12
WfJRKERS ,,1N(JIJI1,, 25¢ No. 294 X·523 4 December 1981 Class Struggle Against Racism, Cold War Austerityl eaaan's WV Photo there to receive a standing ovation; Fritz Mondale was there too, as well as Tip O'Neill. With all the speechifying, it looked more like a Democratic Party gathering than a labor convention. And while the AFL-CIO convention delegates squabbled over which token black bureaucrat to add to the executive board, Reagan's austerity drive has hit the black population first and foremost. More than 50 percent of black teenagers are without jobs, not counting those who have given up looking for work. Welfare and food stamps have been slashed and job training has been "zeroed out." The basis of Kirkland, Fraser & Co.'s new New Deal with the Democrats is not the usual liberal/reformist "butter vs. guns" promises. Now the bureau- crats and Democrats unite on the impossible program of guns and butter: more missiles along with the restoration of some of the social services cuts. This would be paid for either by higher taxes-as Mondale now proposes-or the kind of banana republic-style inflation experienced in early 1980 under Carter. In either case it is the workers and poor who will continue to pay for the anti-Soviet war drive. This policy is not popular among the union ranks. The memory of the grim economic conditions under Carter hasn't been erased by Reaganomics. If continued on page 11 to receive the "George Meany Human Rights Award." (Had this award existed during the Vietnam War, it would no doubt have gone to General Thieu and Marshal Ky.) Decades of Stalinist bureaucratic rule have driven much of the Polish working class into the arms of the Vatican, the International Monetary Fund and NATO imperialism. And now the loyal lieutenants of the Pentagon and Wall Street are doing what they can to bring Poland into the "free world" (i.e., to incite capitalist counterrevolution). Acting as imperialism's labor auxili- ary is nothing new for the AFL-CIO leaders. Their American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) is a notorious CIA front. Last fall the infamous CIA provocateur Irving Brown offered to set up "free trade unions" in UNITA-held areas of Angola-undoubtedly to aid South Africa's efforts to overthrow the Cuba- supported nationalist government in Luanda. Lane Kirkland's keynote speech at the convention bemoaned that Reagan's blatantly anti-labor policies have result- ed in "the destruction of domestic support for necessary military expendi- tures"! In order to win support for a hard-line militarist program which would appear less anti-labor, Kirkland brought the Democrats to the conven- tion in a big way. Teddy Kennedy was The Newest "New Deal": War Drive and "Sacrifice" The AFL-CIO national convention last month was full of ritualistic denun- ciations of Reaganomics. But the heart of Reaganomics is not "supply-side" fiscal quackery. It is the massive military build-up intended to secure first-strike nuclear capability against the USSR as well as to fight conventional wars, from the mass graves in El Salvador to the shores of Tripoli. The anti-Communist fanatics of the AFL-CIO executive board support Reagan's anti-Soviet war drive to the hilt-more so, in fact, than some Democratic politicians. A Wall Street Journal (18 November) editorial argues that Lane Kirkland & Co. should be less hostile to Reagan and friendly to the Democrats since "clearly, their [the Reaganites'] attitudes toward foreign policy are more in harmony with the AFL-CIO's strong anti-communism than were the accommodationist [I] notions of the Carter administration." At the convention the AFL-CIO tops displayed this strong anti-Communism by fulsome support to the only "trade union" in the world that Reagan likes, Poland's Solidarnosc. It was fitting that the fervently anti-Soviet leader of Solidarnosc, Lech Walesa, was invited .;';;"'''':;:;';';' 'w Labor Day 1981: Anger at the base against strikebreakers Reagan/Koch. "friends of labor" three years from now. Through militant action. labor can bring down Reagan! Democrats, Labor Fakers Beat Anti-Soviet War Drums By firing an entire national union and throwing 12,000 air traffic controllers on the street, Ronald Reagan has launched the most aggressive assault on labor rights since the rise of the CIa in the 1930s. He wants to turn the clock back to the days before industrial unions when sweatshop conditions and 14-hour days were the norm not just in little garment shops, but in steel, auto and the rest of American industry. His High Noon confrontation with labor pushed the sellout union bureaucracy to mohihze at least a gesture of labor opposition on September J9 in Washington. No doubt the turnout .for this, the largest labor demonstration in U.S. history, far exceeded the expectations of the cowardly AFL-CIO tops, especially given the refusal of the bureaucrats of the strategic industrial unions in the Midwest to build for it. The anger and discipline demonstrated by workers in Washington showed they wereprepared to fight. And so did the favorable reception received by the Spartacist League banner "Fight for Workers' Rights! Build a Workers Party! Smash Reagan!" and the sale of over 8,000 copies of Workers Vanguard with the headline in defense of the air traffic controllers: "Labor Must Shut Down the Airports!" At the recent AFL-CIO convention in New York City the labor traitors on the platform only trumpeted their dedica- tion to a strategy that has led labor from defeat to defeat: back the Democrats in the next election and support Reagan's militarist foreign policy. Reagan's war on the working class is part and parcel of his massive military build-up and war drive against the Soviet Union. But the AFL-CIO tops from Kirkland to Fraser have been in the front line of the anti- Soviet superhawks. They were beating the drums for the Cold War while Reagan was still making movies. Now, as the economy falls apart and the anti-Soviet war drive heats up, the givebacks and austerity will be de- manded more openly as sacrifices for the "national defense" against the USSR. Race terror and witchhunting will be the domestic face of the Cold War. Defense of the gains of the 1917 October Revolution which overthrew capitalism in Russia is key to the defense of the workers' interests at home. That is why the struggle to unleash the power of labor in its own interest must be a political fight to oust the Cold War bureaucrats. The labor movement has the power to turn back Reagan's attacks, but not by installing the old set of capitalist

