• Leaflets-ENG

All workers around the world are working harder than ever and are getting less and less of the value of our labor while the ruling classes rake in massive profits. We are robbed of our time and wages. Inflation and state sponsored violence is killing us and forcing us to leave our homes. The situation in the U.S. is getting more dire by the minute. Millions of working people cannot afford to put food on the table or  get medical care. Many more are one paycheck away from being homeless. Capitalism is threatening to turn us all into climate refugees.

When workers are misled by racist rhetoric against our asylum-seeking siblings we forget one important detail: Capitalists (the profit making exploiter class) and their politicians  don't care about any of our lives; we are cheap and disposable to them. Today, it is our migrant, asylum seeking class siblings. Tomorrow, it could be you and your family who are forced to flee the U.S. because of war, climate, or economic crisis. We are one world, one international class. Borders are artificial lines written with the blood of our class.The ruling class uses national borders to control their profits and take ownership of our labor. 

The rulers put up their deadly border walls and guards to keep workers out, but the borders are always porous for weapons, money, and drugs. Imperialist bosses and their militaries know no borders and neither should we. When capitalist disasters or violence strikes it is we who always have each other’s back, not the government or our bosses. We care for and defend our class with mutual aid, antiracist, antisexist fightback, solidarity, and unity. 

Progressive Labor Party has been supporting Mutual Aid efforts in Floyd Bennett Field called Welcome Migrants. These are the seeds we need to build a better world—a communist world where workers own and control all the fruits of our labor and can solve the world’s problems without money or racist and sexist bosses. In a communist world workers will be free to move and receive the benefits of society from each according to need. Together, we could smash these lethal borders once and for all. Join us! 

It’s not just Klansman Trump or Holocaust Harris, it’s capitalism

Trump winning the presidency is a scary thing —for his divisive gutter racism and attacks on women’s health, for his threat to deport millions of migrating workers and the list goes on. His motto is drill baby, drill and get the migrants out of here so “America is Great Again.” He plans to force Medicaid recipients, many disabled, to work or die. Even so, Kamala Harris' presidency would have been a greater danger to our class. She has shown her true colors in her unwavering support for fascist Israel and the bloodbath in Ukraine, in her embrace of concentration camps at the Mexican border, in her stated pride that the U.S. is producing more oil and gas than ever before. She is ready and willing to sign on the dotted line for World War III.

Don’t mourn Trump, fight back and defend each other

For the millions of workers duped into voting for Harris or Trump, millions more rejected an unhinged racist, open fascist and a covert genocidal fascist Harris. We don’t deny another Trump presidency is depressing, but we are more powerful when we unite and fight back against our common enemy. We must raise the consciousness of those who voted for Harris, and of those who will soon regret voting for Trump, and rebuild the only movement proven to stop the advance fascism— the revolutionary communist movement— and break the chains that bind us once and for all. Join Progressive Labor Party!

• Pamphlets-ENG

Workfare - Slave Labor U.S. Style

A Progressive Labor Party Pamphlet

1. Workfare - Slave Labor U.S. Style
2. Why slave labor workfare now?
3. Bosses welfare cuts drive down all workers wages
4. Workfare slave labor is here now
5. Union leaders -- wardens of slave labor workfare.
6. Racism and sexism distract workers from dangers of workfare
7. Capitalism: Millions starve in midst of plenty
8. Capitalism: work or starve Communism: work from commitment
9. Smash slave labor workfare with communist revolution

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10. Nazis invented workfare

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Clinton's workfare program would put a smile on Adolph Hitler's face. They tell us workfare will "give people jobs," that "Work Makes You Free." That was the slogan the Nazis posted at the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp. "Free" all right; free labor for the bosses to make maximum profits. Twenty thousand slave laborers were at the heart of Hitler's rocket program.

But Hitler, representing Germany's big bosses, didn't enforce fascism solely with storm troopers. They also passed laws which mandated death through euthanasia and slave labor, among other murderous acts.

Fascism, U.S. style, has Clinton acting for bosses with a combination of 100,000 new cops nationally; racist attacks on immigrants and black and latin youth; and strike-breaking with workfare and immigration laws.

Why slave labor workfare now?

The US bosses along with the rest of the capitalist world are in a desperate crisis. Economic competition is intensifying worldwide forcing the bosses to cut costs and produce more. The result is a falling rate of profit. They are in a desperate battle with Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Russian, and other bosses for control of resources and markets. Ultimately this fierce worldwide capitalist competition can only be settled as imperialist rivalry has been decided in the past -- by war. The U.S. ruling class must institute fascism as a way to discipline the working class. They will set us up to march off as cannon fodder and fight other workers so that one or another set of bosses can come out on top. Workfare slave labor is one more fascist weapon in the bosses' arsenal to prepare us for a war to save their profit system.

To succeed in this worldwide competition, the US bosses must squeeze the working class to the wall. To secure maximum profits and beat off all competitors, the bosses must inevitably drag down the workers' standard of living, depressing wages and eliminating benefits any way they can. That's why Clinton has said that we must "reconcile ourselves ... to having a higher percentage of people at lower wage levels." (Rolling Stone Magazine, September 1992).

Under capitalism, all workers are wage slaves. We are all just a paycheck or two away from being homeless. Capitalism is based on wage slavery. We workers create all value but the bosses steal most of it in the form of profits. The only way we can abolish this wage slavery is by abolishing the wage system itself -- which means destroying capitalism and all bosses. Only communism can accomplish that. Only communism -- workers in control -- can improve workers' lives.

Bosses welfare cuts drive down
all workers wages

The bosses are creating an army of unemployed starving workers who will be desperate to work at any wage. The boss can then lower wages for employed workers by saying, "Either you accept these cuts or you're out on the street. There are hundreds who would work for me at that wage."

The bosses are creating four new divisions in their army of unemployed to use as a club to drive down the wages for the whole working class.

Division 1: Workers cut off welfare completely. Millions of workers will be cut from welfare roles when the new Clinton welfare law goes into effect. This law tells states they must kick 25% of families off welfare next year, 35% by 1999, and 50% by the year 2002 in order to receive welfare grants. In addition there will be no public assistance for families without a minor child, and no assistance at all after being on welfare for five years, whether or not you have a job.

Division 2: Documented ("legal") and undocumented immigrants. The new Clinton immigration and welfare laws will cut Social Security, SSI disability benefits, and food stamps for documented and undocumented immigrants. These workers will also be subjected to arbitrary deportation. In California alone, 410,000 legal immigrants will lose food stamps and 230,000 blind, elderly and disabled will lose SSI, their sole income. All immigrants (except those with refugee status or those already working for 10 years) will be cut off from public assistance as of January 1, 1997. These desperate immigrant workers can then be used as another club to threaten employed workers and force them to accept still lower wages.

Division 3: Prison Labor. The bosses' criminal injustice system has created over one million potential prison laborers. They can be used as contract labor at wages as low as twenty cents an hour. Thirty-six states are now using prison slave labor, producing anything from Annie Sez clothing in Oregon to acting as TWA telephone agents in Arizona.

Division 4: Workfare. The bosses are forcing the over two million workers who remain on welfare into slave labor jobs, making them work off their welfare checks and food stamps at anywhere from 79 cents an hour in Mississippi to $3.12 an hour in New York City; all well below even the puny federal minimum wage. These workfare workers replace union-scale jobs at one-fifth the pay! If they refuse, they starve outright.

Workfare slave labor is here now

Workfare fascism is not a future program. It's well under way. Over 40,000 are already in these slave labor jobs in New York City alone, with 100,000 more slated by 1997. They are cleaning parks, streets, offices and hospitals, and processing paper work. That's 100,000 jobs that used to be paid at a rate three to five times the amount received by workfare workers.

The NYC Dept. of Social Services lost 5,000 full-time jobs and added over 2,000 slave laborers. Certain titles are no longer filled. The bosses just hire workfare workers. Sanitation lost at least 1,500 jobs since 1993 while adding 4,000 part-time slave laborers. The Parks department dropped 760 full-time jobs but uses about 5,400 part-time slave laborers.

Beyond New York, in the shadow of the White House, more than 20,000 Washington women on welfare are being forced into workfare, while that city loses 10,000 regular jobs annually. In Michigan, one-third of the work-force in Wayne County Social Service offices are unemployed workers working for their welfare checks. In San Francisco, workers on welfare have been cleaning buses for years.

Workfare slave labor jobs will become the future jobs for our youth, whether imprisoned in the regular jails or in the workplace concentration camp of workfare. It all adds up to Auschwitz, USA.

Union leaders -- wardens of
slave labor workfare.

Union leaders have endorsed the bosses' slave labor workfare. These traitors, lieutenants of the capitalist class, are trying to deliver the working class into the arms of fascism in the name of saving jobs. Supporting workfare will not provide job security. There can be no job security under capitalism. Economic crisis, mass unemployment and racism are built into the bosses' profit system. The bosses proclaim that a healthy economy, that is healthy for them, requires at least 6% unemployment. In the U.S. that's eight million out of work; and the actual figure is more than twice that.

These union traitors turn job security into its opposite. They use it to depress wages to the lowest possible level, which in turn is used as a threat to all those earning above that level to bring them down also. They disarm workers from rebelling, from turning to revolutionary communism. Thus, in the world according to Clinton, the AFL-CIO and their Wall Street masters, fascism -- job security via workfare -- is good.

For example, the New York City Local of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) recently signed a union contract with the Transit Authority (TA) allowing the TA bosses to use thousands of workfare workers to clean subways and buses to work off their welfare checks and food stamps. The TWU agreed to let the next 586 cleaning jobs go by attrition, in exchange for a no layoff clause -- but no layoffs only for the life of this contract. Even then, a letter dated September 18 from the union to the TA implies that in the event of a "financial emergency," all bets are off. Layoffs could come even during this contract. On top of all that, Point 9 of the agreement says: "The aggregate number of WEP [Work Experience Program] participants that may be utilized is not subject to limitation." The TA bosses boast that this fascist contract will save them $100 million.

An individual welfare recipient cleaning these NY subways receives in welfare what works out to $81.25 per week. Forced to work off that amount for 26 hours a week, his or her hourly wage is $3.12. The union rate for those 586 jobs is $16.62 an hour, more than five times the slave labor wage! And that doesn't include the cost of benefits a TWU cleaner receives. Workfare workers get NO benefits. It's not hard to figure out that the bosses will be reaping huge profits by saving tens of billions in wages and benefits across the country, while millions of workers will be pushed into the lower depths of poverty. Hitler would have been proud of this reform.

Racism and sexism distract
workers from dangers of workfare

The bosses must convince large numbers of workers that welfare cuts and workfare won't hurt them. "We are only cutting benefits from those who don't deserve it any way," they smile with a crocodile's grin. They push the lie that only minority workers benefit from these programs.

The bosses invented racism in slavery times to divide the working class and enforce their rule. First racist job discrimination, last hired, first fired, makes millions of non-white workers unemployed and drives them onto welfare. Racist police terror and CIA-produced crack-cocaine floods the ghettoes and frames hundreds of thousands of black and Latin youth and young adults into prisons, to be used as contract slave labor. Then racist stereotypes are used to justify welfare cuts and workfare, as well as attacks on undocumented and documented immigrant workers. This racism is the cutting edge of fascism and is used to drag down conditions for the entire working class.

Sexism is also used to push these attacks. The bosses push another big lie, that mothers, who are the majority of adults on welfare, do no work. Yet, even the bosses admit that these mothers would need daycare to work outside the home, in other words, taking care of children is work. Welfare cuts are clearly a sexist attack on women who will be forced to work for their tiny welfare checks or starve.

Capitalism: Millions starve in midst of plenty

Under capitalism huge amounts of wealth are concentrated among a tiny number of bosses. At the same time that their system of mass production has the capacity to produce more than enough for everyone. Yet there is scarcity -- a lack of the necessities of life for billions -- amidst this potential for plenty because distribution under capitalism is based on profit for a few (the bosses), not the needs of the many (the working class).

Under communism, even if some natural disaster were to temporarily reduce production leading to a level of scarcity, the scarcity would be shared according to need until such time as the working class collectively raised production back to a level of abundance. Both scarcity and abundance would be shared. But the collective power of a communist-led working class would reduce the chances of scarcity to an absolute minimum.

Capitalism: work or starve
Communism: work from commitment

The bosses and their politician servants assume that people must be forced to work under threat of starvation. Sure, that's the basis of capitalist exploitation. Without bosses and profits, and with the working class in control, communism will struggle to motivate people to work for the common good. There is plenty of real work that needs to be done to feed, house, and clothe the working class and expand our culture. This can never be accomplished under capitalism. This system only creates jobs when and if it is profitable. Then the bosses squeeze maximum profits out of the workers who do them resulting in the lowest possible level of wage slavery. Workfare is just the latest wrinkle. Under communism, the workers' communist party will organize and lead billions of workers to create what is necessary for our class. Maximum profits will never get in the way; that motivation will have been abolished.

In a communist society there will be no welfare because all the ravages of capitalism that lead to welfare and workfare slave labor will have been destroyed.

Capitalism -- a system based on the anarchy of production -- wastes the talents and labor of the working class, and then turns around to label workers "lazy." Communism takes the responsibility to help everyone serve the working class to his or her fullest potential.

