Attention: Challenge is bi-weekly in August.
Intensified competition between the world's auto bosses means intensified exploitation of autoworkers and increased movement of jobs across national boundaries. GM workers in Flint have been on strike for more than six weeks against fascist speed-up and job losses. Meanwhile, GM workers in Mexico, often within yards of an armed border, are forced by unemployment and fascist conditions to work for one-tenth of what U.S. workers earn.
We came here to build an international communist party, led by industrial workers, for the seizure of power and to smash all borders. This is the only solution to the sharpening crisis of overproduction that is leading to war. The GM strike, like all class struggles, is our school for learning how to seize power. By fighting the bosses and union hacks, the cops and politicians, by organizing without regard for the bosses' borders, we can learn how to overthrow the fascist warmakers and build a communist world.
GM is the largest private employer in Mexico, with 100,000 workers. Its 30 factories are modern day concentration camps--beautiful on the outside with fascist conditions for the workers inside. We spoke with many workers who complained of very low wages, no unions, and repressive conditions. The Flint strike is crippling GM's production in Mexico, and 44,000 workers have been laid off here. In one plant, a worker said that about 70% of the workers had been laid off. At another factory, workers are working only two days a week and their pay has been cut in half. But everyone we talked to enthusiastically supports the Flint strikers. "We're all workers, and we have to fight back," said one worker. "The workers here have no organization. The parties and the unions are all corrupt," said another. "The working class needs leadership."
In two days, we were able to visit three of the 17 plants here. At one, we distributed over 500 flyers and 200 Challenges and met hundreds of workers eager to fight back. Many asked for the paper, and cheered us. When we returned for the second shift, we learned that the supervisors had thrown our literature away. As we began to pass out leaflets and Challenges again, the Gestapo showed their faces. We were apprehended by about ten supervisors and the cops. We were interrogated and some of our literature was taken away. Doing just what he was created to do, the cop told us our crime was, "giving the factory a bad name." Fortunately, we had a crowd around us and they let us go.
This valuable experience shows the fascist nature of the bosses, and their fear of communism. There is plenty of room here for many new maquiladoras (border factories). The bosses will build them to stay alive in the global market. GM is making billions in profits while losing market share, by cutting the jobs of U.S. workers who make $22/hour, and forcing workers here into poverty wages of 60cents/hour. These fascist conditions make Mexico "attractive" to GM. While sending work to Mexico is an issue among the UAW leadership, ending these fascist conditions is not! Only a mass communist movement, with the goal of seizing power, can destroy the bosses' plans, and their whole rotten system.
The border close by intensifies the fascist terror that bosses use to make their profits; it keeps workers working for less with no alternative. The build-up of the border patrol is obvious to everyone--dozens of workers have died in the current heat wave after crossing the border and trying to make it through the Texas desert. "Let's abolish all borders," one worker said. "With guns!" said another. "And with communist politics," we added.
Workers are hungry for communist ideas, and they are demanding more leadership from all of us. We can build the Party among GM workers on both sides of the border. There is tremendous revolutionary potential among industrial workers. We are putting the red flag in their hands, from Flint to Juarez!
The old communist movement made a deadly error on this score, by failing to put forward working class dictatorship as the main strategic goal of every mass struggle. The heroic Flint Sit Down Strike of 1937 is a case in point. This strike provided important, inspiring examples of solidarity and militancy. Workers came from many industries and over long distances to support it. It was very violent. But the old Communist Party, which provided its main political leadership, promoted fatal illusions about the nature of the government, urging President Roosevelt to use the National Guard against the company rather than against the strikers.
This mistake doesn't have to be repeated today. The capitalist state apparatus can never meet workers' needs. Society can serve the working class only under communism, when the Party and the state apparatus will be one and the same and will mobilize revolutionary workers to deal ruthlessly with all capitalist forces. This lesson must be hammered home again and again in the crucible of class struggle. The GM strike is a golden opportunity. Workers can use it as a training-ground to learn how to seize power, for instance, by swatting aside the union "leaders" and spreading the strike throughout the international auto industry. Shut down every auto manufacturer in the world! If GM succeeds in having the strike declared illegal, workers must break the bosses' law, keep the strike going, and continue to spread it! And, above all, recruit militant strikers to the Progressive Labor Party!
The first was a campaign-like rally for the Democratic candidate for governor. The other two were held at the Flint Metal Center and The Delphi Flint East plants. UAW President Yokich pushed the losing strategy of nationalism saying, "Let's keep these jobs in Flint, not in Mexico." In contrast, we pointed out how our Party had sent workers and youth to Juárez, Mexico to build international support and to spread the strike. We pointed out how much stronger the workers would be if we were united internationally across the bosses' borders. One worker on the picket line responded, "That would truly be something."
