Index:

1. Editorial: While Rabid Bosses Fight Each Other, Communists Lead Workers to Fight for State Power
2. Box: Workers Have the Power
3. UPS, The Teamsters Union, And The Deepening Split Among The Rulers
4. Red Workers and Soldiers Plan Mass PLP to Seize Power
5. Mark Fuhrman Award: NYC Cop Murders Irish Workers; Gets Off Scot-Free
6. Imperialist Rivalry Behind Japanese Political Chaos
7. All that glitters is not gold: U.S. continues to slide
8. Colombia: Build a Mass PLP: Bosses Talk Peace, Make More War
9. Teaching Communist Science in the Classrooms
10. Capitalism Supports All Academic Racists
11. Letters:

• Learning first hand how to fight
• Is oil war imminent?
• Even the ruling class has limits, right?
• European Fascists Attempt To Finish Hitler’s War
• Box: U.S. Politicians, Oil Bosses Love Azerbaijan Ruler

When thieves fall out, communist-led workers can cash in. That’s the real lesson of the recent strike by 2,600 workers at San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).

The recent UPS strike, with its militancy, unity and seeming victory, definitely inspired the BART workers to strike. But the union wanted a "controlled" walkout, none that would unleash forces representing the real class interests of the working class. However, many times actions like these set in motion movements that defy this control — and, if communists work correctly within those movements, lead to the spread of communist ideas and the building of the Progressive Labor Party to smash capitalism altogether.

In the BART strike, the union wanted no part of stopping scabs. All the other transit unions scabbed on the BART unions, providing extra services in most cases. But PLP members in transit spent their days organizing against scab buses. We led an aroused and more politically conscious rank-and-file to shut down MUNI Line #99. Workers respected us, grasped the need to do this, joined the action wholeheartedly and helped lead it. They more readily listened to our call for communist revolution in leaflets and agitation. Early results show one more worker agreeing to meet with a PLP club; another is organizing a meeting with a group of workers; and a third is agreeing to start distributing Challenge.

This opportunity to build PLP grew out of contradictory forces fighting within a besieged U.S. ruling class. The world market is stagnating. The U.S. share of that market is dropping. And its grip on the all important Mid-East oil fields is slipping. It will take another Mid-East war just to keep the Rockefeller wing of the ruling class from losing control of that oil.

Meanwhile, a rising section of bosses, centered in the South and West, is challenging Rockefeller & Co. They have mobilized mass movements like the Christian Coalition, the Promise Keepers, the Militias and sections of the armed forces. This impels the dominant Eastern Establishment Rockefeller-wing to mobilize its own mass movements. One of these is the AFL-CIO.

These contradictions came out in the UPS strike. The main struggle there was between these two ruling factions over control of the Teamster pension fund and its $60 billion source of investment capital. (See article on UPS strike, page 3.) Because of this fight, the Rockefeller wing (and its servant, Clinton) did not move to smash the strike but tried to use it to pressure UPS into giving up its goal of controlling the pension fund. .

However, once the strike was on, the pent-up anger of the workers emerged. Years of downsizing, wage-cuts, two-tier wage systems, part-time jobs, Workfare and prison labor brought many workers to the strikers’ side. This all raised the expectations of the workers. While the Eastern bosses need a pliant and terrified working class to maximize their profits, they also need an AFL-CIO that can win the workers to their side in this battle with their opposition, the New Money bosses.

So the ruling class and AFL-CIO aim of a "controlled" strike unleashed workers’ class hatred that was in fact harder to control.

This spilled over into the BART strike. And PLP’ers in Bay Area transit were able to use the consequences of this fight within the ruling class to spread the Party’s ideas and put workers into motion against the unions that are serving as junior partners of the bosses.

One thing leads to another. The development of fascism brings great dangers but also presents great opportunities. The Wall Street Journal (9/16) worries that these two strikes may reflect the entering of a period of more heightened working class struggle. Communists and all workers who understand these contradictions can develop the ability to operate within them and help us keep an eye on the only solution — communism. We can destroy the illusion among workers that some bosses are on their side; expose the role of the AFL-CIO as lackeys of the Rockefeller bosses and bankers; and drive home the point that capitalism cannot be reformed, it must be destroyed if workers are to reap the full fruits of our collective labor.

Last week’s BART strike showed the power of the working class. Daily traffic jams miles long attested to that. BART’s role is not just to carry 270,000 passengers daily. Billions of dollars of real estate in the suburbs and downtown San Francisco rest on the daily functioning of 2,600 BART workers. Workers are not marginal. They are central to capitalism and its profits.

This is especially true of BART workers. More than anything else, this key strategic place in the local economy accounts for the relatively lucrative settlement. They get $3,000 in a lump sum, then a 4% increase for the next three years and substantial improvements in benefits.

But one thing leads to another. The BART settlement, unsettles other workers. Paratransit workers ($7/hr.), BART Express drivers ($11/hr.) and AC Transit drivers ($18/hr.) are all angry. AC itself carries 200,000 largely inner-city riders a day. They are subsidized at roughly $2 per rider. BART riders are subsidized some $40 per rider! This racist, automatic coddling of finance capital creates an anger among riders and drivers alike. The capitalist media wants to channel this anger against BART workers.

Communists must direct this anger into revolutionary anger at the system.

