Obama: Commander-in-Chief of Racist U.S. Imperialism

Break with the Capitalist Democratic Party!

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Obama: Commander-in-Chief of Racist U.S. Imperialism

The election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States has aroused great expectations among working people and the oppressed around the world. Black people and others celebrated on streets throughout the country the election of the next Commander-in-Chief of bloody U.S. imperialism. Michelle Obama, the descendent of slaves, will be first lady in a White House whose foundations were laid by slave labor. This is something most Americans never expected to see in their lifetime. Amid fears of a new Great Depression, as millions of working people are losing their homes and unemployment grows, hopes for “change” center on the incoming Democratic Obama administration. These hopes will be brutally dashed.

As America’s next top cop, Obama will preside over the racist capitalist system, which is based on the exploitation of working people at home and abroad. As against the reformists, who either explicitly or implicitly backed Obama, we Marxists fight to break working people and the oppressed from illusions in the capitalist Democratic Party of war and racism. On principle, we do not vote for, or otherwise extend any political support to, any capitalist politician—Democrat, Republican, Green or “independent.” As the front-page headline of WV No. 923 (24 October) emphasized: “McCain, Obama: Class Enemies of Workers, Oppressed.”

We Marxists also do not run for the executive offices of the bourgeois state, such as mayor, governor or president. This is based on our understanding that the capitalist state—which at its core consists of the cops, military, courts and prisons—exists to defend the class rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. Holding executive office means administering the capitalist state. Our aim is the forging of a revolutionary workers party to lead the multiracial working class, and behind it all the oppressed, in the struggle to overthrow the capitalist order through workers revolution and establish a workers state where those who labor rule.

Immediately upon winning, Obama sought to tamp down expectations for his administration. He made his agenda of “national unity” patriotism clear when he declared on election night, before a crowd of 250,000 people in Chicago celebrating his victory, the need for “a new spirit of sacrifice.” In this, Obama is following in the footsteps of the black Democrats who have been employed as mayors and police chiefs of major urban areas—from L.A. to Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and elsewhere. Their job has been to keep working and black people down, to oversee rampant cop terror and administer the slashing of social programs; their value to the racist rulers is epitomized by the statement of black former New York City mayor David Dinkins: “They’ll take it from me.” With the U.S. entering a deep economic recession, it will be Obama’s job to contain potential social unrest and impose austerity measures upon working people—and his current popularity may very well allow him to get away with much.

With cool “post-partisan” arrogance, Obama—wielding his own $660 million campaign, which was supported by significant sections of the bourgeoisie—blames the oppressed for their own oppression. In his Chicago victory speech, Obama stated: “If there is anyone out there…who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” A similar message came from McCain in his concession speech, who bluntly stated, “Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship.” As we warned in “Obama Offers Facelift for U.S. Imperialism” (WV No. 920, 12 September): “Obama serves as a very powerful propaganda weapon for the bourgeoisie, telling black people and the oppressed to shut up and stop complaining, because, you see, ‘the American dream’ works!”

From the standpoint of the international working class and oppressed there is nothing to celebrate in Obama’s victory and much to fear. Enthusiasm among large sections of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is justified. After nearly eight years of one of the most incompetent and widely despised regimes in recent U.S. history, they now have in Obama a more rational face for their brutal, irrational system. Obama has also inspired illusions in the trappings of bourgeois democracy, the means by which the capitalists disguise their rule with the appearance of a popular mandate. Abroad, Obama provides an invaluable facelift for U.S. imperialism, the main enemy of the world’s working people.

Obama calls to remove “combat troops” from Iraq (while maintaining a “residual force”) in order to redeploy at least another 10,000 soldiers to Afghanistan in support of that murderous occupation. He is dedicated to further machinations against Pakistan, including military incursions into that country. In his July 24 speech in Berlin before a huge crowd, he invoked the anti-Soviet Cold War to motivate U.S. imperialism’s interests, not least the restoration of capitalist rule in China. He is a staunch supporter of the “war on terror,” including warrantless wiretapping and the renewal of the USA Patriot Act. His inner circle includes Carter- and Clinton-era war criminals like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright as well as staunch supporters of Zionist Israel like Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel, projected to be the new chief of staff. Obama is considering one John O. Brennan, who was among those who created the current CIA detention and torture programs, for director of national intelligence or head of the CIA. Brennan vehemently defended the administration’s use of “rendition” in a December 2005 interview on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, calling it an “absolutely vital tool.”

We say, from Afghanistan to Iraq and Guantánamo: Free all the detainees! As revolutionary opponents of U.S. imperialism, we stood for the military defense of Afghanistan and Iraq in the lead-up to U.S. imperialism’s invasions of those countries while politically opposing the reactionary Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s brutal capitalist regime. We called for class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home. We are for the defeat of U.S. forces; their every setback serves to assist the struggles of working people and the oppressed the world over. We demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops and bases from Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia! U.S. hands off Pakistan and Iran! As against the reformist left, which has lined up with its “own” bourgeoisie, we fight for the unconditional military defense of those states where capitalism has been overthrown: China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea.

Domestically, working people face grinding debt and mass layoffs. And the bourgeoisie has no solution for the current economic crisis and the inevitable boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism. With auto sales collapsing, General Motors and Ford recently announced that over the past three months they burned through cash at a rate of more than $2 billion a month; GM said that by year’s end it could run out of the cash necessary to fund its business. Even if bankruptcy is averted—or postponed—by government subsidies, as some Democrats are demanding, auto workers face massive layoffs, pay cuts and an all-out attack on pensions and health care.

Meanwhile, in the face of worldwide economic crisis, Obama and the Democrats embraced (with only minor modifications) the Bush administration’s plan to transfer $700 billion of taxpayers’ money to banks and other financial institutions. So far, this gigantic bailout has done little to unfreeze credit markets. Last week the Treasury Department announced that even though about $290 billion of that sum had already been allocated, the banks were still not willing to lend to consumers. Obama seeks to socialize the bourgeoisie’s losses on the backs of working people, while helping the exploiters appropriate the profits for themselves.

Our class opposition to all bourgeois candidates—and to bourgeois electoralism—is based on the Marxist understanding that capitalist society is divided between two fundamental classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose interests cannot be reconciled. Labor needs a fighting leadership that will unleash the power of the multiracial working class in struggle for workers’ economic interests and also for black rights, in defense of immigrants and in opposition to U.S. imperialism. But the trade-union bureaucracy of both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win union federations promotes Democratic Party “lesser evilism” and spent some $450 million of union members’ dues money on the 2008 elections, rather than building up a war chest for the struggle needed to defend the workers’ interests. Instead of class struggle and international working-class solidarity, the union tops push chauvinist “America first” patriotism and protectionism, promoting the lie that working people abroad, as opposed to the U.S. capitalist rulers, are the enemies of the American proletariat.

Class and Race in Capitalist America

The U.S. is a country historically defined by chattel slavery, an institution that was smashed only through the blood and iron of the Civil War. It is a country that required a massive civil rights movement, claiming many black and white martyrs, before Southern Jim Crow segregation was finally defeated. The pride among black people over Obama’s election is, whatever his actual policies, a legacy of this history of oppression and enforced exclusion from the “process.”

However, the condition today of the black masses, particularly those in the ghettos, is one of desperate poverty, police violence, massive incarceration. The “end of racism” myth of Obama’s campaign is a cruel hoax, as is Obama’s statement that the civil rights movement brought America “90 percent of the way” toward racial equality. As we pointed out in our first article on Obama’s candidacy almost a year ago, “The Obama Campaign and the ‘End of Racism’ Myth” (WV No. 906, 18 January):

“Black oppression continues to be the central defining feature of U.S. society. It is materially rooted in and central to American capitalism. As against both liberal integrationists and black nationalists, our struggle for black liberation is based on the program of revolutionary integrationism. While opposing every manifestation of racist oppression, fighting in particular to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement, we underline that full equality for the black masses requires that the working class rip the economy out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and reorganize it on a socialist basis. Only then will it be possible to eliminate the material roots of black oppression through the integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society based on a collectivized economy with jobs and quality housing, health care and education for all.”

As the examples of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice also show, there is now a huge class gulf between the petty-bourgeois black professionals who were the main beneficiaries of the liberal-led civil rights movement and the masses of black workers and ghetto poor. But black president or not, America is America—racist, brutal, violent. As Obama’s Grant Park election night celebration was going on, Chicago cops harassed black residents cheering his victory. That same night in Staten Island, New York, a 17-year-old black youth was chased and beaten by racists who screamed “Obama!” at him. Four days after the election, Ecuadorian immigrant Marcello Lucero was fatally stabbed near the Patchogue, Long Island train station by a gang of racist teens who reportedly drove around searching for a Latino to attack.

Under the guise of being a post-“culture wars” unifier, Obama’s positions on many issues are only a hair’s breadth away from such stalwart reactionaries as Joe Lieberman (and we’re not sure about the hair). Obama opposes gay marriage. He is a supporter of the racist death penalty, a legacy of chattel slavery in the U.S. This past July, Obama stated his opposition to mental health exceptions for “late-term” abortion bans with the paternalistic statement that a woman’s rationale for an abortion cannot be “just a matter of feeling blue.”

Reformists’ Obamamania

The “Anybody but Bush” reformist left is head-over-heels over Obama’s election. In opposition to working-class political independence from the capitalist rulers, they promote collaboration with the bourgeois enemy as the way forward. Workers World (14 November) stated: “The election victory of Barack Obama will go down in history as a triumphant step forward in the struggle against racism and national oppression in the U.S.” This was preceded by a 6 November piece in which Workers World Party leader Larry Holmes babbled on about the “elation” and “feeling of liberation” unleashed by Obama’s win, not bothering to even mention their endorsement of capitalist Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney (whose campaign was, as we said, a stalking horse for the Democrats). According to Holmes, “The feeling on the streets of cities large and small across the U.S. on election night was that now, anything is possible, and it is.” So, it is “yes we can”—under capitalism.

The International Socialist Organization (ISO) threw an election night party in Harlem to “celebrate the end of far too many years of republican rule” and to discuss “what can activists do to press their demands on the next administration?” The ISO’s Socialist Worker (7 November), aping liberal buzzwords, gushed that Obama’s victory was “transformative.” While acknowledging that many of Obama’s positions point “to a big gap between the hopes and expectations of Obama voters and the cautious, moderate program he has put forward,” the ISO intones: “None of this is to say that no change is possible. Tens of millions of people want a new direction. The question is whether they can be organized to fight for it.”

For its part, the eccentric Stalinist-reformist Progressive Labor Party (PL) wrote in its newspaper Challenge (10 November) that Obama is a capitalist politician, noting that PL’s “exposing and opposing Obama and the ruling class he serves may not be ‘popular’ at first.” But actions speak louder than words: As we earlier reported, PL openly declared that it would “actively participate in Obama’s campaign” (Challenge, 26 March). One “Red Registrar” even boasted in a letter to Challenge (4 October), printed without comment, “I helped out at a voter registration drive in my neighborhood that I found out about through BarackObama.com”! These reformists perpetuate deadly illusions that this government of the capitalists, by the capitalists and for the capitalists can be made to serve “the people.”

All of our activity is directed toward forging, training and steeling the proletarian vanguard party necessary for the seizure of state power. In contrast, the politics of the reformists consist of oppositional activity completely defined by the framework of bourgeois society. This was sharply characterized by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in his 1924 work, Lessons of October, as “the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state.”

We stand on what Trotsky wrote in The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (also known as the Transitional Program), the basic programmatic document adopted at the 1938 founding conference of the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. As Trotsky put it, the Fourth International “uncompromisingly gives battle to all political groupings tied to the apron-strings of the bourgeoisie. Its task—the abolition of capitalism’s domination. Its aim—socialism. Its method—the proletarian revolution.”

SOURCE: Workers Vanguard No. 925 21 November 2008

From Wall Street Crisis to International Socialist Revolution

Expropriate the Banks Under a Workers Government!

From Wall Street Crisis to
International Socialist Revolution


Frenzy on New York Mercantile Exchange, March 2008. (Photo: Reuters)

Break with the Democrats and All the Bosses’ Parties!
Build a Revolutionary Workers Party!

OCTOBER 2 – Over the last 15 years, there have been financial crises in a number of countries around the world: the collapse of the banking system in Mexico in 1994-95; the collapse of the currency of Thailand in 1997, touching off a wave of devaluations and stock market crises in all of Southeast Asia; the ruble crisis in Russia in 1998, due to a fall in the price of oil; the devaluation of the real in Brazil in 1999, which unleashed a flight of short-term investments; the economic crisis of Argentina from 2000 to 2002, which resulted in the fall of a succession of presidents; the implosion of the information technology bubble in the United States in 2000-01 with the bankruptcy of many Internet-based “dot-com” companies and a nosedive of share prices on the New York Stock Exchange; and now, from 2007 on, the credit crisis in the U.S. and around the world that began with subprime mortgages.

Yet this is not only a financial crisis: the entire capitalist system is at risk. It has already set off a wave of sharp falls in stock market prices worldwide. The rulers of the United States, who brag that they are the only and “indispensable” superpower, say that if not resolved, the present crisis could have “catastrophic” consequences. The kings of Wall Street, the center of international finance capital, who have dubbed themselves “masters of the universe,” say the same. The stock market panic can end up in a full-fledged crash, as in 1929, and meanwhile the lack of credit is threatening to produce a new Great Depression. Even though they have already pumped more than $500 billion into U.S. banks, the credit system is still frozen. The economists and politicians who in the past acted as prophets of the religion of free markets are now nationalizing one financial institution after another. And the crisis continues.

In Latin America, there is a widespread sentiment of Schadenfreude, of satisfaction in seeing the difficulties of the arrogant Yankee imperialists who used to try to discipline their subjects with the whip of “neo-liberalism,” the doctrine that calls for the elimination of all state interference in the economy. What a surprise! At the moment of truth, Washington and Wall Street don’t want to drink their own bitter medicine. Some “center-left” analysts like the Brazilian Emil Sader ask, “Is Neo-Liberalism Over?” (La Jornada, 29 September). (Sader’s conclusion is that the model has run out of gas, but it hasn’t ended.) Among “far left” groups analyses are proliferating that foretell a total if not terminal “capitalist collapse.” But neither the “moderate” nor the supposedly “far” left put forward a program for revolutionary action.

In the United States, the ruling class was shaken by the unexpected failure of its bank bailout plan in the House of Representatives on September 29. Congressmen received an avalanche of phone calls, letters and e-mails against it, running at a rate of 200 to 400 to 1 opposed to shelling out astronomical payoffs to the financiers who produced the crisis with their boundless “greed.” The same day as the vote in Congress, the New York Stock Exchange suffered its biggest fall since 1987. In one day more than a trillion dollars of what Karl Marx called “fictitious capital” were wiped out. Terrified investors are putting their money in U.S. Treasury bonds at an interest rate of practically 0, while overnight dollar deposit loans among banks, the most secure in the commercial market, went up to 7 percent per day, the highest figure in history.

Meanwhile, in the real economy, hundreds of thousands of families are losing their homes because of mortgage defaults. Companies cannot obtain funds to finance investments or even to carry out their day-to-day operations. Workers’ wages and even middle-class incomes have been hard-hit by the rise in prices of food and fuel. Real inflation is over 14 percent annually, according to the methods used to calculate the rate in 1980, before the government decided to falsify the figures by eliminating the cost of gasoline and food! The real unemployment rate is also already in double digits (over 10 percent) when you include the categories of “discouraged workers” who are not actively looking for work, and others who the government has simply eliminated from the workforce altogether because there are no jobs for them. Both are not counted in the government’s phony official jobless statistics. For the U.S. working class, whose wages have steadily fallen since the 1970s, the crisis is not new but has been going on for years.

In Latin America, the effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s in Europe and North America were partially offset by the relative isolation of their national economies, which made possible a certain process of industrialization by “import substitution.” Today the effect of the capitalist crisis is immediate. The panic on the New York Stock Exchange has spread and intensified on the stock markets of Mexico, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. The crisis in Detroit due to falling automobile sales has led to layoffs in the maquiladoras (free trade zone plants) in the north of Mexico, which produce exclusively for the U.S. market. If in recent years the mounting demand for raw materials has produced a boom in oil and mineral producing countries, now a crash is looming as a result of the plummeting prices and falling exports. In the era of “globalization” there will be no safe harbor from the devastation of a world capitalist crisis.