In certain respects our visit was a continuation of our previous solidarity work, only this time there were many more people, and more resistance to our ideas. This is to be expected from the workers who are following the anti-communist union hacks. But our young comrades were not prepared for this given the enthusiastic welcome we received on our previous visit. Throughout the day we evaluated our efforts and the young comrades overcame their subjective feelings like, "the workers don't want our ideas." And after some struggle and reflection, we continued to talk to many more workers and found that we had a lot to win by continuing our efforts.
We all recognized that these are important first steps to immerse ourselves in the struggles of industrial workers--a key revolutionary force. We talked about how their power to shut down the mightiest of corporations illustrates that a united revolutionary industrial workforce, along with a rebellious army under the leadership of a mass PLP, can topple the capitalist rulers.
A worker we met on our last visit thanked us for the first issue of Challenge she received in the mail. After the second rally, another worker came over to us to talk about the strike and his 20 plus years of experience at the Chevy plant. He pointed out how the workers could run the plant without the parasitic supervisors who don't know how to do anything but count parts and pay them. He gave us examples of the difficulty, and necessity, of fighting back against the bosses' schemes in the plant. He called himself a revolutionary and his friends, his fellow revolutionaries. He said he was scared of how much he sounded like us and how much we sounded like him. He blasted the union leadership for being in bed with the bosses and selling the workers out. In the end he took a bundle of Challenges for "his fellow revolutionaries." Workers like him will show the way in Flint. They are the future of revolution. As we continue to build ties with them in the heat of struggle our Party can and will grow.
The main issues here are outsourcing and job cuts, as GM continues its relentless drive to cut labor costs. Saturn is a huge complex of four buildings, covering almost five million square feet. The giant warehouse is "as big as a stadium." GM is spending $380 million on a 400,000 square foot expansion so that model changeover can take place without production ever stopping. While GM spends billions to "stay competitive," they are squeezing the workers to the breaking point.
The Saturn plant runs two shifts, 20 hours a day, six days a week. The workers produce almost 1,200 cars a day, about 290,000 a year. At the same time, GM has cut back in maintenance, causing more breakdowns on the line, making it harder to maintain production schedules. This has led to the issue which sparked the strike vote.
The regular quarterly production schedule calls for 64,000 cars. In the April-June quarter, the schedule was lowered to 59,000 to adjust for some weeks of down-time. Still the workers produced 61,000 cars which qualified them for a $1,400 bonus. After the fact, GM added the 5,000 cars they had originally dropped from the schedule, and told the workers they would get no bonus. This was the last straw. As the workers prepared to meet and take a strike vote, GM offered them $600 to cancel the meeting. Their answer was loud and clear.
When Saturn started production in the late 1980's, it was GM's answer to the Japanese "Team Concept." It was set up as a separate division from all other GM plants, with workers having no bumping rights to other plants. The UAW local union was also separate from all other GM locals, having a separate contract from the national GM contract. GM maintained the illusion of a "partnership" with the workers by involving them in developing better ways to produce higher quality cars. But now, that illusion is coming to an end.
The international crisis of capitalism, and the crisis of overproduction in auto, is putting an end to all the "teams" and "partnerships." Tens of thousands of auto workers in Korea and Japan are going from "lifetime" jobs to a life of unemployment. In order for the bosses to fight each other, they must attack us harder. Whatever illusions Saturn workers have about their "partnership" are being stripped away. The crisis is taking center stage. The party's over.
The sharpening struggle at Saturn is an opportunity for the PLP to win more auto workers to communist revolution, and open up a whole area of the U.S. to the growing communist movement. All workers, especially those in PLP, are also "glad" that Saturn workers are "finally taking a stand." And we intend to make the most of it.
Workers are mad! They will take a strike vote on July 31st and very likely another flag of GM's Labor-Management Teams will be torn to shreds. That, at least, is the impression we have gotten as we have leafleted and sold Challenges at the private road leading from the plant gates.
"You know," said a University of California (Berkeley) student, "every day on campus I dance around bringing up the word `communism' with the people I come across. But here I offer people a communist leaflet or Challenge and there is interest, support! It's a different world." The workers' reception to us inspired a younger high school student, too. One thing leads to another. A stand by one section of our class inspires others. Other union workers as well can catch the bug--militant action can be very infectious.
The strike had a lot of support among workers and youth, forcing the right-wing Hindu-chauvinist government of the BJP to meet with the strikers, after first refusing to do so. But, the BJP used the meeting to threaten the strikers with the army. Confronted by this use of fascist force, the union leaders and the leadership of the two fake leftist parties (the "Communist" Party Marxist and the "Communist" Party of India), both of which lead the two most powerful unions in India, caved in.
