Every day brings more bad news for Clinton and his masters in the boardrooms of Wall St., Exxon, and Mobil. Rockefeller & Co. has suffered a series of strategic and tactical oil-related failures and are desperate to reverse them. They include the following:
[ The Total energy group of France, a major international competitor of U.S. Big Oil, just signed a $2 billion gas investment with Iranian bosses. The deal thumbs its nose at U.S. imperialism's "D'Amato law," which calls on Clinton to take action against the U.S.-held assets of any country that invests more than $20 million in Iran. Worse, Total stepped in to replace the U.S. company, Conoco, last year even though the Clinton White House told it to pull out of Iran. Worse yet, Total faked Clinton out by selling off all its own U.S. investments before making the deal, and so managed to escape the D'Amato law. Worst of all for Rockefeller, Total has been joined in this deal by the Malaysian firm, Petronas, and by Gazprom, a Russian energy company. In the understatement of the week, the British newspaper The Economist (10/1) called Gazprom's Iran move "a measure designed to antagonize the U.S." and a sign that Russian bosses had "outgrown [their] total dependency on Washington's approval."
[ Another sign that shows that the Russian rulers are feeling their oats: on October 3rd, an Iraqi delegation arrived in Moscow to work out a contract for developing the giant West Qurna oilfield in Southern Iraq. The Russian company, Mashinoimport, is dickering for a deal to develop Iraq's North Rumaila field near the Kuwait border. Russia's fourth-largest oil company is a contender for another Iraqi field. Despite Clinton's threats and sabre-rattling, Iraqi oil barons have 10 oilfield developments up for grabs and are negotiating with Canada, Malaysia, Australia, Italy, South Korea, Turkey, Indonesia and Algeria.
[ Now that Clinton has told the entire world to get out of Iraq, Chinese rulers are staking a claim there as well. Last June, the China National Petroleum Corporation finalized a $1.2 billion agreement to develop the billion-barrel Ahdab field in Southern Iraq.
[ Even formerly secure lackeys are slipping from Rockefeller's grasp. Saudi rulers refused to co-operate with the FBI's request for help in investigating the 1996 attack against U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at Al Khobar. This disobedience reflects what the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique calls "a spectacular [reconciliation] with Iran" (Aug.-Sept. 1997). And now the Saudis are joining the Iranians and Syrians in boycotting an economic summit that the U.S. and Israeli rulers are trying to organize in Qatar. The summit may not even take place--"a new black mark against the United States," according to Le Monde Diplomatique: "like Israel, it attaches the utmost importance to these annual gatherings which symbolize pax americana in the Middle East."
Iran has the world's second largest gas reserves after Russia, and Iraq has the biggest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. The rise of new would-be imperialists in China and other parts of Asia, as well as increased competition among the established imperialists, means that the scramble to control oil and gas can only intensify in the near future. Conventional wisdom among the bosses' pundits says that by the year 2015, Chinese capitalists will need the equivalent of half Saudi Arabia's current oil production.
Obviously, they and their new pals in Moscow see their sphere of influence extending to the Persian Gulf. They're preparing to defend it at gunpoint. For example, China is on target to develop a deep-water Navy capable of bringing large fighting forces there soon. And despite their problems, the Russians still have one of the world's largest armies and a navy that includes nuclear submarines.
Rockefeller, Inc. pushed these economic sanctions after the Desert Oil Storm in 1991. Their purpose: to keep Iraqi oil off the market. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers, particularly youth, die because they can't get adequate food or medicine. But the sanctions have another effect as well. They further isolate U.S. imperialism from the competition that wants to do business in Baghdad. So the Russian, Chinese, and French imperialists are threatening to defy them. The UN showdown and the Nimitz's arrival in the Gulf will occur within days of each other.
Don't be surprised if Clinton orders the Nimitz to launch air raids. Rockefeller, Inc. can't tolerate the further erosion of its oily empire and now finds itself in a race against time. We can't predict the immediate consequences of the Nimitz provocation. Maybe shots will be fired, maybe not. But the near horizon holds a major ground war in the Middle East, probably Iraq. U.S. imperialism can't allow the world's second-largest oil reserves to fall to its main rivals. Every day that passes strengthens the competition economically, politically, and militarily.
Desert Storm sharpened contradictions between U.S. imperialism and its main rivals. The next Rockefeller blood-letting in the Middle East will pave the way for direct military confrontation among the big imperialists. We don't know when it will happen, but the general direction is crystal-clear. How long will the Russians and Chinese tolerate U.S. interference with their Iraqi and Iranian investments? How long will they let their new French buddies get pushed around by Uncle Sam?