It’s not a matter of choosing one “model” or another of capitalist economy: it is the system itself that is in crisis. “Neo-liberalism” spread in the 1980s due to the exhaustion of the Keynesian policies which sought to regulate crises through government spending – policies which in the 1970s led to the phenomenon of “stagflation,” when inflation surged while the economy stagnated. This was intensified due to the decision of the U.S. government, under the Democrats as well as the Republicans, to finance the Vietnam War with a policy of “guns and butter” (i.e., budgeting increased spending for the military and for social programs). How did they do it? By printing greenbacks. Similarly, today the war on Iraq and Afghanistan is being financed entirely by borrowed money: the trillion-dollar (so far) bill will come due later. And if in 1971, Washington’s answer to the economic crisis was to declare that the U.S. currency was no longer backed by gold, today the dollar’s value and its function as the world’s reserve currency is based exclusively on confidence in the stability of the American economy. Once that confidence has gone up in smoke…

But the dire straits in which the masters of the U.S. economy find themselves will not by itself lead to a positive outcome for the international working class. In the 1960s and ’70s as well, the American empire was bogged down in a losing colonial war, along with great social unrest in Latin America, and a large-scale capitalist economic crisis. But nowhere was capitalism overthrown in the region after the Cuban Revolution. Why? The absence of victorious proletarian revolutions in the Western Hemisphere is entirely due to the lack of a revolutionary internationalist leadership. The Latin American left was dominated by the line of Castro- and Mao-style guerrilla struggle, both variants of Stalinism, based on the nationalist and anti-Marxist policy of building “socialism in one country.” The failure of these struggles, based not on the proletariat but on the petty-bourgeois peasantry, led to the destruction of an entire generation of leftist would-be revolutionaries.

Today, the theories of an imminent final collapse of capitalism have gained new currency. Quite awhile ago, Lenin underscored the falseness of such concepts. In his report on the international situation to the Second Congress of the Communist International (1920), he insisted:

“[For the bourgeoisie] there is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation. The bourgeoisie are behaving like barefaced plunderers who have lost their heads; they are committing folly after folly, thus aggravating the situation and hastening their doom. All that is true. But nobody can ‘prove’ that it is absolutely impossible for them to pacify a minority of the exploited with some petty concessions, and suppress some movement or uprising of some section of the oppressed and exploited. To try to ‘prove’ in advance that there is ‘absolutely’ no way out of the situation would be sheer pedantry, or playing with concepts and catchwords…. The revolutionary parties must now ‘prove’ in practice that they have sufficient understanding and organization, contact with the exploited masses, and determination and skill to utilize this crisis for a successful, a victorious revolution.”

At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin revived the theory of a final crisis of capitalism, Trotsky responded: “Will the bourgeoisie be able to secure for itself a new epoch of capitalist growth and power? Merely to deny such a possibility, counting on the ‘hopeless position’ in which capitalism finds itself would be mere revolutionary verbiage.” (The Third International After Lenin [1928]).

Some social democrats also adopted the theory of an automatic collapse of capitalism, basing themselves on a book by the Polish economist Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, published shortly before the 1929 stock market crash. What characterizes the “theory of collapse” (Zusammenbruchstheorie) is that it is deeply objectivist and passive, whether in its Stalinist or social-democratic versions, or any of the variants put forward by groups claiming to be Trotskyist, such as the “International Committee of the Fourth International” of the late British pseudo-Trotskyist Gerry Healy in the 1970s. If it was true that the capitalist system was about to fall on its own, it would negate the urgent need to organize a revolutionary vanguard to win the leadership of the working class.

It should be noted that various Latin American groups who today call themselves Trotskyists – including both the Trotskyist Faction led by the Argentine Partido de Trabajadores por el Socialismo (PTS – Party of Workers for Socialism) and the Coordinating Committee for Refounding the Fourth International led by the Argentine Partido Obrero (PO – Workers Party) – produce endless analyses of the economic crisis without putting forward a class-struggle program leading to revolution. They proclaim the crisis and that’s the end of it.

Another tendency, the International Workers League led by the Brazilian Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado (PSTU – United Socialist Workers Party), the direct descendants of the late Nahuel Moreno, present “A Workers Program to Combat the Crisis” (Opinião Socialista, 25 September), but this program is limited to the capitalist framework. Instead of Trotsky’s call in the Transitional Program for an agrarian revolution they want a “radical agrarian reform” carried out by action of the (capitalist) state. They seek “state ownership of the financial system,” which in Latin America could be a pro-capitalist measure to save insolvent banks, as was the case in Mexico with the nationalization of the banks by President José López Portillo in 1982. And if they call for a “wage trigger” or COLA (cost-of-living allowance), namely an “automatic wage increase taking account of inflation,” they do not link this to the struggle to sweep away the capitalist state and install a workers and peasants government to expropriate the bourgeoisie and extend the revolution internationally.

The League for the Fourth International insists, along with the great Russian revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky, that the capitalist system will not definitively collapse by itself. Despite its many crises, as deep as they may be, capitalism will not disappear due to its own internal dynamic. The working class has to give it a shove to get rid of this system of exploitation and poverty in order to be able to erect on its remains an egalitarian society in which production is for human needs rather than for the exploiters’ profits. We reprint here the leaflet of the Internationalist Group distributed at Wall Street protests, calling for working-class mobilization against the bank bailout and for a program of transitional demands pointing to the only solution in favor of the exploited and oppressed, international socialist revolution. ■

The above article was translated from a supplement to El Internacionalista (October 2008), Spanish-language organ of the League for the Fourth International.

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To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

For Workers Strikes Against the War!

ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, "One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq."

This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly important that this mobilization of labor’s power is to take place on May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically important Persian/Arab Gulf.

The Internationalist Group has fought from the moment U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in September 2002 for American unions to strike against the war. Despite the fact that millions have marched in the streets of Europe and the United States against the war in Iraq, the war goes on. Neither of the twin war parties of U.S. imperialism – Democrats and Republicans – and none of the capitalist candidates will stop this horrendous slaughter that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The only way to stop the Pentagon killing machine is by mobilizing the power of a greater force – that of the international working class.

The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. The ILWU should be commended for courageously taking the first step, and it is up to working people everywhere to back them up. Wherever support is strong enough, on May 1 there should be mass walkouts, sick-outs, labor marches, plant-gate meetings, lunch-time rallies, teach-ins. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!

Now is the time for bold class action. Opposition to the war is even greater in the U.S. working class than in the population as a whole, more than two-thirds of which wants to stop the war but is stymied by the capitalist political system. In his letter to Sweeney, the ILWU president asked "if other AFL-CIO affiliates are planning to participate in similar events." Labor militants should make sure the answer to that question is a resounding "yes!"

There should be no illusions that this will be easy. No doubt the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) bosses will try to get the courts to rule the stop-work action illegal. The ILWU leadership could get cold feet, since this motion was passed because of overwhelming support from the delegates despite attempts to stop it or, failing that, to water it down or limit the action. And the U.S. government could try to ban it on the grounds of "national security," just as Bush & Co. slapped a Taft-Hartley injunction on the docks during contract negotiations in the fall of 2002, saying that any work stoppage was a threat to the "war effort," and threatened to occupy the ports with troops!

The answer to every attempt to sabotage or undercut this first labor action against this war, and against Washington’s broader "war on terror" which is intended to terrorize the world into submission must be to redouble efforts to bring out workers’ power independent of the capitalist parties and politicians. If the ILWU work stoppage is successful, it will only be a small, but very important, beginning that must be generalized and deepened. It will take industrial-strength labor action to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war on immigrants, oppressed minorities, poor and working people "at home."

ILWU in the Forefront of Labor Action Against the War

Workers strike action against imperialist war isn’t new – it just hasn’t happened here for a long, long time. During World War I there were huge mass strikes in Germany against the battlefield carnage, culminating in the downfall of the kaiser in November 1918. A year earlier in Russia, working-class opposition to the war led to the overthrow of the tsar and the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call today for transport workers to "hot cargo" (refuse to handle) war shipments. In the early 1920s, Communist-led French dock workers did exactly that, boycotting ships carrying war materiel to suppress a colonial rebellion in the Rif region of Morocco, as they also did during France’s war in Indochina in the 1950s.

In the U.S., the ILWU struck in 1948 amid Cold War hysteria and in defiance of the "slave labor" Taft-Hartley Act to defend its union hiring hall against the bosses and government screaming about "reds" in the union leadership. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyite witch-hunting, the ILWU called a four-day general strike in Hawaii of sugar, pineapple and dock workers over the jailing of seven union members for being communists. During the Vietnam War, socialist historian Isaac Deutscher said that he would trade all the peace marches for a single dock strike. The ILWU was the first U.S. union to oppose the Vietnam war, but during war and especially during the 1971 strike union leader Harry Bridges refused to stop the movement of military cargo. (Ship owners made use of this by falsely labeling cargo as "military" to evade picket lines and undermine the strike.) This betrayal went hand in hand with a "mechanization and modernization" contract that slashed union jobs.

As the U.S.-led imperialist invasion of Iraq was looming, in January 2003 train drivers in Scotland refused to move a freight train carrying munitions to a NATO military base. The next month, Italian railroad unionists and antiwar activists blocked NATO war trains by occupying the rails. In the United States, ILWU dock workers were a target of "anti-terrorist" government repression, as police fired supposedly "less than lethal" munitions point blank at an antiwar protest on the Oakland, California docks, injuring six longshore workers and arresting 25 people (who eventually won their legal case against the police). And every year since the war started, the San Francisco/Oakland ILWU Local 10 has voted for motions for labor action against the war. Usually they were voted down at caucuses and conventions of the ILWU, but not this time.

Last May, Local 10 longshoremen and Local 34 ships clerks refused to cross picket lines set up by the Oakland Teachers Association and antiwar activists, defying arbitrators’ orders by refusing to work ships of the notorious antiunion outfit, Stevedoring Services of America (see "Oakland Dock Workers Honor Picket, Shut Down War Cargo Shipper," The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007). In the aftermath of that action, the union issued a call for a Labor Conference to Stop the War that would "plan workplace rallies, labor mobilizations in the streets and strike action against the war." The Call to Action stated:

"ILWU Local 10 has repeatedly warned that the so-called ’war on terror’ is really a war on working people and democratic rights. Around the country, hundreds of unions and labor councils have passed motions condemning the war, but that has not stopped the war. We need to use labor’s muscle to stop the war by mobilizing union power in the streets, at the plant gates and on the docks to force the immediate and total withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq."

As the conference date approached, the union was the target of several police attacks, including a vicious cop assault on two black dock workers from San Francisco working in the port of Sacramento. Some 250 demonstrators from every ILWU local in Northern California rallied in their defense outside the courthouse. Their trial to be set march 18 at a hearing will encounter even larger demonstrations.

The Internationalist Group and its union supporters helped build and attended the October 20 conference, along with some 150 labor and socialist activists from the Bay Area, elsewhere in California and across the country. At the meeting, a particular focus was resistance to the Transportation Workers Identification Card (TWIC), which threatens minority workers and the union hiring hall, and which the Democratic Party in particular has been pushing in order to carry out a purge of dock workers in the name of the "war on terror." Not long after that conference, a federal judge ordered Local 10 elections canceled and replaced by a Labor Department-run vote, on the eve of 2008 contract bargaining. Federal agents even invaded the union hall to enforce their order. This action is a threat to the independence of all unions.

This set the stage for the recent longshore-warehouse caucus, which voted a motion for a 24-hour "No Peace, No Work Holiday" against the war. The resolution was introduced in Local 10 by Jack Heyman, who also presented the motion for the 24 April 1999 coast-wide port shutdown demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and renowned radical journalist who has been on Pennsylvania’s death row for the last quarter century. Although the union tops maneuvered to prevent Heyman from being elected as a delegate to the Coast Caucus, the motion passed in Local 10. At the Caucus, the delegate from Local 34 referred to the October Labor Conference to Stop the War as the origin of the motion.

At the close of the Caucus on February 8, there was a vigorous debate on the resolution. The union tops tried to stop it, to no avail. They kept asking, "are you sure you want to do this action." The delegates overwhelmingly said "yes." Even conservative trade unionists, including veterans of the Vietnam War, were getting up saying the government is lying to us, we’ve had it with this war, we’ve got to put a stop to it now. So instead the bureaucrats tried to gut the motion, which was cut down from 24 hours to 8, and changed into a "stop-work" meeting (covered by a contract clause) instead of a straight-out shutdown, thinking that this would lessen opposition from the employers. In the end there was a voice vote and only three delegates out of 100 voted against.

The efforts to undercut the motion continue, as is to be expected from a leadership which, like the rest of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, seeks "labor peace" with the bosses. In his letter to Sweeney, ILWU International president tried to present the action as an effort to "express support for the troops by bringing them home safely," although the motion voted by the delegates says nothing of the sort. Playing the "support our troops" game is an effort to swear loyalty to the broader aims of U.S. imperialism. It aids the warmongers, when what’s needed is independent working-class action against the system that produces endless imperialist war. Yet despite the efforts to water it down and distort it, the May 1 action voted for by the ILWU delegates is a call to use labor’s muscle to put an end to the war.

Mobilize Labor’s Power to Defeat the Bosses’ War!

For the West Coast dock workers union to shut down the ports against the war means a big step forward in the class struggle. The Internationalist Group has uniquely fought for workers strikes against the war, when all the popular-front "peace" coalitions dismissed this and even some shamefaced ex-Trotskyists refused to call for it, saying it had "no resonance" among the workers (see our October 20007 Special Supplement to The Internationalist, "Why We Fight For Workers Strikes Against the War [and the Opportunists Don’t]"). With signs, banners and propaganda we have sought to drive home the central lesson that it is necessary to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war "at home" by mobilizing the power of the workers movement independent of and against the capitalist parties.

That means fighting the war mobilization down the line. First and foremost, this means actively joining the struggle for immigrant rights as the government turns undocumented working people into "the enemy within." Class-conscious workers should demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Last year, San Francisco Local 10 voted to stop work and join marches for immigrant rights on May 1, but this was opposed by the employers PMA and sabotaged at the last minute by the union tops. Shamefully, Local 13 in Los Angeles, a majority Mexican American port, made no protest when police attacked immigrant rights protesters that same day. Today, as the ICE immigration police stage Gestapo-style raids across the country, organized labor should take the lead in organizing rapid response networks to come into the streets to block the raids. Despite the campaign by the capitalist media and politicians to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria, there is widespread disgust among American working people toward the jackbooted storm troopers who are terrorizing immigrant communities.

At the same time, the unions should use the power to put a halt to the attacks on civil liberties which are part of the home front of the imperialist war. Driver’s licenses with biometric data, TWIC identification cards with "background checks," warrantless spying and phone tapping, setting up special military tribunals for "trials" in which defendants are denied the right of habeas corpus, to know the "evidence" or even the charges against them – all these are part of a drive that is in high gear pushing the United States toward a full-fledged police state. There have been scores, perhaps hundreds of resolutions by unions and city, county and state labor bodies against the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, showing that labor activists are well aware of the danger. But just as is the case with the countless union antiwar resolutions, there has been no labor action. It is commonplace in the labor movement to bemoan the lack of real action when Reagan broke the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike, paving the way for massive union-busting, takeaways and racist attacks all down the line. Let’s not let the labor bureaucrats bury the vital struggles of today.

Now is the time to turn words into deeds, to speak to the capitalist rulers in the only language they understand. The imperialist war parties must be defeated by a class mobilization of the working people at the head of all the oppressed. The ILWU motion to stop work on May Day to put a stop to the war can provide working people everywhere with the opening to turn from impotent protest to a struggle for power. For that the key is to build a class-struggle workers party fighting for a workers government, for socialist revolution here and around the world, that will put an end once and for all to the system of endless war, poverty and racism.