CHICAGO, Sept. 15 — The battle between U.S. imperialism and its competitors in Europe and Asia is the main contradiction in the world, shaping all others. Its main expression within the U.S. (as well as other countries) is a deepening split within the ruling class. This split is accelerating the rise of fascism, and poses the threat of domestic civil war. The UPS strike, and the ongoing battle for control of the 1.5 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), is a window into this struggle. It can show millions of workers how the major questions of war and fascism are affecting their daily lives, and how the only solution is building a mass, illegal PLP for the seizure of power and communist revolution.

As Challenge pointed out, the UPS strike was much more than a fight between workers and bosses. It was mainly a battle between two sets of bosses, Rockefeller’s Wall St. bankers, and UPS, fighting for control of the $60 billion Teamster pension funds. The pictures of Teamsters picketing UPS depots don’t tell the whole story. We have to back the camera up and get the bigger picture. UPS is based in Atlanta, a financial backer of Newt Gingrich and the "Republican Revolution."

They wanted to pull their $1 billion annual pension contribution out of the funds that are managed by Wall St., and put them into banks in the South and West, those not directly controlled by Rockefeller &Co.—banks like NationsBank, the third largest in U.S. Clinton and Carey said "No."

The main wing of the ruling class used everything at its disposal, starting with the Teamsters union, to stop UPS from getting its hands on the pension fund. But 110,000 part-time workers wouldn’t fight for a pension they will never see, so "full-time jobs" became the rallying cry of the strike.

Unlike most strikes, where the media, government and courts are mobilized against the workers, this time they were used against UPS. When UPS demanded Clinton stop the strike, he went on vacation (but prevented Amtrak workers from going on strike). When they threatened to use scabs, the Secretary of Labor said, "Don’t do it." The media portrayed the strikers as heroes, and Ron Carey as the new leader of all labor. After two weeks, UPS caved in and settled. The pension funds stay where they are. When Ron Carey says "We kept control of the pension funds," the "we" he’s talking about is Wall St. and the Rockefeller banks, not the workers.

Rulers Fight To Control IBT

The government took over the IBT in 1989. This was the result of a consent decree and plea bargain agreement between the Mafia-run IBT leadership and the U.S. Justice Dept. The original racketeering case against the union leadership was brought by then-U.S. attorney Rudolph Giuliani, now the Nazi mayor of NYC. This takeover was part of the war between different factions of the ruling class.

For many years, the IBT was a driving force behind New Money. Teamster pension funds, "on loan" to the mob, built Las Vegas, and put hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of "New Money" politicians and bankers. As late as 1987, the IBT loaned $11 million to Fife Symington, a Phoenix real estate developer, who became governor of Arizona. (He was recently convicted of fraud and is facing jail time.)The IBT backed Nixon, and drew the fire of the Kennedy administration. The Kennedys jailed Jimmy Hoffa; Nixon freed him. Mob figures associated with the Kennedy assassination were involved with the Teamsters. When Robert Kennedy was embracing Cesar Chavez and the UFW organizing drives among California farmworkers, the Teamsters were being used as strike-breakers and signing "sweetheart" contracts with the growers. Since the 1989 government takeover, the IBT joined the AFL-CIO, backs the Democratic Party and is working with the UFW in joint organizing drives in California and Washington.

All the financial wheeling and dealing, too much to describe here, needs more research. But New Money describes the section of the ruling class whose fortunes are centered in the South and West. The U.S. attorney who brought the case for the government takeover was Giuliani — from NYC. The federal judge overseeing the Teamsters union is Edlestein — from NYC. And the current president is Carey — from NYC. Not exactly the Dukes of Hazard.

Carey, like Clinton, is under attack by New Money forces, as well as his Old Money handlers. Hoffa and the mob, backed by Gingrich & Co., are trying to re-take control of the union. The federal government will use Carey’s money laundering to extend its control over the union. Even if Hoffa wins the new election, the money will stay put.

As for the 1.5 million members, we have no stake in the outcome of this fight. There are no good bosses or lesser evils. Hoffa or Carey, Clinton or Gingrich, each represent different sets of billionaires, fighting each other. The only thing they have for us is our marching orders for their imperialist wars and/or civil wars. We must reject Old Money and New Money and fight for No Money, a communist world without wages and profits, bankers or bosses.

NEW YORK CITY, Sept. 14 — More than 150 workers, soldiers, students, youth from the U.S. and other countries, ended a weekend of sharp, comradely political struggle, by singing "The Internationale." This marked the conclusion of our cadre school, and a year of sharpening inner-Party struggle, criticism, and self-criticism. As a result, our Party is more sharply pointed in the direction of armed struggle for the seizure of power.

The school focused on three main points:

• Building a mass PLP that can function under any and all circumstances, advance under attack, and lead the working class to communist revolution.

Understanding the nature of today’s period of capitalist crisis and rising fascism, deepening splits among the rulers, and the threats of war and civil war.

Marching into the various ruling class-led mass organizations, in order to fight for the political leadership of the working class and break the ideological hold of the rulers.

The overwhelming mood of the school was self-critical, probing for answers and more confidence in the Party and the working class. Reports were discussed in two days of workshops, based on our experiences in the military, auto, steel, aerospace, transit, health care, communities, campuses, and many more places .

There is a lot of unevenness, and a wide variety of views on how to carry out our line. Debate and struggle filled the air. All the "I’s" weren’t dotted, and the "T’s" weren’t crossed. The struggle will continue. But the Party emerged from the school with new leadership, more unity, and greater commitment to advance the work.