Workers were furious about these attacks by the cops and began calling for justice. Family members of both youth actively organized against the cops. Communists in PLP joined in the battle. Politicians, smelling smoke, jumped in to make sure there would be no fire. They put forward the idea that police brutality is due to a few bad apples on the force.
We explained that cop brutality is part of the rotting system of capitalism! We used every opportunity to tell workers that the bosses need their cops, black, latin, asian or white, to harass, terrorize, and intimidate workers. Their profit system is in crisis, they are preparing for war in the Middle East, , they are slashing workers' wages, benefits, and social services. They depend on cops to keep us under control. The only solution is to build the communist PLP and destroy this capitalist system once and for all.
A PL member from Cook County Hospital (CCH) went to the microphone and exposed the politicians' phony bad apple theory and told the audience that all cops are bad, they all protect the bosses' profits, and that only communist revolution would solve our problems. She attacked the politicians as tools of the bosses who could never solve the workers problems.
A state representative quickly came and shut off her microphone. As he did this, a worker in the audience called out, "She's right, and I'm not afraid to say it!" She took Challenge and gave us her address and phone number. Over 50 Challenges were distributed after the meeting.
We are organizing to demand that any discipline against this elevator operator be dropped. Workers who help expose police brutality should be commended! Hand-to-hand and mass sales of Challenge at CCH have increased.
Throughout this small campaign we have met more than 50 workers who want to know more about building a communist movement to smash police terror. They have all received Challenge and we are now visiting them to discuss the Party line and to ask them to join PLP. They agree that cops are all blue, not black, latin, or white! We have to convince them that the answer to police brutality is for them to become a red!
"Well," I answered, "we did have an interesting situation last week." Then I told Joe about Billy.
The Friday before, Billy showed up for work dead drunk. The supervisor wouldn't let him work. Another worker had to drive him home. Now Billy faced being fired.
As the union delegate for the department, I now had to represent Billy in what would no doubt be a time consuming case. This wouldn't be the first time I represented Billy for drinking.
Several years ago the same thing happened with Billy. What impressed me then was the number of workers who came forward to offer me their help to save Billy's job. Billy's friend Marion told me the story of how Billy's daughter was stabbed to death and died in his arms. Marion even found the old newspaper article about her death and told me that Billy had been going downhill ever since. Since then Billy had to return to alcohol rehab again and just recently returned from a hospitalization for depression.
Now I try to be a `good' communist and a `good' person, but I had mixed feelings about Billy's case. Maybe there's no saving this guy, I thought. Plus I am up to my neck in trying to organize things that I believe more directly build the Party.
After the Party conference I recently attended, I know there are strong disagreements about whether or not PLP communist should be union delegates. Over the years I have read in Challenge several discouraging letters from comrades who were union delegates, some specifically mentioning that much of their time was spent getting workers into drug and alcohol rehab.
So I brought the problem to Billy's co-workers and the workers in the Party's base. Billy's friends had the same mixed feelings as I. They had tried to be supportive in many ways. One called Billy every night to awaken him for third shift. Another drove him home every morning. Billy's latest lapse left them a bit angry and discouraged with him.
Some of the workers tried to avoid giving me any opinions. "You should do what you think is right," they told me. But I tried not to let anyone off the hook.
I tried to make this discussion as political as I could. I discussed with many workers that under communism Billy would not be faced with homelessness because we will abolish money and wages. Housing and food will be shared according to need. I also brought up the stories from Away With All Pests that describe the decision of many in China during the Cultural Revolution to take all heroic measures possible to save any ordinary worker's life. We also discussed the causes of alcoholism and the difficulty in overcoming the addiction.
After a few days of discussion we decided that we should fight for Billy to return to work as soon as possible. We also decided to struggle with Billy to attend AA meetings as well as get help for his depression. There was nonetheless a consensus that because life was so lousy in this society we might lose Billy despite all our help.
When I went in to represent Billy, I fought for the position developed by the workers and myself. After some discussion that included my mentioning the workers' support for Billy, the boss agreed to let Billy serve a few days suspension and return to the job with the agreement he seek help.
"So you saved Billy's job," Joe interrupted, "he still might blow it." "Yeah, he might", I agreed. "But to me the victory in this battle was that workers discussed this as a political problem, not a personal problem. We thought about how we might deal with such problems under communism. That's a victory to me."
All of us felt a little intimidated because we were going to be among hundreds of thousands of people organized around conservative, religious politics. We had to overcome these fears because the majority of the people there were workers, and we knew if we want to build a mass communist party we have to win them away from this fascist movement.