The capitalists justify workfare by saying "Work is good for you," but then offers drudgery and built-in mass unemployment as a way of life. Communism has the goal of eliminating the division between mental and manual labor -- both are essential; everyone will do both -- destroying drudgery in the process.

Communism will organize everyone to work, according to their commitment. Imagine what we can accomplish with the labor of billions of workers who are now either unemployed or underemployed. On top of that are the tens of millions employed in labor only useful to parasitic capitalism -- banking and finance, advertising and welfare itself.

Smash slave labor workfare with
communist revolution

Workfare slave labor is a product of capitalism in crisis, another way the bosses hope to lay the burden of their insoluble crisis on the backs of the working class. As we fight to win millions of workers to the understanding of how only communism can solve this crisis -- by destroying capitalism -- we also fight like hell against the racist attack of fascist workfare. That's why Progressive Labor Party is engaged in a militant campaign against workfare, to lay bare its capitalist source and use that exposure to win tens of thousands of workers to communist revolution, to join the Party that's organizing for it.

We are organizing mass demonstrations at workfare centers; spreading these ideas through the mass sale of our newspaper Challenge. We are raising the issue within shops and unions to organize and unite as many workers as possible across all industrial, color and gender lines. This will require unbreakable unity between employed workers and those workers on welfare and in workfare. The historic slogan calling for Unity of the Employed and Unemployed goes double in this situation; not only are welfare recipients really unemployed workers but they are now being forced into slave labor wages via workfare as well. This drags down the wages of the entire working class. The racism used to split workers along these lines enables the bosses to laugh all the way to the bank.

In this smoldering fire of class struggle against slave labor, the working classes' biggest victory will be the building of a revolutionary movement and party that will destroy workfare's cause -- capitalism -- with the only society that can create a decent life for all workers -- communism.

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Nazis invented workfare

The features of fascism that marked Nazi Germany in the 1930's are appearing in U.S.-style fascism 60 years later:

The Nazis restricted the movement of both workers and farmers to serve the needs of the German ruling class. From 1934 to 1936, as rearmament got under way, a series of laws and decrees barred industrial workers from moving out of lower paying jobs into higher paying jobs without government permission. When Hitler's hordes captured Eastern Europe and needed agricultural workers to till the land, they simply packed agricultural and industrial workers into trains and shipped them from Germany and the captured countries of Western Europe to Eastern Europe.

Here in the U.S., workers forced into unemployment and onto welfare now face similar Nazi-like restrictions; they can't collect welfare unless they take slave labor jobs at the rate of their welfare "benefits." Under Clinton's new welfare repeal, the government will throw them off welfare whether or not they can find a job. Amid unemployment officially at 8-9 million (actually 15-20 million), how would it be possible for millions deprived of welfare to find jobs, unless by replacing other millions who, in turn, become unemployed?

Racism makes it especially hard on black and latin workers, subjecting them to double unemployment rates, last-hired-first-fired policies, a higher percentage in lower-paying jobs and higher rates in poverty and in prison.

In Nazi Germany, from 1932 -- the depth of the Great Depression -- to 1937 (after four years of Hitler fascism), wage rates declined 13% while business activity was rapidly increased: the first time this had ever happened under capitalism. Real wages fell even lower due to workers having to pay for Nazi programs that didn't exist before Hitler.

Unions and strikes were banned. Workers were forced to work longer hours and with more intensity (speed-up). Forced impoverishment of the working class was a principal feature of German fascism.

(Information and statistics on German fascism from Labor Conditions in Germany, 1933-1937, by J. Kuczynski.)

Here, too, in the U.S., there has been increasing business activity, -- five years of prosperity, says Clinton -- yet workers' real wages have continued to decline since 1973. More and more workers are compelled to work longer hours and two jobs just to keep their heads above water and out of poverty. Millions of higher-paid workers in production industries have been forced into low-wage jobs in service industries. Many workers now must pay for items that were formerly paid for by the boss.

• Pamphlets-ENG

Table of Contents

Introduction

WHAT IS THE VIOLENCE INITIATIVE?

Box: Federal Psychiatrist Compares Inner-City Youth to Monkeys

Violence Initiative: A High-Level Federal Policy

Box: One Dutch Family

But Hasn't the Violence Initiative Been Stopped Already?

Box: "Biology of Violence" Research Continues

 

"VIOLENCE CONTROL" IS A POLITICAL ISSUE, NOT A MEDICAL ONE

Medicine As Social Control

Violence Is Not Always Bad

"Crime": Who Breaks the Laws...And Who Makes Them

Capitalist System is the Biggest and Most Violent Criminal of All

Box: Racism: Part and Parcel of Capitalism

 

RACISM AND REDUCTIONISM IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

Blaming the Victims: Reducing Complex Social Problems to Individual Biology

Diagnosing Children as Potential Criminals

Box: Racism and Psychiatry: Past and Present

Violence Research: Where's The Beef?

The "Halo of Molecular Biology"

Box: Biochemical Confusion: Hormones and Neurotransmitters

 

RACISM AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE: DOES HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?

Box: Crime and Human Nature: The Ideological Offensive

Adopted Children, Identical Twins, and Eugenics

"Heritability" Doesn't Mean "Unchangeability"

Box: Prequel to the Violence Initiative: the XYY Controversy

 

FIGHTING THE VIOLENCE INITIATIVE

Racist Ideology + Economic Crisis = Fascist Repression

What You Can Do: A Program To Fight Back

Further Reading

Box: Protests Against the VIolence Initiative

A Position Paper of the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR)

P.O. Box A3338, Chicago IL 60690 December 1993

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 Biological Determinism Serves Fascism

Oppose Racist "Violence Initiative"

Imagine a fifth-grade classroom --perhaps in the Bronx or in south central LA. The walls are crumbling and maybe leaking deadly asbestos. There aren't enough books or even desks for the thirty or so children. Anyhow, the books are at best boring and irrelevant, and at worst racist, sexist, and filled with patriotic images of the Good Ole' USA. In comes Deshaun, worried because his mother is sick and late because he had to get his little sister off to school. "Late again!" remarks his teacher nastily, "and take off that hat." Deshaun tries to explain, but the teacher barks, "Don't argue with me." "Aw, shit!" mutters Deshaun as he finds his place, the cap still on his head. Later that morning a government-funded medical researcher -- perhaps from Columbia University or the University of California -- visits the classroom. She is looking for ways to identify and treat potential violent criminals. Deshaun fits her description perfectly: already today he has lost his temper, argued with an adult, defied an adult request, used obscene language, and is obviously angry and resentful. Informing the teacher that Deshaun is sick with "Oppositional Defiant Disorder," the researcher signs him up. Soon he will undergo hospitalization for a spinal tap, an electro-encephalogram and a variety of other medical tests. Then he will probably be dosed with Ritalin, a form of amphetamines (speed).

This is not a scene from "Clockwork Orange." It is an all-too-real part of the "Violence Initiative" of the U.S. government's National Institutes of Health (NIH), a multi-$$billion program designed to apply biological psychiatry to potentially criminal youth, especially young black men. We in the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) believe that the Violence Initiative is helping to justify increasingly fascist repression in U.S. cities. It must be stopped!

In this pamphlet we will:

• describe the Violence Initiative in more detail
• explain why the whole issue is one of political power, not medicine or public health
• expose the fallacies in the ways that science is used for this political agenda
• show how the present proposals link up with a long history of racist ideology
• propose a program of action to STOP THE RACIST VIOLENCE INITIATIVE.

 

What is the Violence Initiative?

Dr. Frederick Goodwin heads the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). He called the Violence Initiative the federal government's top priority for psychiatric research. He describes it as a public health approach to the large social problem of violence, focusing on "the violence-prone individual" in "high impact urban areas." The NIMH intends "to design and evaluate psychosocial, psychological and medical interventions for at-risk children before they become labeled as delinquent or criminal. This is the basic point of it all," he emphasizes, "to try to find out who might be more likely to go on to becoming labeled eventually as delinquent or criminal...identifying at-risk kids at a very early age before they have become criminalized." These children (some 100,000 or more of them) and their families would then be subjected to psychiatric intervention -- mainly drug therapies.

Violence Initiative: A High-Level Federal Policy

Goodwin went public with the Violence Initiative in February 1992. He had influential backers. The then Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Louis Sullivan, appointed Goodwin to the top NIMH job after he made a series of vile racist remarks comparing black people to monkeys (see box), even though Goodwin's so-called "apology" for them included saying the practically the same thing all over again. Among rhesus monkeys, Goodwin repeated, "all males go off and form gangs, and half of them die ... by evoking aggression in others....Can we learn from that?" Then Sullivan claimed that the NIMH job was a "demotion" for Goodwin because of his racist remarks, when a news release from June 17, 1991 (8 months earlier) had already announced that Goodwin would get this job as part of an agency reorganization!

In June 1992 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) proposed to coordinate work of seven different federal agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services into a $400 million Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. These agencies included the NIMH, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Office of Minority Health. This proposal called for a mixed bag of research, ranging from prenatal care to gun control to biopsychiatric techniques of social control. The NIH Initial Research Group that evaluated this program proposed that "early onset of antisocial behavior is essentially genetic, persistent and cumulative, while later onset is environmentally determined and transient." As political scientist Ronald Walters has put it, "there is a strong bias within NIH for the early detection of ... biological markers for aggressiveness in individuals [which] ... would enable researchers to identify them as candidates for early intervention utilizing a variety of agents, including genetic alteration, drug therapy or psychosocial intervention strategies, so as to prevent them from commiting anti-social acts in the future."

Because of the controversy that erupted, and because HHS was tied up with "health reform," this proposal was shelved -- BUT ONLY TEMPORARILY.

In November 1992 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Research Council (NRC) issued a 400-page report, Understanding and Preventing Violence. Work on this had been funded since 1988 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Justice Department, and the National Science Foundation. The report examined three genetic studies, none of which found any evidence for a genetic factor in violent crime. But it still called for more research on alleged "biological and genetic factors," "new pharmaceuticals that reduce violent behavior" and on whether "male or black persons have a higher potential for violence than others, and if so, why?" It complained that the government is "only" spending $20 million a year on violence research (a serious underestimate: the real figure iscloser to $100 milion) and wants the figure upped to half a billion dollars annually.

Clearly these three events -- the NIMH proposal, the CDC project, and the NRC report -- were closely related. It is not true, as the New York Times (11/13/92) suggested, that they built on "new findings in genetics, biology and neurobiology." They do build on nearly a decade of mass-media propaganda claiming that criminality is "in the genes." All assume that crime and violence are caused by "diseased" individuals and are best addressed by medical authorities.

There is another important link. The key "public relations" event of the genetics-and-crime campaign of the mid-1980s was the publication of Crime and Human Nature by James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein in 1985. Within the next few years, Herrnstein wrote a pamphlet for the U.S. Department of Justice entitled Biology and Crime. And immediately after that, the Justice Department co-funded the NRC report that appeared last November -- just in time to support the Violence Initiative funding proposal!

 But Hasn't the Violence Initiative Been Stopped Already?

No. The only thing that was cancelled was a September 1992 conference on "Genetic Factors in Crime: Findings, Uses and Implications" cosponsored by the University of Maryland and the NIH Human Genome Project. This conference was cancelled due to the anti-racist protests of Dr. Peter Breggin and his Center for the Study of Psychiatry, Inc., and a newly formed Washington-based Coalition Against the Violence Initiative. As of October, 1993, NIH was considering restoring funding for this conference.

The conference brochure stated that "genetic and neurobiological research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct, of isolating environmental features which trigger those predispositions, and of treating some predispositions with drugs and nonintrusive [sic] therapies." Conference organizers invited as speakers some notorious advocates of the "crime-in-the-genes" theory, including Harvard's Richard Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson. They also invited a variety of liberal scholars, including a few well-known anti-racists. Some of the anti-racists were outraged when they found that their names were being used to give a liberal cover to a conference whose main purpose was to promote the "findings that research on the genetics of crime has already yielded and is likely to yield, and consider the utilization of those findings in criminal investigation and ajudication."

The cancellation of this conference was a small victory, but only a temporary one. The controversy also forced the government agencies involved to back off temporarily -- BUT ONLY TEMPORARILY -- from their most ambitious plans for the Violence Initiative.

Representative John Conyers (D, Mich), who criticized the violence initiative in Congress during the winter and spring, declared in May 1993 that the Clinton administration had scrapped it. But CDC representative James Mercy said that "we have an obligation to pursue this issue." The new head of HSS, Donna Shalala, announced she would develop a plan to address youth violence as "a significant health problem." (Detroit Free Press, May 19, 1993) According to Science (June 11, 1993), violence research "is very much alive. Nine institutes and two centers have funded about 300 research projects totaling $42 million for 1993." And various advisory panels have continued to meet through the summer of 1993.

A government official told members of the NIH special panel in June 1993 that "the violence initiative is 'dead'" but even this hand-picked panel noted that many ongoing NIH projects (including most of the research at NIMH) continue to look for "biological factors that may underlie violent behavior." (Science) In October this panel issued a preliminary report endorsing this research and calling for doubled funding. And it's not just NIH-NIMH. The prestigious MacArthur Foundation and the Department of Justice are currently funding similar studies. Don't be caught off guard!