In this period of increasing war and fascism, workers cannot fight the bosses by relying on the old opportunist pro-capitalist leadership. A true communist leadership would have defied the fascist actions and organized the mass support the strikers had, to confront the armed might of the bosses (including organizing soldiers not to scab). This is the lesson that workers fighting back must grasp, from Flint to San Juan to Calcutta.
You learn more from your defeats than your victories, and there's plenty to learn from this strike! Two weeks ago, a support rally was held for the strikers, who heard Hammond's mayor, city council, and labor leadership declare, "We support you 100%." It didn't mean squat! By being passive in the face of court injunctions, scabs, and strike breakers, 10 brothers were fired, 30 scabs were permanently hired, and boss Scharf went in for the kill. As part of the "settlement," the union can't defend the fired workers, and can't discipline those that crossed the picket lines. All it can do is collect dues. Even the union lawyer said, "This is devastating. I've never seen anything like this before." This is a bitter pill to swallow. If we don't learn from it, we're in trouble!
On the bright side, the strike cost LaSalle over $3.2 million in sales, and Scharf was turned down for a $100 million bond for expansion. That is just a small taste of the power we have in our hands. The strike drew the support of rank-and-file workers and students all over the area. If we had called on this base of support to help us stop the scabs and defy the injunction, if we had sent strikers out to the mills to spread the strike and recruit an army of scab-smashers, we could have seen Scharf and raised him!
Scharf says, "Welcome to the new LaSalle." What he means is that the profit system is locked in a crisis of overproduction and vicious competition among bosses. In order to survive this crisis and compete, each boss must drive down wages and increase productivity. Short term super-profits only mask the crisis. GM made $27 billion in profits over the past five years, $12 billion over the last two. But their market share has dropped, and their cost-per-vehicle is still the highest among the major auto makers. This crisis is forcing GM to cut jobs, close plants, destroy work rules, and increase productivity. LaSalle is no different.
Capitalism in crisis means fascism, as in Nazi Germany. Not only are strikes becoming illegal, but "welfare reform" is creating an army of slave laborers, and racist police terror is filling the jails faster than they can build them. Ultimately, the fascist rulers will send us to war to save their crumbling empire. We can turn that war into a revolutionary struggle for communism and workers' power. Communism will produce to meet the needs of the international working class, not Scharf's profits, or GM's.
Trying to beat the bosses by using their courts, their politicians, and their union leaders, is a sucker bet. "The House" always wins. We don't want scraps from their table. We want to build a whole new world, without bosses and profits, scabs and strike breakers. We don't want to risk life and limb just to pay our bills. We want a world where the main job of society is to meet the needs of those who produce everything useful. Under capitalism, we produce everything and own nothing. Under communism, we will own and share all that we produce. LaSalle workers can turn a bad thing into a good thing by joining PLP, and turning their sights on the seizure of power. This is lesson number one.
Racist police terror is on a rampage here. Just over the weekend, a Latin worker was shot by the cops who came to intervene in a fight in a restaurant. All witnesses said that the cop didn't have to shoot him. A few weeks ago, cop Michael Myers shot Antoine Reed, a black squeegee man washing windows at East 139th Street and the Major Deegan Expressway. Fascist cop Myers shot him down just because he was black!
After going to JFK we went to Fordham Road, one of the Bronx' major shopping districts. Here we distributed another 200 Challenges and 400 flyers. Throughout the day people were more than willing to talk with us and 10 gave their names to be visited again. We finished the day with a picnic in Van Cortlandt Park. All in all it was a great day of political and social fun.
Strike actions often included hundreds of workers, but were limited to the bosses' rules and all injunctions were obeyed. Workers around the world, from Puerto Rico to Russia, from Korea to Flint, have been striking against the attacks caused by the worldwide crisis of capitalism. On the one hand, these strikes show the limits, and the futility, of trade unionism. At the same time, they hint at the power that could be unleashed if these were political strikes against fascism, war and the capitalist system itself.
This strike was different than previous SEPTA strikes. TWU leaders were shocked when SEPTA handed them an 84-page proposal on December 23rd. It was a completely rewritten contract, not a wish list like the union's 15-page offering. "When you add it all up, the magnitude of changes SEPTA is seeking to make--it's overwhelming," said a TWU Local 234 business agent.
