No.

697
~ X . 5 2 3
Impeachment Drive
Threatens Right to
Privacy lor All
SEPTEMBER 20-The drive to remove
Bill Clinton from the presidency for his
consensual' sexual affair with former
White House intern Monica Lewinsky
poses a threat to everyone of us. At
issue is one of the most fundamental
democratic rights, the right to privacy-
which in practice comes down to the
right to a private sex life without med-
dling or snooping by state and church
authorities. The politicians and media
are going after Clinton for about the
only thing he's done that isn't a crime
from the standpoint of the working
class. As we noted in an earlier article
(WV No. 695, 28 August):
"Bill Clinton is commander in chief of
U.S. imperialism, and as such a deadly
enemy of working people and minor-
ities in the U.S. and around the world.
But we are not indifferent to the anti-
sex witchhunt which has now targeted
Clinton. The seemingly limitless pow-
ers of the Starr chamber to pry into
Clinton's and Lewinsky's private lives
through harassment and intimidation
are a threat to the most elementary
right to privacy for the population as a
whole."
Among the world's industrialized
countries, the U.S. is the most deeply
permeated by religious and supersti-
tious influences. Yet there is also a
strong sentiment among the populace
that the government has no business
dictating how people conduct their pri-
vate lives. If the long arm of the sex
cops can reach into the White House,
many understand, then'what about their
own bedrooms? It is notable that
despite the torrent of hypocritical anti-
sex moralizing spewed out by politi-
cians and the media, Clinton's approval
rating has remained solid since his
affair with Lewinsky first came out
in January (though this could change,
as opinion polls are notoriously suscep-
tible to the bourgeoisie's propaganda
machine).
At this weekend's conference of the
Christian Coalition in Washington,
D.C., the right-wing religious bigots
gathered there were "despondent" over
the lack of outrage among America's
"God-fearing people." Moreover, as the
continued on page 9
soC!:
25 September 1998
AP
Anti-sex moralism and anti-abortion
bigotry on display at Cincinnati
protest against Clinton.
London, Dublin Impose New "Anti-Terror" Laws
Northern Irela
DownWilh
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The following article is adapted from
Workers Hammer (No. 164, September/
October 1998), newspaper of the Sparta-
cist League/Britain.
British Troops Out Now!
LONDON, September 17-The first ses-
sion of the Northern Ireland Assembly
on Monday, coming after an announced
end to British Army patrols of Belfast
7
and a "historic" meeting between Protes-
tant Loyalist first minister bavid Trimble
and Sinn Fein/Irish Republican Army
(IRA) leader Gerry Adams, occasioned
outpourings of praise for the imperialist
"peace process." But the real face of the
-"peace" deal signj:!d in Belfast's Stor-
mont Castle last April, imposed by Brit-
ish Labour Party prime minister Tony
Blair and Irish Republic taoiseach (prime
minister) Bertie Ahern and brokered by
U.S. president Bill Clinton, was seen
in the massive mobilisations of British
Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary
(RUC) repression and in the Orange
mobs besieging the Catholic community
of Drumcree over the summer.
In a joint declaration by the Spartacist
LeaguelBritain and the Dublin Sparta-
cist Group opposing the Stormont agree-
Reuiers
ment, we warned that this imperialist
"peace" would necessarily be imposed at
the expense of the oppressed Catholic
minority in the North and would not
do working-class Protestants any good
either. We noted that it "will be taken by
the governments in London, Dublin and
Belfast as a mandate for intensified
repression" (see "Northern Ireland: Impe-
rialist 'Peace' Fraud," WV No. 689, 24
April). This is exactly what is now taking
place. The imperialist butchers in West-
minster and their junior partners in Dub-
lin seized on the August 15 bombing
continued on page 10
I
The army of cops that laid siege to
black Harlem and rampaged against par-
ticipants at the "Million Youth March"
(MYM) on September 5 was an ominous
new installment in racist New York City
mayor Rudolph Giuliani's campaign to
brand the ghetto poor as criminal outlaws.
In his efforts to promote race war in the
city, Giuliani found a fitting analogue in
MYM organizer Khallid Muhammad. As
we wrote in our article protesting the
attempt to ban the MYM: "Diverting the
justified outrage of black youth against
conditions of horrendous oppression into
racist bigotry against Jews, Asians and
others, Muhammad stokes the flames of
right-wing reaction whose first targets
will be black people" (WV No. 695, 28
August).
Yet a whole number of self-proclaimed
"socialist" organizations fell in behind
Muhammad's reactionary mobilization.
Workers World (10 September) praised
Muhammad as "strong and unapologeti-
cally anti-white." The Revolutionary
Communist Party hailed the MYM as
"proud, defiant and determined to make a
difference" . (Revolutionary Worker, 6
September). Socialist Action (September
1998) pledged its "uncompromising sup-
port to the progressive political goals
of the Million Youth March," as though
there is anything whatsoever progres-
sive about Khallid Muhammad's anti-
Semitic, anti-Asian, woman-hating black
nationalism.
Seemingly standing apart from these
leftists was the International Socialist
Organization (ISO), which distributed a
leaflet at the Harlem rally titled "Why
Anti-Semitism Destroys Our Struggle."
Leaving aside that the ISO is obviously
incapable of staying away from any
"mass action," even one dominated by
Muhammad's anti-Semitic ravings, this
leaflet was nonetheless a pretty bold
move for these inveterate opportunists.
Doubtless, "the courage of their convic-
tions" was bolstered by "respectable"
opposition to Muhammad coming from
Harlem Democrats like Congressman
Charles Rangel and State Senator David
Paterson.
The black elected officials tried to or-
ganize a "community peacekeeping force"
to serve as an auxiliary to Giuliani's racist
cops. Yet the ISO's leaflet said not a word
in opposition to the Democratic Party.
And, in the aftermath of the MYM, the
ISO's Socialist Worker (11 September)
Socialist Revolution: The Only
to Black Emancipation
Because racial oppression is embedded in
the very foundations of American capital-
ism, the aim of black emancipation can only
be realized through a proletarian revolution
which replaces the rule of the bourgeoisie
with an egalitarian socialist society. In a
1945 pamphlet, published when Jim Crow
segregation reigned in the South and only
TROTSKY two years after lynch mobs had rampaged LENIN
through the streets of Detroit, the then-
Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party advanced a class-struggle program to combat black
oppression and the racist bigotry which has historically been used to divide the work-
ing class. The Spartacist League fights to build the multiracial revolutionary workers
party needed to lead the struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression to
victory.
Without a doubt, it is only those who hire and exploit wage labor who stand to gain
by pitting white against black and black against white: the wealthy planters, the big
industrialists, the monopoly capitalists, and the Wall Street financiers; those who pro-
duce nothing themselves but who, like leeches, live by extracting a hidden toll from their
employees.
The people who own and control the factories, the railroads and all the other means
of production and distribution, stand to gain because interracial prejudice diverts the
attention of both the black and the white workers away from their true foe ....
Capitalist exploitation hangs like a tapeworm from the entrails of human society. It
lives off the nourishment which is created by the labor power of both white and colored
workers. In its parasitic existence it gives off increasing doses of poisonous prejudice.
In America the poison of racial prejudice, which capitalism produces, circulates
throughout society and is the direct cause of the external festering sores of segrega-
tion, discrimination, 'Iynching and race riots.
Since these exploiters are the only ones who really gain in dolIars and cents by driv-
ing this wedge between white and Negro workers, it is easy to understand that the cap-
italist system itself is the real cause of Jim-Crowism. Here, then, is the basic enemy
against which we must battle.
The Negro will never achieve complete equality as long as the capitalist system,
which makes race prejudice profitable, is allowed to exist.
2
-Charles Jackson, A Practical Program to Kill Jim Crow (1945)

EDITOR: Len Meyers
EDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Jacob Zorn
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan Fuller
CIRCULATION MANAGER: Jane Patterson
EDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Helene Brosius, George Foster,
Liz Gordon, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour, Alison Spencer
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 and
August (beginning with omitting the second issue in June) and with a 3-week interval in December, by the Spartacist Pub-
lishing Co., 299 Broadway. Suite 318. New York, NY tO007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861
(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:vanguard@tiac.net.
Domestic subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address
changes to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.
Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.
The closing date for news in this issue is September 22.
No. 697 25 September 1998
applauded Democrat AI Sharpton-a for-
mer FBI fink who ran in last year's
Democratic Party mayoral primary-as
"the only speaker to say that he opposes
anti-Semitism -and homophobia." The
ISO did not note that only a few years ago
Sharpton joined black demagogue Sonny
Carson in whipping up an anti-immigrant
frenzy 'against Korean shopkeepers.
The ISO has postured as an opponent
of reactionary black nationalism in the
past. In 1995, it decried Louis Farra-
khan's Million Man March as "a step
backward from the political goals and
ideals of the 1960s civil rights move-
ment." But the goals of the liberal leader-
ship of the civil rights movement were
premised on the illusion that black equal-
ity could be achieved within the frame-
work of racist American capitalism,
largely through the vehicle of the Demo-
cratic Party. Although sometimes cloaked
with "socialist" rhetoric, the ISO's poli-
tics are fundamentally predicated on the
same liberal pressure politics. Their own
illusions in the Democratic Party come
through in an ISO pamphlet titled "Bill
Clinton: A Record of Broken Promises."
But the Clinton White House is deliver-
ing exactly what it "promised" in its
relentless war against blacks, immigrants,
working people and the poor.
The ISO: Color-Blind
"Socialists"
In its leaflet to the Million Youth
March, the ISO caIls for "a movement
that unites black and white workers to
fight for real change." Indeed, the fight to
break down the racial divisions which are
imposed by America's capitalist rulers is
crucial to mobilizing the multiracial pro-
letariat in its own class interests and in
defense of all the oppressed. But the
ISO's "unite and fight" rhetoric is based
on obscuring the centrality of the fight for
black liberation to the struggle for social-
ist revolution in the U.S. Indeed, the ISO
studiously avoids even mentioning black
people in its articles on the attacks on
welfare, on the burgeoning prison popu-
lation and the increase in state execu-
tions. Yet blacks are the first target of
the attacks of the American ruling class,
which plays the race card in order to drive
down the living standards of all workers.
While denouncing Farrakhan and Mu-
hammad for assisting the-bosses in divid-
ing the working class along' racial lines,
the ISO social democrats say not a word
about the far greater responsibility of
the pro-capitalist trade union tops they
tail in maintaining a system based on
brutal racist oppression. In its cheer-
leading for the Carey leadership of the
Teamsters during last year's UPS strike,
the ISO completely ignored the refusal of
the Teamster bureaucrats to take up any
fight against racist and sexist discrimina-
tion at UPS.
The ISO has denounced Farrakhan's
Nation of Islam for "work[ing] with the
police rather than organizing against
them" (Socialist Worker, 27 October
1995). But the ISO itself sees cops-the
armed guardians of the rule of capital-
as potential "allies" of the labor move-
ment. In 1997, John Molyneux, a leader
of the ISO's British parent group, the
Socialist Workers Party, proclaimed that
the cops would cease being "agents of the
state" if they were to "rebel collectively."
But as any black youth or militant work-
er knows, the cops "rebel collectively" by
demanding more money, more power and
more leeway to gun down the ghetto poor
and beat up strikers. In our polemic
against the ISO's pro-cop line, we wrote:
"The ISO's benevolent view of the capi-
talist state precludes its being a revolu-
tionary organization. Instead, the most it
can be is a tepid 'left' face of capitalist
Marxist
WHAT STRATEGY
FOR SLACK USEUnON?
TroIskr'sm
rs.
Slack Nallonallsm
Key docuillllll1s and8r1ic/es
1005-1978
...... I"ubItiNngCo, ... l3nGPo, .... 'Jtrit,JtVIOII.
-
..... - suo
$1.50 (72 pages)
Make checks payable/mail to:
Spartacist Pub. Co., Box 1377 GPO
New York, NY 10116
barbarity, particularly in the guise of the
racist Democratic Party" ("ISO: Looking
for a Few Good Cops," WV No. 664, 21
March 1997).
For all the ISO's criticisms of Muham-
mad and Farrakhan, its color-blind "social-
ism" is just another statement of its own
accommodation to the existing capitalist
order. As we wrote in the introduction to
our Marxist Bulletin (No.5 [Revised]),
"Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism: What
Strategy for Black Liberation?":
"Any organization which claims a revo-
lutionary perspective for the United
States must confront the special oppres-
sion of black people-the forced segre-
gation of blacks at the bottom of capital-
ist society and the poisonous racism
which divides the working class and
cripples its struggles. There will be no
social revolution in this country without
the united struggle of black and white
workers led by their multiracial vanguard
party. Moreover, there is no other road to
eliminating the special oppression of
black people than the victorious con-
quest of power by the U.S. proletariat.".
SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY
National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 (212) 732-7860
Boston
Box 390840, Central Sta.
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 666-9453
Chicago
Box 6441, Main PO
Chicago, IL 60680
(312) 454-4930
Los Angeles
Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
(213) 380-8239
New York
Box 3381, Church St. Sta.