On the other side of the political spectrum at the counter demonstration were the liberal organizations, led by the National Organization for Women (NOW), other radical feminist groups and "left-of-center" organizations. The leaders of this side are also trying to win workers, but to liberal style fascism. They were opposing the PKs because of its open sexism and anti-abortion stance. We discussed politics and sold our paper to them. These organizations, however, did very little to reach out to these workers, and their counter demonstration was very weak. They seemed only to chastise the rank-and-file for following the PKs.
Once we were selling Challenges we were fine and some of the people there with the PKs took leaflets, bought papers, and stopped to talk about what they were doing there. Like any place we sell, some people gave us bad looks or told us we were crazy because we were communists.
Many of the attendees expressed that the PKs had saved their marriages and families. One worker from Missouri told me that he was an unemployed farm-worker, and religion was the only thing that helped him get by. We told him and others that capitalism destroys workers lives everyday. The leaders of this movement, like Bill McCartney, have won these workers on one level or another to believe that it is their own fault that their relationships and jobs have not worked out. We put forward our line about how the different sections of the ruling class are dividing the working class to win them to their side. Many were receptive to our views, but were won to the PKs idealism of religion and individualism.
After a long day of giving out thousands of leaflets and hundreds of Challenges, we realized that we have a lot of work to do to reach out to more workers. Every time the bosses win workers to religion or liberal reforms the bosses win. We realized that our Party has to start organizing more and more workers from every area where the working class lives and breathes. We can't let any bosses' faction win these workers. During the rally, the liberal media, NY Times Washington Post, toned down its criticisms of the PK Washington Mall gathering--showing that Old Money bosses know the importance of not letting their New Money rivals win the allegiance of all these workers. We in PLP have to win them to the communist side, the one that will make a revolution for workers' power.
Thousands of black women will march in Philadelphia on October 25th to build strength and unity. This "Million Woman March" (MWM) promises to help one of the most oppressed sections of the U.S. working class to regain control of family and community. However, the ideology around the MWM will only strengthen, unify and consolidate black women around a set of bosses whose system is responsible for their oppression: CAPITALISM.
Many black women are angered at the bosses' government and the results of the economic crisis of their system. Whole communities have been destroyed with joblessness, drugs, gangs and racist police terror. But the MWM platform is useless to black women workers, because it never addresses the cause that has subjected black women to such tyranny in the first place. It never exposes the sexist and racist nature of a system where the bosses' need to maximize profits will always contradict the needs of the working class.
Most of the working poor in the U.S. are white, but blacks are twice as likely as whites to be poor. The figure is 1.2 million Black women and rising as Clinton's vicious slave-labor welfare "reform" throws millions more into poverty and homelessness.
Since 1980 the number of women in prison has grown tremendously. There are 74,730 women in U.S. state and federal prisons, not including women on work release, home monitoring, or in juvenile detention centers. Three out of four female inmates are mothers.
The MWM program plays into the bosses' "blame-the-victim" stereotypes. It calls for programs for "women in transition" to change their behavior instead of changing the system that oppresses them.
MWM misleaders encourage black women to think of themselves as separate, not as part of the working class. They then channel workers back into the system with the call for more black women professionals, entrepreneurs, and politicians. For example, their response to drugs is to call on black women to "support Congresswoman Maxine Waters" who wants an "investigation" of the CIA's drug-running in black communities.The capitalists use movements like this to defuse the anger of black workers. Their goal is to keep black women workers from seeking out and giving communist leadership in the struggle to destroy the racist, sexist capitalist system and the ruthless killers who run it.
Whenever we see workers mobilized behind a pro-capitalist program, we need to ask which capitalists stand to gain. No such movement can remain apart from the fight raging between rival sections of the U.S. ruling class.
It appears that the MWM, like the MMM and the Promise Keepers, is aligned with New Money forces. Politically, for example, it calls for the development of Black independent schools which would be Afrocentric "Rites of Passage" centers for black girls.This cultural-nationalist program is directly opposed to the Rockefeller/Clinton "national standards" and is consistent with New Money's "voucher" schemes. The Nation of Islam has long-standing financial ties to the Hunt family. Its links with Khaddafy and other African rulers suggest an alliance with Rockefeller's French and Italian competitors for Mideast oil.
The MWM keynote speaker will be Winnie Mandela, ex-wife of South African leader Nelson Mandela. As a leader in the African National Congress (ANC), Winnie helped divert revolutionary black youth into fighting for pro-capitalist "multiracial democracy" instead of for communism. More recently, reflecting splits within the South African ruling class, the ANC fired her for stealing funds. She has also been indicted on murder charges for the death of a teenager at the hands of her bodyguards, who terrorized her Soweto district. Winnie Mandela's presence at the MWM suggests links between New and Old Money factions in the U.S. and their South African counterparts.