 "VIOLENCE CONTROL" IS A POLITICAL ISSUE, NOT A MEDICAL ONE

The idea of "violence as a public health issue" was first proposed by liberals about a decade ago in order to call attention to the horrendous numbers of our youth destroyed by street violence every year. Homicide is the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds, and the leading cause of death among black youth. If you add in suicide, the numbers soar still higher. Groups like Deborah Prothrow-Stith's National Institute for Violence Prevention (founded in Boston in the mid-1980s) and the San Francisco-based Physicians for a Violence-Free Society (founded in 1993) have taken up this cause.

The American medical establishment is pushing hard for the "medicalization" of violence. George Lundberg and former surgeon general C. Everett Koop made a formal appeal "to the American Medical Association family of journals to address their June 1993 issues to aspects of violence that are medically relevant." Many of them complied. The Journal of the American Medical Association (vol 267 #22) itself featured an editorial by Koop and Lundberg, a report by J. Mason "From the Assistant Secretary of Health, US Public Health Service: Reducing Youth Violence," and a piece from Surgeon-General Antonia C. Novello on "A Medical Response to Violence." "Medicalization" defines a behavior as an illness that requires treatment by doctors and other supposed "experts." Those who engage in medicalization try to remove social problems from public and political discussion by ordinary people. This arrogant elitism provides a cover for tightened social control.

Medicine As Social Control

According to Maisha Bennett, president of the Association of Black Psychologists, "The question which demands an answer is whether the DHHS Violence Initiative is protecting and promoting African-American life; or whether this initiative actually constitutes an act of violence against the very population it proposes to protect." We say that it is the second! The Violence Initiative assumes that individuals, rather than the system itself, is at fault. Even when public health officials acknowledge that unemployment, racism and poverty are among the causes of street violence, they quickly turn their attention elsewhere. As Ron Walters emphasizes, "when it appears that political leaders consider social strategies [to reduce crime and violence] too costly; they resort to the biomedical model."

The NIMH wants to have teachers and psychiatrists identify kids they think will cause problems for the government. Dr. Goodwin doesn't discuss the issue of seeking informed consent of the patients or even their parents. From his point of view, the children themselves are the public health threat and they must be treated, like it or not, as the government sees fit. The NIMH is focusing on children in "high risk areas," "the innercity," "low economic and educational level of parents," "female headed households" -- all easily recognizable code words for "poor black children." Goodwin's own remarks on this subject make it clear that the Violence Initiative is racist to the core.

The problem of violence is often posed in terms of gang warfare (which results in the majority of non-family murders) and other forms of street crime such as robberies (which are seldom accompanied by murder). But what of violence that is even more widespread and more deadly? What of the acts of well-dressed executives, such as those at Ford Motor Company who estimated that the Pinto policy decision would kill over one hundred people and then casually approved the policy? Or the hospital administrator who turns away an uninsured parent carrying a sick child, or the executive board that approves that policy, or the armed security guard who escorts the parent out of the building? What of landlords who pay arsonists to burn down unprofitable buildings? Or the police who beat up Rodney King and thousands more like him? Is there a national initiative to label these practices a disease based on the biology of these individuals?

Is the terrible fighting in the Balkans supposed to reflect a biological peculiarity of the Serbs, Bosnians and Croats? Have the death squads of El Salvador gone through periods of hormone fluctuations? Was U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan contras a public health intervention? Are pilots who bombed civilian areas in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada and Iraq considered to be infected with the disease of violence? What about the politicians and generals who issued their orders? When NIMH and CDC officials say they want to stop "violence" they're not talking about making pacifists out of the Pentagon!

 The decision to label some behaviors "violent" and others not, to subject those engaging in the former and not the latter to "public health" interventions, is inherently and inescapably political. In particular, it is racist.

 Violence Is Not Always Bad

Both supporters and opponents of the Violence Initiative often talk as if "violence" were always a bad thing. But this, too, is a question of politics. We agree that it's bad when teenage drug-dealers shoot it out over turf, often hurting bystanders as well as each other. We also think it's bad when governments convince or coerce working-class youth from different countries to shoot it out in imperialist turf-battles (for example, over oil). However, in some circumstances violence is not only justifiable but necessary. We would be a lot worse off if nobody had ever taken up arms against slavery, or if workers hadn't taken on the capitalists in violent battles for higher wages, shorter hours, and union recognition. We would be a lot better off if more people had violently resisted the rise of Nazi fascism.

A recent report of the American Psychological Association's Commission on Violence and Youth (August 1993) rejected the idea that violence is "in the genes," saying that it is a learned behavior that can also be unlearned. It recommended school-based programs to teach kids how to manage their anger, negotiate, adopt another's perspective, and think of alternative solutions to disagreements. Physicians for A Violence-Free Society wants doctors to "explore new ways of teaching patients non-violent approaches to conflict resolution."

That's fine when you're talking about a domestic disagreement or two kids on a playground. But what about a racist skinhead who's about to burn down a hostel full of immigrant workers? Or a strikebreaker running a truck over a worker on a picket line? "Opposing violence" should not become an excuse for building passivity in the face of racism or exploitation. Prothrow-Stith's group "is committed to advancing a national agenda for violence prevention that complements criminal justice efforts with public health prevention strategies." This sounds to us suspiciously like getting health care professionals to help the cops prevent justifiable rebellion!

We all need to learn how to distinguish friends or potential friends from real enemies. Most important, we must understand that all workers (employed and unemployed, of whatever color, "race," sex, religion, or nationality) have a common interest in smashing racism and opposing the economic violence and imperialist wars of the capitalist system. Among friends we need patience and persuasion, but the class war requires a multi-racial, militant, and sometimes violent fight-back. Think of abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown, of Ida B. Wells Barnett (who wore two pistols to defy the KKK lynch mobs), of the women, men, and children who rose in arms against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and at Stalingrad, and of the militant youth of Soweto and the Intifada.

 "Crime": Who Breaks the Laws...And Who Makes Them

The concept of "violence" is often linked with the concept of "crime." For many, the word conjures up images of an unknown mugger on a dark street or a mysterious rapist climbing into a bedroom window: the image racist Bush brought to TV with the face of Willie Horton. In fact, we are constantly being bombarded with images of "crime": much of local radio/TV/newspaper "news" consists of crime reporting; there are dozens of police or private detective shows on TV, crime movies, even the comics. During the first half of 1993, this barrage was intensified as Clinton forces pushed for his big "anti-crime" bill. According to the New York Times, this media blitz led huge numbers of people to conclude that crime was the #1 social problem in the US.

Actual "crime" statistics are very unreliable. It is certain, however, that federal, state and local government expenditures for police are increasing: for example, from $4.9 billion in 1970 to $20.3 billion in 1983. State government spending for prisons increased from $1.1 billion to $6.7 billion over the same period. These spectacular increases have continued, most recently with Clinton's "crime bill" putting thousands more cops on the streets. As of 1992 more young black U.S. men were in the criminal justice system than in college, and a higher proportion were in the criminal justice system than among young black South African men. "Crime" publicity is meant to justify these huge costs to the taxpayers, while encouraging people to rely on the cops to protect "us" from "them."

Police records of crime and delinquency are virtually the only data "violence researchers" have to measure what they call the "epidemiology" of violence. But laws are enacted and selectively enforced by governments pursuing specific social ends. German judges have recently been accused of "right-eye blindness" for the lenient sentences they give to neonazi thugs. In the US, the violent act of killing someone may or may not be illegal, depending on the circumstances. Is the killer an Air Force bombardier over an Iraqi bomb shelter, or the official executioner of the state of Texas, or a New York City cop shooting wildly at a bank robber and his hostage and killing both? Then the killing will never show up in "crime" statistics -- or in "scientific" studies of biological causes of crime.

Many of the young urban men counted in crime statistics were convicted of selling drugs. But producers and dealers of other drugs, like alcohol and tobacco, are not counted as criminals. These racist killers market their products to children and youth (as with the "Joe Camel" campaign) and target predominantly black and latin neighborhoods. This has nothing to do with the biological characteristics of the "criminals" versus "non-criminals." It simply reflects the economic interests that have ensured that some drugs but not others are illegal. The U.S. tobacco, liquor, and pharmaceutical industries are the biggest drug dealers in the world.

 Capitalist System is the Biggest and Most Violent Criminal of All

Some 90% of U.S. law regulates and implements the capitalist system of private property. At the very core of this system is a form of armed robbery: the capitalists use the cops, the courts, and the treat of starvation to force workers to work more than they need to support themselves and their families. Then they take for themselves the surplus value the workers produce. This is especially clear in places like Haiti or El Salvador, where the most intense exploitation of the workers is enforced with the most brutal repression, backed by the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, capitalism perpetuates mass unemployment, hunger, and preventable disease -- three plagues that kill far more people than urban youth do. But none of this is officially "criminal." None of it violates the law. None of it prompts calls for the screening of children at elite private schools to identify likely perpetrators for early biomedical intervention.

The U.S. rulers claim they want to stop violence and crime when they themselves are the most violent criminals of all. Their profit system kills tens of thousands of people worldwide EVERY DAY through malnutrition and preventable disease. It kills hundreds of thousands more in wars for profit, and millions every time international capitalist competition leads to world war. But all this is perfectly legal, because the capitalists themselves make the laws.

In Capital, Karl Marx described how the breakdown of feudal society created a new criminal class: peasants uprooted from the land and forced to steal in order to eat. Rising capitalism used brutally harsh laws to drive these laborers into public workhouses and private mines, mills, and factories. Marx also analyzed how capitalists constantly introduce labor saving technologies in both agriculture and manufacturing to produce as cheaply as possible. Only thus can they survive in a competitive marketplace. But more production from fewer workers means a "relative surplus population:" increasing numbers of the unemployed. Marx pointed out that capitalism cannot even support "the slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him."

But the crisis of US capitalism has brought with it the destruction of many of the social programs that have fed the unemployed. So inevitably a certain percentage choose street crime: the capitalism of the poor. The bosses are happy to see working class youth high on drugs or killing each other rather than fighting back against the system. U.S. capitalism can't provide jobs or a decent future for most young people. Thus capitalism itself, by its very nature, creates the "crime wave" that the "violence initiative" falsely claims it will stop.

Violence and crime, however and whoever defines them, are political and social problems -- not medical ones.

 RACISM AND REDUCTIONISM IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

"If we find a gene that increases the risk of alcoholism, manic-depression, or whatever, then we'll find what protein that gene codes for. If we then find out what the protein does, we can understand the basic mechanism of the disease. And if we understand the basic mechanism, then we can develop new treatments." -- Richard Cloninger, M.D., Psychiatrist, Washington University (as quoted in the Wall Street Journal)

This quote summarizes the assumptions of the current focus on criminal behavior: (1) that complex social problems can be reduced to simply-defined individual behaviors; (2) that the appropriate (scientific) approach is to focus on biological or "disease" aspects of such behaviors; and (3) that it is singularly important to focus on genetic determinants of those biological aspects. These same assumptions characterized eugenics movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Both the logic and the data purporting to support them are just as flawed today as they were back then.

 Blaming the Victims: Reducing Complex Social Problems to Individual Biology

The Violence Initiative equates the social problem of "crime" with the existence of criminal individuals. In Goodwin's words: "The predominant tradition in criminology...has been sociological. The working assumption of this literature is that social forces explain behavior and that the variables measured involve large groups of people....In contrast, there is [sic] the clinical approaches which are traditional in psychology and psychiatry, social work and the clinical disciplines. And here the assumption is that behavioral forces must be on an individual basis to understand the causal factors and to, in fact, intervene."

Goodwin has to admit the relevance of "macro-environmental factors," including poor housing and schools, deteriorating economic conditions, and even what he calls the denial of "experiences of significance," although he never mentions racism or mass unemployment. But instead of addressing these directly, he treats them as "risk factors which have been hypothesized to contribute to a younger age of onset and the higher probability of the continuation and intensification of violent behavior." For Goodwin, the root of the problem is the defective individual child.

The NAS-NRC report Understanding and Preventing Violence similarly focuses on "individual vulnerabilities" and proposes a search for "neurobiologic markers for persons with elevated potentials for violent behavior." It calls for large-scale studies following individuals almost frrom birth to adulthood, especially in the inner cities, looking for "biological and hehavioral characteristics of infants that increase their risk of growing up to commit violent crimes." Literature for the Maryland conference on "Genetic Factors in Crime" claimed that "genetic research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct, of isolating environmental features which trigger those predispositions, and of treating some predispositions with drugs and unintrusive [sic] therapies."

But crime (and even "violence") only exist in a social context. If it were somehow possible to isolate a young child from society, that child could not become a criminal (violent or otherwise) because there would be no laws to break! Or suppose that the child grows up to join an organized group of young men who ritually chant violent slogans and train with deadly weapons. Is this evidence that he had a "predisposition" to a "certain kind of criminal conduct" that was "triggered" by recruitment to a gang, a KKKlavern, or the Marine Corps?