New York, NY 10008
(212) 267-1025
Oakland
Box 29497
Oakland, CA 94604
(510) 839-0851
San Francisco
Box 77494
San Francisco, CA 94107
(41 5) 777-9367
TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA/LiGUE TROTSKYSTE DU CANADA
Toronto Vancouver
Box 7198, Station A
Toronto, ON M5W 1X8
(416) 593-4138
Box 2717, Main P.O.
Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2
(604) 687-0353
WORKERS VANGUARD
O
n September 21, the Spartacist
LeaguefU.S. and other sections
of the International Communist
League joined in united-front pro-
tests against the Islamic fundamentalist
regime in Iran initiated by exile groups
of the Worker-communist Party of Iran
(WPI). The protests in New York City,
Vancouver, London, Berlin, Hamburg
and Sydney, Australia were timed to
coincide with Iranian president Moham-
mad Khatami's visit to the United
Nations and were called to "defend
rights, secularism, Socialism, freedom
and equalitY" against the murderous Ira-
nian regime (the word "socialism" was
omitted from the WPI's appeal in the
U.S.). A day earlier, our Los Angeles
comrades joined a protest there.
Protests Denounce
Reactionary
Iranian Regime
Among the signs carried by our con-
tingents were ones reading: "Down With
the Woman-Hating Mullah Regime! For
Workers Revolution in Iran!" "U.S.fUN/
NATO Out of the Persian Gulf! Down
With UN Embargo of Iraq!" and "Defeat
U.S. Imperialism Through Workers Rev-
olution!" In a letter endorsing the WPI's
united-front call, we stressed "the neces-
sity of the absolute independence of the
working class from its 'own' capitalist
rulers and from the agencies of impe-
rialism, notably including the U.nited
Nations, that den of thieves and their vic-
tims, to paraphrase Lenin's earlier for-
mulation about the UN's predecessor, the
League of Nations."
This points to a key difference be-
tween our revolutionary Marxist program
and the politics of the WPI. Many WPI
cadre have been murdered, imprisoned
or exiled for their heroic opposition to
the ayatollahs' regime in Teheran. Yet
despite its stated commitment to social-
ism, the WPI has repeatedly issued
impotent appeals to the UN and other
imperialist agencies to oppose repression
in Iran and Iraq. This is implicitly
reflected in its protest call, which states,
"Rather than speak at the UN, the
regime's representatives must be tried for
their crimes against humanity." .
WV Photo
September 21: Spartacist contingent at NYC united-front protest outside
United Nations against bloodsoaked Iranian regime.
A statement issued by the WPI's affil-
iate, the Worker-communist Party of Iraq,
for a September 14 demonstration in Lon-
don made this appeal explicit, calling for
a "team of international inspectors to visit
Iraqi prisons" to make "full inquiries"
about prison conditions there. And a 25
May Internet posting by the Iraqi group-
which is heavily centered in the Kurdish
region of the country-demanded a pleb-
iscite on Kurdish independence in Iraq
with representatives of the "UN to
observe the process and to give legiti-
macy to the result of the referendum."
Such appeals dovetail with the designs
of the imperialists themselves, who
already have an army of UN "arms
inspectors" in Iraq and have killed more
than one million Iraqis in the last eight
years through the UN-sponsored starva-
tion blockade. Also under a UN fig leaf,
the imperialists have carved out an
"autonomous region" in Iraqi Kurdistan
which has been opened to repeated, mur-
derous invasions by the Turkish army as
it pursues its own war of annihilation
against Kurdish nationalists. Only days
before the WPI-initiated protests, Wash-
ington brought together the feudalist and
petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders of the
Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patri-
otic Union of Kurdistan to broker a truce
between these perennially feuding groups
in order to further imperialist control of
the region and bolster the CIA-sponsored
"opposition" to the regime of Iraqi
strongman Saddam Hussein.
As the SL speaker at the New York
City protest emphasized:
"Repeated appeals for UN intervention
in Iraq and Kurdistan can only result in
the further oppression and misery of the
masses of the Near East. .Jt was under the
aegis of the UN that the U.S. slaughtered
over 100,000 Iraqis in the 1991 Gulf
War. And it is today the UN which is
strangling and starving the masses of
Iraq, including its Kurdish inhabitants.
The liberation of the Kurdish peuple can
only be achieved through the overthrow
of capitalism in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and
Syria. For the right of self-determination
for the Kurdish people! For a Socialist
Republic of tlnited Kurdistan!"
During the 1991 Gulf War, we raised
the slogan "Defeat U.S. imperialism-
I?efend Iraq!" while calling on the Iraqi
working people to sweep away their cap-
italist oppressors. But WPI's prede-
cessor organization refused even to side
militarily with Iraq against the U.S.fUN
onslaught.
Behind the WPI's appeals to the agen-
Bound Volume
We are proud to make available the first bound volume
of Women and Revolution, journal of the Women's Commission
of the Spartacist League/U.S. Now incorporated into Spanacist,
the theoretical and documentary repository of the International
Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), Women and Revo-
lution reflects our commitment to the fight for women's liberation
through socialist revolution.
The fully indexed clothbound volume contains issues
No.1 (May/June 1971) through No. 20 (Spring 1980).
Order from/make checks payable to:
Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116
25 SEPTEMBER 1998
cies of "democratic" imperialism lies
its failure to transcend the Mensheviki
Stalinist schema of "two-stage revolu-
tion," which puts off the fight for social-
LOS ANGELES
Saturday, October 10, 4 p.m.
Ho"ywood United Methodist Church
6817 Franklin Avenue
(Highland Ave. exit off 1 01 Freeway)
For more information: (213) 380-8239
SAN FRANCISCO
Saturday, October 24, 7:30-p.m.
Women's Building
3543 18th Street (near Valencia)
For more information: (415) 777-9367 or
(510) 839-0851
BOSTON
The Fight for Revolutionary
Marxism Today
Saturday, September 26, 7 p.m.
102 Sever Ha"
Harvard University, Cambridge
(take the Red Line to Harvard)
For more information: (617) 666-9453
CHICAGO
Defeat of Reconstruction and the
Great Rail Strike of 1877
The Shaping of
Racist American Capitalism
Saturday, October 10,7 p.m.
Ida Noyes Ha", Library Room
University of Chicago
(1212 E. 59th St.)
For more information: (312) 454-4930
MADISON
The Revolutionary Road to
Black Liberation
Saturday, October 3, 3 p.m.
Memorial Union
University of Wisconsin-Madison
(See "Today in the Union" for room)
For more information: (312) 454-4930
ist revolution to a distant future while
seeking to pressure a (nonexistent) "pro-
gressive" wing of the bourgeoisie to
carry out a democratic revolution. This
perspective has led to countless defeats
and betrayals for the workers of the colo-
nial and semicolonial countries, notably
in Iran itself. At the time of the 1978-79
upheavals which overthrew the Iranian
monarchy and installed the Khomeiniites
in power, we called for a revolutionary
mobilization of the proletariat in opposi-
tion to both the shah and the mullahs. In
contrast, much of the left in Iran and
internationally tailed behind the Islamic
clergy. And while the WPI did not exist
at the time, it retrospectively tries to
draw a nonexistent distinction between
the Khomeini-Ied "revolution" and the
ayatollahs' accession to power, talking of
the "suppression of the 1979 revolution
by the Islamic regime" (Bolshevik Mes-
sage, February 1989).
As the SL speaker at the NYC protest
concluded:
"What is essential is the application of
Trotsky'S theory of permanent revolu-
tion, powerfully vindicated by the 1917
Russian Revolution. In backward coun-
tries, the bourgeoisie is tied by a thou-
sand strings to the imperialists and inca-
pable of resolving the tasks associated
with the European bourgeois revolutions
of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as
political democracy, agrarian revolu-
tion, national emancipation or elemen-
tary rights for women. Trotsky stressed
that in the epoch of imperialism these
tasks can only be resolved through the
proletarian seizure of power. To thwart
imperialist intervention and overcome
the economic backwardness of 'Third
World' countries, this must be integrally
linked to a struggle for international
socialist revolution, particularly in the
advanced industrial countries. What is
necessary for this is the forging of prole-
tarian, internationalist Trotskyist parties
in the Near East committed to the fight
against all forms of oppression through
the struggle for proletarian revolution.".
TORONTO
The Fight for a
Trotskyist Party
Introducing "Who We Are, and What We
Fight For, " Programmatic Theses of the
Trotskyist League/Ugue trotskyste
Saturday, October 3, 7:30 p.m.
St. Paul's Centre
427 Bloor Street West
(one block west of Spadina Station)
For more information: (416) 593-4138
VANCOUVER
For World Socialist Revolution!
Imperialism and
Class Struggle in Asia
Saturday, October 3, 2:30 p.m.
Britannia Community Centre
1661 Napier Street
(off Commercial Drive)
For more information: (604) 687-0353


NEW YORK CITY
Anti-Labor Attacks, Cop Terror
and the Capitalist State
Tuesday, September 29, 7 p.m.
Loeb Student Center, Room 413
New York University
(laGuardia Place & Washington
Square South)
For more information, readings: (212) 2671025
TORONTO
The Bolshevik Revolution
Thursday, October 1, 7 p.m.
International Student Centre
33 St. George Street
(north of College St.)
For more information, readings: (416) 593:4138
3
Zionists Amnesty the Bourgeoisie of Auschwitz
The Holocaust, "Collective Guilt"
and German Imperialism
We reprint below the first part of
an article originally published in the
German-language edition of Spartacist
(No. 20, Summer 1998).

The recent publication of A Nation on
Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Histor-
ical Truth (Henry Holt & Co., 1998) by
Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina
Birn has revived the controversy touched
off two years ago by Daniel Goldhagen's
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage
Books, 1997). Goldhagen's warmed-over
version of the half-century-old "collec-
tive guilt" argument-that the German
people as a whole were responsible for
the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust-met
with a frenzy of adulation among bour-
geois commentators in the U.S., and ini-
tially with an ugly chauvinist uproar in
Germany. Finkelstein and Birn's polem-
ics against Goldhagen have, in turn, pro-
voked a vile outcry among American
Zionist spokesmen, including attempts to
have their book banned.
The Holocaust-in which six million
Jews were murdered, along with millions
PART ONE
more Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Slavs,
homosexuals, leftists and Soviet citi-
zens-was a singular event in human
history: a systematic attempt by a tech-
nologically advanced capitalist power to
wipe out an entire people. But none of
the countless other Holocaust books pub-
lished in recent years were featured on
the covers of major American and Ger-
man magazines and few made it onto the
best-seller lists in either country. Nor is
the prominence achieved by Goldhagen's
arid, pseudo-academic treatise explained
by any breakthrough in research or analy-
sis. His "evidence" that the mass of
"ordinary Germans" were responsible for
the Holocaust is largely derived from a
case study of a Nazi police unit! More-
over, this same unit was prevjously
examined (with different conclusions) in
Christopher Browning"s Ordinary Men:
Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the
Final Solution in Poland (1992).
The Goldhagen controversy has been
fueled less by a historical dispute over
the degree to which the German peo-
ple were driven by a supposedly unique
form of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" to
4
Eastfoto
Top: Nazis round up Jewish survivors of heroic 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising
for deportation to Treblinka death camp. Goldhagen book glorifies U.S.
imperialist "democracy," but it was Soviet Red Army (below) which smashed
Nazi regime.
embrace the Nazi extermination machine
and more by the current international
political situation. The U.S.-dominated
anti-Soviet Cold War consensus which
shaped world capitalist politics for 45
years after World War II has given way to
a resurgence of interimperialist rivalries.
Already in the 1970s and '80s, as it
regained its former economic might fol-
lowing the defeat and devastation of
'World War II, the German bourgeoisie
was chafing at its subordination to U.S.
imperialism. This was expressed on an
ideological level in a revival of reaction-
ary chauvinism, both in "left" and right
colors, as German imperialism sought to
reclaim its role as a world power in its
own right. This chauvinist resurgence has
Yevgeni Khaldei
sharply accelerated since the capitalist
annexation of the East German (DDR)
deformed workers state in 1990 led to a
reunified Fourth Reich of German impe-
rialism. As it extends its reach throughout
East Europe, the Balkans and the Cauca-
sus, seeking to fill the void left by the col-
lapse ofthe USSR, the German bourgeoi-
sie is hindered in its ambitions by the
memories still vivid among its intended
neocolonial subject peoples of the horrors
of Nazi occupation.
Throughout the Cold War, U.S. imperi-
alism amply assisted its now "demo-
cratic" German ally in deep-sixing the
crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. Immedi-
ately after World War II, U.S. intelligence
agencies and the Vatican set up the "rat
5?
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::::I
"Democratic"
imperialists'
war crime:
February 1945
firebombing of
Dresden by
U.S. and Britain
slaughtered
over 100,000
German
civilians.
line" to spirit out Nazi mass murderers to
safety in order to serve in the anti-Soviet
war drive. Seeking to resurrect its former
imperialist enemy as a front-line bastion
in the Cold War, Washington financed the
reconstruction of the shattered German
economy under the postwar Christian
Democratic (CDU) regime, while culti-
vating the Social Democracy (SPD) as
an instrument for its anti-Communist
designs against the West European work-
ers movement. To a man, the industrial-
ists who had bankrolled Hitler's rise to
power and presided over the Third Reich
were "rehabilitated." Under the Third
Reich, the Deutschebank (which was ini-
tially Bismarck's instrument for foreign
trade) was Hitler's partner in the genoci-
dal business of slave labor; today it is the
country's largest bank. In 1985, U.S.
president Ronald Reagan joined with
German chancellor Helmut Kohl in "hon-
oring" the memory of SS killers buried
at Bitburg.