It's always a mistake for workers to ally with capitalist bosses or to embrace their nationalist ideologies. PLP members will be attending the MWM, many coming with contingents from their job or community, in order to make communist ideas mass ideas among the angry black women and their supporters who will be there. Black women workers have given important leadership to the whole working class, from the U.S. to South Africa. We want to win many to join, build, and help lead our Party on the road to communist revolution.
SAN FRANCISCO -- A strike makes a difference when communists put forward their politics. In a strike actions speak louder than words. For union leaders, the strike means making choices that show they are partners with the Big Capitalists. For workers, the strike raises the real question of whether capitalism and the unions can deliver on promises of a better life. For PLP members and friends, we have the opportunity to develop the revolutionary movement for communism as the only way out of crumbling capitalism.
During the BART strike, we fought against scabbing and for workers' solidarity. More importantly, we developed a better understanding among a circle of Challenge readers of why the union leaders are tied to capitalism.
The Challenge editorial on the BART Strike (9/24) said "the union wanted no part of stopping scabs." In following up our activities during the strike, we visited some BART workers who told us just how true this was. BART management had hired private buses to take commuters from outlying BART stations to Downtown SF. The ATU 1555 and SEIU 790 pulled picket off these stations so the buses would not be challenged.
In SF, the BART Unions did not picked the Balboa Station where the BART scab strike shuttle organized by Muni started, even after Muni drivers who were organizing to stop the scab shuttles asked for pickets. BART workers confronted their Union leadership about no pickets and got the run around.
At AC Transit, Union leader Zook even took a public stance in the Media--our members will not work any extra service because it would be an attempt to break the BART strike. "ATU Local 192 would certainly never cross the picket line of any union." When AC management dug up some old buses to beef up service across, Zook acted as their partner. She agreed that the strike was an opportunity to attract riders away from BART by providing scab service.
At Muni, where PLP members organized successfully with their coworkers to stop the scab BART shuttle, the top Union leadership talked workers' solidarity with the Strawberry workers in Watsonville last April. They talked progressive pro-affirmative action, against Prop 209, and unity with young people with a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge with Jessie Jackson. When it came to the BART strike, the TWU 250a Union officials, with the exception of one shop steward, stalled, turned their heads, and pretended the BART strike shuttle didn't exist. They only got out of the way of the rank and file after Mayor Willie Brown said it was OK to stop the shuttle.
In transit today, the employers already have the beginnings of a slave labor tier: General Assistance workers clean busses for their starvation check, welfare-to-work workers do transit jobs for their starvation check, prisoners clean graffiti and grounds for room and board and fines-- all this work is replacing unionized, living wage jobs. When the capitalists say "slave labor" is what we need to compete or win a war, the transit Unions will tell their members to bring the slaves to work. That is the logic of partnership with capitalism.
After united treachery during the strike, the BART Unions announced that their main goal was a better place at the table in partnership with management. Our Unions will turn as reactionary as the capitalist need them to be. To maintain credibility, they will grandstand for the workers and talk about social needs. To maintain a place at the table, they will act for the bosses and help bring fascist labor conditions to the work place. They are Social Fascists.
This strike made it clearer to many of our friends and readers of Challenge: The working class has a choice--social fascist union leaders or the growth of the communist movement.
That same week, three teenagers from our neighborhood were arrested in the killing of a millionaire. The media--the official paparazzi (and yes, we know what the word means!)--swarmed all over our school the day after they were arrested, looking for dirt to convince people how delinquent latin youth are.
We were laughing at them. "If you want a real story, you should write about police corruption in the neighborhood!" we told them, and about this millionaire being a real criminal, who served time in prison for embezzlement. Thinking about them with their pleas to give them information "anonymously," we gestured at our school. "Write about our school, about how it's a concentration camp, a prison," we said. Two students on their own talked of the need for revolution to overthrow the system.
Also, the police are much more visible in our neighborhood since the Abner Louima torture case. The cops of the 34th precinct have begun a series of training sessions inside the school in which the entire precinct uses the auditorium and school classrooms to train officers in "community policing." Giuliani himself has shown up. They want to forge closer ties to the workers and parents in the community, they say. To us, it's like they're occupying our school, using it as another headquarters. To many of us, cops are the enemy! They are using our classrooms to try to meet with parents and workers from the community to form a "dialogue." In other words, they want to get close with the parents and workers, to try to con them into thinking that the police can be on their side. But most of us students don't buy it. The government and their cops want tighter control and more terrorizing of students.
The cops and the principal are afraid of us when we get rebellious and dissatisfied with a school and a society that is falling apart. We can see that the cops will look for any excuse to arrest us and lock us up, torture and kill us, as they did to Abner Louima and Norman Batista, a restaurant worker in Washington Heights. They try to blame us for the problems they caused. Then their pals the media will spray it all over the news: "Delinquent latins don't deserve a decent life." Yes we do!!