In sum, we cannot even define -- much less understand or explain -- "crime" or "violence" without reference to the society in which it takes place. Any theory, biological, psychological, or whatever, that tries to reduce "crime" to "individuals predisposed to crime" is inherently flawed.

Diagnosing Children as Potential Criminals

The Youth Violence Prevention Initiative is not even aimed at those convicted of violating laws or perpetrating violent acts. It is aimed at grade-school children.

NIMH-funded research uses the diagnostic categories of the American Psychiatric Association's 1987 manual (DSM-III-R for short). This fat book has a section on "Disruptive Behavior Disorders." Of course it says nothing about the racist and repressive institutions that disrupt kids' lives, or about the fact that such institutions ought to be disrupted! Instead it pigeonholes kids (most often boys) as Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and Conduct Disorder. For example, a kid who often loses his or her temper, often argues with adults, actively defies or refuses adult requests or rules, is angry and resentful, and swears or uses obscene language can be labeled with "Oppositional Defiant Disorder." Never mind that the kid might have good reason -- for example, if he or she is stuck all day with a racist teacher. If a child also is caught stealing on the sly at least twice, "often lies," and is "often truant" he can be labeled with the more serious "Conduct Disorder."

Psychiatrists have conned many parents (especially in middle-class families) into worrying about "hyperactivity" or "attention deficit." A child might earn this label by being fidgety (or just feeling restless, if a teenager), not remaining seated when required to do so, getting distracted from assigned tasks, not paying attention, talking "excessively", not seeming to listen, blurting out answers to questions before they have been completed, and often losing things.

Only a sick society would call such children "sick" and drug them into passivity. And, as the Breggins have pointed out, these diagnoses are racist. A white child from an affluent family might be labeled "attention deficit" while a working-class black or latin child with similar problems is labeled "oppositional defiant," mentally retarded, or severely emotionally disturbed.

 Violence Research: Where's The Beef?

Goodwin himself admits that "we don't have a matching agreement about measurements of behaviors which relate to violence which are not part of diagnostic criteria, such as scales for violence itself, scales for impulsivity, scales for aggressiveness." This is a significant admission, for "impulsivity" and "aggressiveness" have been key elements in reductionist theories of crime. For example, James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein in their influential book Crime and Human Nature (1985) claimed there is a relatively permanent personality "trait", typified by the criminal's inability to "delay gratification of impulses." This abnormal type of person, say the authors, "cannot resist the rewards of an immediately available opportunity" and therefore "snatches a purse if it is ready at hand."

Wilson and Herrnstein referred to a few limited and questionable social-psychological studies, which lent their book the aura of "science." As the psychologist Dr. Leon J. Kamin put it in a detailed review in Scientific American (Feb. 1986), "tiny snippets of data are plucked from a stew of conflicting and often nonsensical experimental results. Those snippets are then strung together in an effort to tell a convincing story, rather in the manner of a clever lawyer building a case." For example, one study asked high school students whether they would save or spend certain sums of money, and found that "delinquents" were more likely than "non-delinquents" to say they would spend the money. However, this correlation, only held for small sums (25 cents or $2) and not for large ones ($20 or $200). As Kamin shows, it took some twisting to interpret this as supporting the hypothesis that "delinquents" are more impulsive or present-oriented.

But the patent limitations of reductionist attempts to ground crime in identifiable traits of pathological individuals, from the "criminal anthropology" of Cesare Lombroso a century ago to Wilson and Herrnstein in our own time, have not deterred Goodwin and his merry band from trying again.

 The "Halo of Molecular Biology"

Talk about biological traits usually slides smoothly into talk about genetics, as the quote from Robert Cloninger shows. "There is a genetic contribution to any social personality disorder," Goodwin told the American Psychiatric Association in May 1992, "The environment does not cause one to be violent or to develop a criminal record if there isn't a [genetic] vulnerability already there."

Molecular biology has had spectacular success recently in identifying genes related to specific diseases such as cystic fibrosis. The Human Genome Project, an effort to map and sequence all human genes, is moving along even faster than expected. It is being used as a cover for a tremendous resurgence in eugenic thinking, one which makes the "sociobiology" of the 1970s look like a tiny blip. Even some liberal scientists are jumping on the bandwagon: for example, efforts to prove that homosexuality is "all in the genes."

Ironically, the "genetics" studies cited by biocriminologists owe nothing to the new molecular biology that has flourished since the 1950s. No geneticist in the Genome Project would consider hunting for "crime genes," and if the Genome Project actually achieves its goal, advocates of social control through genetics will be hard-pressed to maintain what one critic, Professor Troy Duster, has called the "halo of molecular biology."

RACISM AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE: DOES HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?

Reductionists often try to link "traits" such as criminality with biological observables. In 1887, the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso claimed he could identify criminals by physical characteristics he called "stigmata." For example, he said thieves had small, restless eyes while sex criminals had bright eyes and cracked voices. In general, Lombroso said, the more "apish" a person was (thick skull, large jaw, long arms, darker skin) the more likely he or she was to be a criminal. This garbage did a lot of damage in its time, becoming important criteria in criminal trials. Who knows how many were unjustly condemned by Lombroso's racism?

The Harvard anthropologist E. A. Hooton set out in 1926 to update Lombroso's techniques with financial support from the Social Science Research Council and other sources. Unlike Lombroso, Hooton categorized his 17,000 research subjects according to nationality and race, as he measured 125 characteristics for each one. By the time his book Crime and the Man appeared in 1939, English and American critics found Hooton's views to be uncomfortably similar to those of the Nazis. However, he had meanwhile promoted his racist ideas among his graduate students, many of them future leaders of American physical anthropology, and his undergraduate pre-medical students.

Pro-Nazi "race hygienists" held their Fourth Congress of Criminal Biology at Hamburg in June 1934, building on two decades worth of "research" on the supposed genetic basis of crime. Within a few more years, most German universities offered courses on this subject. In 1936 the Nazi "Justice" minister funded fifty research centers nationwide to investigate links between genetics, race and crime, especially in young offenders. Three years later, Nazi boss Himmler ordered that genetic examination be a routine part of criminal investigation. As historian Robert Proctor put it, "Science thus conspired in the solution to the Jewish question....To be Jewish was to be both sick and criminal; Nazi medical science and policy united to help 'solve' this problem."

During the 1940s, Harvard professor W. H. Sheldon measured individual variations in physique, concluding that 200 Boston delinquents were preponderantly "mesomorphic" (square, muscular) in contrast to a group of 4000 college students. Wilson and Herrnstein cited this conclusion some 40 years later as evidence of the "constitutional" underpinning of the criminal personality "trait." As Kamin noted, however, they omitted mention of later studies such as one that showed a sample of Princeton students to be more "mesomorphic" than the Boston delinquents.

In the words of historian Elazar Barkan, Herrnstein and Wilson's book Crime and Human Nature (1985) "is a testimony that Hooton's ideas have been rejuvenated at Harvard." And as Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin said in their 1984 book Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, "There is an unbroken line of science from the criminal anthropology of 1876 to the criminal cytogenetics of 1975, yet the evidence and argument of determinist claims remain as weak now as they were a hundred years ago." (p. 25)

Adopted Children, Identical Twins, and Eugenics

Biocriminologists today actually use the kind of "family studies" originally popularized by eugenics advocates like Francis Galton and Charles Benedict Davenport in the early years of the century. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was the Jukes family who served as a graphic example of the inheritance of crime; in the 1910s they were joined in the textbooks by the Kallikaks and other families (real or imagined) given fictional names by the eugenists: the "Tribe of Ishmael," the "Pineys," the "Happy Hickory" family, etc. These ideas were introduced to a still broader public in the novels of Jack London and by the science-fiction writer Phil Nowlan in his racist "yellow peril" novel Armageddon 2419 A.D., the original "Buck Rogers" story.

More recent studies examine identical twins who have been separated very young. This movement got a big boost in the 1960s, when arch-racist William Shockley (of "genius sperm bank" fame) got Berkeley professor Arthur Jensen working on his 1969 Harvard Educational Review article. Jensen suggested that Head Start had failed (!) because the kids were just born dumb and that black/white differences in average IQ scores reflected inherited racial differences in intelligence. This let loose a torrent of racist propaganda, including Richard Herrnstein's claim that unemployment might run in the genes. It also provoked a storm of anti-racist protest, including the organization of the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR).

Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin showed convincingly that Jensen's whole argument depended on fraudulent "data" collected by Cyril Burt over a 40-year period. But meanwhile Jensen had inspired his student Thomas Bouchard to "research" the heritability of personality. In 1979, Bouchard began his "Minnesota Twins" study with a pair of separated identical twins named Jim, whose first and second wives had the same names, who both drove Chevys and who had given their dogs the same name (among other coincidences). Mass media publicity rounded up other pairs of separated twins who were eager to show off their identical tastes for particular brands of beer or cigarettes or their identical peculiar habits.

Bouchard's work was (and is) so shaky that he has been able to get almost none of it published in scientific journals. Biologists at his own school, the University of Minnesota, refuse to take it seriously. Some of the data he has published (in very obscure journals) contradicts his main thesis that personality is largely determined by the genes. But the mass media have uncritically brought Bouchard's ideas to a huge audience through popular science journals, Time and Rolling Stone magazines, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the "Tonight" show -- to name just a few.

Today the new eugenicists rely mainly on a series of studies based on adoption records kept by the Danish and Swedish governments. This work was helped along by the Scientific Affairs Division of the NATO military alliance, which sponsored an "Advanced Study Institute" in Italy during September, 1986 on "Biolobical Bases of Antisocial Behavior'" and later published a volume of the conference papers edited by Sarnoff A. Mednick and a co-worker.

Goodwin singles out a 1984 paper in a series by Mednick's group on the chances of an offspring removed from a criminal biological parent developing a criminal record him/herself if the adoptive parents do or do not also have criminal records. He concludes from this study that "the environment does not cause one to be violent or to develop a criminal record if there isn't a vulnerability already there but if there is a vulnerability already there then certainly a bad environment can amplify it." Wilson and Herrnstein cite the same body of research.

There's a lot wrong with each one of these studies. For example, Mednick's correlations only held for crimes of property, and not for violent crime. In another study of female prisoners, their "crimes" included prostitution, adultery, bigamy, desertion, and transmitting a venereal disease. Is there supposed to be one gene that impels its possessor to engage in all of these behaviors? Could the biological basis of criminality be abolished by decriminalizing these behaviors? Or does the gene somehow allow its possessor to intuit what is and is not legal and then "code" for behavior that happens to be illegal? Any way you look at it, this is ridiculous. 

"Heritability" Doesn't Mean "Unchangeability"

Other criticisms apply to the whole genre of studies. For example, correlation is often confused with causation. Correlation simply means finding that two characteristics tend to be found together. Causation is a much stronger claim that the two are interconnected in such a way that one leads to the other. One of the most elementary lessons in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation, or even a common cause. For example, your age over the last ten years shows a strong statistical correlation with the size of the national debt: both have been increasing steadily. But did one cause the other?

Another problem occurs when researchers turn to "heritability" estimates. "Heritability" is a statistical method of estimating what proportion of the total variation in a trait that can be accounted for by genetic variation in a given population in a given environment. But popularizers, and sometimes the researchers themselves, confuse this statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept of "genetically determined" and the social concept of "unchangeable," which are not at all the same things. The heritability of a given trait might be extremely high and yet have (as Lewontin, Rose and Kamin point out) "absolutely no predictive power for the result of changing the set of environments." To illustrate: several diseases (such as phenylketonuria and Wilson's disease) are known to be single-gene disorders. However, whether or not the possessors of that gene develop the symptoms of the disease depends entirely on whether or not their environment includes appropriate medical or dietary interventions.

Major methodological flaws such as these have been dissected in detail in the case of the IQ controversy: for example, by Leon Kamin in The Science and Politics of IQ and by Lewontin, Rose and Kamin in Not In Our Genes. The same flaws reappear in the biocriminology studies now being cited in support of the Violence Initiative.

 

"What is the direct evidence for genetic control of specific human social behavior?" asked Stephen Jay Gould, answering his own question: "At the moment, the answer is none whatever."

FIGHTING THE VIOLENCE INITIATIVE

In an editorial provocatively entitled "Anatomy Of An Attempted Murder: How To Kill Research On Violent Behavior", Deborah M. Barnes, editor of the Journal of NIH Research, nearly drowned her readers in self-righteous indignation over the cancellation of the Maryland "Genetics and Crime" conference. "At the heart of the controversy," she asserted, "is a deep-seated fear of discovering that human behaviors, even violent ones, have biological roots." (We wonder whether Barnes think that this "fear" is genetic!) Opponents of the Violence Initiative, she suggested, are against scientific inquiry itself.

We disagree. There is no valid scientific rationale for the Violence Initiative. There have been no recent scientific advances which might justify its political agenda. There is no prospect of making scientific advances using the concepts and methods employed by advocates of the Violence Initiative. "But shouldn't we be willing to follow up any possibility?" some might ask. One might as well say that the Nazi doctors were justified in trying to link "Jewishness" to a variety of social evils because of the "possibility" that such a correlation might have been found.