But since the counterrevolutionary
destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-
92, the American media have been filled
with accounts of German and Japanese
World War II atrocities and-a half cen-
tury after the fact-cynical memorials to
the victims of the Holocaust have sud-
denly sprung up in one American city
after another. (At the same time, the U.S.
rulers could not even countenance a
tame exhibit at the Smithsonian Institu-
tion on the A-bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki!)
It is in this context that Harvard profes-
sor Goldhagen's book elicited such an
enthusiastic response among bourgeois
commentators in the U.S. By the time
Goldhagen toured Germany in late 1996
to promote the German edition of Hitler's
Willing Executioners, he was effusively
greeted there as well. The following Jan-
uary, he became the first recipient in six
years of the German bourgeoisie's pres-
tigious Democracy Prize. The reason is
simple: Goldhagen amnesties the bour-
geoisie of Auschwitz for both its past and
current crimes, blaming the horrors of the
Third Reich not on the imperialist rulers
but on the German people as a whole and
joining in the chorus of hosannas to the
"democratic" Fourth Reich.
Far from expressing opposition to
resurgent German chauvinism, the em-
brace of "collective guilt" by German
liberals serves as a cover for aggressively
promoting imperialist military interven-
tion to "stop genocide" in the Balkans
and elsewhere. For their part, Zionists
like Goldhagen seek to paint genocide as
a uniquely German undertaking, not least
in order to deflect criticism of the Nazi-
like persecution of the Palestinian Arabs
by Israel's rulers. It was for making this
elementary observation that Finkelstein
incurred the wrath of a sizable chunk of
the American Zionist establishment.
A genuine reckoning with the causes
and horrors of the Holocaust cannot come
from ideologues for one or another impe-
rialist ruling class-which have all per-
petrated untold atrocities against working
people, minorities and semicolonial peo-
ples around the world-nor from the
Zionist apologists for Israeli state terror
against the Palestinian people. Nor can it
be expected from the various pseudo-
socialists who seek to prettify the Social
Democratic face of resurgent German
imperialism. Only Leninist international-
ists, 'fighting to reforge Leon Trotsky's
Fourth International as the world party
WORKERS VANGUARD
of socialist revolution, can draw the les-
sons of Hitler's rise to power and advance
a strategy to defeat the growing fas-
cist danger today. This is the task of the
International Communist League and its
German section, the Spartakist Workers
Party (SpAD).
Historical Roots of the
Jewish Question
The history of the 20th century pain-
fully underscores the Marxist under-
standing that the fate of the Jewish peo-
ple hinges on the victory of the world
socialist revolution. This .understanding
is rooted in the very history of Europe's
Jews, as Abram Leon made clear in his
incisive book, The Jewish Question: A
Marxist Interpretation. A Belgian Trot-
skyist' of Polish origin who was mur-
dered in Auschwitz after his capture by
the Nazis, Leon completed the book in
1941, even as he was organizing clandes-
tine anti-Nazi resistance.
Leon built on the writings of Karl
Marx and Karl Kautsky to rip away the
metaphysical mythology shrouding the
history of the Jewish people. Leon situ-
ated the continued existence of a distinc-
tive Jewish people in Europe through the
Middle Ages, and their brutal oppression
under capitalism, in their social role as a
commercial "people-class" in feudal and
prefeudal society. With the rise of mer-
cantile capitalism, the Jews were driven
out of one West European country after
another, only to face similar persecution
in the lands of the tsarist empire as capi-
talism took root there several centuries
later. As Leon wrote:
"The Jews lived within the pores of feu-
dal society. When the feudal structure
started to crumble, it began expelling
who owned the land and held the power,
but at the Jews who purchased the peas-
ants' crops, bought and sold livestock
and made loans.
In any case, as Heinrich Heine ob-
served, Germany joined with the rest of
Europe in reaction, but not in revolution.
The democratic revolution of 1848 was
betrayed by the German bourgeoisie out
of fear of the nascent proletariat. The
national unification of Germany took
place not under the banner of "liberty,
equality, fraternity" raised by the French
Revolution, but under the reactionary
Prussian Junkerdom. In direct counter-
position to the internationalist ideals of
the early socialist workers movement,
German chauvinism gloried in "race,"
"blood and soil" and the "Christian Ger-
man state."
Fascism is simply the most extreme,
the most consistent expression of such
chauvinism, despising anything which
is transnational. In "What Is National
Socialism?" (November 1933), Trotsky
wrote of the Nazis' crazed anti-Semitism:
"In order to raise it above history, the
nation is given the support of the race.
History is viewed as the emanation of the
race. The qualities of the race are con-
strued without relation to changing social
conditions. Rejecting 'economic thought'
as base, National Socialism descends a
stage lower: from economic materialism
it appeals to zoologic materialism ....
"Nationalism in economy comes down
in practice to impotent though savage
outbursts of anti-Semitism. The Nazis
abstract the usurious or banking capital
from the modern economic system be-
cause it is of the spirit of evil; and, as is
well known, it is precisely in this sphere
that the Jewish bourgeoisie occupies an
important position. Bowing down before
capitalism as a whole, the petty bourgeois
declares war against the evil spirit of gain

IVIEDER .IT DE. KRIEG
I
SOFORTIGER FRIEDEIV I
----I Dw __



Jewish Trotskyist Abram Leon, author of
Marxist analysis of the Jewish question,
was murdered in Auschwitz after
capture by Nazis. Trotskyist paper
Worker and Soldier appealed to German
troops in occupied France on basis of
proletarian internationalism.
elements which were, at one and the
same time, foreign to it and indispen-
sable to it. Even before the peasant had
left the village for the industrial center,
the Jew had abandoned the small medie-
val town in order to emigrate to the great
cities of the world. The destruction of
the secular function of Judaism within
feudal society is accompanied by its pas-
sive penetration into capitalist society ....
"The highly tragic situation of
in our epoch is explained by the extreme
precariousness of its .social and eco-
nomic position. The first to be elimi-
nated by decaying feudalism, the Jews
were also the first to be rejected by the
convulsions of dying capitalism. The
Jewish masses find themselves wedged
between the anvil of decaying feudalism
and the hammer of rotting capitalism."
The Jews of Germany had been freed
from the ghettos by a foreign con-
queror, Napoleon, but continued to suf-
fer decades of oppression following his
defeat and were first granted legal equal-
ity, by the North German League, oilly in
1869. By the latter half of the 19th cen-
tury, they were on the road to assimila-
in the guise of the Polish Jew in a long-
skirted caftan and usually without a cent
in his pocket. The pogrom becomes the
supreme evidence of racial superiority."
It was precisely the precarious posi-
tion of the Jewish people which impelled
its best thinkers and fighters to place
themselves in the front ranks of the
radical-democratic bourgeois Enlighten-
ment and, subsequently, of the interna-
tionalist, proletarian struggle for social-
ism. The October Revolution of 1917, in
turn, confirmed in flesh and blood that
only through the proletarian seizure of
power could the Jewish people find
fbi f f
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bit argcrlfc1t1
bcr nubt1l
I. ". , .... If ellUl,
O'DMoo ............... ..
.,"",.,
,n ". h ...... , ..... '" ..... ..
.....
Bildarchiv Prussischer Kulturbesitz I ,
Napoleon enters Berlin in 1806. His military victory over Pruss ian aristocracy
led to 1812 Emancipation Edict freeing German Jews from ghettos.
emancipation. In like measure, the forces
of bloody counterrevolution raised as
their battle cry the struggle against "Jew
Bolshevism."
Interwar Germany: Revolution
vs. Counterrevolution
In December 1938, shortly after the
Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom which was
a harbinger of the Holocaust, Trotsky
wrote:
"It is possible to imagine without diffi-
culty what awaits the Jews at the mere
outbreak of the future world war. But
even without war the next development
of world reaction signifies with certainty
the physical extermination of the Jews."
Trotsky was armed with a material-
ist analysis and a Marxist program. He
understood that the Nazis were not merely
an expression of anti-Semitic reactionary
frenzy but an instrument of last resort of
the German bourgeoisie to defend its
class rule against the powerful workers
movement. It was this which led to fas-
cist dictatorships also in Mussolini's Italy
and Franco's Spa-in. We observed in the
introduction to Documents on the "Pro-
letarian Military Policy" (Prometheus
Research Series No.2, February 1989):
"After the military defeat in WWl of the
most powerful European state, Germany,
and especially after the failure of two
successive proletarian revolutions in that
country, the stage was set for Nazism,
Germany's virulent nationalism, to place
itself at the head of European reaction ....
Since fear of Communism had not been
accompanied by its spread, the growing
Nazi party, with wide echoes of agree-
ment, offered up the Jews as surrogate
Bolsheviks."
The rise of Nazism cari only be under-
stood in the context of the 1917 Bol-
shevik Revolution in Russia and Ger-
many's military defeat in World War I.
The German bourgeoisie was determined
to recoup its losses in World War I
through a second installment of interim-
perialist war. Yet they feared the powerful,
highly organized German workers, who
they thought might follow the example of
their Russian class brothers. The war's
end found Germany in the throes of in sur-
rection, as a mutiny by revolutionary sail-
ors led to a broader proletarian upheaval
and the January 1919 Spartakist uprising
in Berlin. However, Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht's Spartakists had only
just formed themselves into the Commu-
nist Party (KPD) in the midst of the rev-
olutionary situation, and proved unpre-
pared to lead the workers to victory.
The SPD, which had definitively made
its peace with the capitalist order in
August 1914 when it signed on as re-
cruiting sergeants for the imperialist war,
confirmed its loyalty to the bourgeoisie
by crushing the 1918-19 German Revo-
lution. Despite its mass working-class
base, the SPD became the chief bulwark
of the bourgeois Weimar Republic which
was installed following the abdication of
the Kaiser. Vowing to be "bloodhounds
of the revolution," the SPD leaders un-
leashed the murderous Freikorps para-
military units to suppress the proletariat
and assassinate Liebknecht and Luxem-
burg. Railing against Weimar as the
"Jewish republic" and vowing to "dam
the flood of Bolshevism," the Freikorps
went on to become the core of Hitler's
SA stormtroopers.
The onerous terms of the Versailles
Treaty imposed on Germany by the impe-
rialist victors continued to fuel political
and economic turmoil. In March 1920,
workers mobilizations defeated the Kapp
Putsch, when right-wing army officers
tried to overthrow the SPD government.
A year later, the KPD attempted the abor-
tive "March Action" rising. The burgeon-
ing crisis came to a head in 1923, as
the occupation of the Ruhr by French
troops provoked uncontrollable infla-
tion and mass strikes. The KPD's influ-
ence grew enormously. (The far smaller
fascist movement also experienced rapid
growth.) The situation was ripe for pro-
letarian revolution. Trotsky urged the
KPD and the Communist International to
prepare for an insurrection. But Stalin
preached passivity and his ally Zinoviev,
then head of the Comintern, vacillated.
And the KPD, saddled with a weak, inde-
cisive and faction-ridden leadership, let
pass the revolutionary opportunity which
peaked in October 1923.
. tion. Some had distingui shed themsel ves
in the revolutionary movement; others,
like the Rothschilds, had become pillars
of the financial establishment. Beginning
in the I 890s, the influx of large numbers
of impoverished, religiously backward
Ostjuden-East European Jews fleeing
tsarist pogroms-saw a renewed upsurge
of anti-Semitic bigotry, often cloaked in
"populist" rhetoric against "Jewish capi-
tal." It was such sentiment which led
leaders of the Social Democratic workers
movement like August Bebel to warn
that anti-Semitism is "the socialism of
fools." Bebel pointed out that in the
countryside, the peasants' bitterness was
directed not at the aristocratic Junkers
Sparta kist uprising in Berlin, December 1918: Mass workers demonstration
demands ''All Power to the Workers' and Soldiers' CouncilS." SPD regime
drowned proletarian revolution in blood.
It was always the understanding of the
Russian Bolsheviks that for the October
Revolution to survive, workers revolution
had to extend into industrialized West
Europe, especially Germany. The defeat
of the German October sealed the isola-
tion of the young Soviet republic and pro-
duced widespread demoralization. This
led directly to the consolidation of polit-
ical power by a conservative bureaucracy
headed by Stalin, whose nationalist, anti-
revolutionary program was soon made
clear with the proclamation of "socialism
in one country." In Germany, the 1923
defeat paved the way to a temporary
restabilization of capitalist rule. But the
German bourgeoisie remained deter-
mined to crush the proletarian movement
and to prepare for a new imperialist war;
even as.the Weimar regime publicly repu-
diated rearmament, the giant Krupp
works secretly "forged the new German
sword" (schmiedete das neue deutsche
Schwert; William Manchester, The Arms
of Krupp 1587-1968).
