“We did our job and now we’re going home,” says a GI. This is the theme of “Restrepo,” a National Geographic documentary which describes the 15-month tour of duty of an Army platoon whose job was to secure a valley in a mountainous area of Afghanistan so that a road could be built there to “help” the people of the valley.

“Restrepo” follows in the footsteps of the Oscar-winning film, “The Hurt Locker” which tells the story of caring, capable men assigned to a U.S. Army bomb-disposal unit. It brings to life the U.S. ruling-class slogan to “support the troops even if you oppose the war.“ But the only way to support working-class troops is for PLP to organize in the military to turn the guns around on the warmakers. The only way the working class wins is when we build a Red Army to fight for a communist revolution.

In this film we are asked to feel the camaraderie of men at war,  the grief they feel at the death of one of their platoon members and their joy at the death of one of the insurgents. They all “have a job to do” and they do it without any questioning of the Afghan war or their role in it. It recalls the oft-repeated line in “The Godfather” movie that “it isn’t personal, it’s just business.” The ruling class needs soldiers to believe this so they will continue killing their working-class brothers and sisters, in the bosses’ widening wars for profit and control.

In the film, one of the Army’s strategies is to win over the people in the village near their camp. The Army must apologize for the mass destruction of the villagers and their resources. The Army replaces the officer held responsible for the atrocities. His replacement meets with village elders and tells them that he won’t make the same mistakes as the previous officer and that the elders should trust him.

This pushes the idea that the military as a whole is doing the right thing, and is for the villagers. By replacing the one “bad” officer, we are to believe the villagers will be protected.

After their 15-month tour of duty, the soldiers go home, but the village and its elders are still there with the insurgents and a new group of soldiers who they are supposed to trust. The U.S. troops eventually withdraw from the valley after 50 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The documentary neglects to document how many civilians and insurgents were killed or how much destruction the U.S. military caused.

“Restrepo,” like “The Hurt Locker,” is a description of U.S. military duty as “just another job.” The men are shown as accepting the necessity of fighting imperialist wars for control of oil, oil pipelines and new-found mineral wealth. Neither the men nor the documentary questions the politics or morality of the war. Couched as “objectivity,” this allows ruling-class justifications for the war to go unquestioned and therefore dominate the discussion.

We need to bring CHALLENGE’S understanding of U.S. imperialism to high school students who will be joining the military and we need to win soldiers to PLP so that these wars will not be “business as usual.” Then we can make new documentaries that will tell the story of working-class rebellions and communist victories. 

In July 1967, one of the most stirring struggles of multi-racial working-class unity occurred when 15,000 black and white workers struck the Newport News (Va.) Shipbuilding Co., the world’s largest shipbuilder. The walkout was initiated by mostly black workers in the transportation department and followed by virtually all the company’s black and white workers. It eventually turned into a full-scale rebellion — similar to the big-city black rebellions that were sweeping the U.S. — against the loan companies and pawn shops surrounding the shipyard, sleazy merchants who had been bleeding the workers dry for years.

The workers had never struck before and were striking “against the national interest,” given the huge Navy contracts in the middle of the Vietnam War. It occured in a state with a 350-year history of racism, going back to the first arrival of black slaves in 1609.

They faced a pro-company press, the mayor, local police, Governor, State troopers, a company union and a judge’s Taft-Hartley injunction. Yet the workers, depending on their own rank-and-file leadership, organized a wildcat strike that shut the state’s largest corporation tight.

Black Workers Lead a
Wildcat Walkout

It began when three workers in the transportation department, two black and one white, refused overtime as a protest to press demands over grievances and unequal pay and were suspended. After a meeting of 239 mostly black workers in that department, 75 on the night shift walked out and set up a virtually all-black picket line. Although the department represented only 1% of the entire work-force, they were the main artery that kept the yard running.

The black and white workers on the incoming day shifts respected the picket line and the yard ground to a halt. The engineers on the Chesapeake & Ohio R.R. refused to move trains into the yard and the teamsters refused to drive their trucks past the wildcat picket line.

Virtually the entire yard’s workers soon met and voted 4 to 1 to walk out. They defied the court injunction ordering them back. Mass picketing stopped any scabs from entering. When a cop’s police car rammed the pickets, injuring two workers, the strikers launched a hail of rocks, bottles and bricks and soon the cops were huddling against a fence.