Another worker is dead who thought he had fled fascism by coming to the U.S. This week’s Mark Fuhrman award for racist police terror goes to NYC cop Richard Molloy, who murdered Hessy Phelan, and is still on the payroll. Phelan, an Irish worker who measured less than five feet, had been imprisoned in Northern Ireland for activity with the IRA.

After being released, he moved to the Bronx, where he worked as a house painter. In January 1996, he was drinking in a bar on 206th St. When he started getting loud, the bartender, a friend of his, asked her boyfriend, cop Molloy, to take Phelan to her apartment across the street to sleep it off. Molloy grabbed him off the stool, pinned his arms behind his back, and dragged him across the street. They were let in by a man who rented a bedroom there. He soon heard them arguing, Mr. Phelan yelling "Go on! Go on!," and then a shot. Phelan had been shot by cop Molloy in his left eye and through his brain. When the renter rushed out, the gun was already back in Molloy’s pocket.

When questioned, Molloy said that Phelan had grabbed his gun out of the holster, put it to his eye, and shot himself. How the gun got back in HIS pocket was a mystery.

Since the story was so obviously a lie, the Bronx DA was forced to bring charges against the cop. Instead of 1st degree murder, he charged 2nd degree murder, "reckless behavior" — by shoving a loaded gun into a man’s eye and pulling the trigger. But, of course the judge threw out even that indictment, saying he "saw no evidence of reckless behavior."

This is a striking example of how racism hurts all workers. This white worker suffered the same fate as his black, latin and Asian working class brothers and sisters. Racism and brutality come with the badge, but some cops are so vicious that they deserve the Mark Fuhrman award.

Japanese Political Disarray Produced by Intensifying Imperialist Rivalry

What’s going on in Japanese politics? On July 22nd , K. Kato, Secretary General of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), told a U.S. State Department Official that the new guidelines for military cooperation between the U.S. and Japan should not apply to the protection of Taiwan. On August 17th, S. Kajiyama, Chief Cabinet Secretary, senior leader of the LDP and an open fascist, appeared on nationwide TV saying that it is only common sense that Japan must cooperate with the U.S. to defend Taiwan. Prime Minister Hashimoto subsequently tried obfuscation tactics, telling Chinese leaders that "no specific areas near Japan " are discussed in the new military guidelines. In naming his new cabinet last week, Hashimoto was careful to appoint allies of both Kato and Kajiyama, including one veteran with a bribery conviction under his belt, to important posts.

This disarray among Japan’s political elite shows a lack of unity on the strategic question of how to continue to use U.S. military power to contain China while continuing to effectively compete with the U.S. all over the world. Japan is faced with a mounting national debt and a stagnant domestic economy. It must continue to invest in Asia to exploit cheap Asian, particularly Chinese, labor while continuing to enjoy profits from massive exports to the U.S.

In general, the older fascists in Japan lean toward closer cooperation with the U.S., while the neo-fascists want Japan to more quickly abandon the military alliance with the U.S., fully re-arm the country, and strike a more independent course. For now, the older group has more power. After all, Japan cannot risk openly defying the U.S. at this stage of the game.

The aim of both the U.S. and Japan is world domination. China’s long-range aim is the same. Despite the massive flow of trade and investment among these three countries, their capitalist economies are still organized on the basis of nation states. U.S. capitalists running Ford, GE, Boeing and other giant corporations are locked in fierce global competition with rivals in Japan. Chinese capitalists lag behind for now, but the tremendous economic and military potential their country has makes them contenders for world domination.

The competitive nature of the capitalist system prevents the various capitalist powers from peacefully dividing world markets and sources of raw materials for long stretches of time. The political and military elite of the U.S., Japan and China all know that war will decide which country will dominate Asia and the rest of the world in the coming decades. Obviously two of the countries will end up allying to fully defeat and subjugate the third. Then it will be a fight between the two former allies for ultimate dominance.

More than ever before, the Asian geopolitical scene is one of shifting alliances on both the international and domestics fronts, intensified imperialist rivalry , and a constant build-up of military forces by all countries active in the region. Underlying all of this is the failure of capitalism to meet the basic needs and aspirations of Asian workers. No matter which country in Asia one chooses to examine, one sees mass poverty, growing fascism, and political corruption. .

Asian workers have nothing to gain from alliances with capitalist bosses, domestic or foreign. Only the unity of workers of all nations will end the imperialist system that oppresses all. And only a movement led by communists can destroy the capitalist system once and for all. We urge Asian workers to contact PLP.

There is much evidence to show that the U.S. and other big imperialists are losing their share of the market. This is part of the process leading to wars, small and large. War, as in the Mid-East is closer. Large wars, including World War III, are inevitable. As Challenge has pointed out on occasion it is not possible for us to pinpoint the outbreak of wars. But it is absolutely possible for us to show the trends.

As the chart points out, between 1970-1990, the U.S. has dramatically been losing its market share in many vital areas. For example, in aircraft sales of the U.S. market share has plummeted from 65% to 20% in just 20 years. U.S. share of auto sales has fallen from 17% to 9%. In steel and scrap iron sales, the U.S. free-fall continues, going from 40% to 29%. The only key area that the U.S. share increased was in machines, going from 2% to 5%.