[TO BE CONTINUED]
25 SEPTEMBER 1998 5
Reformists' Agenda at Black Radical Congress
New IIRadica/" Veneer
for Old Betrayals
Just as the increasingly
brutal workings of Ameri-
can capitalism have started
to engender a new fighting
mood among the working
class, seen in strikes from
Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
By Marable's own ad-
mission, many BRC pro-
moters came from "among
the more affluent, the bet-
ter educated, the politically
UPS to Flint GM, there is a new genera-
tion of black youth looking for an alterna-
tive to both the Democratic Party "lesser
evil ism" promoted by Jesse Jackson and
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's
reactionary black nationalism. This was
seen in the more than 2,000 people, over
half of them youth, who turned out for the
Black Radical Congress (BRC) held in
Chicago in June.
The BRC claimed to offer a perspec-
tive of struggle against the racist capital-
ist system, declaring in its manifesto, "A
Black Freedom Agenda for the Twenty
First Century": "What we want is an end
to the exploitation of capitalism, white
racism and every manifestation of human
oppression, a revolutionary transforma-
tion of the state and society, and the real-
ization of humanistic values." The road
to black freedom does lie through the
destruction of racist American capitalism,
which from its origins has been charac-
terized by the forcible segregation of
blacks at the bottom of this society. But
this was hardly the perspective ofthc BRC
organizers. Behind their left-sounding
rhetoric lies the same treacherous politics
long used to channel black militancy into
the confines of the Democratic Party.
Among the main movers and shakers
behind the BRC were the Communist
Party (CP), the Committees of Corre-
spondence (CoC) and the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA). The CP
and CoC are virtually defined by their
"fight the right" program of abject capit-
ulation to the capitalist Democrats, while
the DSA isan integral part of the Demo-
cratic Party. With the Democrats cur-
rently at the fore in dismantling welfare
and other social programs for the work-
ing class, minorities and the poor, the
CP, CoC and DSA feel the need for some
"radical" verbiage in order to try to con-
vince black youth to enter "progressive"
coalitions-which are meant only to
"progress" toward increasing the vote
total for the Democrats in the year 2000.
The Spartacist League intervened at
the congress to champion the perspective
of revolutionary integration: the under-
standing that black freedom can only be
achieved through a socialist revolution
which places the multiracial proletariat
in power, laying the basis for the full
integration of black people in an egalitar-
ian socialist society. The social power of
the working class must be brought to
bear in the fight against every manifesta-
tion of capitalist oppression and exploi-
tation. But this can only happen if the
proletariat is mobilized independently of
and in opposition to all the parties and
institutions of capitalist rule. -
If many black youth do not today see
6
the working class as a motor force in the
fight for black rights, this is above all
the responsibility of the AFL-CIO labor
bureaucracy, which has not lifted a finger
against the escalating attacks on the black
masses. And it is precisely the likes of
the CP, CoC and DSA (which includes
among its members AFL-CIO chief John
Sweeney) which have done their share to
prop up the pro-capitalist trade-union
tops. Exposing the "socialist" pretensions
of the BRC organizers as a subterfuge, we
stressed that support to the Democratic
Party has long served to retard any con,
sciousness by the American proletariat
that its class interests-and the inter-
ests of all the oppressed-are directly
counterposed to those of the capitalist
exploiters. ,
Our purpose is to win the 'working
class to that understanding, to build a
revolutionary workers party which cham-
pions the cause of all the oppressed. The
fight to forge such a party is expressed,
for example, in our efforts to mobilize
labor to win freedom for black death row
political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and
abolish the racist death penalty. This
means a political struggle against the
racist Democrats who push the speedup
on death row and preside over intense
repression of the ghetto masses, as well
as against their black liberal front men
and the pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats.
Bankrupt Liberals
Looking for a Home
In an article in Black Scholar (Spring
1998) building for the BRC, Manning
Marable, co-chairman of the social-
democratic CoC, noted the "crisis of
confidence in the official representa-
tives of the black establishment, and its
traditional liberal integrationist, let's-
work-within-the-system credo." Marable
decried the fact that former leaders of the
1960s civil rights movement supplanted
civil disobedience and community-based
AP
Martin Luther King Jr.
with Robert Kennedy,
NAACP head
Roy Wilkins and
Lyndon Johnson
in 1963. Liberal civil
rights leaders looked
to racist Democrats.
In 1992 election
campaign, Clinton
dumped on Jesse
Jackson to win "white
backlash" vote.
organization with "a blind adherence to
electoral politics."
But the mass marches led by Martin
Luther King Jr. and the other liberals
who headed this movement were always
premised on electoral pressure and lob-
bying Democratic Party administrations
for legislative redress. Indeed, the pro-
gram of liberal integrationism is based
on the chimera that black equality can be
achieved within the framework of capi-
talism. At bottom, this means accepting
the racist status quo, while seeking sim-
ply to alleviate some "excesses" through
pressuring a "progressive" wing of the
bourgeoisie, particularly the Democrats.
progressive." This layer of
the black popUlation, the "talented
tenth," were the main beneficiaries of
the civil rights movement. Following
the brutal suppression of the ghetto
upheavals of the 1960s, the ruling class
sought to quell the anger of the inner cit-
ies by co-opting civil rights activists and
installing "black faces in high places."
Marion Barry, the first chairman of the
militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), went on to become
mayor of Washington, D.C. Coleman
Young, who came from an earlier gener-
ation of black and labor activists, was
installed as mayor of Detroit. In Chi-
cago and Atlanta, more mainstream
black Democrats-Harold Washington
and Maynard Jackson-were elected. The
purpose of these black elected officials
was to serve as front men for racist capi-
talist rule. But by the 1992 elections, their
powerful and wealthy Democratic Party
patrons made it clear that they had no
need for the black politicians who had
served to discipline the inner-city masses.
The Democrats' election strategy in
1992 was centered on winning back the
"Reagan Democrats"-Southern whites
and white ethnic constituencies in the
North who had defected to the Republi-
cans as part of a racist backlash against
the minimal gains achieved by blacks in
the 1960s. To this end, the Democrats ran
a slate of two Southerners, Clinton and
Gore. Clinton's election campaign pro-
moted his "New Democrats" as the party
of racist "law and order," as he returned
to Arkansas to personall y oversee the exe-
cution of a brain-damaged black man. In
the course of the campaign, Clinton also
ostentatiously "dissed" Jesse Jackson,
who for years had desperately sought
influence in the Democratic Party by
appealing to a broad range of "constituen-
cies"-blacks, women, trade unionists,
youth-with his "Rainbow Coalition."
In casting aside the loyal backing of
Democratic black elected offiCials, Clin-
ton expressed the contempt of the ruling
class for the majority of the black popu-
lation locked in the inner cities. With the
slashing of industrial jobs, particularly in
the Midwest, the ghetto masses who had
long served as a reserve army of labor
for the capitalist exploiters were largely
deemed "expendable." Now the capitalist
rulers present the unvarnished face of
raw racist reaction, from the elimination
of welfare to intensified police terror, an
overflowing prison population and the
speedup on death row.
In 1995, Jesse Jackson, the Black
Congressional Caucus and black liberals
like Cornel West embraced Louis Far-
rakhan's Million Man March. A reaction-
ary mobilization calling on 'black men to
WORKERS VANGUARD
"atone," the Million Man March blamed
the oppressed for their own oppression
and amnestied the racist rulers for their
enormous crimes against blacks, working
people and the poor. Having no alterna-
tive to Farrakhanite black nationalism,
Jackson & Co. hoped that the sight of a
million black men in front of the Capitol
would give them some bargaining power
with the Clinton White House.
As Spartacist League supporter Don
Cane wrote in an article i!1 the Winter/
Spring 1996 issue of Black Scholar
(reprinted in WV No. 647, 7 June 1996):
"Much is made of the march as a demon-
stration of 'black operational unity'-a
million black men standing together. In
the 1960s, 'I'm Black and I'm Proud'
race consciousness, influenced by masses
in stmggle, wasdefiant of the racist cap-
italist mlers. Today we witness 'I'm
black and I'm not a criminal' race con-
sciousness influenced by a desperate
black middle class begging for 'under-
standing' from the racist mlers. The
black misleaders, branded by race them-
selves, can barely conceal their contempt
for the black masses on whom they call
to 'atone.' I say black people have noth-
ing to atone for! But the false prophets
of the 'American Dream' blame the vic-
tim for not 'succeeding' and degrade the
proud history of black working people
who have stmggled long and hard for
freedom from the chains of racist
oppression." .
WV Photos
Spartacist League initiated November 1982 labor/black mobilization which
stopped Klan from marching in Washington, D.C. (above) and July 1993
protests against racist discrimination at Denny's.
Now, two years later, Marable claims in
his Black Scholar article that "it was only
after the Million Man March's success
that the serious limitations and dema-
goguery of Farrakhan became readily
apparent to many African Americans who
had supported and even attended the mass
event." In the context of growing disen-
chantment with Farrakhan, black liberals
and social democrats see the opportunity
to advance their own political fortunes in
calling, in Marable's words, for "a radical
democratic third alternative."
The BRC's "Principles of Unity" pro-
displace existing organizations, parties or
campaigns." Though never stated in so
many words by the congress organizers,
it was obvious that the party they don't
"intend to displace" is the Democrats!
Since the time of Franklin D. Roo-
sevelt's "New Deal" government of the
1930s, the CP has sacrificed labor strug-
gles and the fight for black rights on the
altar of the Democratic Party. And the
CoC was set up in 1991 as a right-wing
split from the CPo Pushing for even more
open support to Democratic politicians
like Jesse Jackson, those who formed the
CoC saw the troublesome "Communist"
label as an impediment. Joining these ex-.
Stalinists in building the BRC was the
virulently anti-Communist DSA, which
has been firmly ensconced in the Demo-
cratic Party throughout its history as the

Democrats unite
to fight the .illht
Manning Marable
(left), CP leader
Jarvis Tyner. BRC
reformists promote
"unity" with capitalist
Democrats, as seen
in CP headline on
1996 elections.
Herb Robinson
fessed rejection of "Black patriarchy and
Black capitalism as solutions to problems
facing Black people." At the sametilne,
these "principles" coyly added, "We can-
not limit ourselves to electoral politics."
What the liberals, reformists and radical
has-beens who organized the BRC have
in mind is an "alternative" modeled on
Jesse Jackson's "Rainbow Coalition." In
an article in Color Lines (Summer 1998),
Marable harked back to Jackson's 1988
bid for the Democratic presidential nom-
ination, which he lauded as "on the verge
of becoming the most significant left-of-
center force in national politics." He went
on to complain that "the decline of the
Rainbow left a gaping political vacuum"
which opened the door to Farrakhan.
Left unsaid is that most of the same
outfits that were behind the BRC sup-
ported Farrakhan's Million Man March.
Despite all their various rationales, this
ret1ected their own desperation and impo-
tence in the face of a rising tide of racist
reaction. Now, with Jackson serving as
"spiritual adviser" to Bill Clinton and
Farrakhan widely recognized as a black
Reaganite, Marable & Co. see their
chance to come in from the cold.
Old Hands at Betrayal
The preamble to the BRC "Principles
of Unity" stated: "The Black Radical
Congress does not intend to replace or
25 SEPTEMBER 1998
People's Weekly World
"left wing of the possible." As U.S.
_ imperialism was hip-deep in its dirty,
losing war against the Vietnamese during
sijccessive Democratic administrations in
the 1960s, DSA founder Michael Har-
rington was brain trusting .the Democrats'
"war on poverty" to defuse black mili-
tancy on the home front.
An article on the BRC by black CP
leader Jarvis Tyner opined, "We must
reach out to the mass of radicalized Black
working class folks ... the most consistent
progressive voting bloc" (People's Weekly
World, 20 June). Addressing a plenary
session of the BRC, Tyner identified the
desired goal of this "voting bloc" when
he stressed the importance of the fall
elections-in order to garner votes for
the Democratic Party. The CP made this
crystal-clear qn the eve of the 1996 pres-
idential elections, when it enthused in a
front-page headline, "Democrats Unite
to Fight the Right" (People's Weekly
World, 31 August 1996). For its part, the
CoC provided a handy list of Demo-
cratic legislative updates in its leat1et at
the BRC.
Many of the BRC organizers wanted
to forgo the "radical" label altogether.
Salim Muwakkil, a columnist for the
DSA house organ In These Times, wrote
of concern that "the 'radical' label would
scare people away" (In These Times,
12 July). But what really had them wor-
ried was that some of the youth might
actually be serious about being radical.
As Muwakkil put it, "Understanding that
black youth, especially those int1uenced
by hip-hop culture, are often attracted
to images of cultural audacity and 'no
sell-out' authenticity, the framers of the
Freedom Agenda used some rhetoric so
soaring that many movement veterans
winced."
But even this "soaring language" was
not enough to corral many of the youth at
the BRC into the organizers' warmed-
over version of Jackson's "Rainbow
Coalition." Many even boycotted a party
featuring a rap singer-"presumably
booked for their benefit," as an offended
BRC participant reported in the Nation
(27 July), sneering that the younger activ-
ists instead went off to "hammer out their
own, 'more radical' principles of unity."