All this is part of their turning the school into a military outpost preparing youth to fight in another bosses' war for profits in the Middle East (or Latin America). You think I'm joking? I'm not! Stay tuned for other articles on George Washington High School. We'll spell out the bosses' plans, and our plans to smash them forever, because we are not their little sheep. We are the youth, and we are the leaders of the communist revolution tomorrow!
We divided the students into four groups. At first some of the students thought they would be in a group with their friends, but the organizers were trying to get the students to make new friends and to learn how to work together. For example, in order to have somewhere to sleep, we had to put up tents. We all helped each other and accomplished what we wanted.
We also discussed how the bosses are preparing for a war for oil in the Middle East, and that all their "multiculturalism" and "GI Jane" is about trying to recruit black and latin youth and women to fight in their war.
We had a night hike, and the next morning we talked about fascism and police terror. The youth were exposed to the real nature of the system, how more jails are being built and how the majority of the people who are going into the jails are black. We decided to be more active in the fight against racist police terror here in Los Angeles and to take this fight into the mass organizations on our campuses.
This was the best cadre school we've ever had in Los Angeles in terms of the leadership given by the youth. The youth cadre gave the talks, led the discussions, organized the cooking and other work, and struggled with each other about their behavior (drugs and sex). We have a more mass base in the high schools after this cadre school and we can be more active in leading the fight against war and fascism.
Our literature and the presence of the party and our friends was directed at winning workers to the party and to see that capitalism cannot be reformed to meet our needs. It must be destroyed with communist revolution. A garment worker who we met during the march told us "we need a revolution with arms to end this exploitation!" Participating in these marches and in the bosses' organizations gives us the opportunity to get to know many workers who are looking for an alternative to racism, exploitation, and deportations and who will not find the solutions there, unless we present them.
The AFL-CIO (of which UNITE is a part) is trying to organize students and workers in a movement to support the biggest bosses,represented by Clinton and Rockefeller in their fight against the Old Money bosses and in their plans for another oil war.. The fight of UNITE and the AFL-CIO is not to end exploitation but to maintain it in a way that the workers don't rebel or look for a communist alternative. Even as the bosses step up their attack on immigrants, they need to win immigrants and others to support them..
One of the unions that formed UNITE, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, was born in New York at the beginning of this century fighting against sweatshops. Garment workers, including thousands of children, worked 70 hours a week for $3, having to pay for needles, thread and even for use of the chairs. They organized a union and improved the conditions in the shops so much that by the 1920's, garment workers were among the better paid workers in the country. But today 150,000 LA garment workers have no union and right here, as in New York and world wide, there are thousands of sweatshops. If there were a union, this would still be the case.
The same bosses and politicians who claim tooppose sweatshops support slave labor pograms like workfare and prison labor, paying prisoners about 7 cents an hour.
Since its birth capitalism has been murdering and superexploiting workers. Today, 500 years later, according to a UN report, today there are more than 200 million slaves in the world, including 15 million children.
PLP members are organizing among the 150,000 LA garment workers. These workers suffer the triple oppression of superexploitation, racist immigration laws and sexism, to fight for communism and build a society without bosses and their thirst for maximum profits: the real source of sweatshops.
I am a third year college student who is very interested in politics, especially Marxist ideology. I consider myself sort-of in between Communism and "light weight" socialism, if you will. I am very pleased with your web-site and frequently visit it. I agree with most of your opinions, and am writing you today to compliment you on your anti-Promise Keepers position and how you plan to voice this opposition. I am sick and tired of this oppressive patriarchy that firmly implants itself and continuously grows out of Capitalism and religion. Although I am a young man, I firmly believe that women should attain a completely equal position in this society as men. I think that this country especially has an incredibly anti-women stance. Just look at the fact that we never even had a female president or vice president. The PKs is just a right-wing religious group that wants to re-establish, or rather reaffirm male dominance in every part of this society. They use religion as the tool in order to attain this. Politics, in my opinion, comes second to them. Religion, as you brilliantly pointed out, is the "opium of the masses" and should be obliterated in any true Communist society. Religion is a massive institution that thrives on spiritual superiority, elitism through discrimination, a means of hate-speech against other religion and psychological, social, and political brainwashing and control. It is also an institution that promotes homophobia, the adherence to Capitalism, excessive sexism and in some cases, racism. I think that the PKs is a dangerous organization that will try to garner support through sly PR and "good natured" behavior. They preach for the submission of women and how men should "reclaim" their "rightful leadership roles over the house and their community". I think that they should be portrayed as the extremist sexists they are. I hope that you have a great demonstration tomorrow and I hope that this rightist organization will be smashed and annihilated in the future. We must stop and smash the patriarchy as well as religion and Capitalism in order to achieve a true Communist state.