While Japan has serious problems, it had advanced its market share in two important areas since 1970: machines went from 4% to 20%, and auto sales increased a slight 1%, going from 9% to 10%.

Generally, Germany and France have not done well in the trade wars (See chart). During these 20 years, including the last seven years, other countries, such as China, have more vigorously entered the production and trading markets. The chart indicates modest Chinese advances until 1990; it is fair to assume that these figures are continuing to advance. But, then South Korea and the Southeast Asia "Tigers" have become more aggressive. It should be pointed out that the Japanese have heavily invested in South Korea, and other Southeast Asian countries.

In a recent article in the Wall St. Journal there was a revealing article about the newly coined "Fast Track Trading." The Journal points out that if U.S. imperialists do not streamline its trading legislation — giving the President more power to by-pass Congress — more losses will occur for the U.S. The WSJ says, "Instead inter-locking trade relations have been forming around the Southern cone customs union — Mercosur — comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

"Last year while Washington dithered, Mercosur took decisive action, offering Chile, Bolivia associate membership. This created a market for 220 million potential consumers with a combined gross domestic product of about $1 trillion — more than twice the economic output of Asean, the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations."

Mercosur is negotiating heavily with the EU (European Union) imperialists. Clinton is trying very hard to prevent this, even changing the policy of not selling modern war planes to South American countries. But still the U.S. is falling behind. Behind the appearance of great strength is the essence of growing weaker.

BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia is in the middle of a civil war. Some 40,000 people die each year because of the capitalist violence. But in spite of that, the bosses keep on talking about peace. When the rulers and their mouthpieces talk about peace, better get your helmet. No sooner had President Samper called on the guerrillas to engage in peace talks, than 3,000 soldiers of the 4th Army Division and a mobile counter-guerrilla brigade were sent to the Yari jungle to attack the guerrillas. Airplanes have carpet-bombed the region.

We in PLP say that under capitalism there cannot be peace for workers no matter how much the government and FARC (the main guerrilla group) say they want peace. On Sept. 3rd, PLP brought that message to a march organized by the unions. In the midst of the union leaders’ calls for peace, an end to privatization, free elections, etc. PLP gave out 2,000 leaflets denouncing elections as a capitalist circus in which workers always lose. The different candidates are spending $10 million in the Oct. 26th local elections, when workers have no money to feed their children.

PLP was in front of a group of Colmotores (the local GM plant) strikers. These workers showed a lot of support toward our chants and our flyers. This angered the hacks and fake leftists, who unsuccessfully tried to stop our comrades from chanting communist slogans against wage slavery, against elections and for fighting to build a mass communist Party to destroy capitalism.

We also met some COMESA workers who have been on strike since July. This Lithuanian-owned company builds pipe for oil lines. The union leaders have kept these strikers isolated from the rest of the working class because they are trying to get legal arbitration to force the company to make a deal. Again, reformism only builds illusions in the same system that is murdering workers.

We in PLP will be doing much more to win workers like those at GM and COMESA to becoming communist organizers and building PLP into a mass revolutionary Party to destroy the capitalist warmakers.

NEW YORK CITY, Sep. 15 — A PLP conference was held in July to discuss the role of teachers in the classroom. Teachers generally feel they must teach to keep their jobs and want to teach something useful to their students. What makes it "useful," however, can be a complicated question. Is it useful for passing a standardized test or useful for understanding how capitalism exploits us? Can anything useful for workers be taught in the bosses’ classrooms?

Many communist teachers, for example, won’t distribute Challenge in class because it does not fit their curriculum (like science or math). This reflects a liberal illusion that classrooms and schools, are neutral arenas for study. Fascist, racist teachers have no problem teaching anti-communism, attacking students and generally doing the job of running the bosses’ schools as prisons for working class youth. Why are we so hesitant?

There was much debate on this at the conference. One proposal was for teachers to teach the science of dialectical materialism across all subjects in all classrooms. Dialectics is the only real science. But, since understanding it would give youth the ability to analyze the world and change it, such lessons are dangerous to capitalism. The schools teach mechanical, useless pseudo-science. Communist teachers could lead the ideological fight that capitalist science hurts all workers and that dialectical materialism is the working class science that will lead us to revolution.

This fall, in an effort to explore this in practice, a teacher in a New York high school began his chemistry classes with the basic laws of dialectic materialism. He started with a discussion of idealism and materialism. Then covered the laws of dialectics and the categories of dialectics. The teacher tried to bring in examples from chemistry, school and life, making the examples as political as possible.

This process opened his eyes to many issues that make Challenge relevant to his classroom. For example, two of the classes are "honor" classes which meet for two periods each day. A third class is a "low level" class, which meets one period each day. Obviously, the honor classes have more time and attention for preparing for the statewide tests. Yet being mainly concerned with those tests divides these students and builds illusions about capitalism.

His lessons on dialectics helped him see this division. The "honor" students are very good at copying down whatever is written on the blackboard. They are also better at making some connections between dialectics and the course work. However these students are also more won by the bosses ideology of individualism. When asked to identify things that would affect their education, the most common answers were "bad peer pressure" and "poor study habits,"— answers that blame themselves and their classmates not the system

Students in the other class are not as good at making abstract connections between dialectics and the course work, but had a stronger material basis for understanding the world around them. When they were asked to identify contradictions affecting their education they focused on overcrowding the economic need to work, and to take care of families.