These changes include cutting costs, while significantly increasing control and discipline of the workers. Mass transit is facing reduced federal funding due to the worldwide crisis of overproduction and the intensification of imperialist rivalry. The bosses project a budget deficit of about $350 million at SEPTA by 2003, or nearly half SEPTA's total revenues. "We need to get out of the distant past, reaching back almost to the beginning of the century. We need to come into the 21st century," SEPTA general manager Leary said. "The amount of change required will be accompanied by a fair amount of pain for the entire workforce."
The "pain" Leary refers to is increasing fascism. Whether in transit, auto, communications, or health care, the economic crisis has the bosses searching for cheaper labor, increased productivity, and more control of the workforce. Rather than attacking the crisis of the system, the TWU leadership focused on SEPTA's governing board of suburbanites and Republicans. This reduced the fight to "good" boss and "bad" boss. Different sections of the national and local ruling class may have different tactics to deal with the economic crisis, but they all have the common goal of increasing the fascist oppression of the working class. Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, endorsed SEPTA's threat to use scabs to run the subways. "Traditionally when a union strikes, management has a right to keep an operation going," Rendell said in an interview. "I wouldn't have any problem with it." (Philadelphia Daily News, 7/3)
SEPTA is following the national trend in transit by demanding more part-time workers, more privatization and sub-contracting, and trashing work rules to circumvent the union's seniority system. The issue of part-timers has been submitted to arbitration, and nothing is being said publicly about the issue of sub-contracting. The TWU accepted a "Management Rights" clause in the contract. Not all the details are known, but workers will vote on the proposed contract, July 24th.
We do not need strikes that are defensive actions to protect the narrow interests of one or another union--and which usually fails to do even that! Fascism and war are attacking hundreds of millions of workers around the world. We need political strikes against the cause of these attacks on our jobs and our lives. We need strikes against fascism and war and the capitalist system that causes them. We need strikes that can become schools for the working class to learn how to seize power and build a communist society.
shipping out to Bahrain in the next few weeks."
--Young Sailor
LOS ANGELES, July 20 -- The above quote is an example of the positive responses that the LA Summer Project got this past weekend when we went to sell papers and hand out leaflets to servicemen and women. Inspired by a Friday night forum on the escalating inter-imperialist rivalry and the urgent need for our Party to organize military men and women and their families, we headed out on Saturday morning to scout out the Navy scene and hopefully sell some papers. We also took a leaflet that included two Challenge articles written by GI's.
Initially, we were all pretty scared of selling to sailors--we thought they would be gung-ho patriotic and quick to attack our line. But sailors are, after all, our class brothers and sisters. Selling papers and talking to them turned out to be more like selling and talking to workers or students than it was different. These people are joining the service because they have no other options and, in the military, they are gaining first-hand knowledge of the growing inter-imperialist rivalry.
The sailors we spoke to did not harbor many illusions about coming war--they know that it is inevitable. We learned from a sailor that permission for the U.S. to have troops on Saudi Arabian soil ends in 2010. The U.S. is not wanted there and tension is mounting.
One serviceman said that he was certain that world war is coming, and that this one will be nuclear. He was willing to consider that the only solution to coming war is for the working class to join together and destroy the ruling class bomb-making machine. Although this sailor did not immediately agree that a communist world is possible, he did buy a paper. And his was not an isolated case. We sold papers to over half of the people that we spoke to. We saw many people poring over the leaflet. Even a very conservative serviceman who identified himself as an "imperialist Republican" recognized that the capitalist system is doomed to destruction, as history has proven all corrupt civilizations to be.
The experience of selling to sailors was good for all of us, and the positive responses of so many servicemen and women drove home the importance of our work in the military, and the potential for growth. U.S. imperialist dominance has already been attacked on the fronts of heavy industry, natural resources, and currency. The final manifestation of current imperialist rivalry will be a challenge to the U.S. military hegemony. It will be the sailors and soldiers themselves who must be called upon to turn the guns around and make capitalist world war into workers' revolution. As one sailor's son and brand new marine said, "Communism, huh? I'm for that!"
I have just finished reading Stephen Meyer's Stalin Over Wisconsin. The book is a history of UAW Local 234's attempts to organize the Allis-Chambers manufacturing plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The story begins in the mid-1930's with the UAW organizing effort. Before that there had been sporadic efforts by the AFL craft unions, but they had not been able to overcome the company's strong anti-union bias.
Harry Christoffel, a young electrical worker in the plant, strongly committed to worker solidarity and industrial unionism, and under the influence of the Communist Party, spearheaded the campaign. The company responded to this by promoting the AFL craft unions and building a company union. Harold Storey, the company's labor strategist, started gathering information on Communist Party influence in the plant.