Write to the Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008. E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com. Visit us on the Internet at: www.internationalist.org

State of Siege in Oaxaca, Preparations in Mexico City

For a National Strike Against Repression

State of Siege in Oaxaca,
Preparations in Mexico City

Paramilitary Federal Preventive Police behind electrified barbed wire in Oaxaca. (Photo: Indymedia)

Down with the PRI, PAN and PRD! Break with the AMLO Popular Front!
Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The following is a translation of a leaflet put out by the Grupo Internacionalista,Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International.

NOVEMBER 30 – As Mexico is preparing to hand over power from President Vicente Fox, of the right-wing clerical National Action Party (PAN), to fellow PAN member Felipe Calderón, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca is under a state of siege, while in the Federal District (Mexico City) preparations are underway so that the capital will awaken December 1 under a virtual police state. The outgoing president promised to carry out the dirty work of putting an end to the mass strike in Oaxaca before his successor took office. For his part, the “president-elect” – by the vote and grace of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal – promises to bring down “the full weight of the law” against those who oppose his taking office and his takeover of the National Congress. Fox’s six-year term is ending, and Calderón’s begins with the tanquetas (armored personnel carriers mounted with water cannon) deployed and the pounding of military boots in the streets. The prospect is for a bleak future, and/or an outbreak of fierce class struggles.

Already on November 20, a kilometers-long metal wall was erected around the Chamber of Deputies, on the basis of rumors of an occupation of the legislative palace by “uncontrolled” groups. This provocation produced rancor among the legislators who were harrassed (by police), and anger among residents of near-by neighborhoods, forced to make long detours on foot. Later, on November 28, deputies of the PAN seized the podium in San Lázaro (the Congress building) in order to head off the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which had promised to prevent the swearing-in of the imposed president Calderón. The PAN maneuver precipitated a brawl in parliament the likes of which has seldom been seen in a bourgeois legislative chamber. At the same time, it was revealed that at least 50 members of the Presidential General Staff [the chief of state’s praetorian guard] were already in the building. In the early morning hours today, hundreds of Navy troops began arriving to tighten the ring around the Congress and Auditorio Nacional.

We have warned that this attack represents an act of class repression directed against the workers, peasants, Indians and working people of the whole country by a capitalist regime which fears an uprising of the exploited and oppressed. It is the follow-up to the series of massacres against steel workers in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán in April, against peasants and townspeople in Texcoco and San Salvador Atenco, Mexico state in May, and the teachers of Oaxaca in June. Even more, it is revenge for the defeats suffered by the forces of “law and order” at the hands of their victims, who in each of these cases ran off the killers in uniform. Against the bourgeois onslaught, the Grupo Internacionalista has urged that workers defense committees be formed, independent of the bourgeois parties and state, and a national strike undertaken to counter the repressive wave hanging over the entire country.

Donneybrook in San Lázaro Legislative Palace. PAN deputies seize podium in Chamber of Deputies supposedly to block PRD, provoking free-for-all. (Photo: José Carlo González/La Jornada)

It is also necessary to combat this attack politically. Tomorrow in the capital, thousands upon thousands of demonstrators will go into the streets to oppose the taking of office by “Fecal” (Felipe Calderón), the reactionary technocrat tied to the sinister Catholic order of Opus Dei (heirs of the Franco regime in Spain) and the cristeros of El Yunque.¹ Challenging the “bogus president,” the beneficiary of wholesale electoral fraud, many identify with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his PRD. Widely known by his initials, “AMLO” was designated the “legitimate president” in September by the National Democratic Convention organized by the PRD, and was sworn in at Mexico City’s Zócalo (Constitution Plaza, the main square in the capital) on November 20, the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution which the present group in power rejects. However, despite the “progressive” airs they give themselves, AMLO is a bourgeois politician and the PRD is a bosses’ party.

The Grupo Internacionalista calls to break the popular front which chains large sectors of the working people to the PRD and its standard-bearer, López Obrador. It is this class-collaborationist alliance that has stood in the way of extending the Oaxacan teachers strike to the rest of the country. It also blocked workers action over the police attack against Atenco and the assault on the SICARTSA steel plant. And not by accident. In each case, PRD legislators and officials were jointly responsible for unleashing the repression itself (Governor Lázaro Cárdenas Batel in Michoacán, the mayor of Texcoco Nazario Gutiérrez and the PRD fraction in the Oaxacan legislative assembly). Against the attacks by the bosses’ parties, it is urgently necessary to forge the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party which fights for a workers and peasants government to expropriate the bourgeoisie and launch the international socialist revolution.

Night and Fog Operations in Besieged Oaxaca

November 25 in Oaxaca: PFP claimed to be reestablishing “tranquility.” Instead they have imposed
state of siege, brutally beating and randomly arresting people to terrorize the population. (Photo: AFP)

Five days ago in Oaxaca, a peaceful march of tens of thousands of opponents of the bloody governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was brutally repressed by the militarized Federal Preventive Police (PFP) and PRI paramilitaries. It was the seventh “mega-march” against the murderer-governor since the beginning of the teachers strike at the end of May (see “Mexico: Oaxaca Teachers Repel Bloody Cop Assault,” The Internationalist No. 24, Summer 2006). On this occasion, the demonstrators added the demand “URO [Ulises Ruiz Ortiz] and PFP Out of Oaxaca!” When demonstrators arrived at the historic center of the city, they began setting up new barricades around the PFP, entrenched in Oaxaca’s Zócalo behind electrified barbed wire. Suddenly police sharpshooters on the rooftops began firing off hundreds if not thousands of tear gas canisters. Soon dozens of automobiles were set on fire along with several offices of the state government. Combing the streets in search of anyone suspected of being a sympathizer of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), the police arrested more than 140 people in the long night of November 25 (see “Oaxaca, November 25: The Night of the Hyenas”).

In the following days, the PFP and Oaxaca state Ministerial Police have carried out house searches, checked identity documents of passengers on public transport and kidnapped defenseless pedestrians in the streets. “Dozens of convoys of ministerial police prowl the city, each composed of five pick-up trucks with 8 police with assault rifles in firing position,” reports an APPO bulletin. “We have run out of tolerance,” says the commander of the PFP. Police say they have arrest warrants for 300 people, and intend to arrest the entire State Council of the APPO. In a display of police lunacy, the PFP talks of “at least 100 people of Cuban, French and Venezuelan origin, who ‘have financed and advised’ the ‘radical groups’” (La Jornada, 29 November). To prevent mobilizations demanding the freeing of those jailed, the authorities transferred 141 prisoners to a federal prison in the state of Nayarit. None of the arrested have been able to talk with relatives or lawyers. When representatives of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), a government outfit, were able to examine 17 of the inmates, “they said that all had been severely beaten” (La Jornada, 30 November).

As of yesterday, according to the Oaxaca daily Noticias (30 November), the number of those arrested is estimated at 250, of which 90 are teachers of Section 22, SNTE-CNTE, whose six-month strike resisted the whole gamut of repression and threats by the PRI state government. Others of the arrested include 13 from Oaxaca’s “Benito Juárez” Autonomous University (UABJO), six from the Oaxaca Institute of Technology, and one from the Secretariat of Health. In addition, a human rights investigator linked to the United Nations was seized, and at least 39 disappeared have been reported (including 13 women). The general secretary of the Union of Workers and Employees of UABJO, Rosendo Ramírez Sánchez, declared that “in Oaxaca individual rights have been canceled.” He roundly denounced a “military occupation in gray uniform. We are living under a state of siege, with state terrorism.” Students at the School of Medicine reported three people killed, whose bodies were dragged off by the repressive forces. As they were announcing this in an outdoor press conference, they were fired on by cops from a pick-up truck passing by at high speed.

The pirate radio state of the PRI death squads, “Citizens Radio,” called to burn down the offices of the Oaxaca New Left (NIOAX), headed by Flavio Sosa, one of the most prominent spokesmen of the APPO; only a few hours later the building was torched. The federal government pretended to be open to dialogue, but three hours before the scheduled start of talks, state police arrested Erik Sosa, Flavio’s brother and himself a member of the Assembly’s statewide council. Yesterday in the pre-dawn hours, the various police bodies (federal, state and municipal) launched an operation to dismantle the last barricade, located at the Cinco Señores intersection, site of the victory of thousands of APPO supporters over the PFP hordes on November 2 (see “The Battle of Oaxaca University,” The Internationalist supplement, November 2006). Later in the day, some 200 federal police crowded the entrance to the University, where Radio APPO has been transmitting over the antenna of Radio Universidad. After three days of massive raids, the population didn’t dare to come out in defense, and the defenders decided to turn over the station to university authorities. Bertha Muñoz, La Doctora, the calm and tireless announcer of Radio APPO, along with APPO leaders who had been holed up in the Church of the Virgin of the Poor managed to slip out surreptitiously without being arrested.

Oaxaca teachers staged 48-hour walkout demanding immediate, unconditional freeing of arrested protesters.
(Photo: Noticias)

Today, despite the massive repression aimed at terrorizing the population, thousands of teachers of Section 22 staged a 48-hour work stoppage, demanding an end to arbitrary arrests, immediate freeing of the arrested and the presentation of the disappeared alive. Two weeks after returning to classes, they threatened to go back on statewide strike. The response of “URO” and his thugs didn’t take long in coming. Ministerial police broke into classrooms of schools that hadn’t yet shut down and violently arrested dozens of teachers in the municipalities of the Central Valleys region. “They dragged out primary, secondary and kindergarten teachers at gunpoint in front of their students,” according to an APPO bulletin. Tomorrow, the teachers, once more on strike, and the APPO have announced a march to protest against the swearing-in of Felipe Calderón. Several of the APPO and Section 22 leaders are PRDers (among them Flavio Sosa, a national councilor of the PRD, and Enrique Rueda Pacheco), and it is evident that, as they did with their call for a “punishment vote” against the PAN and the PRI (and therefore implicitly for the PRD) in the July 2 presidential vote, they are again seeking to attach their struggle, if only “tactically,” to a mobilization on behalf of López Obrador.

Forge a Proletarian and Revolutionary Leadership!

Until now, the struggle in Oaxaca has been wholly waged under the watchword of democracy. However, as we have repeatedly emphasized (see “Oaxaca Is Burning” and other articles of the 10 November supplement to The Internationalist), underlying the turbulent mass strike in Oaxaca is the class war. In order to win this battle, a proletarian leadership is required which breaks with all the bourgeois parties on a genuine class program and mobilizes the tremendous power of the working class nationally against the capitalist state. The present leaders of the Oaxacan teachers and their APPO allies, in contrast, have restricted their demands to the confines of the state and have sought the support of bourgeois forces. Thus they call for the removal of the PRI governor by senators of the PAN and PRD. Despite the support of the church hierarchy for sending in the PFP (which they themselves initially accepted), APPO spokesmen have called for the intervention of arch-reactionary anti-Communist pope Benedict XVI. Now they are appealing to the United Nations, that den of imperialist thieves and their flunkeys that authorized, after the fact, the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

These calls are made in the name of “human rights,” the myth used by supposedly democratic imperialists in order to subjugate troublesome regimes. The human rights crusade was one of the battle cries of their anti-Soviet Cold War, and the Yankee imperialists even pretend to be defending the rights of women in Afghanistan. The reality, as affirmed in the German version of the revolutionary proletarian anthem, is that “the International will win human rights,” through socialist revolution.

Tomorrow the candidate of the Neanderthal right, Felipe Calderón, backed by imperialist companies like Wal-Mart and Pepsi-Cola, will succeed the former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox. He will have the parliamentary support of the PRI, bought for the price of keeping Ulises Ruiz in office in Oaxaca. The “PRIAN” (PRI + PAN) government cannot be fought by joining with the PRD, a bourgeois party whose very reason for existence is to maintain capitalist rule by extinguishing workers’ struggles. It is necessary to forge a workers party – revolutionary and internationalist, Leninist and Trotskyist – which fights for the taking of power by the proletariat, supported by the peasantry, the indigenous peoples and all the oppressed.

The “democratic” program has led to a dead-end, because the struggles of the working people cannot be resolved on the basis of bourgeois democracy – which, moreover, is impossible in semi-colonial countries like Mexico. As Trotsky indicated in his perspective (both a theory and a program) of permanent revolution, today no wing of the capitalist class is capable of carrying out the tasks which the great bourgeois revolutions accomplished in centuries past. The agrarian revolution necessary to free poor peasants and Indians from their centuries-old poverty; national liberation from the imperialist yoke; and democracy for the exploited and oppressed, the wage slaves of capital, can only be won through workers revolution, expropriating the profit-hungry bourgeoisie and extending to the very heart of the empire, where today more than ten million Mexican workers toil. For this struggle to be the beginning of “the revolution of the 21st century,” as a slogan stenciled on the walls in Oaxaca proclaimed, it must break out of the narrow mold in which it is now constrained. We do not look backwards, to the heritage of Zapata’s peasant nationalism; instead, we seek to be the proletarian Bolsheviks of the 21st century. n

Grupo Internacionalista at rally in defense of Oaxaca teachers by SITUAM union at Iztapalapa
campus, November 11.

---

¹ The cristero revolt of 1926-29, so-called for its battle cry of “Christ the King,” was a war of Catholic reaction against secular education and anti-clerical government measures following the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution. El Yunque is an ultra-rightist secret society based in Guadalajara, Jalisco, which was a center of the cristero revolt. It includes many PAN leaders.

Spirited Solidarity Picket in New York: "Oaxaca Teachers, We Are With You!"

Demonstrators outside Mexican consulate in New York City, September 21. (Internationalist photo)

On September 21, some 150 teachers, professors, trade-unionists, students, leftists and community activists joined in an energetic picket outside Mexico’s Consulate General in New York to “Protest Repression in Oaxaca, Mexico – Defend the Striking Teachers.” (See leaflet with endorsers list.) The picketers were demonstrating militant solidarity with the 70,000 teachers in the southern Mexican state on strike since last May 22, who have braved massive police repression and death squads that have killed at least five strike supporters in the last month.

“Maestros oaxaqueños, estamos con ustedes” (Oaxaca teachers, we are with you), the NYC demonstrators chanted. The chant was so loud, in fact, that it was heard all the way to Oaxaca, via a live broadcast from the picket line to the strikers’ station, Radio Plantón (Sit-In Radio). Pictures of the protest were printed in El Diario-La Prensa in New York and La Jornada in Mexico City. On the same day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, members of the teachers union (SEPE) from the steel city of Volta Redonda carried a banner proclaiming: “SEPE-V.R. Calls on the Working Class to Strike in Solidarity with the Teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico.”

The New York protest exceeded the organizers’ expectations, as protesters kept arriving. Soon it was almost impossible to move in the narrow area blocked off by steel barriers set up by the police to cordon off demonstrations. Picketers chanted, “From New York to Oaxaca, fight for the right to strike!” Other chants included, “Oaxaca, Atenco, massacres in Mexico,” “International solidarity with Mexican teachers,” “Defend Mexican teachers against death squad terror” and “¡Viva la huelga de los maestros oaxaqueños!”

An important aspect of the Oaxacan teachers’ struggle is the fight against the oppression of the indigenous peoples of this state, where more than a third of the population speaks native languages. One of the signs carried in the September 21 protest carried a greeting in Mixteco from a Oaxacan teacher thanking New York teachers for their support. Another declared in Spanish: “Against Racism, Discrimination and State Terror, Defend the Indigenous Peoples of Oaxaca and Chiapas!” (A large majority of the striking teachers in this heavily indigenous state are women, many from the Zapotec, Mixtec, Mixe, Triqui and other Indian peoples.)

The united-front protest was in response to a call endorsed by more than 70 individuals and organizations, including scores of professors from the City University of New York (CUNY) and teachers from the city’s public schools. For several weeks, union activists from the Professional Staff Congress (PSC, representing CUNY faculty and staff) and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) have been gathering support for the protest in support of the Oaxaca teachers. The Internationalist Group and supporters in the PSC and UFT as well as members of the Internationalist Clubs at CUNY played an important role in initiating and building the protest.