 Racist Ideology + Economic Crisis = Fascist Repression

The Violence Initiative is being promoted by some of the most influential people in the U.S. government. And it ties directly into the ruling class strategy for maintaining "law and order" in a society coming apart at the seams due to social conflicts stemming from extreme racism and economic injustice. In Chicago, for example, the per capita annual income in the wealthiest neighborhood (the overwhelmingly white "Gold Coast") is $82,000 while in the poorest (the 100% black Stateway Gardens) it is $1600. That's a ratio of over 50:1, and that's just comparing income, not total assets!

President Clinton's aides have already admitted that he can't work economic miracles like eliminating the deficit or creating jobs. And it is precisely the economic crisis of the capitalist system that is both raising the "crime" rate and forcing the rulers to adopt increasingly repressive policies against justifiably rebellious people, especially against black and latin youth in the cities.

 The $billions that the federal government plans to spend on the Violence Initiative could create thousands of jobs outright. These jobs could provide much-needed services for the larger community. This "experiment" could test the hypothesis that rising crime is related to rising unemployment and poverty. Of course, providing decent jobs for everyone who needs one would take far more capital investment than the Violence Initiative, although far more social value would also be generated by putting everyone to work. That's why the Violence Initiative is such an attractive option to federal authorities in the first place!

In this period, the U.S. capitalists are experimenting with "pilot programs" to see what forms of fascist rule will be most effective for them in forcing the working class to submit to a rapidly declining standard of living. Should they rely on psychiatrists administering prescription drugs to ever larger numbers of schoolchildren? Will they try once again to sterilize or castrate those convicted of crimes, or to tamper with their brains? Will they resort to military-style "boot camps" in a National Youth Service, or to massive police occupation of black working-class communities and other policies now being implemented under the federal "Weed and Seed" project? Or will we be subjected to "all of the above"?

 One thing is already clear. The U.S. rulers are relying on "violence research" and its publicity to convince older workers and middle-class people, particularly white professionals, to blame black and latin youth for all the evils of the capitalist system. The Violence Initiative is one of the main vehicles for this fascist agenda. It must be stopped!

What You Can Do: A Program To Fight Back

1. Get the word out about what is going on. Write articles for newsletters of professional and community organizations, or for local newspapers, etc. Organize sessions at professional meetings, or presentations for local groups (churches, PTAs, etc.) Additional copies of this pamphlet are available from the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), P.O. Box A3338, Chicago IL 60690 (312-663-4138). The Center for the Study of Psychiatry Inc. (301-652-5580) has made available a series of reports and a packet of clippings and reprints.

2. Organize to protest against the Violence Initiative using a variety of forums and tactics. Raise the demands that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, cancel the Violence Initiative, that all racist violence research be stopped, and that Frederick Goodwin be fired from the directorship of NIMH.

3. Fight for decent jobs and job-training programs, especially for young people. Build alliances among professionals, employed and unemployed workers, and the youth. Join the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR).

To contact InCAR:

East Coast Midwest West Coast Latin America

212-629-0002 312-663-4138 213-293-4538 A.A. 35498

P.O. Box 904 P.O. Box A3338 2601B M.L.King Jr. Blvd. Bogota, Colombia

Brooklyn NY 11202 Chicago IL 60690 Los Angeles CA 90018

"Biology of Violence" Research Continues

According to Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, the hundreds of ongoing federally-funded violence research projects include:

· An in-house NIMH project headed by Judith Rapoport on "Neurobiology of Disruptive Behavior Disorders," scheduled to continue at least through 1995. This subjects children to spinal taps and experimental drugs -- at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars

· James M. Dabbs, a psychologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, is studying "Testosterone and Anti-Social Behavior" by trying to measure testosterone levels in saliva.

· Rachel Klein of the Long Island Jewish Medical Center and Columbia University is studying Ritalin treatment for young teenagers with "Conduct Disorder," most of them black and latin. Other recipients of NIMH money for research on drugging children include Michael G. Aman of Ohio State University; Kenneth D. Gadow of SUNY-Stony Brook; Russell A. Barkley of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Robert K. McMurnett of the University of California-Irvine.

· Gail Wasserman, in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia, is trying to identify "early predictors of anti-social behavior" in the younger brothers of black and latin men arrested in Manhattan and the Bronx by using EEGs, blood work, and neurological tests.

· Felton Earls at Harvard is running a multi-million dollar program, funded by the Department of Justice and the MacArthur Foundation, to screen over 10,000 young people (some of them prenatally!) to find potential criminals and delinquents.

· David Goldman got $200,000 from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for "Molecular Genetic Studies of Disturbed Serotonin Function" in which scores of "violent offenders," many of them children, have already been given spinal taps and brain scans.

· The NIMH has coughed up $12 million for a multi-site, multi-year experiment in drugging over 700 children with Ritalin. Recipients include Howard B. Abikoff, Long Island Jewish Medical Center and James M. Swanson of the University of California. A group of black psychologists, led by Dr. Jacquelyne Faye Jackson, have already attacked this study, linking it with the Violence Initiative.

 These and all other studies like them must be stopped.

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Prequel To the Violence Initiative: THE XYY CONTROVERSY

In the 1991 movie "Aliens III", the heroine's spaceship crashlands on a remote planet serving as a prison colony for Earthlings. The prisoners, all hardened violent criminals, are males with an extra Y chromosome (XYY). ("Why you want the help of us Y-chromo boys?" growls one.) The myth that an extra Y is a "criminal chromosome" was debunked 20 years ago. The fact that it surfaced in a recent movie testifies to the durability of the sort of scientific myths that underpin the Violence Prevention Initiative.

In the mid-1960s Patricia Jacobs noted that XYY males were over-represented in a mental-penal institution in Scotland. These XYY males were reported to be on the average taller than the average XY male and those institutionalized had been diagnosed as mildly retarded. The overwhelming majority of XYY males, however, are never arrested and are often not even identified as such. Jacobs speculated that an extra Y chromosome might predispose to aggressive behavior.

The media quickly sensationalized the XYY theory of crime, even misidentifying the mass murderer Richard Speck as an XYY male. A former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Bentley Glass, fantasized that abortion would "rid us of . . . sex deviants such as the XYY type." Meanwhile, Harvard researchers proposed screening the infants born in a Boston hospital for XYY, and observing them as they grew up for evidence of "aggressive" or "criminal" behavior. Fortunately, organized opposition by the radical group Science for the People prevented this study from being carried out.

Biology texts perpetuated the myth, arguing falsely that (1) the Y chromosome causes maleness, which is mediated by testosterone; (2) testosterone is linked to "aggression" (as in the 'roid rage of athletes on steroids); (3) more Y chromosome means more maleness, more testosterone, more aggression, hence crime.

But there was no evidence that XYY males had higher testosterone levels, and the association of "maleness" with "aggression" was just an old sexist stereotype. Soon the "criminal chromosome" hypothesis collapsed. XYY males were not over-represented in ordinary prisons, only in those for mentally-disabled criminals. Most embarrassing for the theory was a study of the crimes for which XYY men were incarcerated: nearly all had been jailed for non-violent property crimes ranging from shoplifting to embezzlement. So much for genes for "aggression."

 

But this didn't stop the NIMH from issuing a report in 1980, Behavioral Genetics, that claimed that "the extra Y does create some special risk for developing antisocial behavior" even though the same report admitted that no evidence had been found for this!

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One Dutch Family

 

"Study Finds a Genetic Flaw That May Explain Some Male Violence" -- this and similar headlines hit the New York Times and other newspapers in October 1993. The study was reported in the influential Science magazine, flagged by the editor as being of special interest. But just what did the researchers find?

* They studied only one family in the Netherlands.

* Some men in that family showed "erratic and often hostile behavior" ranging from shouting and cursing to arson and attempted rape.

* These men and some of their "normal" relatives have a specific genetic mutation that results in a specific enzyme deficiency.

That's it! Even the researchers themselves admitted that "even in a seemingly straightforward case like an enzyme disorder, the spectrum of the afflicted men's behavior cannot be explained by a single genetic defect alone." They do not claim to have found a genetic cause of aggression.

But that doesn't stop Dr. Markku Linnoila, scientific director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, from calling this very limited study "an important step in understanding the biological determinants of human behavior." It doesn't stop the Times from printing misleading headlines.

It's not enough just to do "good" and "honest" scientific research when the capitalists (through their mass media and their financial control over science) have the power to twist the results to meet their own needs.

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Crime and Human Nature: The Ideological Offensive

Although the Violence Initiative is relatively new, the ideology underpinning it has been promoted in the mass media for over a decade. In January 18, 1982, Newsweek featured Sarnoff Mednick, a California psychologist who purported to link "bad genes" with crime. This brief release was the beginning of a veritable flood. For example, The Washington Post (3/5/84) promoted the book Inside the Criminal Mind, by a psychologist named Samenow, that claimed that "...criminals commit crimes because they like to." The Post followed this up a few months later with a piece on how "British scientists invent method to identify genes of criminals." (12/23/84)

During the late 1970s, Herrnstein and Wilson taught an undergraduate course on "Crime and Human Nature" in the Harvard University "Core curriculum." Its most thoroughgoing exposition was James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein's book Crime and Human Nature, which came "hot" off Simon and Schuster's press in 1986 straight into the open arms of the capitalist mass media -- including, for example, publicity on The Phil Donahue Show. Parts of Wilson and Herrnstein's book appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and The Public Interest. The New York Times Magazine (8/4/85) helped them along by featuring their answer to the leading question, "Are Criminals Made or Born?" Fortune magazine, wedded to Rockefeller money, ran a story on the Harvard duo, and The Wall Street Journal informed the U.S. business community that "Researchers Close in On Some Genetic Bases of Antisocial Behavior." This piece featured the work of Washington University psychiatrist C. Robert Cloninger.

Wilson and Herrnstein's book was heralded in a pre-publication piece in U.S. News & World Report, in which Wilson revealed the basic outline of the book and glamorized for the public the idea of the inheritance of criminal behavior. Time followed suit (October 21, 1985) with a piece linking Herrnstein's new claim that there are genes for criminal behavior with his old work based on the idea that there are genes for "intelligence." A second U.S. News article (Feb. 10, 1986) following the book's release to the general public also highlighted concurrent studies trying to prove the inheritance of criminality. These included work by psychologists, psychiatrists, and criminologists such as Cloninger (but not geneticists). Meanwhile, a piece entitled "Born to Rob? Why Criminals Do It", in The Washington Monthly (December 1985), citing Crime and Human Nature, also publicized the theory that certain people are genetically predisposed to a life of crime.

Perhaps the most important cheerleader for Wilson and Herrnstein was then-Mayor of New York, Edward Koch. He reviewed their book in the pages of Policy Review (Winter 1986), a publication of the extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation, under the provocative title, "The Mugger and His Genes." Koch praised the thesis that "certain individual biological -- indeed genetic -- traits, when combined with an uncertain moral environment, produce criminal behavior. Moreover, these traits can barely be changed, if at all." Koch also emphasized the application of the book's ideas to law and public policy: instead of government trying to "reshape human nature," he implied, harsher punishment (and perhaps even a revived eugenics program) was needed to reduce crime. Commentary followed suit with a piece by J. Adelson appropriately titled, "Back to Criminal Psychology." (March 1986).

The corporate interconnections among the U.S. mass media and the largest banks and corporations have been well documented. This media-industrial complex orchestrated a major promotional campaign for the "crime-in-the-genes" theory in the mid- to late 1980s, with Crime and Human Nature playing the leading role. It was not simply a "hot" topic: for example, Not In Our Genes (whose authors' credentials are more than a match for those of Wilson and Herrnstein) received no such coordinated ballyhoo.

Make no mistake: the U.S. ruling class selectively promotes that scientific work which provides ideological justification for its own repressive and exploitative policies. The U.S. rulers made very sure that millions of workers, students, and professionals were exposed to Wilson and Herrnstein's views . . . and not to those of their opponents. If people hear this stuff often enough, many begin to believe it.

Racism: Part and Parcel of Capitalism

The ruling class fears working class insurgency against its racist system. It is largely to avert this threat that the rulers promote racist theories of biological determinism, which label those impoverished by the system as morally, biologically, psychologically, or intellectually deficient (or some combination of these).

Racism is the main way that poverty is organized. A "minority" group (black people and immigrants in many U.S. cities; Filipinos and Koreans in Tokyo; Poles in Berlin; indigenous people in Latin America; Sri Lankans in Kuwait; etc.) is segregated and subjected to economic discrimination, and thus forced to bear a disproportionate share of the poverty and unemployment that affects the whole working class. The ruling class can then promote the idea that these individuals are themselves to blame for their own plight and for that of their "majority" working class neighbors.

In the U.S., pro-capitalist intellectuals have promoted the myth of an "underclass" of permanently unemployed and unemployable individuals whom workers and professionals are expected to see as a parasitic burden. In reality, many workers move back and forth between full employment, part-time work, and joblessness. Very few individuals are permanently unemployed. If anyone is a parasite, it is the commodities trader, the junk-bond dealer, the coupon-clipper or the banker who lives high on the hog and never produces any value at all!