The union organized a strong shop steward system that gave it a presence in every corner of the plant. They were able to struggle on the shop floor against management and right wing workers. This culminated in a major strike by more than 10,000 workers in 1941 that established the UAW as the main organization of workers in the plant. However, the strike did not win the union shop. Storey, the company spokesman, claimed the strike was engineered by the Communist Party to interfere with the U.S.'s effort to aid Britain in its war against Germany.
As World War II expanded, Local 234 moved towards the left as it took on the issues of racism and sexism in the plant. Women and black workers were developed as leaders in the Local. During the war, management was in a tactical retreat, but it was preparing for the war's end and a renewed attack on the left leadership of the Local.
In 1946, with its profits from the war securely in the bank, management provoked a strike with the outlook of destroying the union. The strike lasted 11 months and ended in defeat for the union. During the strike, management, the national CIO leadership, the federal government, and the local government all launched a vicious anti-Communist attack on the Local.
In the middle of the strike, a decertification election was held, which the union managed to win. The union officers were hauled before House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify about their relationship to the Communist Party. The Milwaukee Sentinel ran a two-month series about Communist influence in the Local. Dozens of workers were arrested in fights with the scabs. In the end, the workers were forced back to work. All the top union officials and many militant rank-and-file workers were terminated.
The company demanded a new representation election and again Local 234 won. This time Walter Reuther, the president of the UAW, put the Local into receivership. They then negotiated a contract, which gave management everything they wanted including the open shop.
The lessons of the Local 234 struggles are clear. Militant trade unionism cannot defeat the power of the bosses. Harry Christoffel was a heroic but a tragic figure. He led a tremendous struggle, he was fired from his job, and he spent three years in jail as a result of his efforts. Forty years later, when asked about the struggle he said, "To hell with the nickel, I am interested in much more than that, I want to make a better world."
As long as the bosses hold state power they can defeat any reform struggle the workers launch, if not immediately, then in the long run. Only building the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party can alter this process. If the old Communist Party had given better leadership to workers like Harry Christoffel in the '30s and '40s, we might be closer to a communist world today.
None of the construction is coming without controversy. However, that controversy centers not around the act of imprisoning more and more workers in the state (California currently imprisons over 150,000 people), but rather around the most effective way to get it done and which faction of the rich will benefit most. The powerful prison-guards union is thoroughly opposed to expanding use of private-sector prisons. That union is pushing an amendment to the California Constitution prohibiting state and local governments from contracting with private companies for prisons, fire fighting or police services: essentially for any "public safety function." Meanwhile, the private sector prison companies have "hired squads of the state Capitol's most experienced and expensive lobbyists and public relations experts" to defeat the amendment so dangerous to their interests. If it should pass, they will still be able to run their prisons in California, but only through contracts with the Federal Government's prison system. CCA and other prison-for-hire corporations have correctly analyzed the needs of this capitalist system and see that there is enormous profit to be made in the business of repression. Despite California's 14-year, $4.5 billion spending spree, building 21 new prisons, the state expects to run out of space by June 2000. They see dollar signs.
The private prison operations corporations are so thoroughly convinced of their rosy future under this system that they are willing to build "on spec" without signed contracts. None of the private prisons currently under construction in California have firm contracts with any government agency to purchase them. This faction of capital stands ready to take advantage of the fact that the ruling class is turning the screws tighter on workers and passing more laws to imprison us every year. They also know that times are getting harder for the middle class and especially for us in the working class and that voters are unlikely to pass more bonds to build prisons. The last prison construction bond passed was in June of 1990. As yet, there has been no official position taken by the state government toward privatizing prisons but interestingly, the State Department of Corrections has publicly come out opposing the proposed amendment prohibiting the state's use of private prisons.
The rulers and their representatives in government see that their system is decaying on numerous fronts and realize that they are losing their ideological hold on workers. Newer, larger, more efficient prisons are a cornerstone of their plan to maintain their death-grip on us workers. Everything that is created and produced in this society comes about because we workers make it. The power is in our hands to make communism a reality if we organize to bring it about. But capitalism is not going to simply be voted out of power, nor much less get tired and let us walk over and take it. The rulers are going to fight us every step of the way, and part of their plan for us as workers is to increase the level of incarceration in an attempt to hold us down. We must prepare ourselves more rapidly and in a more disciplined way in order to win this revolution for communism.
Russia is in the abyss of the capitalist crisis of overproduction. The constant bailouts by the IMF only postpone the crisis for a short while. From the coalfields of Siberia to the auto plants of Flint, workers need communist leadership to fight for a society without bosses of any kind.
All during 1997, Challenge had said war between the U.S. and Iraq was coming. And during the crisis from November 1997 to February 1998, it looked like war there was about to happen. But in the end, the Clinton camp blinked, and there was no war. What happened?