Good luck and thanks for a great website.
A Sort-of Comrade from Philadelphia
The bosses tell us this is the golden age of capitalism since communism is dead and economic prosperity is around the corner for everyone. But what is around the corner is more capitalist violence, war and unemployment. There are already 1.5 billion workers without jobs or underemployed. Those lucky enough to have jobs don't know how long they will have it.
This is the problem facing the 60,000 workers of the 150 companies owned by the Santodomingo capitalist group in Colombia. In 1996, these workers produced $4 billion in profits for these bosses (that is $66,000 per worker). While most of us earn the minimum wage, with no benefits, the bosses are not pleased and in some of their companies (Serdan, Vise, Auditamos) just hire temporary workers who earn even less.
Many workers believed that if they are "good" workers, they will not lose their jobs. Well, ask the 30 workers at the Bavaria beer company of this conglomerate that were fired. Also 500 Avianca airlines workers lost their jobs, some of whom had 15 years seniority. And when people try to do something about these firings, they send the cops. When Cesar Díaz, one of the workers fired at Bavaria, chained himself to the front gate, the cops came and violently removed him along with his supporters.
And boss Augusto López, Santodomingo CEO, is not finished. He is negotiating with the Ministry of Labor (unemployment) about the elimination of 450 more jobs at Bavaria. He will get the go-ahead, since his class runs the country and the government.
Workers must learn that job security under capitalism is an extinct animal. They need to join PLP to fight for a society based on the needs of the workers, not of conglomerates like Santodomingo. Under communism, the only ones who will lose their jobs (and more) will be bosses like Augusto López and his henchmen like the cops and the Minister of Labor.
A Bavaria worker in Colombia
I have been in PLP for several years. I have had my own internal contradictions because of this damn capitalist system, but lately I have become more secure in my understanding of the need to fight the system. The recent sharpening of the Party line has helped me a lot in this. I am not used to writing, but I have decided to give it a try.
I went with other comrades to the trade union march of Sept. 3. It was good for us because we spread our communist ideas, giving out 2,500 leaflets attacking the electoral circus here. Workers in the march liked the leaflet a lot.
I have been distributing C-D to friends in my neighborhood, and talk to them about the crisis of capitalism. Many of them don't quite understand this, but I keep on trying to see whom can I win to our ideas. Sometimes, these friends believe that I am crazy to fight for communism. But I know that communism is the only solution to this capitalist hell we are living under.
My commitment to the Party, and my break with my strong religious past, have been strengthened by the PLP schools I have attended. We have studied dialectical materialism, the philosophy of communism, in those schools, showing clearly how communism is the way of the future. Greetings to all comrades and friends all over the world!
At a conference I attended with a friend, speakers discussed the proposed "national history standards." During the question period, I criticized them for ignoring the politics of the debate and how "standards" would affect students. "Standards" imply standardized national tests. Such tests are actually used against students with lower scores. More important, they force teachers to "teach to the test," especially when teachers' pay is pegged to students' scores.
Everyone seemed interested in my explanation of how the "history standards" debate reflects Old/New Money conflicts. Old Money wants to build patriotism through multiculturalism, preparing for overseas wars and sharp struggle against New Money domestically. New Money fights back on the platform of "state and local autonomy" and "back-to-basics."
Many historians like the new "standards," so it was important to expose Old Money's political slant. I gave five examples:
An article in "Cobblestones" magazine on the founding of the CIO didn't mention the Communist Party, the driving force behind that movement, even in a section on the Flint Sit-Down Strike, which communists organized and led.
A children's book, "She's Wearing a Bird on Her Head," about the founding of the Audubon Society a century ago describes two wealthy ladies who object to decorating women's hats with feathers from endangered birds but had nothing about the sweatshops where such hats were made.
There were suggested lessons on child labor. Students were supposed to calculate the difference between wages a century ago and today but the lesson planners did not suggest calculating how much profits the bosses made, and still make, from child labor.
"History" (in high school) means U.S. history from 1877 to the present -- the period of Rockefeller dominance. Students will have no opportunity to discuss revolutionary social change, like the U.S. war for independence or the civil war. These blinders are already being built into the curricula for Illinois and Michigan.
My friend commented, "you should have given the talk instead." We need to be bolder about seeking out opportunities to have such discussions. We also need to discuss and write more about how fascist developments such as the "history standards" affect our classrooms, and how we can organize students and teachers around these issues.