For their part, the BRC organizers t1atly
warned that anyone who didn't stand by
their "principles of unity" were "invited
to withdraw."
Lessons of the
Civil Rights Movement
In articles building for the BRC, the
organizers made a point of recalling vari-
ous black movements and struggles of
the past. At the congress itself, dozens
of former 1960s black activists-who
long ago sold their political souls to
the very system against which they had
once rebelled-were called upon to
instill the "lessons" of these struggles to
Lowndes County,
Alabama Black
Panther Party,
1966. Radical
wing of civil
rights movement
rejected liberal
pacifism and
advocated armed
self-defense.
the youth who turned out. But the aim of
these exercises was precisely to obfus-
cate those lessons.
Typical was an 18 June article by Mar-
able posted on the "Black World" Web
site, which purported to outline the "long
and rich tradition of African-American
radicalism in the United States." Marable
cynically amalgamated the militant Black
Panther Party of the 1960s with the tame
liberals of the NAACP and 1980s Chi-
cago mayor Harold Washington. This is
of a piece with efforts in recent years by
apologists for pro-Democratic Party pres-
sure politics to identify militant black
nationalist Malcolm X with Democratic
Party liberal Martin Luther King Jr. by
endlessly rerunning the one photo ever
taken of the two together.
Malcolm X was the voice of black
militancy, intransigently opposed to the
"white man's puppet Negro 'leaders,'" as
he called King, Bayard Rustin and other
liberal civil rights leaders. He reviled
their calls for "turn the other cheek" pac-
ifism in the face of murderous racist
attacks by the KKK and other agents of
Southern Dixiecrat rule. He denounced
their appeals to Democratic president
John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert,
the attorney general, who "came to the
aid" of civil rights activists by sending
in the FBI and federal marshals to sup-
press militant black protest. Malcolm
X inspired a generation of young black
radicals in the 1960s who came to repu-
diate the "moral suasion" and reliance on
the federal government promoted by
King et al.
While the mass of black and white
activists who were the foot soldiers of the
civil rights movement wrote a heroic
chapter in the fight for black equality in
racist America, the politics of the Kings
and Rustins were those of liberalism.
Their goal was formal, legal equality in
the South, whose beneficiaries were to be
primarily the black middle class. But no
new civil rights bill could address the
systematic racist discrimination and
dehumanizing conditions suffered by the
masses in the South--Dr in the Northern
inner cities, where blacks already had
"equality" under the law. As the bank-
ruptcy and impotence of the liberals'
strategy became increasingly clear, many
young activists began to champion the
call for "black power" prominently raised
by Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame
Ture) of SNCC.
Initially, the "black power" movement
was contradictory. As we wrote:
"SNCC's . empirical rejection of the
more obvious brands of reformism ad-
vocated by .white liberals and petty-
bourgeois Black 'leaders' has taken
the form of a call for 'Black Power: a
militant-sounding phrase which frightens
the.white liberals and Uncle Toms. The
concepts implied in the SNCC slogan of
'Black Power' are radical enough to have
caused the bourgeois press and politi-
cians to shower vicious abuse on it, pre-
cisely because the slogan is a groping for
continued on page 8
7
= = = = = = = = = = = 9 I ~ ~ ~ _ o_ ung Sparl
Reformists ...
(continued from page 7)
solutions outside the framework of the
capitalist society."
-"SNCC and Revolution,"
Spartacist No.8
(November/December 1966)
But we warned that "the slogan 'black
power' must be clearly defined in class,
not racial terms, for otherwise the 'black
power' movement may become the black
wing of the Democratic Party in the
South" ("Black and Red-Class Struggle
RQad to Negro Freedom," Spartacist No.
10, May/June 1967). Today John Lewis,
a militant SNCC leader in the 1960s, is a
Georgia Dem()cratic Congressman.
The most militant expression of the
"black power" movement was the Black
Panther Party. The best of a generation
of young black radicals, the Panthers in
their own contradictory way sought to
challenge the entire system of racist
American capitalism. Largely thanks to
the treachery of the AFL-CIO labor
bureaucracy, which openly joined with
the capitalist rulers in opposing any
expression of black militancy, the Pan-
thers rejected the multiracial proletariat
as the agenoy for social liberation. Sub-
jected to murderous repression by the
FBI's "Counter-Intelligence Program"
(COINTELPRO), the Panthers were also
destroyed by factional feuding born of
the contradictions inherent in their "revo-
lutionary nationalist" program.
The Spartacist League was born in
good part in a fight for a revolutionary
intervention into the civil rights move-
ment, aimed at winning the thousands of
left-wing militants who rebelled against
King's liberal pacifism. The precursor of
the SL was the Revolutionary Tendency
of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP),
which fought against the latter's criminal
abstention from the struggle to win these
activists to a revolutionary proletarian
program. After our expulsion from the
SWP, we sought to carry out this perspec-
tive. As we wrote in "Black and Red," one
of the SL's founding documents:
"The struggle of the Black people of
this country for freedom, while part of
the struggle of the working class as a
whole, is more than that struggle. The
Negro people are an oppressed race-
color caste, in the main comprising the
most exploited layer of the American
working class .... Because of their posi-
tion as both the most oppressed and also
the most conscious and experienced sec-
tion, revolutionary black workers are
slated to play an exceptional role in the
coming American revolution ....
"The victory of the socialist revolution in
this country will be achieved through the
united struggle of black and white work-
ers under the leadership of thf< revolu-
tionary vanguard party. In the course of
this struggle unbreakable bonds will be
forged between the two sections of the
working class. The success of this strug-
gle will place the Negro people in a posi-
tion to insure at last the end of slavery,
racism and super-exploitation."
It is precisely such a perspective of rev-
olutionary struggle against the capitalist
system that the reformist and liberal
organizers of the BRC oppose. In his
Black Scholar article, Marable declared
8
that a new "radical black political proj-
ect" must by all means not be "a party
based on a vanguard, cadre-type organiza-
tional mode." This is a direct echo of the
imperialist rulers' triumphal proclama-
tions following the counterrevolutionary
destruction of the Soviet Union that
"communism is dead." The lie that Marx-
ism has "failed" serves the bourgeoisie
in promoting its system of brutal exploi-
tation and oppression as the best and
only possible world. At bottom, this out-
look is shared by the social democrats,
Teamsters picket
in New York City
during 1997
UPS strike.
Marxists fight
to mobilize power
of multiracial
working class in
struggle against
black oppression.
~
;:i
>.
c
c
~
ex-Stalinists and radical has-beens behind
the BRC. Thus, they necessarily reject a
proletarian, internationalist party mod-
eled on the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and
Trotsky which led the 1917 Russian Rev-
olution and opened the portals of emanci-
pation to the oppressed peoples of the
tsarist empire.
The BRC organizers don't seek to
destroy the system of capitalist exploita-
tion and racist oppression, but merely to
give it a "human" face. While Mumia
Abu-Jamal sent greetings to the BRC, the
congress couldn't even bring itself to take
up the fight for his freedom. About the
only concrete proposal the organizers put
forward was to appeal to the United
Nations for "reparations" for American
blacks. This appeal to the sponsor of
numerous imperialist military occupa-
tions of black African and other semi-
colonial countries epitomizes the liberals'
impotent faith in the agencies of imperi-
alism to serve the cause of the oppressed.
Liberals Unite with Nationalists
in Redbaiting
Seeking to silence any revolutionary
perspective at the BRC, the reformist
organizers found a ready purpose for the
black nationalists-whose politics they
claim to oppose as "conservative"-as a
battering ram against communists. Spew-
ing the divisive venom of the capitalist
rulers, the nationalists race-baited our
comrades for championing integrated
class struggle and the forging of a revolu-
tionary workers party. This accompanied
an anti-Communist diatribe against the
Progressive Labor Party (PL), which dis-
tributed a leaflet calling to "smash the
KKK" in Jasper, Texas, where James
Byrd had been sadistically lynched only
days before. Typical of PL's mindless
bombast, the leaflet went on about "vio-
lent workers revolution" and the need for
"armed revolutionary violence." But it
was because of PL's posture as revolu-
tionary communists that the reformist
BRC organizers condemned them as a
threat to the "unity" of the conference.
In response, PL complained in Chal-
lenge (1 July) that the BRC organizers
had broken "their 7th principle of unity-
'we must be democratic and inclusive in
our dealings with one another'." This
touching appeal to the democratic creden-
tials of anti-communist reformists and
nationalists reveals PL's own liberal
underbelly. While idiotically proclaiming
that the "essence" of the BRC is "to lure
angry black workers farther down the
road to fascism" (!), in the same article
PL declares its objective was "to win the
center people to our ideas." For decades,
PL has alternated between "fight for com-
munism" rhetoric and pushing the notion
of a "center-left coalition," which is cut
of the same class-collaborationist cloth as
the CP's call for "progressive coalitions."
While in its leaflet on the Jasper lynch-
ing PL declared that "the struggle against
racism is the key to the struggle for work-
ers' power," this is an organization which
has condemned the fight to mobilize
against the assault on affirmative action
as "divisive" and even echoes the "reverse
discrimination" rhetoric of the racists.
And when Mumia A\?u-Jamal was under
immediate threat of execution in the sum-
mer of 1995, PL refused to take up the
defense of this eloquent . spokesman for
the oppressed. Moreover, as we noted
in "How PL Caves In to Racist Bosses"
(WVNo. 645,10 May 1996):
"Acceptance of the most backward social
consciousness bred by capitalism, how-
ever, has long characterized PL. You'll
never find an article in Challenge de-
fending gays-in fact PL claims homo-
sexuals are 'sick.' Nor will you find
much about the fight against women's
oppression, defense of abortion clinics,
etc. To this day, PL retains the reaction-
ary Stalinist position that the family-
the main institution responsible for the
oppression of women-can somehow
help in the fight for communism."
Another self-proclaimed socialist
group at the Black Radical Congress was
the International Socialist Organization
(ISO). Not surprisingly, these social dem-
ocrats were conspicuously passed over in
the frenzy of red baiting at the congress.
Indeed, the ISO's own liberal politics,
dished up with a patina of "unite and
fight" rhetoric, fit in well with the prevail-
ing theme at the congress. From its incep-
tion, the ISO's hallmark has been rabid
anti-Communism. In the name of fighting
"Stalinist totalitarianism," this outfit
embraced "democratic" imperialism, sup-
porting virtually every counterrevolution-
ary movement sponsored by the Ameri-
can bourgeoisie in its drive to destroy
the Soviet Union. Yet at the BRC, ISO
spokesman Ahmed Shawki shared the
platform at the "Socialism and Black Lib-
eration" workshop with CPer Joe Sims.
Neither Shawki nor Sims breathed a
word against the Democratic Party in
their presentations. This is not surpris-
ing, as the "anti-Stalinist" ISO seeks to
follow in the footsteps of the Stalinist CP
in its heyday, i.e., when it wielded mass
influence in support of Roosevelt's "New
Deal." Consonant with this, the CP, DSA
and the more left-posturing ISO slavishly
tail the labor bureaucracy, whose alle-
giance to the Democratic Party is the
chief obstacle to successful class strug-
gle in the U.S.
In opposition to the reformists, the
Spartacist League intervened at the BRC
to stress that breaking with the Demo-
cratic Party is central to any genuine fight
for black freedom, which can only come
through the seizure of power by the inte-
grated working class. Through its num-
bers, organization and above all its role in
producing the wealth in this society, the
working class has the social power to
sweep away the capitalist oppressors.
This power was seen at the time of the
Black Radical Congress in the United
Auto Workers strike at Flint GM, which
crippled the largest corporation in the
world. But this power will only be fully
realized through the forging of a class-
struggle leadership of the labor move-
ment which actively champions the cause
of black liberation and mobilizes in
defense of the rights of immigrants and
all the oppressed. The key to unlocking
the chains that shackle labor to its
exploiters is a political struggle against
the pro-capitalist trade-union misleaders.
In the course of the class battles and
social struggles to come, the Spartacist
League seeks to build a revolutionary
workers party which will serve as a trib-
une of the people. A sense of what such a
workers party will look like can be seen
in the exemplary actions we have initi-
ated over the years to combat Klan terror
and racist discrimination. From Wash-
ington, D.C. in 1982 to Atlanta in 1989,
the SL and the Partisan Defense Com-
mittee have initiated united-front labor/
black mobilizations drawing in sections
of the trade unions against KKK race-
hate provocations. As we wrote in
"Unchain Labor's Power" (WV No. 673,
5 September 1997) after last year's
Teamsters strike against UPS:
"In these mobilizations could be seen the
powerful combination of black and red:
labor united in its own defense and in
defense of all the oppressed under a
communist leadership. At the time of the
Civil War, Karl Marx captured a funda-
mental truth of American society in his
statement that 'Labor cannot emancipate
itself in the white skin where in the black
it is branded'."
The Civil War was a social revolution
which smashed the system of chattel
slavery. But the promise of black free-
dom was betrayed by the Northern capi-
talists. It will take a third American revo-
lution to smash the system of wage
slavery. The road forward lies in an
aroused and struggling labor movement,
imbued with the class consciousness and
understanding that it must champion the
cause of black liberation and the rights
of all the oppressed in the fight to shatter
this racist capitalist system through pro-
letarian socialist revolution .