Basically, the main wing of the U.S. ruling class decided that they would lose from such a war. Not on the battlefield, but with the other imperialist powers--Europe, Russia, China and Japan--who totally opposed the U.S. takeover of Iraq. If the U.S. pursued the war, it ran the risk of uniting all the other imperialists in the world against it. U.S. bosses had already been bullying the other imperialists, especially the Europeans, to get their way on several important issues, including:
* the expansion of NATO over Russian objections;
* the takeover of several Central African countries by English-speaking soldiers with strong U.S. ties. Countries like the mineral-rich Congo (formerly Zaire) and Rwanda had long been in the European sphere of influence, especially the French sphere;
* the coddling of Israel over its refusal to make concessions to Palestinians or Syria. Clinton was unwilling to discipline Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who refused to make concessions that are in the strategic interest of the imperialists. These imperialists wanted Israel to reach a deal with Arab rulers, so Israeli forces can become part of the defense of the Persian Gulf oilfields (RAND did a major study in 1997 about how useful Israel would be for this).
So the other imperialists were complaining about U.S. arrogance. The pages of Foreign Affairs were full of warnings about "hegemonism." Faced with these objections to war, but having a strong interest in disciplining Saddam and controlling his oil, the Clinton crew came up with a breathtakingly stupid idea: have half a war. Clinton proposed a few days bombing and then to stop. The almost universal reaction, from the U.S. bosses and the ruling classes abroad, was vicious criticism. This "compromise" had all the disadvantages of a war (stirring up fears of U.S. hegemonism) and all the disadvantages of no war (Saddam would still be in power), with no advantages at all.
It would be nice to think that working class anti-imperialism also played a part in the decision not to go to war, but the evidence is mixed. At the famous Ohio State fiasco, the complaints from U.S. workers were partly anti-imperialist, but also partly objections to only going part of the way, to not taking out Saddam entirely. And similarly in the Arab world, there were a lot of workers ready to demonstrate against the U.S. war on Iraq, but the local ruling classes seemed more concerned that the U.S. would only go half-way.
What was most important in Clinton's failure to go to war was U.S. weakness. The U.S. was not in a political position to carry the war through to its local conclusion, which would be to occupy all of Iraq. Such a full war would:
* create a big backlash from other ruling classes (the main factor);
* deepen the split within the ruling class over how much the bosses should spend on defending Persian Gulf oil--the Republican right-wingers want to develop U.S. oil instead.
* run the risk of working class anti-imperialism, both in the U.S. and throughout the Middle East.
So what is Clinton's current strategy for Iraq? Ignore it, and hope it goes away. The fancy term is "deterrence." This plan involves giving up any effort to disarm Saddam or to use UN inspections to end his programs to build missiles and biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. Instead of trying to prevent him from acquiring the weapons--which is not working anymore, since other ruling classes refuse to support the U.S. on this--the U.S. would show Saddam that if he ever used such weapons, he would be crushed.
Will this plan work? For the short term, probably. The other imperialists will be happy with this scheme, because it offers the prospect that they can make deals with Saddam. Already, the U.S. has agreed to allow Saddam to export all the oil he can produce. UN Security Council Resolution 1143 set a "limit" of $10.7 billion a year, while Saddam admits he can't pump more than $8 billion (the UN agreed to let him import oil-field equipment to boost his production further). And Saddam is at present too weak to attack his neighbors. But give him a few years with all that oil money, and he will have a pretty powerful army. Meanwhile, the Saudi ruling class is debating whether they can trust the U.S. to defend them. Crown Prince Abdullah, who is set to take over when King Fahd dies, thinks the U.S. can't be trusted, so he wants to deal with Iran and Iraq, but that is taking time to arrange. In other words, Clinton bought a few years.
The Party's analysis of the Iraqi situation was basically correct. War is coming in the Persian Gulf, because it is a vital region for imperialists and because the U.S. position is too weak to be sustainable. We did exaggerate the prospect of war in the short term, because we overestimated U.S. strength. We thought the U.S. could win a war now, whereas in fact, the main wing of the ruling class decided that it could not. Perhaps in the future, the ruling class will be forced to fight a war to defend its position in the Gulf. But perhaps they will slowly pull out of the Gulf, the way the British did from 1961 to 1971. That will not change the move towards war; it will only change the cast of characters. Even without the U.S. in the Gulf, the local ruling classes will fight bloody wars among themselves. The one sure thing about modern-day capitalism is that workers lose in the bosses' horrible wars.