The week of lessons had a profound affect on the teacher. He gained the confidence to bring Challenge to these students. His conviction that communist ideas can only fit in social studies classes was reversed. Not only did students grasp communist ideas but they advanced his understanding of how capitalist ideology is pressed into each generation of workers. Out of 50 honor students only three took the paper, while 9 out of 25 students from the other class took it.

He still has a lot of work to do to win these students to communism. No set of lessons in a classroom will do it. But it has helped him see aspects of the capitalist ideology that divide youth. Now he can include that in future lessons. It has given him the basis to use Challenge, and to popularize the science of communism, dialectical materialism, to a wide range of students. It has helped him identify which students are interested immediately in our ideas. This will be an exciting semester for him and for all teachers as we follow his lead!

"I am happy to be called a scientific racist," says ex-professor Chris Brand of Edinburgh University. Brand was recently sacked for "gross misconduct," as anti-racists have demanded for years, but not for his notorious racism. Brand was fired for defending pedophilia (adults having sex with children).

A year ago, Brand's third year psychology students staged a walkout of his 2 p.m. Tuesday lecture. They declared him a racist, complained that his teaching was biased, called for a new teacher, and arranged a meeting with 2nd year, 4th year and postgraduate psychology students to debate whether to demand his dismissal. When it came to Brand’s racism, Edinburgh University officials bragged that they had "gone out of their way to defend the concept of academic freedom."

Brand is part of an international academic network that includes Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray and Dinesh D’Souza in the U.S., J. Phillipe Rushton in Canada, and Richard Lynn and H. J. Eysenck in the U.K. These reborn Nazis get big bucks from the Nazi Pioneer Fund and from New Money foundations such as the Bradley Foundation.

Their advocacy of white-supremacy contradicts the "multiculturalist" ideology pushed by Old Money think-tanks. This reflects a difference between different sectors of the ruling class about how best to spread racism, build fascism and maintain capitalism. The multi-cultural Old Money wing organizes for a "kinder, gentler" vicious fascism. Brand and the rest are generally treated with respect by old-line academic institutions. For example, in 1987 the prestigious scientific journal Nature invited Brand to review Schiff and Lewontin's anti-racist book, Education and Class: The Irrelevance of IQ Genetic Studies. The New York publisher John Wiley & Sons agreed to publish Brand’s 1996 book The ‘g’ Factor, though he had been pushing grossly racist ideas for decades. When Wiley backed out in the face of mass protests, they offered to give him the already-printed copies to distribute himself. They are all loyal to the same system.

The Psychology Department of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) recently accepted tens of thousands of dollars from the Pioneer Fund for studies "analyzing the abilities of high school students in the upper 1 percent and the distribution of intellectual talent in our population." This represents the New Money support for open gutter racism. This wing of capitalists wants a US capitalism organized around their economic interests.

Last month, the American Psychological Association proposed giving a "lifetime achievement award" to Raymond B. Cattell, whose main lifetime achievement has been trying to make eugenics respectable. Cattell praised Third Reich eugenic policies, and is a board member and contributor to the infamous Mankind Quarterly racist rag. Race-supremacist organizers have commonly used Cattell’s "intelligence" and "personality" studies to make their fascist claptrap seem legitimate. The award was "postponed" due to anti-racist protests, but has not been rescinded.

Whether old or new, harsh or gentle, racism is racism and the only ones to benefit from it are our oppressors. They twist themselves into liberal knots justifying the existence of this scum. Edinburgh University officials claim, for example, that British law protects children and therefore minimizes Chris Brand’s disgusting statement that "the vast majority of young partners (of pedophiles) suffer no harm, especially where there is a cash payment involved." Brand’s book The ‘g’ Factor, in particular, endorses The Bell Curve and D’Souza’s attack on affirmative action. It calls for more racism and sharper class divisions in public education. Says Brand: "many children have suffered from the bizarre educational egalitarianism and similitarianism of the past generation."

Many educators were inspired directly or indirectly by the mass movements of the 1960s, including the U.S. civil rights movement, the heroic fight of Vietnamese workers against U.S. imperialism, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. They fought against school practices, such as segregation and tracking, that helped to maintain the gross social inequalities of capitalism. At the same time, academic scholars debunked and attacked the scientific pretensions of the academic racists.

But education under capitalism is, inevitably, education to maintain capitalism. In this period of capitalist crisis and growing fascism, the limits of merely fighting individual academics, or particular academic movements, is exposed. The system will continue to pump out a steady stream of them for as long as it exists. Communists in the PLP have played a leading role, over the last twenty-five years, in the fight against academic racism. We must continue to do so today, but making it clear from start to finish that only communist revolution can put the racists in their long-deserved grave.

Dear Challenge:

I’d like to add something to the recent letter about the duck slaughterhouse. I got a call from a comrade late one night that another comrade had been ill with high fever for eight days and they wanted advice on what to do. I took her to the LA County Emergency Room. The ER was like a concentration camp. People on stretchers in the waiting area with IV’s in their arms, ambulances bringing in more and others sitting against the wall waiting their turn. The nurse very politely said it would be a 4-6 hour wait, trying as best she could to determine who needed the care most urgently. She tied a tag around each patient’s wrist that looked just like the "toe tags" they put on the dead! This unnerved me somewhat, but it was late at night and I had to work the next day. I decided that I had to trust that the nurses and other workers in the hospital would do the best they could under the circumstances for my comrade.