The broadcast over Radio Plantón was particularly important, lasting for 25 minutes before the connection was broken. The strikers prepared beforehand to transmit on all the occupied radio stations in Oaxaca. So when the call from New York came in, four other stations (Radio La Ley, Radio APPO, and others) were networked in. Amid the chanting some of the signs carried by protesters were mentioned, among them the call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. A student from the CUNY Internationalist Clubs spoke from personal experience growing up in the state of Guerrero about the racism directed against indigenous peoples in Mexico. CUNY professor Electa Arenal sent greetings to the Oaxacan teachers she had met while attending a tri-national (U.S.-Canada-Mexico) conference in defense of public education there last March.

As demonstrators called to fight for the right to strike, we explained to listeners that under New York’s anti-labor Taylor Law, public sector workers are banned from striking here, yet last December the powerful Transport Workers Union (TWU) shut down the city’s subways and buses for three days. Despite massive fines, the TWUers were unbroken. A spokesman for the Internationalist Group explained to listeners that this was intimately connected to the burning need for a revolutionary workers party, both in the U.S. and Mexico, because all the bosses’ parties supported repression against the strikers. The announcer in Oaxaca said that many strikers had expressed the need for a party representing the working people.

The picket was being broadcast while Oaxacan strikers were beginning a long trek by foot to Mexico City that is expected to last two weeks. Marchers listening to the broadcast from the striker-occupied radio stations called in questions to Radio Plantón to pass on to the protest in New York. One listener wanted to know what unions were represented (dozens of members of the PSC, UFT and TWU). Another asked if any document had been brought to the consulate. We reported that a New York teacher and a high school student had tried to deliver a letter from UFT president Randi Weingarten protesting the repression against Oaxacan teachers, but they were rebuffed.

There is no doubt that the radio broadcast gave marchers trekking through the Oaxacan countryside a real lift hearing the chanting from New York and knowing that there was a large and combative solidarity demonstration in the heart of U.S. imperialism supporting the strikers. Now the right-wing government of Mexican president Vicente Fox is threatening to send in federal forces to dislodge the teachers. Governor Ulises Ruiz has issued an ultimatum for teachers to return to work by Monday, September 25, or he will replace them with scabs and send in the police. It is urgent for the working class internationally to come to the aid of our class sisters and brothers in Oaxaca.

Bloody Repression, Hard Class Struggle

For the last four months the Oaxacan teachers and their supporters have been engaged in a hard and protracted class battle, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in Mexico in several decades. On June 14, the governor sent an army of 3,500 riot police to evict strikers camped out in 52 blocks in the heart of the state capital. The repressive forces let off repeated volleys of tear gas (and rifle fire), burned the strikers’ tents, invaded the teachers union headquarters, destroying the strike radio station, and brutally beat anyone they came across. But after a tenacious struggle, tens of thousands of teachers retook the city center.

Two days later 300,000 people marched in solidarity with the teachers. Ever since, the entire city has been in the hands of the teachers and their allies. Police, often masked, periodically sneak into town for nighttime incursions in unmarked vehicles. After one such raid in late August, in which a strike supporter was shot to death by a marauding “caravan of death,” more than 500 barricades were thrown up all around Oaxaca city. The city hall, state legislature, supreme court and governor’s office are all occupied, as well as several radio stations and the state government’s TV channel.

Upon receiving phone reports from our comrades of the Grupo Internacionalista in Mexico about the bloody June 14 cop attack on the striking teachers, the Internationalist Group in New York called an emergency protest outside the Mexican consulate on an hour’s notice. The IG initiated a second demonstration at the consulate the following day which was joined by a large contingent from the PSC. Photos of that demonstration were published in the Mexico City daily La Jornada and in Noticias in Oaxaca, the widely read daily newspaper which is supporting the teachers.

Over the next two and a half months, militants of the Grupo Internacionalista were in Oaxaca almost constantly, distributing thousands of leaflets to the strikers and talking of the need for a national strike against the murderous government, the formation of workers defense committees and fighting to forge class-struggle unions to break the stranglehold of the corporatist “unions” which for decades acted as labor police for the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). A particular focus was the GI’s call to break with the popular front around the bourgeois-populist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led by presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, widely known by his initials AMLO.

This was a key issue among the teachers, since after saying for a month that they would boycott the July 2 elections, the union leadership and their allies in the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) ended up calling for a “punishment vote” against the hated PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) of the bloodthirsty governor Ruiz, which ruled Mexico for 70 years and was still in power in Oaxaca, and against the right-wing clericalist PAN (National Action Party) of Mexican president Fox. This popular-frontist appeal amounted to a call to vote for AMLO and the PRD, which 46 percent of the voters in the state did. At the end of July, supporters of the Grupo Internacionalista held a video showing of the film “Land and Liberty” about the Spanish Civil War and forum on the popular front which drew several dozen strikers.

In August, a youth leader of the GI addressed a mass meeting of 1,500 strike supporters in Oaxaca called by the APPO, declaring that there would be no “democracy” under capitalism for the poor and working people, women and indigenous peoples, denouncing the role of the PRD, and calling for a revolutionary workers party. As PRD supporters attempted to shout him down, our comrade held his ground, while a number of teachers called out to “let him speak.” In the end he got more applause than a PRD senator. Striking teachers crowded around to see photos of the June 14 and 15 protests in New York City and effusively asked IG supporters to convey their thanks to NYC teachers for their solidarity. 198 copies of a new issue of the Mexican edition of El Internacionalista were sold as strikers lined up and called out for copies.

The struggle of the Oaxaca teachers figured prominently in a Grupo Internacionalista forum on “Mexico: Bourgeois Elections and Workers Blood” and “Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Post-Soviet World” held in the Leon Trotsky Museum in Coyoacán (Mexico City) on August 19, the eve of the anniversary of Trotsky’s murder there by a Stalinist agent in 1940. Starting in late August, supporters of the International Group back in New York began agitating and working with activists of the PSC and UFT, to build a labor protest of solidarity with the embattled Oaxacan teachers. UFTers to Stop the War was among the initiators of the demo. Although the union tops refused to endorse, many individual members enthusiastically did.

The IG had a stand at the annual West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn on September 4, selling copies of The Internationalist with several articles on the hot struggles in Mexico. A well-attended forum was held by the Hunter Internationalist Club on September 7 showing a just-completed video produced by the Internationalist Group on “Class Battles in Mexico” (copies of the video are available for sale). On September 9, several hundred leaflets calling for the protest along with a fact sheet on events in Oaxaca were distributed and dozens of endorsements for a protest gathered at the Labor Day parade, despite the wretched Democratic (and in some cases Republican) politics of the pro-capitalist union tops.

On September 14, a “report-back” meeting was held at the City University Graduate Center, sponsored by the Association of Latino and Latin American Students and endorsed by the PSC, CUNY Internationalist Clubs and the Doctoral Students Council. In a room packed to overflowing with more than 60 people, CUNY faculty who recently were in Oaxaca recounted the struggle there and segments were shown from a video shot and being edited by Professor Tami Gold of the Hunter Film Department. After the presentations there was a lively debate with more than a dozen speakers in the audience over the role of the PRD, the nature of the corporatist “unions” in Mexico and the need for solidarity action in the United States.

On September 17, flyers were distributed and 50 copies of El Internacionalista sold at the Mexican Independence Day festival in New York. As momentum built for the picket, an IG spokesman gave an interview on WBAI radio emphasizing key aspects of the struggle in Oaxaca, including the important issue of racism against indigenous peoples. The Hunter Internationalist Club held a sign-making session making dozens of signs. In Mexico City, the Grupo Internacionalista held a forum on the teachers’ struggle, with students who traveled from Oaxaca speaking, at the CCH-Sur preparatory school which was attended by over 100 students. Meanwhile, in Brazil, supporters of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brazil, section of the League for the Fourth International, were pushing for the teachers union there to demonstrate support for the Mexican strikers. In all three countries, the Internationalist video was shown.

These intense efforts prepared the way for the successful September 21 protest. At the picket, an Internationalist Group leaflet was distributed with an update from Mexico on the “Threat of Heavy Crackdown in Mexico.” At the end of the hour-long protest, the crowd was addressed by a number of the participants. An executive board member of TWU Local 100 spoke of the battle for the right to strike and against the union-busting Taylor Law, after which demonstrators again chanted to fight for the right to strike. A prominent member of the PSC spoke of how teachers in Oaxaca had inspired teachers in New York, and of the need for the working class to become active against the war. Protesters chanted “For workers strikes against the war!” and “Defeat U.S. Imperialism!” An activist from the UFT told how the consulate refused to receive the letter from the NYC teachers union, with 150,000 members, against the repression in Oaxaca.

There were also speakers from Grassroots Haiti, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, the International Socialist Organization, the League for the Revolutionary Party, Progressive Labor Party and the Spartacist League. The speaker from the Internationalist Group emphasized that the key issue is revolutionary leadership: the Oaxacan teachers have certainly shown tenacity and courage, and have massive popular backing, but the strike is undercut by the leadership’s support for the PRD, many of whose members have been scabbing on the strike and whose legislators are now calling to bring in the Mexican federal police to dislodge the strikers. The fight against massive poverty, to defend immigrants’ rights, to defeat the imperialist war on Afghanistan and Iraq, both in Mexico and the U.S., require the leadership of a revolutionary workers party.

The demonstration ended with vigorous chants to fight for the right to strike, denouncing death squad repression, and proclaiming “¡Viva la huelga de los maestros oaxaqueños!” n

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To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Israel launches Regional War on the Road to World War III

Defend the Palestinian People and Lebanese Shiites -
Defeat Zionist Expansionists! No to U.N. Mercenaries!

Drive the Zionists Out of the Occupied Territories!
Drive the U.S. Imperialists Out of Iraq and All the Near East!


Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP

On July 14, Israel began a full-scale assault on Lebanon, bombing targets, military and civilian, throughout the country. The first target was Beirut's airport, followed by blowing up bridges and highways leading out of the country. Aside from a few tens of thousands who managed to rush to the Syrian border before the main roads were destroyed, the entire Lebanese population is now trapped. Having blockaded the country, the Zionist militarists are proceeding to pulverize the southern part of the capital, flattening whole city blocks, as well as attacking cities and Palestinian refugee camps from north to south. Particularly hard-hit have been the Shiite Muslim communities where the Islamic organization Hezbollah is strong. To date (July 18) well over 200 Lebanese have been killed in the indiscriminate Israeli bombing.

Leaders of the Zionist state portray their assault as "retaliation" for Hezbollah's July 12 surprise attack on Israeli military forces on the border, in which eight soldiers were killed and two captured. This effective attack left the Israeli army smarting, but what followed is far more than a reprisal. It was "a wonderful option to do something the army was already prepared to do, with a well-constructed operational plan on the shelf," commented the head of an Israeli "peace" center. War minister Amir Peretz, head of the Zionist "Labor" Party, declared that "we shall not allow Hezbollah forces to remain any further on the borders of the state of Israel." The only way that can be accomplished is by an Israeli occupation, and today the first Israeli troops moved into southern Lebanon.

Whatever the pretext used by Israel to justify its aggression, the international workers movement must stand squarely for defense of the Palestinian people and Lebanese Shiite population under attack and for the defeat of the Israeli assault. The current invasion of Lebanon is part of an overall plan by the Zionist expansionists to unilaterally withdraw the borders of the Near East and impose their military dominance on the Arab peoples. Having declared the bogus "peace process" dead, the Palestinians are to be fenced in and confined to giant prisons in Gaza and the West Bank, the Zionist settlements will fill in huge swaths of the Occupied Territories, and the stage will be set for a future mass expulsion, euphemistically known in Zionist circles as "transfer." This "final solution" to the "Palestinian problem" today is openly avowed only by Zionist hardliners, but it is the logic of the decades-old policy of "creating facts on the ground.”

There is no "equivalence" between the blows struck by the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah and Palestinian groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and various secular nationalist resistance forces on the one hand, and the Zionist military juggernaut on the other. Contrary to the hysteria trumpeted by the bourgeois press in the West, the existence of the Hebrew¬ speaking population of Israel is in no way threatened today whereas the Palestinian Arab and Lebanese Shiite populations are very much in danger of being decimated and driven out of their lands. At the same time, while noting that the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank are far deadlier, proletarian internationalists oppose indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population such as suicide bombings of non-military targets and the rockets which struck a railway repair shop in Haifa, killing eight workers. The League for the Fourth International calls to drive the Zionists out of all the territories conquered by Israel in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem. All the West Bank settlements are military outposts for the subjugation of the Palestinians.

Revolutionary Marxists recognize the right of self-determination of both the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew speaking peoples, that is, their right to national existence in the area. The creation of the state of Israel, a theocratic Jewish state which is inherently oppressive to the Palestinians, was a historic crime by the Western imperialists, coming on top of the monstrous annihilation of 6 million European Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Instead of accepting the Jewish refugees from the fascist slaughter, the "democratic" imperialists pushed them into Palestine. But the fact is that there is now a Hebrew-speaking nation in the same territory as the Palestinian Arab population, and proletarian revolutionaries defend the democratic rights of both.

Since the demise of the phony "peace" process following the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000, when U.S. president Clinton demanded Palestinians submit to the carving up of the West Bank, and the subsequent provocation staged by Ariel Sharon at the Al Aksa Mosque with the full cooperation of the "Labor" Zionist government of Ehud Barak, many Palestinian secular nationalists and Israeli leftists have abandoned their earlier support for a Palestinian "mini-state" and call for a democratic, secular Palestine. This was the original program of the Palestine Liberation Organization. However, there is no way that under capitalism there can be an equitable and democratic solution to the conflict between two competing claims to national self-determination on the same territory. How would the water rights be divided between Israel and Palestine, for example? What about the undeniable right to return of the Palestinian refugees forced from their homes in 1948?

The Trotskyists of the Internationalist Group and LFI oppose forced population transfers and all religiously based states, whether a Jewish state of Israel or an Islamic state in Iran or U.S.-occupied Iraq. We hold that in the case of historically intermingled peoples, the only possible framework for a just solution to national rights is under proletarian rule, when the working people of all nationalities, peoples and minorities can resolve democratic questions through their common efforts in a collective economy. In the present case, while recognizing the right of national self-¬determination on behalf of both the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking peoples, we fight for an Arab-Hebrew workers state in a socialist federation of the Near East. This can only be achieved by joint struggle of the working people against their Zionist, Islamic fundamentalist and Arab nationalist rulers.

The current Israeli assault is in many respects a repeat of Ariel Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which led to almost two decades of occupation and Israel's ultimate withdrawal. Last year they tried to set up a puppet government in Beirut by forcing Syrian forces to leave the country. While giving no political support to the nationalist Syrian government, Marxists point out that Lebanon was carved out of Syria in the 1940s by the departing French colonialists as an artificial state, then dominated by pro-Western Christian forces, in order to hold Arab nationalism in check. As demonstrated in the civil war of two decades ago, Lebanon is a checkerboard of communalist enclaves, which under capitalist rule is will always be oppressive to one national minority or another (Shiites, Christians, Alawites, Druzes, etc.)

But the current military escalation comes in a new context, of U.S.-led imperialist invasions and colonial occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Palestinian "president" Abbas, a figurehead without a state or a government, warned that the attack on Lebanon could lead to a regional war. In fact, Israel has already launched the war. The Zionists are counting on the Saudi, Egyptian and other reactionary Arab regimes to do nothing, which they undoubtedly will do, and is calling for the Lebanese government to control Hezbollah, which it will not and cannot do. As a result, many European imperialists in the Group of 8 meeting in the tsarist palaces of St. Petersburg, Russia, have called for United Nations intervention. But U.N. "blue helmets" will only serve as mercenary border police on behalf of Israel and U.S. imperialism.

The U.S. imperialists have been attempting to impose a Pax Americana on the region for decades, particularly since the 2001-2003 attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. The Zionists have always sought to serve as cat's paws for imperialism, going back to when they got British foreign minister to issue the famous Balfour Declaration in 1917 by offering to act as pawns for Britain astride the vital Suez Canal. But the interests of the Zionists and the imperialists are not always identical. In fact, crazed Israeli right-wingers and their defenders abroad are perfectly prepared to blow up the world in pursuit of their messianic expansionist plans. Currently, Zionist spokesmen in the U.S. have declared that World War III has begun, and that the key is for the United States (and Israel) to "prevail." Democrats and Republicans alike rushed to defend Israeli aggression, with warhawk Hillary Clinton taking the lead in saber-rattling. Against the bipartisan war party, we fight for a revolutionary workers party.