Spartacist League
Public Offices
-MARXIST LlTERATURE-
Bay Area
Thurs.: 5:30-8 p.m. and Sat.: 1-5 p.m.
1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)
Oakland, CA Phone: (510) 839-0851
Saturday: 2-4 p.m.
123 Townsend St. (near 2nd SI.)
Dial #826 for entry
San Francisco, CA Phone: (415) 777-9367
Chicago
Tues.: 5-9 p.m. and Sat.: 12-3 p.m.
328 S. Jefferson St., Suite 904
Chicago,IL Phone: (312) 454-4930
New York City
Mon.: 6-8:30 p.m. and Sat.: 1-5 p.m.
(from Aug. 31 to Oct. 5)
299 Broadway, Suite 318 (north of Chambers St.)
New York, NY Phone: (212) 267-1025
WORKERS VANGUARD
Clinton ...
(continued from page 1)
London Independent (17 September)
noted, the polls increasingly show a
"class divide," with opposition to Clinton
strongest "at cocktail parties, dinners and
gatherings of the smart in Washington
and across America" and support for the
president strongest among the black pop-
ulation and those with incomes under
$15,000 a year.
This in part reflects the illusions
in the Democrats as a "lesser evil" to
the Republicans promoted by the pro-
capitalist labor bureaucracy and petty-
bourgeois black "community leaders." At
the same time, working people and
minorities are far more likely to come
up against the increasingly augmented
repressive apparatus of the bourgeois
state. Black people in particular are
keenly aware of how black spokesmen
from Martin Luther King Jr. to Washing-
ton, D.C. mayor Marion Barry were
hounded and vilified as a result of
FBI sting operations and snooping. In
an op-ed piece titled "What Is Freedom
Without Privacy?" (New York Times, 15
September), black Harvard academic
Orlando Patterson observed:
"One reason African-Americans have so
steadfastly stood by the President, in
spite of his having done so little for
them, is that their history has been one
long violation of their privacy. Long
after slavery was abolished, blacks were
keenly and humiliatingly aware that
whites could invade their lives in count-
less ways and with total impunity."
At the same time, it is a real reflection of
the racial divide in this country that a
president who has done more to devas-
tate the lives of blacks than any of his
Republican predecessors has won their
admiration in part because he numbers
Vernon Jordan among his closest friends.
Puritanical Hypocrisy
Run Amok
The "national discourse," such as it is,
has taken on the character of an evangel-
ical tent meeting or Catholic confes-
sional, replete with talk of shame, sin,
contrition and sexual "perversity." When
Grand Inquisitor Kenneth Starr, himself
the son of a Christian fundamentalist
family, released his report of 400-plus
pages filled with a raft of details about
every single encounter between Clinton
and Lewinsky, porn video star Nina
Hartley commented to the San Francisco
Chronicle (12 September): "Ken Starr's
investigation is the biggest publicly
funded porn production I've ever seen."
Or, as drag queen "Sister Boom-Boom"
aptly put it in the same article, "I don't
care if Clinton is doing a three-way with
Janet Reno and a monkey. It's his private
business."
What is taking place is a monumental
exercise in public hypocrisy, in which
the guiding "moral" is: don't get caught!
As the snoopers are themselves snooped
upon, right-wing Republican Congress-
men Dan Burton, Helen Chenoweth and
Henry Hyde are among the most recent
to be "outed" for sexual "indiscre-
tions." Hyde, who now presides over the
House Judiciary Committee's impeach-
ment inquiry, dismisses his four-year
extramarital affair (when he was in
his mid-40s) as "youthful indiscretions."
And the hypocrisy cuts many ways.- Gay
Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank
exclaimed, "They're trying to impeach
this guy for lying about his sex life. But
you're talking to a guy who's been criti-
cized for not lying about my sex life"
(New Yorker, 14 September).
Starr and his backers hypocritically
assert that the only thing at issue is that
Clinton committed perjury and an "abuse
of power" in trying to cover up the affair.
No doubt, Clinton used the considerable
powers at the disposal of the imperial
presidency to try to hide his affair with
Lewinsky, though clearly without much
success. And he is a truly unappetizing
character. But the bottom line here is that
it's nobody's business who people screw,
and so it's nobody's business that they lie
about it. For Marxists, opposition to gov-
25 SEPTEMBER 1998
ernment interference in people's personal
lives is a matter of principle, regardless of
who is on the receiving end. That is why
we also defended Air Force Lieutenant
Kelly Flinn when she was thrown out of
the military on nominal grounds of lying
about a sexual affair.
When Republican president George
Bush nominated black anti-abortion
bigot Clarence Thomas for the Supreme
Court in 1991, the feminists and liberal
Democrats went after Thomas for his
predilection for pornography and his
alleged sexual harassment of law intern
Anita Hill. While opposing Thomas for
his anti-abortion stance and his support
to the racist death penalty, we con-
demned the ensuing "orgy of prudery
and prurience in the service of racism
and sexism" as a "Moral Majority moral-
ity play" ("Sex, Race and Reaction,"
WVNo. 537, 25 October 1991).
Now bourgeois feminists like the
National Organization for Women have
rallied behind Clinton because of his sup-
posedly "progressive" stance on women's
rights. Clinton won the presidency in
1992 largely because millions of women
were repulsed by the Republicans' anti-
abortion platform. But the reactionary
"family values" crusade has been amply
promoted by Clinton and his party-from
the "don't ask, don't tell" sham which has
led to even wider persecution of gays in
the military to the ever more ominous
censorship laws justified in the name of
"protecting" children from pornogra-
phy. And access to abortion for poor and
rural women in particular has actually
decreased during Clinton's reign.
The capitalist rulers foster "family val-
ues" religious moralism as a conservatiz-
ing ideology to regiment the population
and bolster the family, the key institution
for the oppression of women in class
society. The feminists have played no
small role in helping to fuel a climate of
anti-sex hysteria. In portraying sexual
harassment as everything from the real
vtctimization of women in the workplace
to any sexual innuendo or consensual sex
between an employee and.a superior, they
reinforce the sexist view that the woman
is always the victim in any relationship
with a man-especially an older, more
powerful one. Here they again find com-
mon ground with the Christian right,
which argues that women are in need of
"protection" because they are incompe-
tent in controlling their sex lives. Maybe
next they'll propose forcing women to
apply for licenses with different classes
and restrictions, like driver's licenses,
delimiting who can screw whom, when
and at what age!
Demolishing this reactionary outlook,
Katie Roiphe, author of The Morning
After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Cam-
pus, noted in a commentary in the New
York Times (15 September), "If there are
any lingering doubts about Monica
Lewinsky's ability to take care of herself,
any lingering perceptions of her as a vic-
tim, an innocent used for sexual pur-
poses, a careful reading of the Starr
report should put them to rest." Lewin-
sky showed the staying power and drive
of a hawk going for a bunny in her steely
pursuit of Clinton, including angry, hour-
long, late-night phone calls demanding
the president secure her a high-paying
GOV::rNfl
OF
BEDROOM f -
...
WV Photos
SL contingents at abortion rights protests
denounce Democrat Clinton for his crimes
against working people and minorities,
oppose government sex snoops.
prestige job she "didn't have to work
for" in exchange for keeping quiet about
their affair.
Now former Reagan legal adviser
Peter Wallison tries to make the case for
impeachment by comparing Clinton's
affair with Lewinsky to a who
"engaged in child abuse while in office"
(New York Times, 14 September). Leav-
ing aside that Lewinsky was hardly a
child, "child abuse" can mean a host of
things in this brutal, anti-sex society:
from a 19-year-old man screwing a 17-
year-old "underage" woman to spanking
a child as punishment to actual rape and
physical attack. We oppose reactionary
"age of consent" laws and the view that
children are asexual beings. The key cri-
terion for determining whether a sexual
relationship is abusive must be effective
consent-as long as it is genuinely con-
sensual, it's nobody's 'business and cer-
tainly not a matter for the courts.
Impeachment and the
Imperial Presidency
A number of commentators have com-
pared the Clinton cover-up with the
Watergate affair that brought down
Republican president Richard Nixon in
1974. However, what Nixon covered up
was a break-in he had ordered at the
offices of the Democratic National Com-
mittee. While Nixon was a certified war
criminal who presided over the slaughter
of millions of Vietnamese workers and
peasants, Marxists did not call for his
impeachment, as this would have sown
illusions that another imperialist chief
could be any less an enemy of workers
and the oppressed. But when Congress
moved to impeach Nixon, we supported
this while insisting: "Impeacl)ment is not
enough!" We raised a series of demands
aimed at mobilizing the proletariat in
struggle against both the Democratic and
Republican parties of capitalism: "A
class-struggle answer to Watergate must
shift the axis of struggle. The fight to
remove Nixon must become a fight not
to replace Nixon with Gerald Ford, but
a fight to replace the rule of capital with
a workers government!" ("What Labor
Should Do About Watergate," WV No. 34,
7 December 1973).
Historically, the possibility of im-
peachment was written into the Constitu-
tion precisely in order that Congress be
able to rein in the powers of an overly
strong president who might tend toward
dictatorship. But America's emergence
as a world power created the need for a
strong, imperial presidency, particularly
in times when it is deemed necessary to
launch a war or invasion without the
bother of Congressional approval as
mandated in the Constitution. Thus, the
bourgeoisie has been loath to wield the
impeachment mandate. In the end, Nixon
was not impeached but forced to resign.
Now liberal columnist Anthony Lewis
warns in the New York Times (15 Septem-
ber) that forcing Clinton out of office
"would do terrible damage to the role of
the Presidency in our constitutional struc-
ture. It would move us toward a parlia-
mentary system." In fact, a parliamentary
system would be more democratic, but it
would still be an instrument for enforcing
what Marxists call the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie, the rule of capital over the
vast majority of the dispossessed and
exploited.
For Workers Revolution!
In the period immediately following
the Civil War which smashed the South-
ern slave system, when the American
bourgeoisie was still in its progressive
phase, there was an impeachment attempt
which posed questions of real social sig-
nificance for the population. When Ten-
nessee's Andrew Johnson became presi-
dent after Lincoln's assassination in
1865, he sought to conciliate the former
.slavocracy and curtail the Reconstruction
effort aimed at ensuring full equality for
the newly freed slaves. Johnson handed
out mass pardons to representatives of the
defeated Confederacy, allowing them to
set up state assemblies known as the
"Johnson governments" to defy the Union
Army and drive the black freedmen pro-
tected by the military occupation of the
South out of local and state administra-
tion. In 1866, Johnson unsuccessfully
tried to veto the Civil Rights Act which
conferred citizenship on the black freed-
men. He also attempted to undercut the
Freedmen's Bureau which had been set
up by Congress to help the emancipated
slaves in securing access to food, medical
care, work, property and basic education.
Finally, when Johnson tried to remove
radical Reconstructionist Secretary of
War Edwin Stanton from the Cabinet,
Congress moved to bring him down. The
House of Representatives voted over-
whelmingly for Johnson's impeachment,
which lost by only one vote of the
needed two-thirds majority in the Senate.
Afterward, Congress operated around
Johnson, casting him aside as an obstacle
to the pursuit of Radical Reconstruction.
But the Northern bourgeoisie increas-
ingly undermined this great democratic
effort, culminating in the Compromise
of 1877 which formalized the end of
Reconstruction and sealed the betrayal of
the aspirations of the black masses.
The American capitalist class long ago
ceased to be a force for social progress.
Today, the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie is
the foremost enemy of workers and the
oppressed around the world. In the U.S.,
this is expressed not only in the burgeon-
ing attacks on the black and working mass-
es but in the growing influence of Dark
Ages attitudes toward sex and women. As
we noted in "Race, Sex and Reaction":
"As far as we're concerned it's not the
peccadillos of the bourgeoisie that we
care about, but their crimes against the
working people, against women and
blacks, against Vietnam and Iraq.
"It says something about the end-of-the-
20th-century American social climate
that we Marxists are fighting to defend
many tenets of the bourgeois revolu-
tion-the separation of church and state,
rights of privacy, etc."
To justify its increasingly brutal class
rule, the bourgeoisie repudiates the most
progressive aspects of its own origins.
The stench of hypocrisy and moralism
emanating from the bourgeoisie is a
measure of the decrepitude of this out-
moded capitalist system. For our part, we
seek to do away with the imperial presi-
dency, and all the institutions of the
bourgeois state, as part of a thoroughgo-
ing socialist revolution which will place
the only progressive class, the proletar-
iat, at the helm of society .
9
Ireland ...
(continued from page 1)
atrocity carried out in Omagh by a group
called the "Real IRA" -which followed
the Loyalist arson murder of three young
children in a Catholic home in Bally-
money-as a pretext to impose new
police-state measures which even Blair
and Ahern described as "draconian."
In all but name, the new "anti-terror"
laws amount to internment-imprison-
ment without trial or even criminal

charges. The word of a "senior police
officer" will now constitute evidence that
someone is a member of an "unlawful
organisation," bringing with it the pos-
sibility of a life sentence. Remaining
silent under interrogation will be treated
as "corroborating" evidence. Any oppo-
nent of British imperialism, the Orange
statelet in the North and the clericalist
state in the South is liable to be labelled
an "enemy of peace" and potential terrOr-
ist, set up to be dragged off in the small
hours or blown away by the state-as
happened to Diarmuid O'Neill in London
two years ago, or to Ronan McLoughlin,
a supporter of the Real IRA shot dead by
Irish cops in May.