Open Rebellion: ‘They attacked us like they were brothers…’

Then open rebellion ensued. Multi-racial groups of workers smashed the pawn shops and loan companies that had been bleeding then dry for years. Soon the city’s entire 150-man police force with police dogs arrived and were met with a barrage of rocks and bottles. Then 3,500 strikers squared off against the cops charging with guns drawn and drove them back. One police official said the rebellion was “thoroughly integrated. [They] attacked us like they were brothers.”

Nine cops were hospitalized and five police cars burnt or damaged. The state troopers were ordered out onto the battlefield and sent dozens of bloodied workers to the hospital, but the yard was still crippled.

Finally the Governor ordered out more troopers to escort scabs into the yard, wading into the pickets in brutal fashion. With no real organized leadership, increasingly violent threats from the Governor and intervention of federal mediators, the workers were forced back with only the “promise” that their grievances “would be dealt with.”

But it was a historic lesson in multi-racial working-class struggle. As one worker declared, “Workers have gotta learn that they have to stand up or they’re dead…” 

The racism spewing forth from Arizona’s bosses and their politicians is not new. In order to drive down all workers’ wages and keep them fighting each other rather than uniting, capitalism has always singled out a section of the working class for greater oppression. With increasing fascism in Arizona and worldwide (see CHALLENGE, 8/4), it is helpful to review past history, during which every governor and president has been committed to enforcing capitalism and using racism to divide the working class. This emphasizes the working class’s one task: to unite and destroy capitalism and the racism on which it depends.

Copper Bosses Feared Miners
Militancy and Unity

In 1903, many strikes and other militant actions occurred in Arizona’s mines. Perhaps the most important was the Morenci strike, organized by three workers, two Mexican and one Italian. Armed workers seized company offices and shut the mine for three days. The three organizers were jailed, but the workers’ unity — as well as further strikes in Arizona and Mexico against U.S. copper companies) — scared the bosses. The latter began a campaign of intimidation and harassment.

One tactic was accusing Mexican union organizers of being “horse thieves,” a very serious crime then. On August 20, 1914, Mexican unionists so charged fought with a posse of anti-unionist and anti-Mexican forces. The LA Times reported that four white men and twelve Mexicans were killed. Infuriated at the death of posse members, white residents from the town of Ray invaded the Mexican section, driving men, women and children from their homes. Reports said that the racists “were searching the hills near Ray…bent upon killing every Mexican they meet.”
Agitation to exclude Mexicans continued throughout that decade.

Racism Follows the Flag

In 1914, the rulers passed the Arizona Anti-Alien Labor Law requiring 80% of a firm’s employees to be native-born. Arizona’s newspapers equated the law to patriotism, editorializing, “The Flag and Eighty Per Cent.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional, holding it would exclude immigrants from Arizona, saying immigrants had the right to work and that the law discriminated against lawful residents.

Then, as now, a section of the ruling class understood that U.S. capitalists need immigrant labor, both documented and undocumented, to exploit for super-profits. Currently, this Obama-led section wants to marginalize immigrants, to enforce lower wages and terrible living conditions, not deport them.
During that era, union organizing was increasing rapidly, but in the Arizona mines, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) did little to support it. (Twenty years later this union became communist-led and organized fierce strikes against the copper barons.)

Racism towards miners from Mexico and fear of their militancy kept the UMMSW at bay, but the International Workers of the World (IWW) emerged, organizing 1,000 members into its Local 800.
On June 26, 1917, the local struck for improved working conditions, higher wages and an end to discrimination against union members. The copper bosses responded violently to this threat to their profits.

On July 5, about 2,000 vigilantes rounded up more than 1,000 workers and family members, loaded them into railroad cars (provided by the railroad bosses), and dumped them in the middle of New Mexico’s desert, 200 miles away. Very few ever returned to their Bisbee homes.

The copper bosses not only went after union members, but also immigrants from Mexico, who they feared were becoming more militant as unionization spread. In a campaign to rid the mines of Mexican workers, in April 1921, they shipped up to 1,800 Mexican men, women and children by train from Morenci Southern station to the U.S.-Mexico border. Simultaneously, tens of thousands were deported from the agricultural fields, and literally dumped across the border.

Bosses Still Using Racism
to Divide Workers

There are striking similarities between Arizona’s past and present. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently claimed “discovery” of “bodies in the desert” either “buried or beheaded,” linking the crime to “illegal” immigration. Even some of Arizona’s compliant press disputed her claim. Brewer also claimed that “illegal aliens” were “muling” — transporting drugs into the U.S.