At the time of World War I, the German communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg declared that the choice facing mankind was barbarism or socialism. Certainly, the Zionist rulers of Israel and the imperialist warmongers in Washington show the ugly face of barbarism as they rape and pillage their way through Iraq and dismember the Palestinian people. We call on the workers of the world to unite in class struggle to drive the imperialists from Iraq and Afghanistan, to defeat the colonial occupation and the "war on terror" which is actually a drive to terrorize the world into submission, as well as to drive the Zionists from all the occupied territories, from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon. And to put an end to the imperialist chamber of horrors, from the carnage of World War I to the Nazi holocaust (and U.S. atom bombing of Japan) in World War II, to the torture and murder camps of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, it is necessary to sweep away the capitalist system through international socialist revolution.

For more information, write to: Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008. Telephone: (212) 460-0983 Fax: (212) 614-8711 E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com
Visit the IG/LFI on the Internet at www.internationalist.org

Oaxaca Teachers Repel Bloody Riot Cop Assault

After Massacres at Sicartsa Steel Mill and Atenco

300,000 march in Oaxaca, June 16, denouncing repressive governor and supporting teachers strike.
(Photo: Marco Ugarte/AP)

Not One Vote For the Bourgeois Parties PRI, PAN y PRD!
Break with López Obrador, the PRD and their Popular Front!
Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!

The following is a translation of a leaflet by the Grupo Internacionalista, Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International, distributed in Oaxaca where 300,000 people marched June 16 to protest the bloody police attack on striking teachers there two days earlier.

JUNE 16 – Two weeks before the Mexican presidential elections, the government of Oaxaca under Governor Ulises Ruiz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) staged a blatant provocation, violently evicting teachers who have been occupying the downtown area of the state capital. In the classic manner of military dictatorships, thousands of city and state police fell upon the teachers as they were sleeping in the 53 blocks where they have been camped out for the last three weeks. Firing off tear gas grenades in all directions, they invaded the union headquarters, destroyed the teachers’ tents and burned what was left of their encampments. But the government only succeeded in shooting itself in the foot, and the eviction was a failure. After three hours of pitched battle, the 40,000 strikers managed to break through the police barriers and to drive out the forces of repression.

Amid the great confusion reigning in the city, there were reports of several people killed: an initial notice by the Mexican Red Cross reported eleven dead, a number that was later reduced to four according to spokesmen for the teachers and the Oaxaca daily Noticias. Clarity is still lacking on this issue. What is certain is that Social Security hospitals treated 92 people wounded in the attack, several of them in serious condition; in addition, a number of teachers are still missing. In short, the streets of Oaxaca ran red with the blood of the working people. It was a real massacre – the third in less than two months – coming after the April 20 shooting of workers at the Sicartsa steel plant in the Pacific Coast port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán; and the deadly attack on the townspeople of San Salvador Atenco, near Mexico City, on May 4. In the electoral contest, each of the three main bourgeois parties is posing as being the toughest on “security” issues. In fact, the PAN (National Action Party), PRI and PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) have all sent killer cops against the working people. This is how the Mexican ruling class prepares its electoral farce drenched with workers’ blood.

In the wake of his failed paramilitary operation and facing the fury of the working class nationally and internationally, Governor Ruiz had to retreat. He freed ten strikers and suspended (but did not drop) arrest orders for 25 teachers union leaders. The federal government of President Vicente Fox joined in and the Ministry of the Interior (under the rightist Carlos Abascal) dispatched an undersecretary to act as mediator. They intimated that all of a sudden they might be able to find federal funds to pay for “rezoning” the teachers which would provide a minimal raise to their starvation wages. But matters will not be resolved with a round-table “dialogue.” This battle is not over, and any “truce” could prove fatal. Although they have withdrawn from the center of the city, the strikers have not abandoned their mass sit-in and they are now demanding the head of the repressive governor. The union has called not to vote for any of the presidential candidates, and is proposing to boycott the July 2 election – which they have the power to disrupt, at least on the state level.

What is urgently needed at this time is to break out of the state framework and to undertake a national strike against the murderous government, fighting for victory to the strikes by Oaxaca teachers and mine workers; for total trade-union independence from the bourgeoisie, breaking the shackles of the corporatist pseudo-unions and throwing back the government attack on miners and metal workers; for freeing and dropping all charges against the arrested workers, peasants and teachers, victims of the repressive onslaught by the ruling class. Above all, what’s needed is a political reply to the bourgeoisie’s class offensive, refusing to give a single vote to the PAN, PRI, PRD or any other bosses’ party, breaking with the popular front tying the “independent” unions to the PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and forging the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party which would fight for a workers and peasants government to begin international socialist revolution.

Teachers, Miners and Peasants in the Face of the Capitalist Assault

Teachers (in rear) confront an army of police following eviction, June 14. (Photo: Indymedia México)

It is striking that in each of the recent massacres, the workers under attack tenaciously resisted the repression and routed the repressive forces. In Lázaro Cárdenas, they took back the Sicartsa steel mill in a hard battle against the police and marines. (It now seems that the Fox government may be trying for a repeat performance in the copper mine town of Cananea, Sonora near the Arizona border, where the miners walked out when they were ordered to work on the centenary of the great strike that sparked the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17.) In Atenco, hundreds of police from the state of Mexico fled from the fury of the population incensed over the arrest of some flower sellers. And now in Oaxaca, the uniformed guard dogs of capital received a sharp response from those they sought to put down.

It began with a silent operation in the early morning ours of June 14. At 4:50 a.m., the general secretary of the union, Enrique Rueda Pacheco, sounded the alert over Radio Plantón (Radio Sit-Down, the strikers’ radio station), calling on the ranks to prepare for “organized resistance against the repression that the state government is carrying out in an irrational manner.” At 5:15, the police took over the Teachers’ Hotel (union headquarters), a few blocks from the city center, and then advanced on the Zócalo, Oaxaca’s central plaza. Enveloped in dense clouds of tear gas from troops on the ground and from a helicopter which flew over the plaza for hours, the police managed to momentarily “recapture” the Plaza de Armas and the Alameda. At gunpoint and brandishing riot clubs, they pillaged and burned the teachers’ encampments, dismantled the equipment with which the strikers broadcast Radio Plantón, and savagely beat teachers they encountered.

But what happened next certainly wasn’t part of the operational plan. While the governor with hands soaked in blood tried to hide his crimes behind his own cloud of verbal laughing gas, talking about a fantastical “state of law,” Excélsior (15 June) reported on its front page that the teachers “Force Police to Flee.” The Oaxaca daily Noticias described how the teachers used buses to smash through police barricades:

“At around 7:45, the 40,000 teachers regrouped almost in their entirety and began to corner the police who as the minutes passed were forced to fall back on the Alameda de León and the Zócalo, due to a shortage of munitions, mainly tear gas canisters. A helicopter of the special operations police circled over the historical city center and fired off grenades on multiple occasions, but still they could not defeat the teachers….

“About 8:50, the educational workers now numbered thousands and proceeded to launch the final battle. The police were forced to pull back and abandon the Zócalo, retreating along Bustamante Street, after offering their last defense.”

Throughout the day, federal and state authorities bandied about threats of a new attack by the Federal Preventive Police (PFP). It was reported that Hercules troop transport planes filled with the paramilitary police were headed to Oaxaca to “finish the job.” The governor wanted to “clear” the Zócalo in order to “promote tourism” and carry out the demands of the state Coparmex (employers’ association) to get rid once and for all of this “rabble” of teachers who fight for higher wages. Ruiz claimed to have the support of the federal government, but apparently the president’s office decided otherwise. Interior minister Abascal announced later that it would be “better” not to attempt a new eviction. The federal government made an electoral calculation and decided to leave the PRI governor twisting in the wind.

The Story of the SNTE and CNTE: Oaxaca Teachers in the Eye of the Storm

In the face of the all-sided anti-labor repression, what’s needed is a class-struggle leadership to wage an all-out battle against the capitalist government. In the first place, it is necessary to burst the shackles of the corporatist “trade-unionism” (represented by the CTM, CROC, CROM, CT, SNTE and related federations) which during more than half a century of PRI rule served as the labor police of the regime to suppress the Mexican workers, break their strikes and murder their best fighters on a mass scale. Today the corporatist bureaucrats offer their services to the Fox government, although they have occasionally fallen afoul of their godfather as they find themselves caught between a furious proletariat and a decaying regime in a tight spot. This is what happened with the mine leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia (“Napito”) after the “industrial homicide” in Pasta de Conchos¹ for which the corporatist mine and metal workers union was co-responsible along with the company and the capitalist state.

Police destroyed the teachers camp and burned the remains. (Photo: Indymedia México)

The effects of the corporatization of the workers movement in Mexico are still being felt. The National Education Workers Union (SNTE), under its caudillo (strong man) Carlos Jonguitud, served for decades as the political instrument of the PRI (of which it was a part) to control the rural areas of the country. When discontent over his misrule boiled over, Jonguitud was replaced by the current “moral leader” of the SNTE, Elba Esther Gordillo, who was hand-picked by the PRI president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and designated union president in an all-night meeting in Gobernación (the interior ministry). The SNTE maintained its control over the teachers through internal terror, with bands of hired gunmen whose job was to “clean out” any dissidents. Jonguitud and Gordillo between them are responsible for the assassination of more than 150 members of their “union.” When a labor body engages in mass murder of its members, dedicates itself to breaking strikes and not simply selling them out (as the reformist bureaucrats regularly do), when it is an integral part of a whole repressive apparatus, then it is no longer a workers union, but instead a state apparatus for control of labor.

The Oaxacan teachers in particular rebelled against this repressive apparatus, playing a key role in the National Educational Workers Coordinating Committee (CNTE), a union tendency which in much of the country acts as a separate union. This is the case in the state of Oaxaca, where the CNTE controls Section 22 of the SNTE. Although the PRI no longer holds the presidency of the country, the corporatist apparatuses have continued offering their services to the federal government, now run by the PAN. Thus the general secretary of the SNTE, Rafael Ochoa, declared that “the SNTE dissociates itself” from the Oaxaca teachers’ struggle. In the same tone as Fox’s education secretary, he asked “who is supplying the money to pay for the [strike] movement” (La Jornada, 6 June). Even after the June 14 massacre, Ochoa insists that “the teachers in the struggle belong to the National Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CNTE) and not to his union” (Noticias [Oaxaca], 15 June). The SNTE leaders yearn to put an end to the labor militancy of the Oaxaca teachers and would not hesitate to call on the police to do so, as they have done against the CNTE in Mexico City.

But breaking the stranglehold of corporatism on the Mexican workers is far from sufficient. It is also necessary to free the proletariat from the political bonds tying it to the ruling class via the pro-capitalist leaderships of the “independent” unions who are subordinate to the PRD, among them top leaders of the CNTE. It is pro-PRD union bureaucrats in the first instance who stand in the way of joint action by the proletariat on a national scale against the repression (offering the mockery of a three-hour national work stoppage). They don’t want to pose problems for PRD candidates and particularly for its presidential hopeful, López Obrador, who calls for “dialogue” with the butchers (i.e., for the teachers, miners, peasants, etc. to surrender).

Massacres and Elections: Plenty of Stick, Not Much Carrot

The six-year term of Vicente Fox is drawing to a close as mass repression rains down on the working people of the countryside and the cities. Fox’s victory in the 2000 elections was seen as the longed-for end of the “perfect dictatorship” of the PRI. But the end of the PRI-government regime of a state party and its replacement by a PAN-PRI-PRD condominium has only brought more repression, helping to dispel many democratic illusions. No matter who emerges as the victor in the July 2 elections, the workers’ blood will continue to be spilled until the gruesome capitalist ruling dynasty in Mexico is swept away once and for all.

In fact, the string of police massacres is closely linked to the elections. The PRI, PAN and PRD are up to their necks in the electoral circus and are going after each other with all they’ve got. The main theme of their campaigns is the “lack of security.” The bourgeois candidates are competing over who can be the best repressor in upholding the business affairs of capital. Felipe Calderón of the PAN promises a “firm hand”; Roberto Madrazo of the PRI says he “knows how to do it”; and López Obrador proposes to throw in a little carrot along with the stick. Until now, the triplet parties of the pseudo-democratic “alternation” have not hesitated for an instant in banding together in the hour of repression. At Sicartsa, it was a joint action by the local (PRI), state (PRD) and federal (PAN) police. In Atenco, the repression was ordered by a PRD mayor and the PRI governor, backed by the PAN federal government. They cut down 14-year-old Javier Cortés and National University student Alexis Benhumea, who died last week after more than a month in a coma. The death toll in Oaxaca is not yet known.

The Oaxacan teachers of Section 22 also know that the “PRI, PAN and PRD are the same thing,” as a teacher said last week in a union assembly of the sit-down strikers. “First they kill the Sicartsa workers in Michoacán, then two youths in Atenco,” he went on. “This is the work of the same wretches. The PRI, PAN and PRD, all three of them, are parties of the rich. We call not to vote for any of them; what we have to do is boycott the July 2 elections.” His conclusion is correct, but insufficient. A negative, passive policy is not enough. In the face of the repressive onslaught by the capitalist regime, we must build the indispensable vehicle to wage a political struggle against the bourgeoisie: a revolutionary workers party.

It must be a Leninist vanguard party; a party of class struggle, which points the way and mobilizes the working people to win battles like the Oaxaca teachers’ strike; an internationalist party, capable of fighting the nationalist demagogy peddled by the bourgeois politicians (while grossly subordinating themselves to the imperialists), which is also reflected in the empty posturing of the Other Campaign². It must be a party based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution, which in the face of the anti-democracy of the bourgeois regime that oppresses the peasants, Indians and all working people raises the program of workers revolution, not only in Mexico but also on the other side of the Line, in the imperialist bastion to the north, where millions of Mexican workers form a human bridge and a growing, potentially militant sector of the North American proletariat.

In fact, the struggle of the Oaxaca teachers and the massacre they have suffered has had a strong impact in the United States. Our comrades of the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International (LFI), initiated a mobilization protesting the repression in Oaxaca in front of the Mexican consulate in New York. Already on April 14, the day the massacre took place, the IG called an emergency picket, pulled together in less than an hour. Yesterday, June 15, they held another protest attended by more than 50 people, among them many members of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty and staff union of the City University of New York. Demonstrators chanted angrily, “Atenco, Oaxaca, massacres in Mexico,” and “Hail the Mexican teachers’ strike!” Union speakers expressed solidarity with their Mexican brothers and sisters. And last night, the San Francisco local of the West Coast U.S. dock workers union, the ILWU, unanimously approved a motion protesting the repression in Oaxaca.

The IG also fights for full citizenship rights for all immigrants under the slogan: “The workers’ struggle has no borders.” In Mexico, the fundamental objective of the Grupo Internacionalista is to build the nucleus of a genuinely revolutionary workers party, as part of a reforged Fourth International. This is not something that will become necessary in the distant future: faced with the government repression against the working people, it is necessary to build this indispensable political instrument for proletarian revolution. Today is when it is possible to give the final push to bring down the tottering corporatist edifice and land a telling blow against the murderous regime. We call upon teachers and other fighters who want to go from resistance to a fight for revolution to joint the ranks of the Grupo Internacionalista. n

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¹ On February 19, an explosion in the Pasta de Conchos mine in the state of Coahuila trapped 65 miners underground where they were left to die. In the face of the outraged relatives of the doomed miners, who complained to the press that the “union” was “the same as the company,” Gómez Urrutia accused management of “industrial homicide,” even though the union had signed off on fraudulent safety certifications along with the company and state labor inspectors. Thereupon, the mine owners demanded Gómez’ ouster and the Fox government summarily dismissed him (just as they had installed him four years earlier over opposition in the miners’ ranks). The Grupo Internacionalista opposed the government intervention while calling on the miners and metal workers to break the corporatist stranglehold and fight for genuine workers’ unions, free of state control, with a class-struggle leadership .