Mid West Comrade
As the letter implies, control of oil remains crucial to imperialism. The writer convincingly points to U.S. weakness as the main reason Clinton couldn't attack Iraq last winter. He refers, correctly, to two divisions within the U.S. ruling class as a sign of this weakness. There is a strategic split between the Rockefeller interests and the Oil Patch/New Money/domestic capitalist gang, as well as a sharp tactical division within the Rockefeller camp over how best to reverse U.S. imperialism's sharpening international decline.
Some "intellectuals" within the Rockefeller camp have recently floated the suggestion that the U.S. should abandon the Middle East. This is impossible. Even though the U.S. gets much of its oil from non-Middle Eastern sources (Venezuela, Mexico), Rockefeller & Co. still needs to dictate the conditions under which the competition will get oil and the price to be paid. Controlling Middle Eastern oil and Middle Eastern oil prices is crucial in this regard.
In the current crisis, this contradiction is rapidly intensifying. The crisis affects the oil industry as well. Improved technology and the Asian financial collapse have added to the glut of oil on the market. No less an authority than the Boston Globe (now owned by the New York Times) uses the dreaded "O" word: "The last time oil prices were lower than now...[was in]...1973," and "the reason can be summed up in one word: `overproduction' "(7/19). Other than the Asian financial meltdown (also due to overproduction), the Globe mainly blames the oil deal Clinton had to accept last winter allowing Saddam Hussein to increase Iraqi output dramatically. The letter mentions this deal but doesn't take its significance into full account.
According to the Globe, the current arrangement with Iraq means "2 million barrels a day on the world market without regard to price." Iraqi oil is among the worlds cheapest, and this is crucial. Under capitalism, the cheapest commodity determines the price of all other commodities in its class. As the first Rockefeller proved while building his empire, given oil's crucial importance, whoever controls the cheapest sources can also dictate significant aspects of all industrial production.
U.S. imperialism simply can't stand idle indefinitely while Iraqi oil makes a comeback and Rockefeller's Russian, Chinese and European rivals cut deals for it, while Exxon and Mobil look on from the sidelines. The letter rightly points to many of the reasons for which Clinton couldn't intervene militarily last winter to prevent this development. It also shows the weakening of the U.S. position vis-à-vis other Middle Eastern bosses, particularly the Saudis. But there are no vacuums in politics. If Rockefeller pulls out of the Middle East, someone else will push in. This won't happen peacefully.
The main wing of U.S. bosses is shredded with disputes over how best to solve these and other problems. Over the long run, this internal contradiction makes Middle Eastern war more, rather than less, likely. We may have underestimated U.S. weakness last winter, but we were right to try to put the Party and the working class on a war footing. Other imperialists and local bosses may well have their own scores to settle in the Persian Gulf, as the letter states. Whenever or however the shooting starts, U.S. imperialism will be right there as well.
As we have often said, imperialist war offers the working class and the Party a great opportunity to turn the guns around and organize for communist revolution. Weak political morale in the U.S. military, often described in Challenge, is the "dirty little secret" underlying U.S. rulers' strategic weakness. They will have to go to war, in the Middle East and elsewhere, with soldiers who aren't committed to fight and die for the profits of Exxon et al. This contradiction presents us with a tremendous opening, but we have to be ready for it. Part of getting ready is keeping our collective guard up. Rockefeller and Middle Eastern oil are locked in a death-dance. We can't predict the date of the next oil war, but we're sticking to our formulation of "sooner rather than later," and we have a responsibility to prepare constantly for this development.
CNN was launched by Ted Turner in 1978 as a direct challenge to the Big Three networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC. Turner picked up the anti-Establishment torch from Joseph Coors, whose own attempt at a fourth network called Television News, Inc., was failing. Turner made Reese Schonfeld who had run Television News, Inc., president of CNN. Coors, the beer mogul, has been trying for decades to break into the domestic oil business. The Rockefeller-dominated Environmental Protection Administration has stifled Coors repeatedly.
The Rockefeller interests clearly saw Turner as a threat to their control of the media. In 1987, 14 companies, led by Time Warner, bought up a third of Turner's TBS, but Turner remained defiant. He answered Time executives' criticism of his "wild" (i.e. openly fascist) ideology by cozying up to Saddam Hussein and helping organize a "world peace" conference in Baghdad.
The Turner-Saddam romance blossomed during the Gulf War. CNN was the only major U.S. news group to remain in Iraq during the war. Turner news star Peter Arnett filed nightly reports from Baghdad, many of which exposed U.S. genocide. The most famous was the story that the U.S. Air Force had bombed a babies' milk factory. Several Rockefeller loyalists in the Senate began to question Arnett's loyalty. Meanwhile, Bob Simon, a CBS reporter, remained Hussein's prisoner until the war's end. CNN also made Bibi Netanyahu, the most anti-Rockefeller of recent Israeli politicians, Israel's main mouthpiece during the war.