Meanwhile, Jason Ready, a well-known neo-Nazi, has begun organizing armed vigilantes to patrol the border. Ready is a close associate of Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, the sponsor of Arizona’s current racist law, and of Maricopa fascist Sheriff Joe Arpaio. All have close ties with the Federation of American Immigration Reform.

Brewer, Arizona’s vile racist governor, and Barack Obama, whose Justice Department sued to nullify certain aspects of Arizona’s law, are more alike than different. They have different tactics and serve different bosses, but both are wholeheartedly committed to maintaining and defending the racist capitalist system.
Brewer’s repulsiveness is evident. But Obama continues to enjoy popular support while further militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border. He has ordered use of the same Predator drones that murder innocent Afghans and Pakistanis to monitor the border and recently dispatched 1,000 National Guard troops to stations in California, Arizona and Texas.

As CHALLENGE indicated (8/4), the Obama administration has increased deportations to a level exceeding the Bush years. Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, smiling while slaughtering workers at the border and worldwide.

The working class has nothing to gain from supporting either side in this battle. The fascists openly target our Latino brothers and sisters while the liberal politicians hide their racism behind the DREAM Act and Comprehensive Immigration Reform, both tactics to coerce young immigrants into the U.S. military (see CHALLENGE Supplement, 6/23) Neither group wants workers to understand that our class has no nations. We have a common international enemy, the bosses, and only by uniting across their borders can we defeat them. J

Sources:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion/124-124/2505-race-war-in-arizona
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation
Francisco Arturo Rosales: “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement,” (pages 113-116).

On July 29, people across the country were scheduled to travel to Arizona to protest that state’s racist anti-immigrant law (SBI070) which would require local cops to stop individuals they “suspect” of being undocumented immigrants and turn them over to immigration authorities.

Recently, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit to stop the law from taking effect. The Obama Administration’s stance against this law, and promotion of Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), appears to oppose anti-immigrant racism. However, virtually simultaneously Obama also asked Congress for $500 million to add 1,000 agents to the Border Patrol and 160 to Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Additionally, two more aerial drones would be deployed to continue the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border. This expansion adds to the 1,200 National Guard troops Obama already plans to send to the border.

The Obama Administration has adopted this seemingly contradictory position because it is concerned with winning workers, especially Latino workers, to buy into U.S. patriotism and support U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, at the same time, U.S. capitalism needs to control and exploit these very same workers. That’s why Obama supports the DREAM Act — which essentially promises U.S. citizenship in exchange for military service. Yet, since the beginning of his presidency, deportation rates have climbed above those reached under the Bush Administration.

According to internal memos obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, ICE officials set deportation quotas and spelled out how agents could meet them. Thus, Arizona’s racist law hardly approaches the level of anti-immigrant racism the Obama administration already is enforcing.

Don’t Just ‘Boycott Arizona’ — Smash Capitalism!

Since the early 19th century, U.S. imperialism’s legacy in Latin America has been one of destroying workers’ lives on both sides of the border. Imperialist economic policy has pushed Latino workers around like pawns on a chessboard, exploiting their labor when needed and then unceremoniously deporting them. The last major deportations were in the late 1940s.and ‘50s. The U.S. has had a militarized border program since the 1980s, serving not to keep immigrants out but to keep them unable to fight low wages and abuse. This resurgence of deportations under Obama is partially aimed at using immigrants as scapegoats for capitalist-created unemployment, but most importantly it’s another racist measure aimed at further terrorizing those immigrant workers who remain.

It is capitalism that generates such apparent racist contradictions, resulting in attacks on workers, whether they’re on the streets, in Arizona’s ICE detention camps or on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Governor Jan Brewer is certainly a vile racist, but she is only one cog in a machine that is rotten to its core. Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, these politicians serve the interests of the capitalist class and U.S. imperialism.

The international working class must unite, not only in such protests but also for the long haul, to wipe out the capitalist system that makes Arizona’s SBI070, CIR and the DREAM Act possible and build a communist society that meets all workers’ needs and ends racism for good.

PLP’s Summer Project was joining this July 29 protest, not to beg Obama for mercy but to expose him as part of the growing racism and terror workers face, linking that to the need to destroy the capitalist system that perpetuates this violence. (Full story next issue)