This 27-year-old woman was treated overnight in the Emergency Room for pneumonia, caused by the conditions in the duck slaughterhouse where she works. She should have been hospitalized but she was sent home after 12 hours with an antibiotic and an off-work slip for three days. The conditions in this plant are life-threatening. The air is filled with filth — feathers, blood and duck feces. Conditions such as these cause some of the more serious epidemic diseases of capitalism — tuberculosis, typhus, malaria — all found among populations who live or work in filthy conditions such as this. Only a handful of the workers are given protective masks to wear (those who actually kill the live ducks). Most don’t work there for long because the conditions are so horrible. This worker became ill after only a few months and probably many more are ill. They get little or no medical care because they have little money and even the County now charges for its services. The antibiotic she was given was inadequate and she had to go back a few days later to get another medicine. Since you are only allowed one free medication per visit, she was required to pay $75 for the new medicine. A County hospital worker friend was able to help her get the medicine she needed.

This experience had a big effect on me. I work in a hospital and am just beginning to involve myself and the Party in the reform struggle around patient care issues, often issues of life and death. I thought about what would I do or encourage my coworkers to do if I were working in an ER. How could we involve our coworkers in a fight against sending sick workers home to die? What should our nurse comrade in the Brooklyn Hospital do about the limited number of ICU beds and the horrible conditions in Labor and Delivery? How can the duck workers launch some kind of a fight around health and safety conditions in the plant? While making a small dent in the bosses plans to kill, maim or enslave the entire working class is not what we are after — the fact that struggle sometimes saves workers lives is not insignificant. Fascism can be weakened if the workers do not cooperate in the bosses fascist schemes, especially if they are won to resisting them on a mass scale and that resistance is tied to the fight for communist revolution. Tens of thousands of workers resisted various aspects of Nazi fascism. But their resistance was weakened by the fact that they did not build for communist revolution in the process. The capitalist roots of fascism were not destroyed and it is now up to us to rise to that task.

Self-critically, I have withdrawn from the reform struggle during the past year. I was confused about how to be in reform fights while making communist revolution primary. Recent experiences fighting to help friends and comrades get the health care they need to stay alive have helped me to see that we cannot remain outside of the arena of struggle. We must bring the fight against fascist working conditions and fascist health care into the unions and other mass organizations that we participate in. This will give us many opportunities to expose the limits of reform and show the need for communist revolution. It will expose the unions as the fascist organizations that they are. Our comrades in the duck slaughterhouse are considering the possibility of a union organizing campaign, not because they believe it will solve their problems, but because it will give them a bigger arena for struggle with more workers and help them expose the limits of reform, and win them to the party. In health care we must figure out how to bring the fight against fascist health care into the unions. These fights can be the jumping off point from which to expose capitalism in all its horrors and build the Party. And we can save some comrades and other workers lives in the process. Capitalism means death and the Party and the fight for communism mean life.

Challenge comments: We agree that Party members should be active in class struggle. The important question is: what line are we fighting for? If we fight for a worker to get life saving medical care without exposing capitalism as a killer, we’re inadvertently building illusions that a militant fight back for reforms is the "best there is." If we remain passive, staying out of the struggle, it’s a killer. So the comrade is right to say we have to fight the bosses everyday — putting forward that capitalism is the problem and communism is the solution. Without putting that forward, we’re condemning our friends and our class to deadly capitalism that much longer.

Dear Challenge:

As one who has raised questions about the Party’s characterization of the present era as one of war between major capitalist states or U.S. factions, I have seen many answers that seem to me to evade the main points. Now I see that "LA Comrade" is being treated in the same fashion through replies to his or her sincere letter in Challenge. Unconvincing dismissals of criticism will not strengthen the Party.

LA comrade says major war is not imminent. In reply, Challenge says, "a contingency the imperialists don’t control could set off world war, even nuclear war." The examples given are MacArthur’s push for war with China, U.S. consideration of nuking Hanoi, and the Cuban missile crisis.

Had nuclear war developed from one of these crises, it would not have been an example of "no control" — far from it. There was always a significant minority of the U.S. ruling class that wanted to nuke Russia and China. Considering the way vast amounts of territory were coming under the control and influence of Russia and China and being moved out of the profit-makers’ orbit, a nuclear ultimatum was not a ridiculous policy from the capitalists’ point of view in that era. Naturally, the wing that favored the ultimatum/war became most vocal when world events presented them with an opportunity, such as the crises mentioned by Challenge. It they had come to represent the majority of the U.S. ruling class — which was certainly not impossible nor ridiculous — Russia and China would have faced nuclear attack. To call such a chain of events "a contingency the imperialists don’t control" is not a Marxist analysis.

It made much more sense in that era for the U.S. to opt for all-out war against Russia and China — who were an immense impediment to their exploitation of the world — than it would for the U.S. to opt for a big war today. It was hardly an "uncontrolled" belligerency. By Challenge’s definition, Desert Storm happened mainly because Saddam Hussein made some disrespectful remarks.

After giving a list of previous "uncontrolled" situations which could have caused World War in the recent past, Challenge says, "The potential is even greater today." This is stated without evidence — although this is what the argument is all about. To lecture LA comrade with a bare assertion is not a way to build unity. If you think Germany or Japan is more of a threat to U.S. capitalism today then Russia or China was in the past, say why.

