l.oyalistdeath squads, was murdered by the LVF[Loyalist Volunteer Force]. RosemaryNelson, a prominent Catholic lawyer whoreported to the UN that she received deaththreats from the RUC, was also murdered1999; ten years earlier Pat Finucane,another well-known Catholic lawyer, wasalso murdered 'by Loyalists in collusionwith the state. The current Labour government is withholding documents on the1974 bombings in Dublin and Monaghanwhich killed 33 people and British stateinvolvement is widely suspected.The Labourite left even advocate

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. "peace" with Loyalist thugs such as BillyHutchinson. Irish secretary of the transport union ATGWU, Mick O'Reilly, recruited the UVF's Hutchinson and DavidErvine into the ATGWU. The wretchedSocialist Party has sponsored Hutchinsonin public meetings and the SWP jumpedon the bandwagon by taking part in a1999 "debate" with him organised by theScottish Social ist Party. .Not Orange Against Green,But Class Against Class!

Following capitalist counterrevolutionin the Soviet Union in 1991-92, pettybourgeois nationalist movements likeSinn Fein and the PLO have had muchless room to manoeuvre and have increasingly sought to make deals with imperialism. Sinn Fein played up illusions thatby involving U.S. imperialism and theDublin government they would secure abe

workers vanguard no 773 - 25 january 2002

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