It is in the direct and absolute interest
of the working class in Britain to mobil-
ise against Labour's repression, against
the imperialist "peace" fraud and for
British troops out of Northern Ireland
now. The Blair government is whip-
ping up chauvinism over Northern Ire-
land to launch a sweeping attack on
the multiracial working class and all of
the oppressed. In particular, sweeping
international "conspiracy" clauses in the
new legislation will serve to incite racist
attacks against Muslims under the guise
of countering "Islamic terror" and will
provide the legal basis to ban Turkish left-
ists, Tamil and Kurdish nationalists and
other exile political organisations.
We refused to give one iota of support
to Labour in the last election. We seek to
split Labour, which is what Lenin called
a "bourgeois workers party," winning its
working-class base to a revolutionary
party and programme. The Labour gov-
ernment is a capitalist government: anti-
working-class, racist to the core and
totally committed to the monarchy and
British imperialism. It was an earlier
Labour government which introduced the
1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, lead-
ing to the notorious frame-ups of the
Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
The working class must defend itself and
all of the oppressed against attacks by
the capitalist state. Black, Asian, Turkish
and Irish workers are an integral part of
the proletariat in We fight for
full citizenship rights for all immigrants,'
as a necessary part of the struggle to
forge a multiracial revolutionary van-
guard party.
Not Orange Against Green
But Class Against Class!
The Real IRA's Omagh bombing,
which killed and maimed both Protestant
and Catholic civilians in an integrated
shopping area, was a hideous ,crime from
the standpoint of the working class and
in no conceivable way a blow against
imperialism. Marxists oppose the tactic
of individual terror because it is antithet-
ical to the necessary task of mobilising
the working class-Protestant and Catho-
lic-against their imperialist/capitalist
oppressors. Nonetheless, when Irish
nationalist groups strike a blow against
the forces of British imperialism, the
RUC or Loyalist fascistic killers, we
defend the perpetrators of such acts
against state retribution.
We have always taken a fundamentally
different attitude toward indiscriminate
terror directed against civilians. From a
proletarian standpoint, the bombing in
Omagh and similar attacks on British
shopping centres and pubs are criminal
10
acts which serve'only to deepen hatred
between Protestant and Catholic, English
and Irish workers. This was evident in
the 1993 IRA Shankill Road bombing
which killed nine Protestant shoppers in
Belfast. Only weeks earlier, Protestant
workers at Shorts aerospace factory had
walked off the job and marched in
protest against the murder of a Catholic
worker by the Ulster Volunteer Force
(UVF). This proletarian unity was wil-
fully destroyed by the bombing, and led
to the same workers demonstrating
against the IRA and all Catholics.
The SUB and DSG are dedicated to
building Leninist-Trotskyist parties to
fight for the revolutionary overthrow
of all the capitalist powers on these
islands-British imperialism, the Orange
state let in Northern Ireland and the Cath-
olic clericalist state in the South. We
demand the immediate and unconditional
withdrawal of British troops from North-
ern Ireland. This would not automati-
cally ensure advance in a revolutionary
direction but is a necessary starting point
which must be linked to a revolutionary
ror and forced population transfers. We
fight for an Irish workers republic as part
of a voluntary federation of workers
republics in the British Isles. Under
workers rule, the Protestants may yet be
incorporated into a common Irish nation,
they may develop a more distinct identity,
or they may find other democratic forms
of accommodation with the Catholics.
British Fake Left Tails
Blair's Labour
From 1993, when it was first mooted,
the imperialist "peace" deal was always
premised on the British Army presence to
reinforce repression by the RUC. British
imperialism regards Northern Ireland as
an economic liability, but is totally com-
mitted to Orange rule. Contrary to Sinn
Fein's preaching about "demilitarisation"
and "reforming" the RUC, the only force
to be "de-commissioned" in Northern Ire-
land is the IRA and other Republicans.
We say the RUC must be smashed in the
fight for working-class rule.
Karl Marx insisted the working class in
Britain must oppose imperialism in Ire-
AP
Birmingham Six leave prison in 1991 after 16 years behind bars, framed up
under Prevention of Terrorism Act introduced by a Labour government.
proletarian and internationalist perspec-
tive for both islands.
Northern Ireland is a situation of inter-
penetrated peoples sharing a common
territory. The Catholics are an oppressed
minority in the North and part of the
Irish Catholic nation which dominates in
the South. At the same time, the privi-
leges historically enjoyed by Protestants
in the North over Catholics in jobs and
housing have always been pretty margin-
al. With the decline of British capitalism,
Northern Ireland has some of the worst
wages and unemployment in the British
Isles. While championing equality for
the oppressed Catholic minority and
opposing all forms of discrimination, we
fight for jobs for all, as part of a pro-
gramme for the revolutionary overthrow
of capitalism. We fight for programmati-
cally based workers militias including
both Protestants and Catholics-which
would have to be organised on an inter-
nationalist basis under communist lead-
ership-to combat sectarian terror, both
Orange and Green. This is necessarily
linked to the forging of a Leninist van-
guard party.
We oppose the call for an "inde-
pendent Ulster," which means supporting
Orange supremacy. We also oppose the
demand for "self-determination for the
Irish people as a whole" (including when
it is dressed up as a "socialist united Ire-
land"), which is a call for Irish Catholics
to "self-determine" at the expense of the
Protestants. This would reverse the terms
of oppression against the Protestants,
who form a distinct community and
would forcibly resist incorporation into
an Ireland dominated by the Catholic
church. The Irish capitalist state is notori-
ous for brutality toward Travellers and
immigrants and for repression of women.
Abortion is illegal, and vigilante mobs
attack women's health clinics and Trav-
ellers halting sites.
Any attempt at a bourgeois "solution"
is a recipe for increased communalist ter-
land. In 1870, he wrote that the "ordinary
English worker," influenced by anti-Irish
chauvinism, "feels himself a member of
the ruling nation and so turns himself into
a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of
his country against Ire/and, thus strength-
ening their domination over himself." The
policy of the fake-socialist groups in Brit-
ain today, who welcomed the election of
Labour and are shameless supporters of
the imperialist "peace" fraud, is in flat
contradiction to what Marx fought for.
Tony Cliff's reformis'fSocialist Work-
ers Party (SWP), affiliated to the Interna-
tional Socialist Organization in the U.S.,
supports the imperialist "peace process."
Since the "peace process" began, segre-
gation has increased under threat of mur-
derous terror-"ethnic cleansing." The
killing of the three Quinn children in Bal-
lymoney was only the most horrific of
Loyalist outrages in a campaign of driv-
ing Catholics out of mixed areas in Bal-
lymoney. Around 35 Catholic or mixed-
marriage families have been forced out of
the town. In Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim,
22 families were forced out, mostly with
firebombs. Several formerly integrated
housing estates were completely cleared
of Catholics. In 1968, there were 40,000
Catholics in East Antrim, but today there
are only about 2,000.
A few weeks after the Orange siege
at Drumcree which led to the Loyalist
arson attack in Ballymoney, the SWP
complained that "the British govern-
ment could have stood up to them
long before this" (Socialist Worker, 25
July). The SWP's lie that the British
government "stands up to" Orange po-
gromists is of a piece with the Cliffites'
line in 1969, when they supported the
introduction of troops into Northern Ire-
land by a previous Labour government
with the argument that it would provide
a "breathing space." Despite illusions
among the Catholic community that the
British Army would be the lesser evil
to Loyalist mobs, the outcome was
Bloody Sunday in 1972, when British
troops shot and killed 14 marchers
in Derry.
Today the SWP whines that the
new "anti-terror" legislation is excessive
because "the security forces admit there
are no more than 100 members of the real
IRA. It is a small, isolated group. So why
are such draconian measures needed?"
(Socialist Worker, 5 September). This is a
straight echo...of bourgeois criticism of the
new laws, that repression by the "security
forces" should be more "surgical," using
the existing mechanisms of repression.
The Socialist Party (SP) of Peter
Taaffe is notorious for its chauvinist
opposition to the call for British troops
out, and as publicity agents for fascistic
Loyalist killer Billy Hutchinson of the
Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), "polit-
ical wing" of the UVF scum. Like an
echo of David Trimble, the Socialist
Party defends the pogromist Orange-
men's "right" to march in Catholic areas,
such as Bogside and Garvaghy Road. In
Omagh, the SP actually took part in a
prayer vigil along with Trimble and
Ahern, sympathetically noting that
"many in the crowd went across to shake
hands with the RUC men, just one indi-
cation of the deep sea change in attitudes
brought about by this bomb" (Socialist,
28 August). Such expressions of solidar-
ity with the RUC are typical of the refor-
mist SP's longstanding embrace of the
bourgeois state's armed thugs as "work-
ers in uniform" (see Militant Labour's
Touching Faith in the Capitalist State,
Spartacist Pamphlet [August 1994]).
The centrist Workers Power (WP)
group has for years supported the social-
imperialist British Labour Party and
capitulated to Green nationalism. Now
they complain that Sinn Fein/IRA has
"abandoned the revolutionary armed
struggle for a united Ireland" (Work-
ers Power, September 1998). Far from
being "revolutionary," the Sinn Fein/IRA
nationalists have always looked to the
Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, of whom they
wish to be part, and ape their social val-
ues. Following the destruction of the
Soviet Union through capitalist counter-
revolution in 1991-92, petty-bourgeois
nationalists like the IRA quickly came to
terms with the "New World Order" by
placing their hopes in U.S. imperialism.
But the "armed struggle" and the "ballot
box" have always been twin parts of the
same nationalist strategy to pressure
British imperialism to grant a 32-county
capitalist Irish republic incorporating the
North. Notwithstanding lip service to the
need to reach out to Protestant workers,
WP supports the IRA's nationalist per-
spective, which serves to compact the
Protestants behind the Loyalist bigots
and is directly counterposed to the Lenin-
ist fight for working-class power.
Workers Power now says: "The indis-
criminate and reactionary bombing of
Catholic and Protestant workers in
Omagh ... must be condemned" and
describes it as "a crime against the Irish
working class." This is true, but so were
. IRA bombings such as Enniskillen in
1987, which WP in Britain justified, say-
ing "We defend the right of the Provi-
sionals to struggle by any means to end
Britain's rule" (Workers Power, Decem-
ber 1987). Now that the IRA has itself
become a prop for continued British rule,
WP pontificates that "the attempt by
the Real IRA to carryon the guerrilla
struggle .. .in 1998 is utterly stupid and
counter-productive" and admonishes "all
those Republicans who reject the pro-
imperialist peace deal" to "find a bet-
ter way." Workers Power's "way" was
campaigning for Tony "I believe in the
United Kingdom" Blair in the 1997 gen-
eral election.
The bloody spiral of imperialist repres-
sion and communalist terror can only be
broken by uniting the proletariat-Prot-
estant and Catholic, English, Scottish,
Welsh and Irish-across national and
religious lines against British imperialism
and the Irish bourgeoisie. For workers
revolution on both sides of the Irish bor-
der and both sides of the Irish Sea!.
WORKERS VANGUARD
Teamsters
(continued from page 12)
control the vast union. Better to put the
Teamsters in the hands of those within
the union who were loyal and trusted
agents of the state. The following year,
the Justice Department adopted the TDU
proposal.
Forge a Class-Struggle
Leadership!
The reformist left has a long history of
championing "reform" bureaucrats, going
back to Arnold Miller's campaign which
captured the presidency of the United
Mine Workers (UMWA) through Labor
Department-run elections in 1972. Miller,
a Democratic Party politico, subsequently
joined hands with the courts and Demo-
crat Jimmy Carter's White House to
smash wildcat strikes and then flatly sold
out the militant 1977-78 national coal
strike. These class-collaborationist poli-
cies gutted the ranks of the UMWA and
brought the once mighty union to its
knees. Miller was one of a slew of union
"reform" candidates in the 1970s, such as
Ed Sadlowski in the United Steelworkers
of America, who prated about "union
democracy" while appealing to the Jus-
tice Department and the bourgeois courts.
In his 1991 book, Which Side Are You
On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's
Flat on Its Back, Thomas Geoghegan, a
yuppie labor lawyer who built a career
advising Miller, Sadlowski and the TDU,
wrote that now "the entire labor move-
ment is like a giant bar association of
nonlicensed attorneys."
The Spartacist League stood out on
the left in refusing to support Miller,
Sadlowski and their like. Our opposition
to any intervention by the capitalist state
into the affairs of labor is a fundamental
part of our principled fight for the politi-
cal independence of the working class
from the exploiters, their political parties
and their state. It is only on such a basis
that labor can be mobilized in class
struggle. As Russian revolutionary leader
Leon Trotsky noted in his 1940 article,
"Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperial-
ist Decay," the fight for trade-union
democracy "presupposes for its realiza-
tion the complete freedom of the trade
unions from the imperialist or colonial
state." Trotsky observed that the imperial-
ist ruling class demands that the refor-
mist labor bureaucrats "become trans-
formed into its political police before the
eyes of the working class."