Finally, it is stated that "it is never too soon to warn the working class about the inevitability of war." Is there really no difference in the kind of work we would try to do if nuclear war were a reasonable possibility within ten years or so, as contrasted with day-to-day work based on a different outlook that the next few decades will feature: (1) Globalization — which will produce a more militant working class in many weaker nations; (2) Cut-throat economic competition — which will lead in the major nations to falling wage and economic crisis; (3) Wars, but only against considerable weaker nations? LA comrade thinks we’ll get signals of the big-war era well in time to react. I agree.

Red-Eye Editor

Marxism-Leninism teaches that war is the inevitable outcome of economic competition among imperialists. We understand that the buildup to direct armed struggle among the world’s major bosses is a process, and that a military confrontation between the U.S. and Japan, Germany, China, or Russia is very unlikely to erupt in the immediate or even the medium-range future. Nonetheless, the economic rivalries leading up to it are sharpening every day and are reflected in the nearly 100 "small" wars currently ravaging the globe.

All these wars reflect one aspect or another of inter-imperialist rivalry, and they are growing, in both quantity and intensity. As we have frequently pointed out, the Middle East remains the eye of the storm. Despite murdering 500,000 Iraqi workers in 1991, U.S. imperialism suffered a major strategic defeat in the Gulf War, a defeat that will require Rockefeller & Co. to launch another oil intervention there. The next oil war isn’t on the distant horizon. It is imminent, and we believe that our Party must prepare the working class for it.

Preparing for the next oil war also means preparing for its consequences. The coming Middle Eastern bloodbath will further isolate the U.S. ruling class and sharpen contradictions with all its primary and secondary rivals. The competition for oil, for other strategic resources, for labor pools, and for market share, which has been intensifying during this period, will continue to do so. The crisis of world capitalism cannot resolve itself bloodlessly. As the current Middle East "peace" talk fiasco reveals, every deal Clinton tries to make blows up in his face.

Red-Eye Editor is right to call capitalist economic competition "cut-throat." War is its only logic: regional war today, global war tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. The Middle East isn’t the only possible site of U.S. bosses’ next interventions. Rockefeller & Co. have interests in Africa, which is a tinderbox. U.S. troops are already in Bosnia, where they have solved nothing. Asia has many hot spots.

Self-critically, we agree that foolish comparisons and predictions don’t help clarify our line. A recent Challenge article made a silly mistake in comparing Princess Diana’s death to the assassination that launched World War I. The response to LA Comrade’s criticism of it minimized this error, and the response’s tone wasn’t particularly constructive. We mustn’t distort or trivialize a deadly serious situation.

We also agree with Red-Eye Editor that as the day for World War III approaches, the signals will get louder and clearer. But war is already a fact of life, and more war inevitably lies ahead. Communists must expose the reasons for this and win workers to understand the process that leads to world war and that can lead to revolution.

Dear Challenge:

I was watching the news on public TV last Friday, and previous U.S. Secretaries of State Brzezinski and Baker were being interviewed about the situation in the Middle East. The focus of the discussion centered on Secretary of State Albright's visit to Israel, where she publicly told Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that he should clean up his act and abide in spirit to the Oslo accords or the US would consider detaching itself from Israel in some manner. Also of discussion was a column in the NY Times by Thomas Friedman, who wrote an article saying that the Middle East was no longer of vital interest to the U.S. and that the U.S. should let the local parties solve their own problems.

Both previous secretaries of state, who remain prominent in ruling class political think tanks, agreed to a large degree to both Albright's negative comments and Friedman's statement. It appears that a change in thinking has developed among these capitalist thinkers, and warrants further study. Statements recently given in the press and reported by Challenge have described a future ground war by U.S. forces in the Middle East, which would have large casualties, and would clearly set the stage for other ruling class forces in the U.S. to use this as a means to gain the upper ground. And the U.S. would still be no more assured of winning a ground war in the Middle East then it was in Vietnam. Further, as has also been reported in Challenge, lining up an alliance for a bloody war, which clearly benefits mainly the U.S. bosses, will be a near impossible task. The only alliance that could be patched together would be one which attacks Arab or Muslim radical nationalism, which in their view destabilizes many parts of the world, but their chances of successfully heading off this development by violence seems both pretty remote and quite bloody. On the other hand, the U.S. could just sit back, pretending to be neutral, and let the local parties kill each other, until they could clearly see how they could quickly pick up the pieces to their advantage. After all, they probably believe they have the best and quickest means to enter into the Middle East, and if they wait until war drags on, as they did in Bosnia, they will seize the upper "moral ground" by delaying their war plans. In this way, they would also have fewer casualties to explain.

I do not understand why three of those ruling class spokesmen agreed that the Middle East should be downplayed as a "vital interest", and this assertion is clearly in contradiction with many recent Challenge articles, but I also think this question merits further study. If Middle East oil is still of such importance to the U.S., then how can these main ruling class thinkers suggest the above publicly? I'm not sure, but I don't believe that all or even any of these bums belong in the "Oil Patch" gang representing primarily domestic oil concerns.