A forced effort to fit every development of American capitalism into the Old Money/New Money split within the ruling class marred the otherwise very strong article exposing the disgusting experiments using women with AIDS ("Thousands of Women Used as Guinea Pigs in AIDS Testing", October 1). The article started out by showing that the bourgeoisie has done this type of fascist manipulation before, in the Tuskegee experiment that used poor black men infected with syphilis from 1932 to 1972. But the article then made the unjustified assertion that "Obviously, the publicity of this case was part of the attack that Old Money and their mouthpieces waged to dump Nixon who represented New Money bosses
(He was forced to resign a few months after the 'exposure' of the Tuskegee experiments)." This simply doesn't hold up. The weapon used to dump Nixon was the Watergate "scandal". The disclosure of the Tuskegee experiment was lost in the incessant pressure in the bourgeois press (the New York Times and Washington Post, especially) hammering away at Nixon for violation of election laws. Tuskegee had nothing to do with it. In fact, our own party's 30-page analysis of the situation, "Watergate: Billionaires' Dogfight" didn't mention the Tuskegee experiment as part of this battle within the ruling class. Using Tuskegee to attack Nixon would have been extremely risky for the Old Money bosses, since for 28 of the 40 years that the experiment was going on the Eastern establishment was in power, and the experiment was launched under the Roosevelt administration, part of what became the Old Money Eastern establishment (although in 1932 the divisions within the ruling class were somewhat different than they were in 1972). This was an excellent and important article that does what a communist paper is supposed to do: expose capitalism for the inhumane system it is. However, as with the recent article that compared the crash that killed Princess Di with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, this article was a powerful enough indictment of the profit system without looking for an unconvincing scheme by a group of bosses to somehow force it into the Old Money/New Money split.
Boston Comrade
After years of budget cuts schools have deteriorated dramatically. Now the top bosses are worried. Their racist strategies of minimizing education for the working class, to cut costs and save money, have gone too far even for them. They are having a hard time finding enough high school graduates who can pilot a helicopter or who can produce one. So corporations are helping teach science to elementary school students, and every student in the upper-middle-class Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach is getting her/his own lap top computer
The bosses know that ideas are key--and they absolutely need the schools to teach the ideas that will win youth to put forward and fight for their line. Multi-cultural nationalism is a key idea that they need to push--that workers of all "ethnicities" are part of the U.S. and have a stake in the system, which means they should kill and die for the "American way." Along with ethnicities, they need a version of feminism that struggles for the "equality to feel proud" to fight and die for capitalism.
A section of students need to learn well the Old Money version of U.S. history, that this country is a unique melting pot well worth defending. For example, Clinton spoke at Central High School in Little Rock last week to emphasize that Federal troops were used to integrate the schools of Little Rock, in the face of New Money opposition. He's cynically manipulating the real anti-racist sentiments that millions have to win them to support Old Money, the biggest racist of them all.
In Congress during the past months there has been a fierce debate over this subject that reflects the differing interests of the U.S. bosses. The Christian coalition types backed by the New Money forces--who oppose war now because they don't have oil in the Middle East-- are against nationwide standards. They know they don't have state power and that they are not in the position to impose their own sexist and gutter racist agenda on the public schools. They have been fighting for local control, to win over some school districts to their ideas, supporting the openly racist militias in any upcoming confrontation with the Old Money "liberals." They have also led the fight for vouchers, to pay for private schools that push their line.
The American Federation of Teachers is supporting nationwide standards. They are linking standards for students with standards for teachers, which they call "teacher accountability." This means tighter discipline over teachers. The new three-year contract offered to Los Angeles teachers includes "teacher accountability." The Los Angeles Times applauded this step, saying that, "If teachers don't teach, they should be fired." What they mean is, if teachers don't successfully brainwash students with the Old Money line, then the teachers will be fired.
Communists--and communist teachers and students--have always explained that every country belongs to the bosses--to the rich bankers and businessmen who own and control the means of production. Workers have never had anything but their own labor power. Patriotism is used to sucker us into killing and dying for the bosses and their profits.
PLP teachers and students also understand that ideology is key. All bosses (liberal and conservative) hate communists because we teach youth, the future soldiers in the bosses' oil wars, to organize against the warmongers. As war comes closer, we can expect the Old Money warmongers to increase their phony anti-racism and their fight for the allegiance of our class. We must take them on and convince our class sisters and brothers that a system which has no future but war, is a system which can and must be smashed with communist revolution.
These are becoming the crucial questions of this historical period. What our Party does or fails to do within the bosses' armed forces will determine the answer. To date, because of opportunist errors we have made, our efforts in the military have been weak. Slowly, too slowly, we are recognizing and attempting to correct them. Part of the correction involves understanding contradictions within the military. Our knowledge will increase as our organizing improves. However, even from the outside, we can begin to see that the rulers' strategic weakness provides us with great opportunity.