So watch out when Violence Initiative advocates claim they are not racist. "Minority group over-representation [in crime statistics] washes out when controlled for social class in urban setting," says Goodwin (he of "urban jungles" fame). The NIMH is not targeting black people, he claims, just the lower class in the inner city! (Edward Banfield pioneered this approach in his 1968 blueprint for urban fascism, The Unheavenly City.) The pseudo-biological categories of "race" are so deeply entrenched in capitalist society that they no longer need to be invoked directly by those who hope to trade on racial stereotypes in the service of repressive social programs.

 FEDERAL PSYCHIATRIST COMPARES INNER-CITY YOUTH TO MONKEYS

"If you look at other primates in nature -- male primates in nature -- you find that even with our violent society we are doing very well. If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males, to knock each other off and, in fact, there are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half of them are dying.

"Now, one could say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural, without all of the social controls that we have imposed upon ourselves as a civilization over thousands of years in our own evolution."

 --Frederick K. Goodwin,then director of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration of the U.S. Government, in speech to National Mental Health Advisory Council, Feb. 11, 1992. (Goodwin, now Director of the National Institute for Mental Health, is one of the main promoters of the Violence Initiative.)

 Further reading:

Chase, Alan. The Legacy of Malthus

Gould, Steven J. The Mismeasure of Man

Hubbard, Ruth, and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth

Kamin, L. The Science and Politics of IQ

Lerner, Richard J. Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide

Lewontin, R. J., Stephen Rose, and Leon Kamin. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature

Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis

Progressive Labor Party. "Racism, Intelligence and the Working Class"

Rose, Steven, ed. Against Biological Determinism

Science for the People. Biology as a Social Weapon.

Biochemical Confusion: Hormones and Neurotransmitters

The particular "marker" currently favored by violence researchers seems to be a lower-than-normal concentration of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain or spinal fluid. (This is where the rhesus monkey studies came in.) As Goodwin told members of the American Psychiatric Association, "serotonin wasn't related to violence itself but it was related to impulsivity so the group that was impulsively violent ... had the low serotonin." Whether the low serotonin was caused by brain injury, genetics, or something else didn't concern him.

The main source for Goodwin's "monkey business" was the research of Stephen Suomi, who works in another part of NIH. But even Suomi admitted in an interview for the Journal of NIH Research that he only observed violent behavior in monkeys exposed to a stressful environment. "For monkeys living in benign circumstances, there is rarely a problem with violent behavior," he conceded. The problem was obviously not in individual monkeys but in their social environment -- exactly the opposite of the conclusion Goodwin wants to draw.

Goodwin probably also had advance knowledge of two additional NIH-NIMH studies published in the Archives of General Psychiatry (May or June 1992). One study of 29 institutionalized children at NIMH claimed to find correlations between frequency of later institutionalization or aggression and low concentrations of a serotonin by-product in the spinal fluid. But this study -- in which the authors found what they were looking for -- is extremely unreliable. Even the authors admitted that "the follow-up interval is relatively brief ... and ultimate outcome is still unknown." They give no indication that it used a "double-blind" system of evaluation, a basic procedure.

There is no non-invasive method of establishing the level of serotonin in the spinal fluid. The procedure, a spinal tap, can be painful and requires a hospital stay. (This procedure was performed on the men in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, who were told the lie that it was part of a cure.) Especially for a child, the upsetting experience of hospitalization may itself be enough to set off a storm of hormonal/neurotransmitter disturbances. The NIMH study required spinal taps on all the children, a terrifying experience with serious potential complications and no conceivable benefit to the children themselves. It is no exaggeration to compare this study to the medical experiments of the Nazi doctors.

The other paper claimed to find similar results in free-ranging monkeys. But the researchers admitted they could not observe "aggressivity" directly and instead counted bite wounds and scars, evidence of victimization, not aggression! Even the authors admit that their findings might reflect a correlation between serotonin levels and stress, not aggression.

Scientific Evidence Makes a Monkey out of Goodwin

Goodwin wants to "tease apart some of the neurotransmitter differences from some of the hormonal differences." But in real-life human beings, neurotransmitters like serotonin and hormones like epinephrine always interact in a complex feedback system. For example, low serotonin levels are sometimes (not always) associated with a lower pain threshhold, which can make someone more "irritable" and perhaps more "on edge." But low serotonin is usually associated with low epinephrine, which lowers the basal metabolism rate generally and makes a person sluggish. Together, they sometimes (again, not always) lead to signs of depression -- but not of anxiety or impulsivity. And there is no good reason to think that these complex relations can be disrupted in a simple way. For example, when people have cancerous chromaffin cells in the gut, the adrenal cortex, or elsewhere, these cells secrete excess serotonin. But this excess has not been found to disturb circulation or other functions in a consistent way: the effects depend very much on what's going on in the rest of the body.

The relation between body chemistry and emotions/behaviors is not a one-way street. For example, if someone insults you and you get angry, your hormone levels will temporarily change. That doesn't mean that the hormones caused you to get angry!

In short, the sum total of scientific evidence in support of the Violence Initiative is ZERO.

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 RACISM AND PSYCHIATRY: PAST AND PRESENT

In the 1850s, the Louisiana physician Dr. Samuel Cartwright described a mental disease of slaves he called "drapetomania," which caused its victims to run away from their masters. The cure, he wrote in articles for medical journals, was a good whipping. In persistent cases, he recommended cutting off the rebellious slave's toes.

In 1967, the psychiatrist Frank Ervin and the neurosurgeons Vernon Mark and William Sweet proposed (in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, in Science, and elsewhere) that the urban rebellions in Harlem, Watts, and elsewhere were caused by brain-damaged individuals. "Is there something peculiar about the violent slum dweller that differentiates him from his peaceful neighbor?" they asked. "We need intensive research and clinical studies of the individuals committing the violence." The cure, these Harvard doctors wrote, was psychosurgery, in which physicians deliberately mutilate someone's brain. This letter netted Ervin and Mark $108,930 from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration of the Justice Department to use Boston City Hospital for screening populations for potential rioters and subjecting their brains to electric shocks. Sweet got half a million more from the National Institute of Mental Health. In 1973, UCLA hired Ervin to help establish a "center for the reduction of violence" there with some $1.5 million from the state of California and another $2 million in grants. Protests led by the Students for a Democratic Society, the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Dr. Peter Breggin and others eventually forced cancellation of this program.

Now Goodwin (with the support of the psychiatric establishment) claims that kids who don't submit passively to the racist jails that often pass for schools in the inner city suffer from the disease of "conduct disorder" and that kids who don't pay attention to their teachers are sick with "attention deficit." He claims that "conduct disorder," especially, is a "reliable" diagnosis because different observers are likely to diagnose the same kids as suffering from it. The same could have been said of "drapetomania".

"When someone starts talking about a racist conspiracy, the first reaction is surprise and disbelief because it's so far-fetched," said the chief of epidemiology at NIMH, Darrel Rieger. Sure, the U.S. Public Health Service funded the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from the 1930s right up until 1972, allowing hundreds of black men to die of untreated syphilis while unknowingly infecting uncounted numbers of others. Sure, the NIMH funded psychosurgery for riot-control. But now we're supposed to believe that the present "Violence Initiative" has nothing to do with race, nothing to do with racism.

Frankly, we don't see a lot of difference between the racist psychiatry of today and that of the past -- except that the ruling class is now more desperate than ever to find excuses for large-scale repression.

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PROTESTS AGAINST THE VIOLENCE INITIATIVE, 1992-93

Spring-Summer 1992: Protests by the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and the Washington-based Coalition Against the Violence Initiative force postponement of the Maryland "Genetics and Crime" conference.

Fall-Winter 1992: DC Coalition Against the Violence Initiative begins circulating petition to remove Goodwin as head of NIMH.

February 1993: Speakers at annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science attack Violence Initiative

Spring 1993: International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) distributes over ten thousand copies of an earlier version of this flier to students, workers, and professionals across the US. Parents bring issue to PTA meetings in several urban school districts.

Summer 1993: DC Coalition members and others testify against Violence Initiative at Congressional hearings; speakers attack Violence Initiative at various professional conferences on sociology, the history and philosophy of science, etc.

October 1993: 250 public health professionals at annual meeting of the American Public Health Association attend session attacking Violence Initiative; group begins organizing for passage of official resolution in 1994.

November 1993: Society for Humanistic Sociology approves resolution to condemn Violence Initiative.

Fall 1993: Hundreds of students attend teach-ins against the Violence Initiative at the University of Connecticut (sponsored by InCAR, Black Student Association and Latin Student Association), University of Wisconsin (sponsored by InCAR, Teaching Assistants Association, Black Graduate and Professional Student Association, and Black Student Union) and elsewhere.

This is only a partial list. Please let us know about other activities (past and future) that we may not be aware of!

 

The U.S. rulers claim they want to stop violence and crime when they themselves are the most violent criminals of all.

Whether you look at the NIMH program from an anti-racist political point of view or from a biological point of view, the result is the same: it's dangerous nonsense.

The rulers are relying on "violence research" and its publicity to convince older workers and middle-class people, particularly white professionals, to blame black and latin youth for all the evils of the capitalist system.

"It is distracting and hazardous to think of violence as a public-health problem ... instead of looking at all the racism, poverty, decay of the schools, lack of health care." -- Dr. Peter Breggin, director, Center for the Study of Psychiatry

• Pamphlets-ENG

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• Black and latin workers get paid about 60% of what white workers get. Three times as many black babies die at birth as white babies.
• Black and latin people die an average of ten years younger than whites.
• One of every three young black men is in the grips of the criminal court system.
• Politicians and the media push bold faced lies that black people on welfare are lazy, drug addicts, gangbangers, and don't the deserve the bosses' welfare crumbs.
• Immigrants are said to be taking American jobs.
• The Mark Fuhrmans are becoming more open and racist terror more commonplace.
• Racist militia groups have tens of thousands of members.

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• Introduction
  • Only Communism Can End Racism.
• Part One:
  • Capitalism Can't Exist Without Racism / Nationalism
  • What Price Racism?
  • White Workers Hurt By Racism
  • Workers Who Believe In Racism Will Not Fight For Communism
• Part Two:
  • Communism and Racism Cannot Coexist
  • Communism Will Smash Racism
• Part Three:
  • Theories of Racism
  • Slavery in the Ancient World
  • Race and Racism Were Created by Capitalism
  • Slavery Ended, but Racism Continued
  • Join Progressive Labor Party

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• The Bosses Proposition 187: An Attack On All Workers
• Louis Farrakhan - The Black Nationalist the Bosses Love to Hate
• There is No Such Thing as Race

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Introduction

Some say there will always be racism. They are wrong. Communist revolution will lead to the death of racism.

Racism -- even the very concept of race -- has not always existed. Race was a term invented by the capitalist class to increase its wealth and profits. By systematically dividing workers by "race" and "nationality," the capitalist ruling class conquers us all. Black and latin workers get the most vicious treatment. That's why  they are the leading forces fighting back against the bosses.

Whole generations of black and latin workers are being wiped out by crushing unemployment. The bosses' racist police work closely with gangs to make sure that workers are drugged and  terrorized. Many families have at least one loved one in jail, strung out on dope, alcoholic, or caught up in the fast "profitable" life on the street that only offers an early grave. Racism cannot be defeated as long as capitalism exists.

Only Communism Can End Racism.

Only communism -- a system of worker's rule through which we share the work and the fruits of our labor -- can end racism. Unlike the capitalists, the working class has no need for racism and every reason to smash it.

Under communism you get up and go to work everyday, but not because your family will starve if you don't. You will go to work because the work needs to be done. Housing needs to be built. Shoes need to be made. Children need to be taught. Your work will make an impact, and society will view your efforts and your ideas as significant contributions. You will work side-by-side with people who look different from you, but you won't be taught the lie that there are different "races" of people. You will get what you need, your share of what society can produce. No group of people will get more or less than any other.

There is no room for racism in a communist society. For workers' rule to succeed, people must cooperate and care for each other, and for the common good. But it will not be easy to eliminate racism because we have been surrounded by racist ideas throughout our lives. Because racism is the lifeblood of capitalism, the only way we can eliminate racism is through communist revolution. To defeat racism we must kill capitalism -- with communist revolution. To make sure workers' rule survives and capitalism can't be revived, we'll have to stamp out races and racism once and for all.

Part One:

Capitalism Can't Exist Without Racism / Nationalism

We are living in a time of crisis. U.S. bosses are locked in battle with other capitalists from Japan, China, Germany, and other countries. They have to increase the exploitation of American workers to survive. They must increase their rate of profit to remain competitive in the world market. They know workers will fight back, so they have planned a fascist response: divide workers by racism and unleash vicious police terror on the working class.

We only see the tip of the iceberg when someone's video camera captures the brutal beating of a Rodney King by the LAPD, or Mexican immigrant workers by California Sheriff's police. Racist cops murder minority workers as part of their routine. In Chicago, a depressed black man was shot to death by cops as his mother and grandmother, handcuffed together in a squad car, watched. In Rockaway N.Y. two young black men were murdered by racist cops in the last year. Racist police terror has become the order of the day. The `Mark Fuhrmans' are the rule not the exception.