But Rockefeller interests had been making big inroads into Turner. In 1988, a Chase Manhattan-led eight bank consortium arranged nearly $1 billion credit for TBS. This debt replaced the junk bonds Turner had floated with the help of Wall Street upstarts Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. In 1995, Time Warner completed its buyout of TBS, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary but leaving Turner a major shareholder, a vice-chairman of the overall firm, and TBS head.
The fight over exposing or covering up U.S. military atrocities reflects a bitter split between Time/Rockefeller and Turner loyalists within the company. This has everything to do with deep conflicts of interest within the ruling class and nothing to do with phony standards of journalism. The Turner forces don't want foreign wars that benefit the Rockefellers' desperate need to rule the world. Both are fascist murderers. Ironically, Turner, who is the more openly fascistic of the two, is trying to come across as a progressive by exposing U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and Iraq, sponsoring the Goodwill Games and showing off Jane Fonda. But workers shouldn't allow ourselves to be taken in by the bosses' lies.
Truth and objectivity are class questions. Challenge remains the only newspaper that prints class truth workers can use in our struggle to destroy the vile, murderous profit system.
(From Porter Bibb's biography of Turner: It Ain't as Easy as It Looks, 1993; Hank Whittemore: CNN, The Inside Story, 1990)
The big news out of Clinton's China trip was missed by most reports, which concentrated on minor points. Sure, Clinton ignored human rights dissidents, but that has been true for years. Not long after becoming president, Clinton realized that "coddling dictators"--the policy for which he criticized Bush--is often good for U.S. imperialism. He endorses "engagement" with rich dictators. Only poor ones get his lectures on democracy, which he gives to preserve the fiction that U.S. rulers care about ordinary people (Right: tell that to the Iraqi people).
And sure, Clinton got nowhere on promoting U.S. business deals. China is teetering on the edge of the cliff that the rest of Asia has already fallen off of--its banks are broke, its export markets are drying up, its economy may not grow at all this year (Chinese statistics tell even worse lies than most capitalist statistics, so they will claim some growth). All Clinton got to announce was a few deals that had long been planned.
For decades, the U.S. ruling class has made ambiguous statements about Taiwan, saying several inconsistent things at the same time. Clinton strongly hinted at plans to sell out Taiwan. The Taiwanese ruling class is worried that Clinton won't stop a Chinese invasion. Count on them to contribute $$$$ to the Republicans in 2000 (they are old hands at this and know how to keep their role hidden). This could also spur them to revive their nuclear weapons program.
But the real news was Clinton's selling out Japan. The Japan-U.S. alliance has been the heart of America's strategy for Asia. As one former Prime Minister of Japan put it, Japan has been America's unsinkable aircraft carrier--and the Japanese paid for the U.S. troops (5% of the U.S. military budget is now paid by Japan). Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the strategic rationale for the U.S.-Japanese alliance is anti-Chinese. In 1992-93, the Japanese ruling class went through a big debate about whether to maintain the U.S. alliance or to strike out on their own. They decided that China was too much for them to deal with, plus Japan went into an economic depression. The Japanese ruling class made some big changes to move closer to the U.S. and to be explicit about the anti-Chinese focus, including a controversial change to the military pact in which Japan agreed to help the U.S. in the defense of Taiwan. (The wording was ambiguous, but when the Chinese complained, Japan refused to deny that this was their intent.)
Against this background, here comes Clinton repeatedly calling the relationship with China a strategic partnership--a term that the Japanese have asked for, without success, for decades to be used to describe the U.S.-Japanese relationship. Clinton agreed not to stop in Tokyo on his way to or from China, breaking the precedent of U.S. presidents stopping to brief their allies after trips to China or Moscow. Clinton's cabinet members repeatedly criticized Japan for this and that--mostly economic matters (as if China was doing what U.S. rulers wanted economically). In conclusion, look for Japanese rulers to hedge their bets and soften their anti-China stance.
A Reader
Dear Challenge:
We thought the pictures of the walkout at Manual Arts High School were pretty good, they helped us to sell a lot of Challenges. But the best thing in that week's issue was the editorial. It helped all of us take more seriously what is going on in the current period and our responsibility to respond to it. Things aren't always simple. Although we have a lot of weaknesses at Manual Arts,, one of our strengths is that we have had a long term outlook of political struggle with a few young comrades over complicated questions. If we didn't, students wouldn't have been in the position to lead a walkout around the line that only communist revolution will stop racist attacks such as Prop. 227 and the lynching in Jasper.
Sometimes the Challenge edito