² The “Otra Campaña” initiated by the Zapatista insurgents calls for opposing the mounting repression without suggesting the means to fight it, other than repeated demonstrations. While claiming to be “anti-capitalist,” their real complaint is that the rulers “are destroying what is our Nation, our Mexican Fatherland (Patria).”

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To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Up to 1 million marched for immigrants’ rights in Los Angeles March 25. (Photo: Los Angeles Times)

Defeat U.S. Imperialist War on Iraq!
Build a Revolutionary Workers Party!

We reprint below an Internationalist Group leaflet distributed along with an 8-page tabloid special issue of The Internationalist at an April 10 immigrants’ rights march in New York.

The United States is bogged down in a losing war and colonial occupation of Iraq. Meanwhile, immigrants in the U.S. are facing mounting racist attack. These two facts are intimately connected. From the beginning of the 20th century and the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, through World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War and up to today, imperialist war has always been accompanied by virulent immigrant-bashing. The bottom line is: to defeat the racist onslaught, you have to defeat the war and bring down the capitalist system that produces both.

The Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International, fights for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, documented or undocumented, and for the defeat of U.S. imperialism in its “war on terror” which in reality is an attempt to terrorize the world into submission to its dictates. We warn against placing confidence in any capitalist parties or politicians, defenders of a system that was founded on slavery and remains racist to the core. We seek to build a workers party to lead the struggle for international socialist revolution.

For the past four months, immigrant communities across the U.S. have grown increasingly alarmed over the prospect of immigration “reform” that could mean losing their jobs, imprisonment and deportation. The passage last December of the vicious H.R. 4437 bill introduced by Representatives James Sensenbrenner and Peter King – that would make all undocumented immigrants felons, make church workers who aid them criminals, and build a 700-mile wall along the Mexican border – has galvanized a population that was politically invisible. All immigrants are affected.

In recent weeks there has been a wave of massive protests in defense of immigrant rights: over 50,000 in Washington on March 7, up to 300,000 in Chicago three days later, and anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million in Los Angeles March 25. Now nationwide demonstrations have been called for April 9-10 that are expected to bring out several million participants. Never before in the history of the United States has there been such a huge political mobilization of immigrants. But what will be the outcome? What program should immigrants fighting for their rights defend?

The massive show of immigrant strength took the capitalist politicians by surprise. The maneuvering over immigration reform legislation was thrown into turmoil. Supporters of a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain felt they were on a roll. Republican Senate leaders scrambled to cobble together a “compromise” bill. The Spanish-language New York paper El Diario-La Prensa (20 March) headlined, “Triunfamos” (We Won). But faced with resistance from the racist hard-liners, suddenly the deal-making collapsed. Politicians fled the capital. Insiders declared immigration reform dead for this Congress.

Mainstream immigrant rights groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF), the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Council of La Raza and a host of local coalitions all call for “amnesty.” They are also all tied, one way or another, to the Democratic Party, one of the partner parties of U.S. capitalism. Most support the Kennedy-McCain bill, as do many unions. But we warn that amnesty is no solution, and the Kennedy-McCain immigration “reform” is a trap that will make things worse for immigrants.

Internationalist Group banner calling for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to build a revolutionary workers party, at demonstration against Iraq war, New York City, March 18.
Internationalist photo

Why is that? In the first place, all the different immigration bills floating around the halls of Congress include the provisions for drastically increasing U.S. military action along the Mexican border, which is already the most militarized international boundary in the world. The compromise Senate bill supported by Kennedy and McCain calls for doubling the size of the U.S. Border Patrol and creating a “virtual wall” of sensors, cameras, vehicles and aircraft to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border. This will mean many more immigrant deaths.

Secondly, the Kennedy-McCain bill includes provisions for a “guest worker” program that would supply U.S. employers with several hundred thousand disposable workers, who would have no rights and would be sent back after six years (or if they lose their jobs). Contrary to the delusions of President Bush and others, not even a tiny fraction of immigrant workers already in the U.S. would sign up for such a program. More fundamentally, this is a form of indentured servitude, supposedly outlawed under the U.S. Constitution. In fact, “guest workers” would be worse off than the original indentured servants, who could stay in America. This will mean many more deportations.

Thirdly, the Kennedy-McCain bill calls for a crackdown on employers’ hiring of “illegal aliens.” In recent years, employer sanctions have seldom been enforced as the real policy on checking documents has become “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In 2004 there was a grand total of three actions against employers for employing undocumented workers. The capitalists know that they desperately need immigrant labor to keep up their profits. But the “bipartisan” immigration reform seeks to regain control of the labor supply. This will mean many more factory raids.

All defenders of immigrant workers’ rights should oppose such slave-labor programs. Yet the bourgeois immigration coalitions support such programs as part of a deal to get “amnesty.”

So why don’t Marxists call for amnesty? Of course, even limited legalization can be a gain for immigrants who presently have no legal rights at all. But “amnesty” is no answer for immigrants on several counts. To begin with, it is asking forgiveness for committing a “crime.” Many in recent protests have held up signs and banners saying “immigrants are not criminals.” But their leaders, along with bourgeois liberals and reformist pseudo-socialists, tell undocumented workers they must beg for a pardon. Revolutionaries, in contrast, say all workers should fight for their rights.

Ever since The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels a century and a half ago, Marxists have held that “the workers have no fatherland.” But amnesty accepts the “right” of the capitalist rulers to police their borders. It does nothing to fight the massive militarization and police repression aimed at persecuting immigrants, whether on the Mexican border or in New York City. Moreover, any amnesty will grant limited rights to certain workers, those who arrived before a certain date, while going after the next wave of “illegal” migrants and those who don’t “qualify” under the bourgeoisie’s laws.

In fact, the present situation, with over 12 million people living in the U.S. without any legal rights, is the direct result of the 1986 amnesty. When he signed it into law, Ronald Reagan said that this measure would let the U.S. “humanely regain control of our borders” by tightening controls on those entering the country, while imposing civil and criminal penalties against employers who hired undocumented workers. (This “humane” act was passed while Reagan was whipping up hysteria about a “red tide” of refugees from Central America crossing the Rio Grande River.) A new amnesty will just reproduce this situation a few years down the road.

The program of the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International is straightforward. We don’t beg the rulers for amnesty, we fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, now, period. Otherwise the bosses will use the lack of legal rights to victimize undocumented workers and set one part of the working class against another. Anyone who lives here should have the same rights as everyone else. That’s what serious defenders of immigrant rights should be fighting for.

But in the imperialist epoch, the fight for basic democratic rights requires hard class struggle. The bourgeoisie is waging a war not only against Iraq and Afghanistan but also against working people, minorities, immigrants and the poor in the U.S. The rulers are systematically curtailing civil liberties while they drive down wages, slash social programs, shove the cost of health care onto workers and gut their pensions. Immigrants are often the first target of this capitalist onslaught, such as in the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act and the “Real ID” Act last year, the first step toward imposing a national identification card.

Imperialist war and anti-immigrant repression go together. Above: Over 1,000 striking miners in Bisbee,
Arizona, led by the revolutionary syndicalist IWW, were rounded up in July 1917, loaded into box
cars and stranded in the New Mexico desert. Hundreds were later deported.* An extensiveexhibit
on the Bisbee deportation is available at http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/
Photo: Arizona Historical Society Library

The same thing has happened during and after every imperialist war over the last century. In World War I, the liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson jailed socialist opponents of the war and ordered the arrest and deportation of militant immigrant workers. Striking miners of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) in Arizona, most of them Mexican, were rounded up at gunpoint and shipped into the desert in box cars to starve and die of thirst (see “‘Reds’ and Immigrants: The Bisbee, Arizona Deportation of 1917,” The Internationalist No. 2, April-May 1997. After the war, the bourgeoisie launched a “red scare,” deporting thousands of foreign-born communists. The Italian anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.

In World War II, the government jailed 18 Trotskyists, led by James P. Cannon, and leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters for their revolutionary opposition to the imperialist war. At the same time they put tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps. After the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as the U.S. government launched a war on Afghanistan and Iraq, thousands of immigrants from the Near East and South Asia were locked up and held incommunicado. The City University of New York moved to drive out thousands of undocumented students by more than doubling their tuition, justifying this as a war measure.

Now U.S. rulers are preparing to launch anti-immigrant repression on a massive scale. The New York Times (3 February) reported that the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $385 million contract to the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation for the construction of a string of “temporary immigration detention centers,” each holding up to 5,000 people. KBR would build these concentration camps for the Department of Homeland Security, to hold “an unexpected influx of immigrants,” people fleeing from a natural disaster (another New Orleans), or “for new programs that require additional detention space.”

And what might those programs be? This is part of a Homeland Security program codenamed “ENDGAME” which is described by the DHS as “a mission first articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798” (which the Supreme Court has never ruled on, although past Court opinions presumed them to be unconstitutional). Its goal is the capability to “remove all removable aliens,” including “illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers” and “potential terrorists.” Last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the DHS included the pursuit of a “fugitive population of 400,000 illegal aliens ordered removed” in its budget plans for Fiscal Year 2005.

Concentration camps in the U.S.? Cover of DHS “Endgame” program for mass round-ups of “illegal aliens.” Halliburton got contract to build the camps.

This is what U.S. rulers have actually been planning – mass “removal,” not mass legalization of undocumented workers. In fact, no major bourgeois politician has come out for amnesty. While liberal Democrats like Kennedy and Hillary Clinton say they are for providing an “opportunity to eventually earn citizenship,” this would be after paying thousands of dollars in fines, thousands more in back taxes, and waiting up to 11 years. The mammoth immigrant demonstrations of the last month may have thrown a hitch into the plans for rounding up “illegal aliens.” But as long as the protests are politically subordinated by immigrant community leaders to the Democratic Party, they do not pose a threat to ruling-class anti-immigrant plans.

There is an acute need for revolutionary leadership in the struggle for immigrant rights. It is necessary to explain that the struggle against plans to criminalize, jail and deport immigrants must be linked to a fight to defeat the U.S. imperialist war in the Near East and the capitalist war on working people, minorities and the poor in the United States. This requires mobilizing the power of the American working class, including the millions of immigrant workers who form a strategic sector. In many cases, coming from countries with a history of sharp labor and peasant battles, immigrants are among the most combative trade-unionists. But their potential militancy cannot be mobilized without a leadership committed to waging the class struggle to victory.

But rather than providing a class program for immigrants’ rights, the bulk of the left in the United States is treating the recent demonstrations as the rise of another “new movement” to be tailed after. Reformist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Workers World Party (WWP) and the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) call for “amnesty” just like the bourgeois liberals and pro-capitalist union bureaucrats. Others who adopt a more left-wing posture, like Socialist Action (SA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and even the left-centrist Spartacist League (SL), don’t criticize calls for amnesty.

Most of the left has reported more or less uncritically on the recent immigrant marches, hardly mentioning the widespread waving of the American flag, for example. This was not a spontaneous thing but was on instructions from protest organizers, who in Washington told demonstrators to leave Latin American flags at home in order not to set off anti-immigrant yahoos. In Los Angeles, the Catholic church told demonstrators to wear white and carry U.S. flags. Certainly L.A. Cardinal Roger Mahoney’s statement that if federal law bars aiding undocumented workers, he would instruct priests to disobey the law was a signal event. But the Catholic prelate’s purpose was to keep angry protesters within the bounds of bourgeois politics.

A telling example of the opportunist left’s capitulation to the bourgeois politics of the demonstration organizers is over the question of imperialist war. Every left group participates in antiwar demos, but in their articles on the immigrant protests the ISO, SWP, WWP, SA, PSL and SL don’t even mention the word Iraq. This is not an accidental omission, given the flag-waving of the protest organizers. With their super-patriotic stance, the last thing the bourgeois immigrant leaders want is to be linked to opposition to U.S. war. Moreover, as we have pointed out, the “antiwar” policy of the left opportunists, all of whom push some variant of “troops out” or “bring the troops home,” is designed to cozy up to growing bourgeois defeatist sentiment.

In contrast, the Internationalist Group has called forthrightly for the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, to drive U.S. troops out rather than calling on the Pentagon to withdraw them (so that they can fight against Iran or North Korea). We have agitated for workers action to “hot cargo” war material to Iraq, and called for workers strikes against the war – as well as calling for workers mobilization to smash the fascist “Minutemen” anti-immigrant vigilantes. And because we have put the Iraq war front and center in our signs and leaflets, pro-Democratic Party leaders of immigration coalitions in New York have repeatedly excluded or attempted to exclude the IG from demonstrations.

It is worth noting the sharp rightward shift of the Spartacist League/International Communist League over the immigration issue. In the aftermath of 9/11, the SL/ICL outrageously accused the IG of “Playing the Counterfeit Card of Anti-Americanism” and of playing to “‘Third World’ nationalists for whom the ‘only good American is a dead American’” because we called for defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Afghanistan war. Now the SL doesn’t even mention Iraq or Afghanistan in a joint statement with its Mexican affiliate on the immigration issue, with no more than a vague reference to an “obligation to oppose the wars and depredations of the U.S. capitalist class.” Nor does their statement mention the flag-waving, or have a word of criticism of the Catholic church, thus making their ritual mentions of socialist revolution empty rhetoric.

Contrary to the thundering silence of the opportunist left, the Iraq war is central to the current attacks on immigrants. Every imperialist war has to have an “enemy within” (in WWII, it was Jews and Communists in Nazi Germany, Japanese Americans in the U.S.), and in this case xenophobic war hawks have focused on “illegal immigrants.” Immigrants are being used as scapegoats as the U.S. sinks ever deeper into the quicksands of the Near East. “First they came for the immigrants” as the U.S. cracked down on democratic rights after 9/11. Then they extended warrantless phone-tapping and surveillance to antiwar activists and others. You can’t fight the attacks on immigrants without fighting to defeat the war that generates them.

This means fighting capitalist exploitation and racism, which in the United States always focuses on the oppressed black population. The victimization of more than 100,000 overwhelmingly black and poor people, left to die amid the floodwaters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is a dramatic picture of what lies in store for immigrants. Now the bourgeoisie is refusing to rebuild poor black neighborhoods of New Orleans or to let their residents return to the city. This is “ethnic cleansing” on a mammoth scale. Moreover, contractors are bringing in undocumented workers from Mexico at sub-minimum wages while refusing to hire black New Orleans residents in reconstruction work. This naturally causes resentment among many blacks, as it is intended to.

Revolutionaries must strenuously oppose all expressions of nativist chauvinism against immigrants. We explain that the way to deal with such attempts by the ruling class to set one sector of the oppressed against another is to wage a campaign to raise conditions for all the exploited. The Internationalist Group has actively participated in campaigns to unionize immigrant workers in the New York area, and from our origins we have had an orientation to developing revolutionary cadres from this potentially militant sector. And the first thing that immigrant workers must know about the U.S. is that the black question is key to everything. In this country built on the heritage of chattel slavery, Latino and Asian immigrants as well as white workers and revolutionaries must vigorously fight every manifestation of anti-black racism.

Above all, it is vital to fight for revolution to sweep away the whole imperialist system. Racists and quite a few trade-union bureaucrats accuse immigrants of “stealing American jobs.” It must be explained that workers are driven to emigrate to the U.S. by the effects of imperialism on their countries. Social services are closed down and state-owned industries sold off to pay debts to the imperialist banks that were foisted on them at a time when Wall Street was awash in petro-dollars it didn’t know what to do with. Now with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), millions of Mexican peasants have been driven off their land, unable to compete with cheap corn from Iowa being imported by the trainload. Some of those workers have ended up immigrating to Iowa and working in packing houses there.

Moreover, immigrant workers contribute enormously to the U.S. economy, up to tens of billions of dollars every year. Most pay Social Security taxes, from which they will never receive a dime so long as they are undocumented, and many pay income taxes. Economists have calculated that over time this subsidy by low-paid immigrant workers amounts to several trillion dollars. The fact is that undocumented immigrants, overwhelmingly workers, are vital to the U.S. economy. They are already 7 percent of all transportation workers, 9 percent of manufacturing, 14 percent of construction, 17 percent of maintenance and 24 percent of agricultural workers (New York Times, 2 April). Moreover, there is no way that the U.S. can jail or deport 12 million – they don’t have enough jails, and it would cause an economic crisis.