The capitalist bosses increase racism by leading white workers into the militias, the KKK and similar fascist groups, while encouraging black and latin nationalism. Certainly, bosses would much rather see us gunning each other down in the streets than have the guns turned on them by a united armed working class led by its communist party. The bosses also make billions from racist super profits paying minority workers less.

What Price Racism?

The bosses' capitalist economy is based on workers producing goods that the bosses sell. The capitalists pay workers a small fraction of the value of they produce, usually just enough to keep them coming back to work. This is what Karl Marx called "subsistence wages". The difference between the value that the workers actually produce and the amount the bosses give back to them is called surplus value. The bosses pocket the surplus value, keeping some of it to make themselves rich, and investing the rest to keep their companies ahead in their dog-eat-dog competition for profits.

The ruling class reaps enormous profits by extracting more and more surplus value from the working class. The fact that black, latin and Asian workers are paid less than white workers amounts to about one-third of all corporate profits in the U.S., more than $240 billion dollars. This is the dividend that capitalism collects from racism. In the U.S. for example, the median income for black families is only 57% of that for white families; latin families get only 63% of what white families do. Unemployment among blacks is more than twice as high as that among whites, and the difference in joblessness is almost as great for latin workers. The bosses save billions by letting schools, hospitals, and housing for black, latin, Asian and other workers deteriorate.

U.S.-born workers are not the only victims of racist pay differentials. Immigrant workers, from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Asia, are imported by the capitalists in huge numbers to work in sweatshops and other low-paying jobs.

The bosses also use racist and nationalist ideas to help justify their exploitation of workers in other countries, from Central America to Asia, where they pay a fraction of wages they pay in the U.S. The bosses make $66 billion per year in profits from workers in other countries.

A communist, class analysis shows that nationalism and racism are two sides of the same coin. Both are based on the idea that `my kind is better than your kind.' Both assume that there really are different `kinds' or `races' of people. Both call for people to unite with each other based on skin color, language, or country of origin, not based on class. Racist and nationalist ideas were created by the capitalists to divide us and get us to follow capitalists of our own "race" or "nationality".

White Workers Hurt By Racism

Racism is not a `black' issue or a `latin' issue. All workers are victims of racism. Profits are made by paying black and latin workers less than whites, but that is not the bosses' main benefit. Racist and sexist division of the working class drives down all workers wages. The wages paid to the poorest workers whether they be black, latin, women, or those with disabilities act like an anchor on all. Workers' wages are lowest in those areas where the divisions between workers are the greatest. For example, the South, which has a history of racial division, never experienced a strong union movement. Often, there were divided locals in a shop, one black and one white. The result? The South became the low wage haven of the capitalists.

"Workers' wages are lowest where divisions between workers are the greatest."

Today's garment industry in Los Angeles is surrounded by anti-immigrant racism and sexism. Wages of garment workers in L.A. are among the lowest in the country. And what is happening to the rest of L.A.'s working class? A massive assault by the bosses, jobs slashed, wages cut. Workers who fall for racism are cutting their own throats. Racism hurts everyone!

To the extent that workers are won to racist ideas, they won't take leadership from black workers, who are often the most militant. This was obvious in the response of workers to the O.J. Simpson trial and verdict. Black workers clearly saw the fight against racism and racist cops as the main issue, while many white workers were blind to this danger.

To the extent that workers let divisions such as language get in their way, they are kept from uniting. Such divisions stand in the way of the fight for a communist and egalitarian society. Until we have communism, we will continue to be wage slaves, exploited and suffering at the hands of the capitalists.

Workers Who Believe In Racism Will Not Fight For Communism

Racist super profits are the backbone of capitalist exploitation. Around the world, capitalists find groups of workers to scapegoat in order to guarantee themselves a foothold in the scramble for the highest profits. What is the real reason why Serbs are fighting Croats, Hutu are fighting Tutsi, or the Indians of Guatemala and Mexico are under their governments' guns? Is it that these groups instinctually and naturally hate each other? Hell no! It is capitalists dividing people in their own battle for high profits.

These international examples prove that nationalism is not the answer, it's racism in another form. Black nationalism, Mexican nationalism, any nationalism, really translates to black capitalism, Mexican capitalism, capitalism period. A boss is a boss is a boss: no matter what the color of their skin or the borders they live within, the boss lives to exploit the working class.

Why is it that in the 1990s, the capitalist class has been able to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, lower wages for millions more, bust unions, employ scab labor, force people to accept jobs with no insurance benefits, close down hospitals, raise class sizes, cut programs in working class public schools, shut down welfare, and triple the number of workers in jail - all without facing a huge uprising by the working class?

The main reason is that our class today lacks class consciousness. Instead of seeing ourselves as the working class, we see ourselves primarily as `white' or `black' or `latin' or `men' or `women'. This is the deadly effect of racist and sexist ideology which pours forth from every newspaper, movie, TV and radio, from every style of music, and from our congress and schools.

Over a million black workers came to the Million Man March in 1995 because of intense hatred of racism. Nationalist march organizer, Louis Farrakhan, took this hatred and channeled it into supporting black politicians and businesses and away from working class unity against capitalism. Nationalist politicians have made plans for a Latin March, and a Family March to continue to divide workers and divert their anger.

Until we overcome racist ideas and racial divisions, and develop an iron hard unity, we will be defenseless against the bosses' attacks on us. Racism disarms us. It keeps us from fighting for communist revolution and destroying the capitalist system.

Part Two:

Communism and Racism Cannot Coexist

Communists recognize that racism is at the heart of the capitalist economic and political system. Karl Marx once said "labor in the white skin can never be free while labor in the black skin is in chains." To fight capitalism is to fight racism. This is why the communist movement has historically been in the forefront of the anti-racist movement.

The working class of the Soviet Union consolidated state power in the early 1920s. Workers all over the world were inspired by the Soviet example. Less than ten years later, when a major depression hit worldwide, they took on the bosses in a huge wave of class struggle. In the United States, the old communist party led a massive union organizing drive as well as a mass movement of the unemployed. For the first time since the Civil War, these movements were integrated and consciously anti-racist. Unions up until the 1930s were mainly segregated unions, organized by craft. The communists led black and white workers into industry-wide unions, which brought the bosses of steel, auto, mining, rubber, electrical and other corporations to their knees. These movements of the 1930s won many of the reforms that are being taken from us now: the forty-hour week, unemployment compensation, social security, and welfare. Workers could see what class unity produced. Tens of thousands of workers joined the communist party.

Then came the greatest anti-racist struggle of the 20th century: the defeat of the Nazis. Nazi ideology was based on the lie that one "race" of people was superior to all others. The struggle against the Nazis was led by the Soviet Red Army. Millions of workers around the world took part. The defeat of the fascists inspired anti-racist struggle around the world. In Africa, the victory against the Nazis was followed by anti-colonial revolts in one country after another. In the United States, black soldiers came home from the war ready to take up the struggle against segregation at home. The civil rights movement was born. It involved tens of thousands of workers and students in struggle against racism, especially in the form of segregation. People who were trained in the communist led union movement of the 1930s and the communist led anti-fascist fight of the 1940s helped militant youth to lead this new movement. This movement led to the elimination of some forms legal segregation, but it clearly did not succeed in eliminating racism or all forms of segregation. The civil rights movement ended without accomplishing these goals because it was led by a liberal ideology, the idea that racism could be defeated without overthrowing the capitalist system.

The key features of that ideology were anti-communism and nationalism. Nationalism was used by the ruling class to attack the black-white unity of the movement. Nothing other than communism is more terrifying to the bosses than unity of the "races." Not even "militant" black nationalism. When civil rights organizations began throwing out white workers and students in the late 1960s, it was only a few years before those organizations themselves died.

What was won by nationalism? Profits for Johnson products and other black-owned corporations. Jobs for a few highly educated, upper-middle class blacks, helping to exploit black workers for major corporations. Political victories for racist politicians like Mayor Richard Hatcher, who presided over the decline of steelworkers' standard of living in Gary, like Mayor Wilson Goode, who firebombed a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, like Mayor Tom Bradley, who supervised and defended the racist attacks on black and latin workers in Los Angeles. As expected the nationalist-based organizing against Proposition 187 in California has only produced political victories for latin politicians and businessmen. Latin workers are only losing -- jobs, health care and education. There are thousands of black and latin politicians in office across the country -- and racism is getting worse. These politicians perform a tremendously valuable service for the ruling class: they keep oppressed black and latin workers in the polling booths instead of fighting back.

The downfall of the civil rights movement happened at the same time that the entire international communist movement collapsed. The Soviet Union was already state capitalist. In China, the right wing was moving that country in the same direction. The communist party of the United States was advocating "people's capitalism," talking about a peaceful transition to socialism and encouraging anti-racists to vote for liberal ruling class politicians. The anti-colonial movements in Africa threw out the European governors, but stopped short of overthrowing capitalism, merely putting a black face on the exploiters. The misery that existed before continues now, intensified, all around the world because the old communist movement deserted its mission of smashing capitalism and establishing communism. Liberalism and nationalism lead to more racism!

Progressive Labor Party emerged during this turning point. In its short history, PLP has taken on the fight against racism in every aspect of our organizing. The Ku Klux Klan, which still plays the racist terrorist role it was founded for, can't move without confronting violent PLP opposition. In 1975, when racists organized to attack black schoolchildren in Boston during the school busing campaign, PLP organized workers to smash them. In every job and every community where we organize class struggle, racism is the key pivot point. We lead workers to resist anti-immigrant laws and racist policies in schools and hospitals.

In addition to pushing Klan-type racists and black nationalists, the rulers revived an openly racist line, led by well-known university intellectuals. These people, in the service of capitalism, published books and went on speaking tours saying they had "scientific" evidence that white people were genetically superior to black people -- basically, Hitler's line of a "superior race." For twenty-five years, this campaign has been going on; now, they are claiming that everything from intelligence to unemployment to violent behavior is racially based. This line is no more scientific than the idea of "race" as a whole. If even something as simple as skin pigment cannot be genetically determined, it is obvious that complex social behaviors aren't. Our party has organized to chase these guys off the stage and expose their fascist nature from the early 1970s until today. The fight against racist ideology is key to winning workers and students to understanding the true nature of racism as the cornerstone of capitalism.

Communism Will Smash Racism

Communism is the opposite of capitalism. As Karl Marx said, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, because capitalism created the working class in order to exploit it. The society we live in today, worldwide, is divided into two main opposing classes: the capitalist ruling class and the working class. These two classes are locked in a struggle over who will get the product of workers' labor. This struggle will only end when it becomes a struggle over power and the working class overthrows the capitalists.

The ideology of communism arises out of the lessons of this class conflict. Communist ideas are the most advanced ideas of the working class' struggle. The communist Progressive Labor Party is the party of the working class, which leads our class in the struggle to overthrow capitalism and end exploitation. Communist revolution will establish rule by the working class, eliminating the whole system of capitalism, the capitalist government and the capitalist class. It will replace these things with an egalitarian society, in which all aspects of life are planned by the working class for the needs of everyone, rather than for the profits of a few.

"Communism can only succeed by winning the working class to reject all racist practices and ideas."

What is the place of racism under communism? Very simply, racism and communism cannot coexist. Communism can only succeed by winning the working class to reject all practices and ideas that are based on one group of people getting better or different treatment than some other group. That is the major lesson which our party has learned from the failures of the old communist movement. Despite being the first country in which the working class took power, and the leader of the greatest anti-racist struggle of the century, the Soviet Union turned into a capitalist country once again: so did China. This is because the old communist parties did not attack inequality in all its forms. Wages continued to exist, meaning some workers had more than others; national differences continued to exist, including separate countries; discrimination against people based on nationality or language continued; women and men were not treated equally on the job or in politics.

Progressive Labor Party has taken a lesson from these mistakes of the past. When the working class takes power next time, wages and money must immediately be abolished. All forms of inequality -- whether according to race, nationality, language, sex, level of education, or whatever -- must be fought tooth and nail. The principle of communism is "from each according to their commitment; to each according to their need." This means everyone will get what they need, within the limits of what society can produce. In relationship to racism and other forms of inequality carried over from capitalism, we know that some people will need more than others. For instance, capitalism has destroyed the health of black and latin workers at a faster pace than that of white workers. Some black and latin workers under communism will need more medical services, at least at first. Racism has led to segregated neighborhoods under capitalism. Minority neighborhoods that have been systematically left to run down will need more of society's resources to fix them up. All neighborhoods will need to be integrated. All aspects of political, economic and social leadership will need to be integrated. There are many similar examples.

Some will object to this plan. All of the racist ideas that exist today will still exist after workers take power. As long as any inequality continues to exist, racist ideas will continue to have life. Every aspect of racism, from the material to the ideological, will be fought in a planned, systematic, detailed way. Obviously, racist groups like the KKK will not be allowed to exist. Anti-racist education will be an important aspect of communist life.

Part Three:

Theories of Racism

History shows us that racism has not always existed and that it did not develop from ideas. It developed from the need for cheap labor in the earliest stages of capitalism, and from the need to divide and conquer workers in order to control them.

Slavery in the Ancient World

Racism in the United States emerged along with slavery, in the 1600s and 1700s. But slavery existed in the world long before that.