Brooklyn Comrade

Challenge Responds: There are many rifts within the U.S. ruling besides those between the Oil Patch and New Money. Some Old Money types want the U.S. to change its Middle East policies for many reasons. Some favor relying less on Israel, etc. Others have illusions about other sources of cheap plentiful oil, like the Caspian Sea, where Brzezinski and other Old Money" types have a lot invested (see NY Times, Sunday Sept. 14). But, Big Oil (Exxon, Mobil, etc.) still relies mainly in the cheap and abundant oil of the Middle East which they now control, unlike the Caspian Sea where the Russians, Chinese, Iran, etc. have much more leverage. So no matter what Brzezinski or Thomas Friedman might say, U.S. imperialism is not going to abandon the Middle East.

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This summer PBS aired a 10 hour documentary called, "Russia’s War — Blood Upon the Snow". Under the pretense of reporting the history of the Soviet Union, especially the Soviet war against Hitler and fascism during World War II, this series hides and distorts the truth of class struggle in that part of the world. The series was originally made by British TV with full cooperation from Yeltsin, who wanted to discredit Stalin because of his popularity among workers, and among some group of rulers who want to return to the old state capitalist Soviet Union.

It is also aimed at covering up the atrocities that European and US imperialism have inflicted in the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe.

The birth of the Soviet State after the 1917 revolution is a mass history of working class heroism and communist leadership. For all its weaknesses, the new socialist system changed the whole world order as 160 million workers, and 1/6 of the world, were freed from capitalist rule. The PBS series was made to wipe out any understanding of that working class history. Specifically, the series attacks Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party that led the Soviet Union to victory over Hitler in 1945. When these rabid fascists invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 the Red Army crushed them and freed all of Europe from the yoke of Hitler’s Nazi tyranny.

Fascism, however, has developed again among the Western European imperialists and US imperialism. The emergence of so many industrial producers of goods, from steel to autos to electronics, has created a worldwide crisis of overproduction. The world is glutted with goods from a wide array of capitalists. Countries such as Brazil and Korea, long consumers of the imperialists goods, are now producers. The European and US imperialists cannot accept this.

They must maximize production, and profits, by attacking their own workers to squeeze out additional surplus. They also need to smash as much of the competing industrial production as possible. This means fascism at home and sharpening wars around the world. It is within this historical period that the liberals of PBS, loyal voices of the Rockefeller imperialists, attempt to wipe out real history.

In fact, their series tries to justify how capitalist democracy has destroyed the industrial might of the former socialist countries. This vicious lie, that capitalist rule is superior to the dictatorship of the working class, masks the absolute destruction of Eastern Europe as an industrial competitor. During the fall of socialism in the late 1980s, exports from Russia and Eastern Europe went up on average 200%. The goods from these producers flooded the European market because they were cheaper but just as well made.

This development terrified the Western European bosses, who had anticipated a flood in the other direction, and the exploitation of cheap labor for them. As a result they launched an offensive against the East destroying the industrial infrastructure built with the sweat blood and toil of generations of workers organized under socialism. Yeltsin and his cohort have blood on their hands. Through the IMF (International Monetary Fund), and other leaders of western finance capital, they were able to destroy industrial production in the former socialist countries.

Today’s capitalists first waged an economic fascist war against workers in the former socialist countries. Between 1989 and 1993, there were nearly a million deaths in Russia, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland caused by the impoverishment that accompanied the massive closings of industry. Then they began shooting wars. Hundreds of thousands have died in wars in Chechnya, Azerbaijan and other former Soviet republics in the Caucasus region. These "nationalist wars" have been a cover for control of the oil in that region. Oil exists in abundance from the area south of the Ural Mountains, in the heart of Russia, down to the Indian Ocean. All the interests in, and disputes over, Mid East oil actually extend well up into this area.

The most important of these, at the moment, is the war for Grozny in TechNet. Western capitalists, the "old" Russian capitalist class who held control of the state apparatus and still pretend to be communists, and the new Russian and Eastern European thugs out for profit are slugging it out at the cost of tremendous devastation for the workers of the region.

Big on their agenda is the grabbing of oil in the Trans Caucasus and real preparations for a war involving NATO. The so-called Communist Party of the Russian Federation is probably the most powerful nationalist force that could rally opposition to these plans. Sometimes, this group use Stalin’s popularity among Russian workers to gain support for their side. That was why Yeltsin wanted the TV series to discredit Stalin.

These bosses have to destroy Stalin so that they, like Hitler of old, can build the imperialist empire that is the goal of every capitalist. As these vile imperialists drag the world into devastating world war we, the working class, must learn from the strengths and weaknesses of the movement Stalin and the Bolsheviks built. We in PLP will carry our class to victory and bury the fascists for all time.

Just like Hitler tried to control Baku and the oil of the former Soviet Union, today’s capitalists are murdering workers for the same oil. The U.S. bosses just welcomed Heidar Aliyev, ruler of Azerbaijan. He came to Washington and met with Clinton and Gingrich. Aliyev is trying to play the U.S. against Iran and Russia, which wants to control the region.

The list of U.S. bosses and politicians trying to make money in Azerbaijan reads like, "a roster of the national security establishment." It includes Kissinger, Brzezinski, Dick Cheney, James Baker, Sununu, Brent Scowcroft. Amoco, Unocal, Exxon, Pennzoil are also involved in that country.

This is making the Russian bosses very angry, forcing even such a pro-U.S. drunk like Yeltsin to say: "Already the U.S. is declaring that it is their zone of influence. Our interest is weakening but the Americans...are beginning to penetrate this zone, and they declare it openly." (NY Times, 9/14).