This was clearly borne out in the case
of the Teamsters. Carey's embrace of the
bosses' government as a vehicle for his
own installment as union president is
simply ref1ective of the labor bureauc-
racy's worldview which is premised on
the maintenance of capitalist exploitation.
Thus the role of these "labor lieutenants"
of capitalism is to police the workers on
behalf of the American rulers. Once in
office, Carey proceeded to organize racist
rallies against Mexican truckers in the
Southwest and to abjectly capitulate to
UPS bosses after only ten hours in the
1994 strike. The Carey team went on
to knife the 1994 national freight strike
while abandoning strike militants like
Jesse Acuna, who was imprisoned for five
years for the "crime" of defending a
Teamsters picket line.
In trumpeting Carey, both the ISO and
Socialist Action have covered up this his-
tory of betrayals. Similarly, neither group
Socialist
Worker
:D
III

-<
One year after ,
TDU "reformers"
urged feds to use
anti-labor RICO
law to "clean up"
. Teamsters, then
U.S. Attorney
Rudolph Giuliani
announced 1988
RICO suit against
the union. TDU
paper now
appeals to FBI
and Justice
Department to
investigate
James Hoffa Jr.
CONIIOV DISPATCH m_
Teamsta.
in Local Union Elections
PETITION
Te"msrers
I
Dem""d
'rIIOPOUgIl Invest:tgcdlon of:
.. a ..... lioHa "unlo.
The undersigned Teamster members caB upon &he Department of Juslicc. the FBI and the Teamster Election
Officer to conduct a thorough investigation of JlllIU:s Hoffa Jr using every bit as many resources as have been
u:sed to investigate and attack Ron CIlfCY and his reform leadership.
Item: MIl. naociate John A Nataaa, Jr.. hits already admitted that he wa a rundrlllser for JUI'lIOl"S alele.
Item. The FBI and a ifWlOJUrY ... lIWfttigeting pert8IOf'Ilund nrMl1 .... INY have funded Junior'liio 5Iate
Item: The Foda ordered UPS managemenC 10 stop making ItegaI contr....... thaI hIIIped JunIOr'. CIiIImpaIQI'I.
Item JlRoflllldhil5t.wIirm_;;r . IOIW*triler in Oetrolt, Mich.
. "em J_ ........ Iaw"m , January 1998 i; .. ...... "'...-.",
terposed to the fight to mobilize union
power against racist discrimination,
which requires breaking from the c1ass-
collaborationist politics of all wings of
the union bureaucracy.
arbitration in this summer's Flint GM
strike, both covered up the fact that the
Solidarity House bureaucrats voluntarily
agreed to arbitration-that is, essentially
requested government intervention-in
fear of waging a hard class battle to
defeat GM.
Occasional "militant" rhetoric notwith-
standing, the ISO and SA act only to law-
yer for the pro-capitalist labor bureauc-
racy. Both ignore the bureaucracy's ties to
the Democratic Party, the main war party
of U.S. imperialism and the historic party
of Jim Crow racism. Both continue to
forgo criticism of the "America First"
.ccw
Teamsters'
ranI! and file
give Garey
'Five More
Years!'
What binds these groups to the labor
bureaucracy is that they, too, share a fun-
damental belief in the "democratic" cre-
dentials of the U.S. capitalist rulers. The
ISO's support to government intervention
in the trade unions goes hand in hand
with their championing of imperialist-
sponsored forces of counterrevolution
which were instrumental in the destruc-
tion of the former Soviet Union-a
degenerated workers state. SA, too, was
in the forefront of the anti-Soviet chorus,
hailing Polish Solidarnosc-company
union for Wall Street and the Vatican-
and every other reactionary movement
backed by the imperialists. Trotsky drew
an analogy between the bureaucrati-
cally controlled unions in the West and
the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet
workers state, calling for defense of both
against the capitalists while fighting to
oust the bureaucratic misleaders. Those
like the ISO and SA who cannot defend
past gains of the working class are inca-
pable of conquering future ones.
Reformists hailed
1996 re-election of
feds' man Ron
Carey. Spartacist
League opposes
capitalist
government
intervention into the
unions on principle.
Teamsters Boo Bush-GMen Run Convention, Elections
With their support to Carey and other
"reform" bureaucrats, the ISO, Socialist
Action and others assist in forging the
chains which bind the working class to
the rule of capital an.d block the road to
proletarian class struggle. The fight for
the political independence of the working
class from the capitalist exploiters and
their state is the most elementary starting
point to unlocking the social power of the
multiracial working class. Bringing that
power to bear in a struggle to eradicate a
system based on exploitation and oppres-
sion requires a political fight against all
wings of the labor bureaucracy. Out ofthe
coming class battles, a new class-struggle
leadership of the unions must be forged
as part of the fight for a revolutionary
workers party necessary for the final vic-
tory of the proletariat as the rulers of a
socialist America .
Feds Hands Off Teamsters!
raised a word_of criticism of Carey's
refusal during the UPS strike to tackle the
issue of rampant racism at the company.
In this the ISO and SA starkly revealed
how their economist cheerleading for
"militant" bureaucrats like Carey is coun-
protectionism which is the primary
expression of the labor tops' ideologi-
cal alignment with U.S. imperialism.
Although the ISO and SA have deplored
the United Auto Workers tops' meek-
ness in the face of the threat of binding
Workers Vanguard Subscription Drive
August 27 to October 7
Local
Quota Week
%
(in points) Three
Boston 200 105% 53
Chicago 425 275% 65
Los Angeles 350 166 47
New York 925 691% 75
Oakland 375 181 48
San Francisco 375 180112 48
At Large 250 76 30
National Total 2,900 1,676 58
25 SEPTEMBER 1998
WV Photo
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11
WfJlIllfliS "/1"'111)
Carey EXPlIlsion-BitterJruitijfOiierijmepllntervention
Fight Feds' Vendetta Against
Ending nearly two decades of
defeated strikes, last summer's UPS
Teamsters strike has sparked a series
Teamsters Union! of strikes indicating that American
workers are fed up with years of
eroding living standards, second-
class and second-tier jobs and a future
that promises even less. Predictably, the
capitalist rulers, bloated with years of
record profits and concerned that these
may soon go pop in a worldwide depres-
sion, have counterattacked against the
labor movement. Only weeks after the
UPS strike, the government moved to
order new elections in the 1.4-million-
strong International Brotherhood of
Teamsters (IBT). Then they barred
Teamsters president Ron Carey from
running for re-election while seizing the
union treasury. Now they have thrown
Carey out of the union entirely.
Dictating who can be a union member,
the feds' purge of Carey is the latest
chapter in a decades-long campaign by
both capitalist parties, and especially the
liberal wing of the Democrats, to gut
the power of the Teamsters, one of the
strongest unions in the country. The
favored weapon in this anti-labor offen-
sive has been government intervention in
the name of fighting union "corruption."
Carey himself owed his ascendancy to
the Teamsters presidency in 1991, and
his re-election in 1996, to union elec-
tions that were totally controlled by the
Justice Department. Carey then threw out
scores of local Teamsters leaders fin-
gered by the feds as "corrupt." Now the
government has struck back against its
own accomplice.
This is an attack against the entire
labor movement, fundamentally against
the ability of unions to wage class strug-
gle-i.e., against the right to strike. Virtu-
ally alone on the left, the Spartacist
League has unconditionally opposed on
principle any intervention by the bosses'
government into the labor movement. As
we wrote in "Government Hands Off the
Teamsters!" (WV No. 673, 5 September
1997) following the UPS strike:
12
"The capitalist state, which represents
the interests of the corporations, fears
the potential power of the Teamsters to
shut down the country, from in-city and
national trucking to the major ports and
airports. The government's only interest
in intervening into the affairs of the
Teamsters or any other union is to crip-
ple their ability to fight for the interests
of their members by directly subordinat-
ing the unions to the government and
dictating how they are run."
We say: Labor must clean its own house,
through a political fight against the venal,
pro-capitalist union bureaucracy. Feds
out of the Teamsters! Government hands
off the labor movement!
ISO, Socialist Action:
Department Socialists"
No greater demonstration of the abject
loyalty of all wings of the trade-union
bureaucracy to the capitalist exploiters
cratic Union (TDU), self-styled "reform-
ers" and Carey loyalists who have spent
over two decades bringing anti-union
lawsuits against the Teamsters; and John
Metz, head of a spoiler slate of long-
time bureaucrats who previously sup-
ported Carey.
All wings of the Teamsters bureauc-
racy, like their AFL-CIO counterparts,
openly act to tie the workers to their class
enemy, expressed politically through sup-
port to the Democratic Party (and some-
times the Republicans) and manifested in
their cringing servility to the bourgeois
Kuntz/Reuters
Teamsters rally in Georgia during UPS strike, August 1997. In wake of
solid, popular strike, capitalist government launched vindictive attack on
Teamsters union.
can be made than that all current candi-
dates for Teamsters president support the
government's raid on the union. The con-
tenders are: James Hoffa Jr., seemingly
preferred, at this time, by the Justice
Department which drove his father out of
the union; Tom Leedham, inheritor of
Carey's "rank and file" movement who
was endorsed by Teamsters for a Demo-
:l
a;
3

o
:>
!':!.
co'
$I)
3
(Il

Ron Carey
announces victory
in government-run
election for
Teamsters president
in 1991. Now feds
have expelled him
from union.
state. This openly class-collaborationist
program is given a "left" cover by
avowed "socialists" like the International
Socialist Organization (ISO) and Social-
ist Action (SA). Lacking any confidence
in the revolutionary capacity of the prole-
tariat, and therefore accepting the current
pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, these
reformists instead have been prominent in
hailing the TDU and its strategy of invit-
ing the capitalist state to "clean up" the
unions and in acting for years as slavish
press agents for Carey.
But with Carey's ouster, the ISO and
SA have now suddenly "discovered" the
evils of government intervention into the
labor movement. So the ISO has taken to
inveighing against "relying upon elec-
tions and the government to transform
the union from above" while calling for
"shop-floor organization independent of
the union bureaucracy" (Socialist Worker,
19 June 1998). And SA hypocritically
proclaims that Carey's removal from
office highlights the Marxist understand-
ing of "the role of the government and
state as a repressive instrument of the rul-
ing class" (Socialist Action, April 1998).
These bald-faced attempts at covering up
their own support to the feds' intervention
are utterly belied by the ISO and
SA's calls for votes to Carey loyalist
Tom Leedham in the next Teamsters
election while omitting any reference
to his own call for government inter-
vention in the Teamsters.
Whatever their current empty declama-
tions against government intervention,
these organizations have always sought to
be waterboys for "progressive" bureau-
crats who act as agents of the bourgeoi-
sie and its state inside the unions. Social-
ist Action-which made its debut by
mobilizing a goon squad for the San
Francisco labor tops during the 1983
Greyhound strike to keep militant work-
ers from stopping scab buses-called
Carey's re-election "an important victory
for rank-and-file Teamsters and for the
entire American working class" (Social-
ist Action, January 1997).
The ISO has a particularly lengthy
record of support to Carey and the TDU,
whose central strategy has always been
to drag the union into the bosses' courts.
In January 1991, Socialist Worker pro-
claimed: "In concert with the govern-
ment-forced to curb the openly corrupt
aspects of the union-the reform move-
ment under TDU's leadership has gone a
long way toward leveling the playing
field for those seeking union offices."
More recently, in a June/July 1997 spe-
cial edition of its paper addressed to UPS
workers, the ISO hailed the 1989 "con-
sent decree," in which the IBT leadership
turned over the union to the government,
as a "breakthrough" and described the
government-controlled 1991 election as
"the Teamsters first-ever democratic vote
for the union presidency."
The ISO's forebears in the Interna-
tional Socialists were directly involved
in setting up the TDU. As one TDU
founder boasted: "Over the years, TDU
has repeatedly gone to the National
Labor Relations Board, to the courts and
to the Department of Labor (and to many
government agencies) to seek justice for
union members" (Dan La Botz, Rank
alld File Rebellioll 11990]). In 1987, the
TDU literally wrote the blueprint for the
feds to take over the Teamsters, helping
to make the draconian RICO Act the
weapon of choice for government inter-
vention in the unions. La Botz's pro-
TDU history shows that the TDU was in
bed with the feds all along:
"In April 1987, even before the official
announcement of the RICO suit against
the Teamsters, TOU National Organizer
Ken Paff sent a nine-page letter to Ste-
phen Trott, assistant US attorney general,
laying out in detail TOU's views at the
time: '[WJe strongly urge the govern-
ment to seek reorganization of the IBT
under Section 1964(a) of the RICO Act'."
The TDU even served as witnesses for
the prosecution in the 1989 "probe" by
the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations-the same outfit that Rob-
ert Kennedy. used as a weapon in his ven-
detta against Jimmy Hoffa in the 1950s
aimed at crippling the Teamsters.
In its submissions in the RICO case in
1989, the TDU offered the capitalist
union-busters a more efficient way to
control the union than putting it in trus-
teeship, in which a handful of outsiders
would face intractable problems trying to
continued on page J J
25 SEPTEMBER1998