Ancient societies were based on slavery; however slavery in these societies, was not based on "race". A person became a slave by being defeated in war, or sometimes because of bankruptcy or punishment for certain crimes. Slaves in Rome came from what is now England, France, eastern Europe, north Africa -- wherever the Roman Empire had conquered. (In fact, the word "slave" comes from Slav -- the name given to people from eastern Europe.) Roman slaves came in all colors, from the palest to the darkest. In north Africa, black Africans were the largest group of slaves, but there were also white, Christian slaves. In those days, slaves could sometimes be set free, and if they were, they would be equal to the other free people. Racism as we know it did not exist.

During the "Middle Ages" in Europe, there was a good deal of contact with African societies. At that time, Africa was more advanced than Europe: it had large cities, universities, huge armies and a lively trade with Asia and the Mediterranean. Africa was admired as a continent of gold and riches. European churches dating back to those days have statues and paintings of black saints in them. Racism as we know it did not exist in those times, either.

Race and Racism Were Created by Capitalism

When slavery developed in the "New World" in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, it was a new type of slavery. It was slavery within the capitalist economy. But slave labor is not the usual form of labor under capitalism: wage labor is. So why did slavery develop in the Americas? And why is it that the slaves were Africans?

When the British began to develop profitable plantations in their American colonies they faced a serious shortage of workers. They also faced the problem of labor discipline because it was easy for workers to leave the plantations or escape to the Indians.

The British tried several ways of dealing with the labor shortage. The main one, at first, was indentured servitude . Under this system, unemployed people from England were convinced to come to America or were kidnapped. They were forced to work without wages to pay off their passage to America from England, usually for seven years. People were packed like sardines into the holds of ships for two to three months. Sometimes, fewer than half of them survived the trip. When people died, they were tossed overboard. Once they arrived in America, they were auctioned off to buyers. Husbands, wives and children were separated. These were white, English people: racism had nothing to do with it. It was just plain capitalist greed.

Indentured servants were brutally exploited. The plantation owners and the colonial government violently disciplined these workers. Runaways were punished by hanging, burning, being staked in the sun or shot. It was also legal to increase their seven-year contract as punishment for various misdeeds. At this stage, most indentured servants did not even live until the end of their seven year contract.

The shipmasters and merchants who brought white laborers to the colonies also went to Africa to get laborers. Slavery of the early, pre-capitalist type existed in west Africa at that time. When different groups went to war, people who were captured became slaves -- not for life, and not without rights, but still slaves. British and other European merchants offered money to purchase captured slaves, and they found the African slave owning rulers willing to sell.

"Africans joined whites as indentured servants and went through the same hell..."

For several decades, the Africans brought to North America joined whites as indentured servants. They went through the same hell, from the boat passage to the auction block to the beatings and harsh conditions. In the colonies, they worked and lived alongside the whites. There was no barrier between white and black servants: their common enemy created an intense solidarity, which overcame the superficial differences in language and cultural habits. They lived, worked, and married together. They often ran away together, and on several occasions they rebelled together.

In the 1660s all this began to change -- drastically. England cut back on white emigration. The industrial revolution was beginning so more workers were needed in the factories at home. British capitalists also gave massive support to the African slave trade. They had made a decision to base the American economic system on human slavery, and the supply of labor from Africa was cheap and plentiful.

"British capitalists made a conscious decision to base the American economic system on human slavery."

The slave trade was immensely profitable. The profits from buying and selling African workers, combined with the rape of gold and silver from South and Central America, provided the capital to drive the engine of the industrial revolution. Europe became the top dog in the world based on the enslavement of American Indians and Africans.

At this time, the colonial ruling class (plantation owning families like the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Mathers and Byrds: the "fathers of our country") began to legalize slavery. At first, some plantation owners began to hold certain Africans for life, rather than for seven years. Then lifetime servitude for black servants became law. In 1662 came the "principal of heredity," which declared that, legally, if the mother was a black slave, the child would also be a slave from birth.

But in a society which until then had paid almost no attention to skin color, a number of questions had to be answered: what was a black person? What was a white person? What was a child whose parents were different colors? At this stage, the concept of race needed to be made up. To do this, more laws were passed. The Virginia legislature, in 1672, defined a black person: anyone with one black grandparent. (Hitler used a parallel law to define a "Jew".) This was very significant: if it was necessary to pass a law to define a "race," it is obvious that at that time, people did not think of each other as belonging to separate "races."

These laws represent the beginning of the idea of racism. The idea was that whites were superior to blacks. This idea was very profitable, so it didn't bother the capitalist rulers of the colonies that it was a blatant lie. They used the idea to justify all past, present and future exploitation and abuse of black people, Indians, and later, other "people of color."

The final step in this process was that black people lost all their rights and became the property of the slave owners. Every aspect of the trade and of slavery became even more brutal. Millions of black people were murdered by capitalism in this process.

But the colonial rulers still faced a big problem: both whites and blacks resisted the new system. Although most historians today say that racism came about because Europeans were "naturally" prejudiced against Africans because of their skin color, the truth is that skin color was an excuse for racism, not the cause of it.

"The truth is that skin color was an excuse for racism, not the cause of it."

Blacks and whites did not view each other as different races. They had to be trained to. This training was ruthless and carefully planned, and continues to this day! The legislatures, the churches, the courts and the press were all used in the campaign. The purpose was to separate whites and blacks in order to control both. This made slavery possible. It also made it possible for the ruling class to make huge profits off the backs of poor white workers and farmers who were divided from their black brothers and sisters, and confused by racism about the cause of their poverty.

Laws were passed to punish whites who had black friends, or who ran away with black people, and vice versa. Laws were passed against interracial dating and marriage -- which people ignored for more than a century. Black and white people were punished by torture, maiming and death for breaking these laws. Opponents of the system were branded, castrated, starved to death, roasted to death over fires. White and black rebels were beheaded, and their heads put on poles along the roads as warnings.

Despite all this, rebellion and unity continued. Whites in general still had not learned to be racist. They openly disobeyed the laws.

The ruling class began to offer rewards to each group to betray the other: Indians were offered bounties for betraying black runaways, blacks were given minor rewards for helping to fight Indians, whites were used against both.

The bosses eventually "persuaded" many white workers to identify with their masters instead of their black brothers and sisters. As racism came to be more accepted, conditions for whites got even worse. The plantations system grew, forcing them off any land they might farm, and out of any jobs they might get.

The truth, hidden by the bosses, is that racist ideas and practices were forced on the working class by one hundred years of violence, laws and propaganda. White workers as well as black slaves became victims of it. The capitalists who devised racism clearly knew what they were doing.

"Racist ideas were forced on the working class by one hundred years of violence and propaganda."

The capitalists made racism an essential part of their system, but they never succeeded in squashing the opposition to it. Because racism (then and now) is against the direct interests of the working class, many workers, both slave and "free," continued to unite in rebellions against slavery. Although they were defeated by the overwhelmingly superior force of the government, there were hundreds of slave revolts in the United States, a great many of which involved white workers and farmers. The event which touched off the Civil War was the Harper's Ferry raid. This carefully planned raid was intended to be the beginning of an army of escaped slaves and a guerrilla war in the south. It was an integrated raid, and one of the main organizers was John Brown, who was white.

Slavery Ended, but Racism Continued

The Civil War was in part a heroic uprising against slavery by slaves themselves, with the support of many workers from the northern states. The Civil War was also a battle by the industrial capitalists of the north to control the nation, because the southern slave owners were trying to split off and set up their own, separate country. Although they were not particularly out to end slavery, the northern leadership discovered after several years of war that they could not win the war without unleashing the power of the slaves. So, eventually (no thanks to Abe Lincoln), slavery in the U.S. was abolished.

But racism did not die along with it. Capitalists both north and south knew what a profitable thing racism was. And they were terrified by what happened immediately after the Civil War in the south.

At the end of the war, former slaves settled on the old plantation land. (The owners had been driven off during the war, or could no longer control their former slaves.) Poor white workers and farmers came to join them. These integrated forces created a mass movement which took over the plantation land, farmed it communally, set up its own, integrated schools, and elected black and white workers to the state and federal governments. Clearly, this was a no-win situation for capitalism. It had to be stopped, by any means necessary.

The former slave owning ruling class of the south sat down with the bankers to work out a plan to retake the land and bring the workers under their control. They knew it couldn't legally be slavery, but they would opt for the next best thing. To accomplish their plans, they needed a vicious, violent campaign similar to the one which, two hundred years earlier, had established slavery. In the 1870's the Ku Klux Klan was born. The bankers, plantation owners, local police and court officials, and their sons, relatives and friends, put on sheets and went out at night to terrorize the communal farmers. The northern capitalists helped out by withdrawing the anti-racist federal troops which had occupied the south since the Civil War's end.

The newly united ruling class succeeded in forcing the former slaves back to work for next-to-no wages, and in forcing a resegregation of workers. Within a few decades, a fresh crop of racist laws appeared across the south, forbidding any close relationships between black and white. (These were called the Jim Crow laws, and they remained on the books until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.) The bosses had what they wanted: a beaten down working class, divided by race. Now the northern industrial capitalists had a huge pool of workers to draw from as they expanded their production in the early 1900s. Black workers by the tens of thousands came north to work in the booming factories of Chicago, Detroit and New York. And with them, the bosses made sure, came all the ideas and institutions of racism. What had worked so well to ensure profits and a weakened, divided work force in the south, they wanted in their factories and cities as well.

Join Progressive Labor Party

Racism is necessary to capitalism. The only way to erase it from the face of the earth is for the working class, led by its communist party, to violently overthrow the capitalist government and establish its own power. Bring that day closer! Join and build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party today!

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The Bosses Proposition 187: An Attack On All Workers

In November 1994, California passed Proposition 187, which keeps undocumented ("illegal") immigrants from getting food stamps, welfare benefits, and medical care. The law also requires teachers, nurses, doctors and other public employees to turn in anyone they think does not have a green card. Then they will use their racist police to arrest these so-called "criminals". The bosses are trying to convince white and black workers that immigrant workers (mainly latino) are sucking up the state's resources. The next step in the plan is to cut all services to legal immigrants. At the same time, the bosses are slashing services for all workers. They will eliminate hospitals, schools and other services in working class communities. They are laying off thousands of workers at L.A. County hospital, all of whom are "legal" and are white, black, Asian and latin. They are planning 16,000 more layoffs.

Meanwhile, the same bosses continue to import undocumented workers so they can super-exploit them in the garment sweatshops. Proposition 187 is the bosses' attempt to divide immigrant workers from other workers. It is a classic example of the divide and conquer tactics of the bosses' racism.

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Louis Farrakhan - The Black Nationalist the Bosses Love to Hate

The bosses love Farrakhan because of his main message to black workers: the enemy, he tells us is the white man, Jews, and Asians, not the capitalist system. The answer to racism that he offers capitalism: black capitalism. Invest in businesses (his businesses), and the profits will set you free. He tells workers he will use the money to build a black business empire which will ultimately lead to their liberation. He has built an empire that serves himself and leaves the workers out.

Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam control businesses from Beverly Hills, California, to Bronwood, Georgia, to Chicago's South side. He runs a number of private security firms, soap and cosmetic companies, a publishing firm, grocery chain, fish franchises, a $5 million restaurant in Chicago, and two clothing firms. Farrakhan promises, that by contributing to his businesses, workers will be part of a billion dollar entity and reap the benefits, but there is as much chance of this than as winning the Lotto.

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There is No Such Thing as Race

If you watch how young children act, you will realize that we learned our ideas about race and nationality -- we weren't born with them.

Two and three year old children usually do not think skin color is very significant. If they are in an integrated day care situation, they are as likely to say, "hey look at that purple kid," identifying another child by the color of a shirt rather than by skin color. It's not that the children don't see each other's skin color, it's just that it means no more than the color of their eyes, or the color of their clothes. As they grow older, they soon learn how significant skin color is in capitalist society.

As much as the capitalists want to force us to believe in race, however, there is no such thing as a race of humans. All humans are part of the same species. There are variations in the physical appearance of humans, but they are insignificant. There is no medical test that will show what so-called "race" a person belongs to. The physical differences between humans are much smaller than you would find in many other species. Think of all the distinct breeds of dogs, horses or cows, for instance.

Many people think that the differences in appearance between people is inherited -- that it's "in the genes." This is a very small part of the story. After all, somewhere between 95% and 98% of human genetic makeup is the same as chimpanzees'. If only 3% to 5% of our genes account for the huge differences between us and chimps, imagine what a tiny amount goes into the small variations in human appearance.

In fact, genes cannot code for race. Many genes code for most human physical characteristics, not just one. There is no such thing as a "black" gene or a "white" gene. All human genes exist in all populations of humans, from all parts of the world. Some appear more frequently in one area than another. There is actually more genetic variation within any given population than there is between groups of so called "races".

The average human being is brown. A smaller number of people are black or white. This is similar to other traits: for example, height. Most people fall in a middle range of height, with a smaller number very tall or very short. There are a few physical traits controlled by only one gene. They are, for example, the ability to curl your tongue, or whether your ear lobes are attached. Those traits don't correspond to the capitalists' needs to divide people into races, however. So nobody even notices them