Immigrants are now a key section of the U.S. workforce, as they were in the early years of the 20th century. In New York City, over 40 percent of the population is foreign-born and in Southern California, Latino immigrants are by far the largest population group. Demonstrators have chanted, “¡Aquí estamos, y no nos vamos!” (We’re here and we’re not leaving), and they’re right. American chauvinists who don’t like it better get used to it. But while the ruling class has internal divisions over immigration, all sectors of the capitalists want to keep the mass of immigrant workers confined to a low-wage existence. They want hamburger flippers, bathroom cleaners and maids, but as this vibrant work force becomes rooted in the U.S. the rulers will be confronted with a powerful working class.

The recent protests have dramatically shown immigrants’ numerical strength. Walkouts by Los Angeles-area students in the week leading up to the million-strong march there demonstrated the militancy of young Latinos, often locked in by school authorities and sometimes beaten by police. Tragically, there has already been one casualty of this repression as eighth-grader Anthony Soltero took his life after being threatened with three years of jail by the assistant principal. We must fight to avenge his death and those of the hundreds of immigrants who have died crossing deserts and frozen mountains, or been the victims of anti-immigrant racists. This requires a struggle for international socialist revolution.

In the U.S. it is necessary to wage a political battle against all the anti-immigrant parties of American capitalism. This means combating dangerous illusions in the Democratic Party. The welfare-slashing Democratic administration of Bill Clinton pushed through the 1996 “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act” that was used to round up and deport thousands of immigrants after 9/11. The huge increase in deaths along the border is a direct result of Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper, which forced migrants into desert terrain where more than 1,200 have died in the last decade. Congressional Democrats overwhelmingly supported the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act and voted for the “Real ID” Act last year that marks a huge step toward a national identification card.

Not only the Democrats but minor bourgeois politicians and parties have joined in the attacks on immigrants. Populist Ralph Nader, who ran for president as the Green Party candidate in 2000 and as an independent in 2004, has been particularly virulent in attacking “illegal” immigrants. In an interview with the fascistic right-winger Pat Buchanan in the American Conservative (21 June 2004), Nader declared: “We have to control our immigration. We have to limit the number of people who come into this country illegally.” And this immigrant basher is the candidate touted by the social democrats of the Internationalist Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative as a “progressive” alternative to the Democrats!

In Mexico, our comrades of the Grupo Internacionalista not only oppose the government of Bush’s rancher pal, President Vicente Fox Quesada, of the right-wing PAN (National Action Party), but also fight against illusions in the bourgeois nationalist PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The Fox government sends its army to cooperate with the U.S. Border Patrol and military while arresting hundreds of thousands of Central Americans heading north. The GI fights to break the unions from their “popular front” alliance with the PRD, which does not oppose NAFTA, at most calling to “renegotiate” (as does Fox himself) parts of this “free trade” agreement that has impoverished millions of Mexicans.

The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International look to the heritage of the Russian October Revolution of 1917, which first established workers rule and, true to the internationalist politics of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, decreed that foreign workers in Russian territory had the same rights as all others. The French Revolution of 1789 similarly made Thomas Paine a citizen of France. We fight for the working class, blacks, immigrants and all the oppressed to break from the Democrats and forge the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party that fights for socialist revolution throughout the Americas and worldwide. n

International Women's Day 2006

International Women's Day 2006
Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Lenin on the Women’s Question
From My Memorandum Book (An Interview with Lenin on the Woman Question)

FBI Puerto Rico Raids: Colonial Repression A Threat to All

Feds Invade Homes of Independentista and Trade-Unionists, Steal Documents, Brutally Assault Journalists

FEBRUARY 13 - On Friday morning, February 10, a task force of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) launched an operation invading homes and offices in six different places in Puerto Rico. With a helicopter of the Department of Homeland Security hovering overhead, federal police in military uniforms, some wearing ski masks to hide their faces, brandished high-powered weapons as they yanked people out of their homes so that swarms of FBI agents could rifle through their files and cart off computers. This is a continuation of the assassination last September of Puerto Rican independence fighter Filiberto Ojeda Rios, leader of the Ejercito Popular Boricua (Los Macheteros), by an FBI death squad. Targeted this time around were several independentistas who have been active in protesting that act of colonial state terror.

FBI official pepper-sprays journalists during raid in San Juan, February 10. (AP)

Among them are well-known trade-union activists including the sociology professor Liliana Laboy and Norberto Cintron Fiallo, who organized Ojeda Rios' funeral.

Last Friday's raids were a naked act of state repression by the imperialists who for more than a century have subjugated the Caribbean island nation of Puerto Rico, which for many years was the largest remaining colony in the world. Today, the U.S. rulers are carrying out a brutal colonial occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as well. Their drive to terrorize the world (and the U.S. population) into submission in the name of a "war on terror" not only affects independentista militants but the workers movement as a whole and the rights and liberties of all. As journalists were covering the raids in the capital, San Juan, an FBI official verbally abused them and sprayed pepper gas directly in the face of several photographers and TV cameramen. As the feds departed, youths yelling "abusers" pounded and kicked the vehicles and threw rocks at the retreating convoy.

When the FBI murdered Ojeda Rios in cold blood, unleashing a hail of gunfire and then leaving him for almost 24 hours to bleed to death, the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International denounced this act of state terrorism and called on the workers movement and all defenders of democratic rights to protest the crime. We noted that this was also a deliberate imperialist provocation, carried out on the anniversary of the 1868 Grito de Lares, when Puerto Ricans first took up arms fighting for independence from Spain. Ojeda Rios was assassinated by the same imperialist butchers whose military guard dogs and CIA hit men torture and murder prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, at the Guantanamo naval base stolen from Cuba, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The government in Washington who dispatched these professional assassins to Puerto Rico is the same one that abandoned more than 100,000 poor, black and working-class residents of New Orleans to die in the floods following Hurricane Katrina. The U.S. rulers are the real terrorists.

The recent FBI raids are a particular threat to the workers movement. They give a taste of what this government has in store for trade-unionists in Puerto Rico and around the U.S. Already in August 2004, a squad of federal cops raided the headquarters of the Independent Authentic Union (VIA), accusing it of planning protests at the San Juan Airport, which under the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act would be labeled a "terrorist" act. The UIA was protesting attempts by the Puerto Rican government's Water and Sewer Authority (AAA) to dismantle the union health¬care fund. When the union went on strike over this attack, the feds struck again, on October 22. This time the FBI claimed it was investigating union "corruption," and accused the VIA of planning "sabotage" of the island's water supply. Federal agents cordoned off the union hall for 15 hours, held union officials hostage and confiscated boxes of documents.

The FBI has for decades engaged in frame-ups, sabotage and disruption of the Puerto Rican union movement. They are stepping up their repression today as labor struggles intensify, including by the powerful and militant electrical workers (UTIER) and teachers unions. The recent raids were described by the daily Primera Hora (11 February) as a "Preventive Strike." We call on the entire workers movement to join in protesting this assault on fundamental rights.

The government assault was directed against Puerto Rican nationalists, who have been the target of FBI/police provocation, including the infamous Cerro Maravilla murders and the carpetas (police dossiers) which were kept on no less than 100,000 Puerto Ricans. We demand that all U.S. military, intelligence and other agencies get out of Puerto Rico, including the FBI, CIA, DEA and the rest of the colonial repressors. We call as well for all Puerto Rican independence fighters to be released from prison. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International stand for unconditional and immediate independence for Puerto Rico. But while many independentistas seek to build a Puerto Rican state like the various other bourgeois mini-states in the Caribbean, as proletarian internationalists we fight for a voluntary socialist federation of the Caribbean, in conjunction with the struggle for workers revolution in the imperialist citadel.

Statement of the Internationalist Group

NATO Troops Fire on Afghan Protesters

NATO occupation troops fired on hundreds of protesters outside their base in Maymana Tuesday in what was the second straight day of demonstrations in Afghanistan over the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

Maymana Hospital said one protester was shot dead and six were wounded, while some 50 others were hurt by tear gas the troops used on the crowd.

Two American A-10 attack aircraft were on their way to the city and a German C-130 transport plane was on standby in case some troops needed to evacuated.

In neighboring Pakistan, 5,000 people chanting "Hang the man who insulted the prophet" burned effigies of one cartoonist and Denmark's prime minister.

The cartoons were first published by a Danish newspaper in September, then reprinted by a Norwegian newspaper last month, setting off protests against the two countries across the Muslim world.

The drawings including a racist depiction of the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb have touched a raw nerve in part because the Islam world feels with justification that a religious crusade is being waged against them. These drawings are adding insult to injury and are fanning the flames that are already engulfing the region scripted by U.S. imperial designs.

In the Afghan capital of Kabul, police used batons to beat stone-throwing protesters outside the Danish diplomatic mission office and near the offices of the World Bank on Tuesday. An Associated Press reporter saw police arrest several people, many of whom were injured.

Afghan police officer beats a protester outside the Danish embassy during a protest demonstration in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuseday, Feb.7, 2006. Protesters were attacked by police and NATO occupation troops across Afghanistan on Tuesday in demonstrations against the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Western press. Several people were wounded and detained, and at least one person killed. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

More than 3,000 protesters threw stones at government buildings and an Italian occupation base in the western city of Herat.

About 5,000 people clashed with police in Pulikhumri town, north of Kabul, said Sayed Afandi, a police commander.

Police in about half a dozen other towns and cities across Afghanistan reported thousands of people protesting.

Demonstrations have been held across Afghanistan since last week, with the size of the crowds progressively swelling. On Monday, four people were killed and at least 19 hurt during clashes, including one outside Bagram, the main U.S. military base.

Elsewhere, China criticized newspapers for publishing the cartoons and appealed for calm among outraged Muslims. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said publishing the cartoons "runs counter to the principle that different religions and civilizations should respect each other and live together in peace and harmony."

Danish citizens were also advised to leave Indonesia, where rowdy protests were held in at least four cities Tuesday. Danish missions, which have been repeatedly targeted by protesters, have been shut down said Niels Erik Anderson, the country's ambassador to Indonesia.

Stop Persecution of Haitian Workers in the Dominican Republic

FOR HAITIAN/DOMINICAN WORKERS REVOLUTION!

Haitians Burned and Hacked to Death by Lynch Mobs,
More than 20,000 Expelled by Dominican Army

JANUARY 31 - Since last May, a wave of racist and xenophobic (anti-foreigner) violence has swept over the Dominican Republic, instigated by the Dominican government, targeting Haitian immigrant workers as well as dark-skinned Dominicans of Haitian descent (Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola, and anti-Haitian racism has long been a staple of Dominican bourgeois politics.) In five major sweeps, at least 20,000 men, women and children were rounded up by soldiers and summarily deported to Haiti without the least pretence of legality. In addition, at least a score of blacks have been murdered by lynch mobs, many of them hacked to death with machetes or burned to death by dousing them with gasoline and setting them afire.
            Beginning January 1, the government of Dominican president Leonel Fernandez escalated the anti-Haitian persecution, launching Operacion Vaquero (Cowboy), which placed a cordon of troops along the border to hunt down immigrants. The first victims were 25 Haitians who died of asphyxiation January 10, trapped in a truck being pursued by the Dominican police. Twelve days later in the town of Guerra, after an incident in which an air force sergeant was killed by a cop, a lynch mob of heavily armed men laid waste to 27 homes of Haitian immigrants and black Dominicans and tried to burn a baby alive. A week later, Haitians' houses were burned to the ground in Moca. Now a high Dominican immigration official has declared that all Haitians without residency papers will be deported, and the government cut off the annual importation of thousands of Haitian workers for the sugar harvest, causing a crisis in this key sector.
            Meanwhile, next door United Nations "peacekeeping" troops occupying Haiti have carried out a series of murderous attacks in the slums of the capital, targeting supporters of Jean-Bertand Aristide, the Haitian president removed from office and kidnapped by a U.S. invasion in March 2004. As large numbers of Haitians flee from the chaos, misery and repression of their occupied country, U.S. authorities keep sending them back. On January 19, lawyers representing scores of Haitian refugees demanded that Washington halt all deportations to Haiti. And on February 7, Haitian presidential elections are scheduled to be held after being postponed several times. With public opinion polls showing the candidate favored by the followers of ousted president Aristide far ahead of all others, the Haitian capital is in a state of high tension, expecting some move by rightwing bourgeois sectors, their paramilitary forces or the U.N. occupation forces.
            The League for the Fourth International and the Internationalist Group urge class-conscious workers, revolutionary-minded youth and all opponents of imperialism to protest the persecution of the Haitian poor, immigrants and refugees. From Santo Domingo to New York, we call for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, legal or "illegal." Against poisonous nationalist hatreds, we fight for the unity of Haitian, Dominican and U.S. workers against capital. In the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the United States, we fight to build revolutionary workers parties against all the capitalist parties. And we underline that this orgy of chauvinist repression and slaughter of Haitians is part of the U.S. "war on terror" aimed at terrorizing the world into submission to U.S. dictates. We say: Drive the imperialists and their flunkies out of Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti!

Anti-Haitian Pogrom

            The trigger for the extended anti-Haitian pogrom was the murder of a Dominican couple in mid-May in the Dominican town of Hatillo Palma in the province of Montecristi. After police arrested ten Haitians (no evidence linking them to the crime was ever presented), lynchers began torching the shacks of poor Haitian immigrants, mainly workers on banana farms.

Vela Pie dries her tears while remembering the beheading of two fellow Haitians in Hatillo Palma, Montecristi. The assailants attacked a group of Haitian farm workers while they slept in wooden shacks. (AP Photo/Miguel Gomez)

Before dawn the next day, Dominican soldiers began indiscriminately rounding up hundreds of blacks and trucking them to the Haitian border. Over three days, almost the entire black population of the town was deported. Soon anti-Haitian mob violence spread throughout the northwestern Dominican Republic, driving thousands over the border into Haiti. When some refugees returned a month later to Hatillo Palma, vigilantes fell upon them as they slept, beheading two.
            This combination of government repression and lynch mob violence awakened fears of a repeat of the 1937 massacre staged by Dominican dictator Rafael Le6nidas Trujillo, when an estimated 30,000 Haitians and black Dominicans were rounded up at gunpoint and executed, often by machetes (to give the impression that peasants had committed the murders). Many others were marched off the docks into the sea at Montecristi with their arms and feet bound. Rio Matanzas (Massacre River) dividing Haiti from the Dominican Republic ran red with the blood of the victims. This horror was the subject of the novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat.
            With that horrific scene seared into their collective memory, last June Haitian and Dominican blacks poured into to Santiago de los Caballeros, the center of the Cibao region, for safety. Parents besieged government offices demanding birth certificates for their children and youth born in the Dominican Republic. The response of the authorities was to order more deportations, 200 from Santiago alone. In mid-August, the government deported another 3,000 to Haiti, particularly women and children. The reason for this selective round-up was clear: Dominican banana and coffee farms and sugar plantations could not function without the labor of Haitian men, who toil in backbreaking jobs for a few dollars a day. Up to a million Haitian immigrants live in the DR (out of a total population of 7 million), many residing there for decades.
            Also in August, four young Haitian men in the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo were gagged, doused with flammable liquid and set on fire; three died. The bloody pattern repeated itself throughout the fall: in late September, two black men were accused of killing a Dominican worker in Guatapanal, not far from Puerto Plata. Mobs descended on the Haitian neighborhoods bent on wreaking vengeance: several blacks were beaten, another drowned in a river fleeing attackers. An article in the New York Times (20 November 2005) reported:
      "Where there are two Haitians, kill one; where there are three
      Haitians, kill two,' said leaders of the mobs that descended
      on the immigrants' camps, the Haitians here recalled.'But
      always let one go so that he can run back to his country and
      tell them what happened'."
And in early December, at least ten Haitians were murdered by vigilantes while dozens of blacks were burned out of their homes in the northern Dominican town of Villa Trina, again supposedly in retaliation for the death of a Dominican man.
            Amid this orgy of xenophobic and racist burning and killing, one thing must be remembered: the frenzied mobs of killers may be made up of impoverished Dominican peasants and slum dwellers, but they were set in motion by the bourgeois rulers.