Thomas E. Ricks, a military affairs expert who covers the Pentagon for The Wall Street Journal, clarified this in an article in the July 1997 Atlantic Monthly. In his article titled, "The Widening Gap Between the Military and Society," he bemoans "the long-term downward trend in the number of officers willing to identify themselves as liberals." By "liberal," he means loyal to the interests and strategy of the Eastern Establishment. He makes this crystal-clear in identifying the majority of the junior officer corps as "overwhelmingly hard-right Republican and largely comfortable with the views of Rush Limbaugh." Ricks goes on to distinguish this position from "the compromising, solution-oriented politics of, say, Bob Dole."
When the chips were down, Dole always lined up behind Rockefeller's foreign policy. He voted for NAFTA and Clinton's $52 billion bailout of the Mexican Peso in 1993. The Dole Republicans basically favor the Rockefeller plan for an infantry-dependent military that can be rapidly and massively deployed by sea and air to defend U.S. Big Oil's Middle Eastern holdings.
Ricks places the majority of the junior officer corps with Rush Limbaugh and the "hard-right Republicans," meaning that growing numbers of tomorrow's generals, admirals, and joint chiefs of staff owe their allegiance to the Oil Patch, the New Money bosses and the Jesse Helms/Buchanan bosses who don't have extensive foreign holdings. Therefore they have a different strategy from Rockefeller's for the development of the military and fascism.
With their so-called all-"volunteer" army, Rockefeller & Co. solved one problem only to create another. A generation ago, while their Vietnam genocide was still going on, class struggle both within and outside the U.S. military had turned the bosses' armed forces into a shambles. Enlisted troops regularly rebelled, deserted and shot their officers. In a major defeat for U.S. imperialism, the draft was terminated in 1973.
But an economic draft still exists. Children of the rich don't enter the military of their own accord. Neither do middle class youth, except in anti-Rockefeller strongholds in the South and Southwest, where many enlist for ideological reasons. Most "volunteers" come from the ranks of the most oppressed black, latin, and white working class youth, for whom the military represents a chance to eat and an alternative to unemployment or prison. But individual material incentive is a wafer-thin basis on which to win ideological commitment. If Rockefeller, Inc. gets its way, millions of young men and women will be called upon to kill and die for the foreseeable future in a succession of wars that will ultimately lead to world war. "Be all that you can be" and "the few, the proud" aren't exactly inspiring slogans to win masses to this scenario. Ricks understands this and warns against it.
So the specter of civil war has been raised. One possibility involves using the military to crush working class rebellion on the home front. The main wing of the ruling class has done this throughout its history. When workers rebelled in Detroit in 1967, President LBJ rerouted the 102nd airborne division from its planned Vietnam butchery to the Motor City. More recently, although many people don't know it, the Marines were sent in to help the Los Angeles cops during the 1992 rebellion there. Here the picture isn't so rosy for Rockefeller, Inc., because the Marine officers didn't always follow orders. More to the point, a New Money-friendly Marine major named Timothy Reeves, wrote a paper warning about the growing need to use the U.S. military within American borders. Ricks quotes him: "The trouble, he said, is that a variety of U.S. laws inhibit the execution of domestic missions. In Los Angeles, Reeves said, when faced with a choice between violating doctrine (i.e. military need, -ed.) and violating federal law, some Marines chose the latter. Reeves called for major alterations of U.S. law to enable the Marines to execute these new domestic missions, just as they execute missions changes abroad--changes that could carry long-term consequences for U.S. civilian-military relations."
This is obviously a recipe for a form of fascism, but it's not necessarily the form of fascism that Rockefeller, Inc. want to develop. Their goal is millions under arms to defend U.S. capitalist interests and investments abroad, not a military primarily for domestic use led by officers unwilling to obey commands from the White House.
Among the solutions Ricks proposes is the restoration of the draft, which he considers politically necessary in the near future for the Eastern Establishment's class requirements. As more and more workers die in the bosses' foreign holocausts, the military won't be sellable as a "career alternative" to unemployment, and a draft, including women, will become a necessity just to give the imperialists enough cannon-fodder. But even before that happens, Ricks and the rulers he backs see the draft as a way to bridge the sharpening contradictions within the military.
We musn't minimize the difficulty of organizing within the bosses' military. It will take serious, skillful thought, preparation, and commitment. On the other hand, we should recognize the growing splits within it as sure signs that both gangs of greedy capitalists are strategically weak and eventually beatable by masses of revolutionary-minded workers. No faction of bosses can serve workers' interests. No military machine designed to fight for the profit system can lead the working class anywhere but to the grave. We continue to have a world to win and vast, growing opportunities with which to win it.