History of
"Anti-Haitianism" in the Dominican Republic

            Throughout Dominican history, reactionary nationalist politicians have appealed to the racist ideology of "antihaitianismo" to shore up their hold on power in "their" two-thirds of the island. Following the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 - the first successful slave revolt in history, defeating the combined efforts of French, British and Spanish expeditionary forces - the Haitian revolutionary armies marched into Santo Domingo three times, finally driving out the Spanish colonialists and abolishing slavery in 1822. Even after Dominican independence from Haiti was declared in 1844, conservative landowners were so worried about a "Haitian threat" that they reannexed the country to Spain. It took the 1861-65 War of Restoration (coinciding with the U.S. Civil War), under the leadership of black general Gregorio Luper6n and his black Haitian lieutenant, future Dominican president Ulises Heureaux, to regain Dominican independence.
            The anti-Haitian racism of Trujillo, the U.S.-installed dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron hand from 1930 until he became no longer useful and the CIA had him assassinated 1961, is legendary. The same goes for his henchman Joaquin Balaguer, who following the 1965 U.S. invasion of Santo Domingo ran the country on behalf of American imperialism from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996. In justifying Trujillo's 1937 slaughter of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry, Balaguer declared: ''The problem of race is, by consequence, the principal problem of the Dominican Republic…. On it depends, in a certain way, the very existence of the nationality that for more than a century has bee~ struggling against a more prolific race" (quoted by Ernesto Sagas, "A Case of Mistaken Identity: Antihaitianismo in Dominican Culture," Latinamericanist [1993]).
            But the supposedly "democratic" rulers of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) and Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) have also played the card of anti-Haitian racism There have been previous mass deportations of Haitians and black Dominicans in 1991 under Balaguer, in 1997 and 1999 under PLD president Leonel Fernandez, and in 2000-2001 under PRD president Hipolito Mejia (National Coalition for Haitian Rights, ''Haitians in the Dominican Republic: Mass Expulsions and Deportations," November 2001). Mejia expelled 12,000 to Haiti in the single month of March 2001 ("Report of the Haiti Support Network's Delegation to the Dominican Republic," April 2001). Even in the absence of mass expulsions, deportations of Haitians from the DR have run about 20,000 a year over the last decade and a half.
            These arbitrary round-ups are justified by top officials with undisguised racism When Human Rights Watch questioned the head of Haitian affairs for the Dominican Department of Migration as to how they identified Haitians, he responded that they can be spotted ''by their way of living," that ''they're poorer than we are," that ''they have terrible homes," that they have "rougher skin," and ''they're much blacker than we are." He denounced the ''invasion'' of young Haitian delinquents, who are "easy to recognize" because they're ''the ones who act like they're in the Haitian capital, drinking and dancing" (HRW, "Dominican Republic, 'Illegal People': Haitians and Dominico-Haitians in the Dominican Republic," April 2002). Such blatant xenophobic and racist appeals from top-level officials whip up the lynchers in the streets.

Superexploitation and
Virtual Slavery of Haitian Workers

            Official sponsorship of anti-Haitian hysteria is not limited to the ideological sphere, it is deeply embedded in the legal structure and economic framework of Dominican capitalism. Legally, the descendents of Haitian immigrants are deprived of all rights by an impenetrable web of obstacles. Although Article 11 of the Dominican constitution recognizes "all persons born in the territory of the Dominican Republic" as citizens, there is a loophole. Undocumented Haitian immigrants are considered to be "in transit," and so their children born in the D.R. are denied citizenship. First, hospital personnel refuse to give mothers maternity papers saying when and where their babies were born. Then, when they seek to register the children in the civil registry, they are refused because the parents don't have a Dominican ID or residency. And when they try to go to school, children are often refused admission if they don't have proof of citizenship
            Thus there has grown up a whole layer of the population with no legal rights whatsoever, kept in enforced ignorance and poverty, and periodically subjected to state-sponsored terror. Demands by Dominicans of Haitian origin to have their children's citizenship confirmed have caused an international outcry and produced a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights last October ordering the government to grant citizenship (as well as reparations and a public apology) to two girls, Dilcia Yean (now 8 years old) and Violeta Bosico (now 20), and to reform its laws to make explicit the right of all children born there to Dominican citizenship. This led to howls of indignation from the government, and in December the Dominican Supreme Court declared that children of undocumented immigrants are not citizens.
            The presence of a huge mass of people (well over 10 percent of the total population) living a semi-clandestine existence can only be the result of powerful economic forces. And in fact, the sugar industry, long the mainstay of the Dominican economy, was built on the forced labor of Haitian workers. This goes back to World War I, when the United States lost its supplies of beet sugar from Europe and undertook a vast expansion of sugar cane production in the Dominican Republic, which the U.S. occupied from 1916 to 1924 (ostensibly to collect defaulted debts to Wall Street banks), using laborers imported from Haiti (which the U.S. also occupied, from 1915 to 1934). The sugar companies had annual quotas for tens of thousands of Haitian workers, who received (at most) starvation wages and were confined to the miserable batayes (shantytowns) on the edge of the plantations by patrols of militia, police and rural guards.
            This plantation system of virtual slave labor was overseen by a National Police formed by the U.S. A few years after the Marines departed, General Trujillo came to power in Santo Domingo. He was one of a string of tin-pot dictators around the Caribbean and Central America who came out of the ranks of the colonial constabularies in other U.S.-occupied countries (Somoza in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba) and the puppet armies of semi-colonial "banana republics" (Ubico in Guatemala). In the 1950s, Trujillo decided to take over the American-owned sugar mills and run them as his own personal fiefdom. After he was dumped in 1961, the plantations were nationalized and formed the CEA (State Sugar Council). Thus whether under the U.S., Trujillo or his pseudo-"democratic" successors, the system was based on the superexploitation of Haitian forced labor.
            This amounted to virtual slavery. In fact, the 1937 massacre and the periodic mass round-ups/deportations in recent years concentrated on blacks found outside the bateyes, who were treated as runaway slaves. This system has been well-documented, notably in the reportage by Maurice Lemoine, Bitter Sugar: Slaves Today in the Caribbean (Zed Books, 1985). A series of reports by the National Coalition for Haitian Rights in 1989-92 showed how Haitian laborers were deceptively recruited, met at the border by the Dominican military, trucked to the different plantations and subjected to brutal mistreatment. After the CEA mills were privatized in 1999, conditions were as bad or worse. When several mills shut down after a crash of sugar prices, tens of thousands of black workers in the bateyes were left jobless. Some found work in the urban construction industry. But they run the risk of being picked up and deported, even though they were born in the D.R., and in some cases their families have lived there for several generations.

Haitian and Dominican
Workers Unite Against Capitalist Exploitation/Repression

            The brutal repression meted out by the Dominican military is not restricted to Haitian immigrants and their offspring. Under Trujillo and his henchman Balaguer, thousands of Dominican leftists were assassinated over the decades. In the post-Trujillo/Balaguer period, general strikes over the constant blackouts and fuel price hikes have been routinely crushed with a toll of several dead. In the most recent case, in October 2005, two protesters were killed by police in a protest in Santiago. Under the previous government of Hipolito Mejia, a general strike in November 2003 was crushed with seven strikers dead. But the best example of the role of these semi-colonial armies, whose job is to put down a restive population in order to ensure the continuation of imperialist domination, came in early 2004.
            The elite Dominican "Plus Ultra" contingent of several hundred troops had just returned from Iraq, where they acted as mercenary troops for the U.S. occupation. On January 28 and 29, the police, presidential militias and the military suppressed a general strike, clashing with strikers in five cities and leaving a death toll of eight protesters killed. Meanwhile, the Dominican military had provided training camps for a force of several hundred former Haitian soldiers who were preparing to invade Haiti and stage a coup d'etat to overthrow the Aristide government. In mid-February, the coup plotters launched their attack. As they were approaching the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, on February 29, the United States sent in an expeditionary force of 2,000 Marines, Special Forces and "private" security agencies that bundled Aristide onto an unmarked plane and dropped him on a runway in the middle of Central Africa.
            The very next day, a force of Dominican soldiers pulled up at the CODEVI sweatshop factory in a "free trade zone" at Ouanaminthe just inside Haiti to put down a walkout by the Haitian workers. The plant is owned by a Dominican garment manufacturer, Grupo M, and is financed by Wall Street via the World Bank. Two days later, a detachment of the former Haitian army "rebels" showed up to handcuff the union leaders and force the workers back to work at gunpoint. So here we have the armed forces of both capitalist states on the island working together as guard dogs for imperialist capital. As we wrote at the time, "This cries out for joint revolutionary struggle by Dominican and Haitian workers against their common bosses, the neo-colonial regimes which repress them, and against their imperialist patrons!' ("The Struggle for Workers Revolution in the Caribbean" in The Internationalist No. 18, May-June 2004).
            For the last century and a half, racist persecution and xenophobic hysteria against Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans of Haitian ancestry has been used by the white landowners, capitalist sweatshop and mill owners, and the murderous military and police to divide working people in the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola. This bountiful island which was once the richest colony in the world remains mired in poverty, while the bourgeois rulers luxuriate in their villas and their imperialist overlords build Manhattan skyscrapers (like the former Gulf+Western tower) and Caribbean island estates with the superprofits extracted from the sweat of the Haitian and Dominican toilers.
            The left, however, has been shackled by nationalism on both sides of the border, subordinating the working people to bourgeois politicians from Dominican nationalist caudillo Juan Bosch to Haitian populist Aristide. In the Dominican Republic, nationalist-reformist leftists have at most offered a tepid, legalistic defense of the right to citizenship of children born in the D.R., in the case of the PTD (partido de los Trabajadores Dominicanos), while disgusting clowns like P ACOREDO (partido Comunista de la Republica Dominicana) actually whip up chauvinist frenzy against "the massive invasion by Haitians" and mythical plans by capitalist/ecclesiastical "Haitian lovers" to fuse Haiti and the D.R. In contrast, a genuine communist party in the Dominican Republic would demand full citizenship rights for all, and take the lead in mobilizing united Dominican-Haitian workers defense of the bateyes against lynch mob violence.
            Today, would-be socialist organizations on the island are weaker than ever, yet the class struggle continues. What's urgently needed is an internationalist revolutionary leadership. From the first moment of the U.S./U.N. intervention in Haiti, the League for the Fourth International has fought to drive the occupiers out. We stand on the side of those resisting the Yankee imperialists, their ''U.N.'' mercenaries and their murderous colonial cops. At the same time, we give no political support to Aristide, the protégé of the liberal Democrats who was put in the Haitian presidential palace and then removed from it by Marine bayonets. Over the past eight months, the Internationalist Group has participated in numerous protests in New York denouncing U.N. repression in Haiti and the persecution of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic.
            For decades, the revolutionary energies of workers and oppressed peoples in Latin America and around the globe have been squandered in the service of class-collaborationist alliances with bourgeois forces. From Spain in the 1930s to Salvador Allende's Chile in the '70s, the ''popular front" has always been a ticket for defeat, limiting the struggle to (bourgeois) democratic goals, which leaves the blood-drenched armies intact and their capitalist masters in power. This reflects the anti-Marxist dogma of building "socialism in one country" put forward by Stalin and his heirs to cover their abandonment of the program of world socialist revolution of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The Stalinist-nationalist shibboleth is all the more criminal in the case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where it means confining the struggle to one-third or two-thirds of an impoverished island.
            The Leninist-Trotskyists fight instead for the program of permanent revolution, insisting that the only way to root out entrenched reactionary forces is for the working class to overthrow capitalism, along with agrarian revolution in the countryside, and proceed to socialist tasks and international extension of the revolution. There is no basis for a democratic capitalist Haiti or Dominican Republic - the bourgeois rulers are too weak to remain in power without the aid of military juntas, death squads imperialist troops (with a plane stashed at the hacienda for a quick getaway). The toilers are set at each others' throats by nationalist hatreds whipped up by the bosses - Dominican against Haitian, Spanish-speaking islands against English- and French- speakers - in a region carved up by seven colonial powers. But by fighting to overcome these divisions on the basis of proletarian internationalism, the basis can be laid for a voluntary socialist federation of the Caribbean.
From the time of the great Haitian revolutionary general Toussaint L'Ouverture, the struggle against the slave masters and capitalists in both parts of the island of Hispaniola has been inextricably intertwined. It is also intimately bound up with the fight for workers revolution in the U.S. imperialist heartland. Close to one million Haitian and Dominican immigrants are strategically situated in the financial capital of the capitalist world. In New York City the seeds of common Dominican-Haitian workers revolution can be sown, while fighting as well for independence for Puerto Rican and to defend Cuba against Yankee imperialism On the eve of the last century, Caribbean bourgeois revolutionaries - the Cubans Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo, the Dominican Maximo Gomez and the Puerto Rican Eugenio Maria de Hostos - joined together in the Cuban Revolutionary Party, working together in Santo Domingo and New York to fight against colonial rule. Today the League for the Fourth International seeks to forge the nuclei of future Trotskyist vaguard parties to lead the internationalist struggle which can finally turn the lush Pearl of the Antilles into a tropical paradise for all.

Capitalism Killed West Virginia Miners

Murder in a Non-Union Mine – Blood for Profits



Twelve miners at the Sago mine in West Virginia are dead following a January 2 mine explosion. This was not an unforeseeable accident but cold-blooded murder for coal company profits. Rescue workers were held back and didn’t even go into the mine for 12 hours. Moreover, Sago was a non-union mine, and everyone knew it was unsafe: the mine owners knew it, the government knew it, and the miners knew it – but they went to work anyway, because they feared for their jobs. Up to the 1970s, miners in the United Mine Workers (UMWA) union had the right, won through hard class struggle, to simply walk off the job if they considered conditions to be unsafe. Not so today. The worst West Virginia mine disaster in almost 40 years is the product of the destruction of labor unions and shredding of union gains throughout the U.S., and particularly of the downfall of the UMWA. And that is the direct result of the lack of a revolutionary leadership of labor with the program and determination to take on and defeat the bosses in the unrelenting class war.

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Bolivian Elections: Evo Morales Tries to Straddle an Abyss

No to MAS’ “Andean Capitalism” – Fight for Workers Revolution!
Bolivian Elections: Evo Morales Tries to Straddle an Abyss


The landslide victory of Indian peasant leader Evo Morales in the December 18 Bolivian elections was met with jubilation by most of the international left, and dire pronouncements from spokesmen for U.S. imperialism. Winning close to 54 percent of the vote, the leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement Towards Socialism) is the first candidate in recent Bolivian history elected with an absolute majority. Washington has demonized Morales, who came to prominence as the leader of coca-growing peasants targeted by the U.S. “drug war,” particularly because of his friendship with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Yet Morales’ program is for “Andean and Amazonian capitalism.” Despite the hopes placed in him by his peasant and indigenous followers, we warn that the MAS is hardly socialist, and Morales’ bourgeois nationalist government will administer Bolivia within the framework of capitalism, spelling more misery for the masses.

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NYC Transit: Throw Back the Giveback Contract!

“A Bum Deal”: Rip It Up, Vote It Down! Workers Have the Power!
NYC Transit: Throw Back the Giveback Contract!


For two and a half days, no subways or buses with passengers moved. Union picket lines were large, spirited and solid. Economists reported hundreds of millions of dollars a day in losses. In spite of the hardships, and partly because of the racist vituperation against “greedy” and “thuggish” transit workers spewing out of the mouth of the billionaire mayor, the transit workers continued to enjoy wide public support. And yet, on Day 3 of the ’05 New York transit strike, the union leadership called it off and ordered strike lines taken down. It was a sellout. Five days later the TWU Local 100 union leadership spelled out the deal. Now all union members will now pay 1.5 percent of their wages for health care, a $110 million giveback to the Transit Authority bosses. Plus $1,000 fines for every TWU member under the anti-strike Taylor Law. A big “no” vote in a mail ballot is not enough. TWU Local 100 members must prepare for an all-out struggle to win. What’s needed is an open fight to forge a class-struggle leadership with a program going beyond economic issues to raise a series of transitional demands serving as a bridge leading from the present struggles of the workers to a revolutionary fight for power.

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