Class Struggle Against Racism, Cold War Austerityl · PDF fileClass Struggle Against Racism, Cold War Austerityl eaaan's ... be less hostile to Reagan and friendly to ... capitalism

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WfJRKERS ,,1N(JIJI1,, 25¢No. 294 .:~, X·523 4 December 1981

Class Struggle Against Racism, Cold War Austerityl

eaaan's

WV Photo

there to receive a standing ovation; FritzMondale was there too, as well as TipO'Neill. With all the speechifying, itlooked more like a Democratic Partygathering than a labor convention.

And while the AFL-CIO conventiondelegates squabbled over which tokenblack bureaucrat to add to the executiveboard, Reagan's austerity drive has hitthe black population first and foremost.More than 50 percent of black teenagersare without jobs, not counting thosewho have given up looking for work.Welfare and food stamps have beenslashed and job training has been"zeroed out."

The basis of Kirkland, Fraser & Co.'snew New Deal with the Democrats isnot the usual liberal/reformist "buttervs. guns" promises. Now the bureau­crats and Democrats unite on theimpossible program of guns and butter:more missiles along with the restorationof some of the social services cuts. Thiswould be paid for either by highertaxes-as Mondale now proposes-orthe kind of banana republic-styleinflation experienced in early 1980under Carter. In either case it is theworkers and poor who will continue topay for the anti-Soviet war drive.

This policy is not popular among theunion ranks. The memory of the grimeconomic conditions under Carterhasn't been erased by Reaganomics. If

continued on page 11

to receive the "George Meany HumanRights Award." (Had this award existedduring the Vietnam War, it would nodoubt have gone to General Thieu andMarshal Ky.) Decades of Stalinistbureaucratic rule have driven much ofthe Polish working class into the arms ofthe Vatican, the International MonetaryFund and NATO imperialism. And nowthe loyal lieutenants of the Pentagonand Wall Street are doing what theycan to bring Poland into the "freeworld" (i.e., to incite capitalistcounterrevolution).

Acting as imperialism's labor auxili­ary is nothing new for the AFL-CIOleaders. Their American Institute forFree Labor Development (AIFLD) is anotorious CIA front. Last fall theinfamous CIA provocateur IrvingBrown offered to set up "free tradeunions" in UNITA-held areas ofAngola-undoubtedly to aid SouthAfrica's efforts to overthrow the Cuba­supported nationalist government inLuanda.

Lane Kirkland's keynote speech at theconvention bemoaned that Reagan'sblatantly anti-labor policies have result­ed in "the destruction of domesticsupport for necessary military expendi­tures"! In order to win support for ahard-line militarist program whichwould appear less anti-labor, Kirklandbrought the Democrats to the conven­tion in a big way. Teddy Kennedy was

The Newest "New Deal": WarDrive and "Sacrifice"

The AFL-CIO national conventionlast month was full of ritualistic denun­ciations of Reaganomics. But the heartof Reaganomics is not "supply-side"fiscal quackery. It is the massive militarybuild-up intended to secure first-strikenuclear capability against the USSR aswell as to fight conventional wars, fromthe mass graves in El Salvador to theshores of Tripoli. The anti-Communistfanatics of the AFL-CIO executiveboard support Reagan's anti-Soviet wardrive to the hilt-more so, in fact, thansome Democratic politicians. A WallStreet Journal (18 November) editorialargues that Lane Kirkland & Co. shouldbe less hostile to Reagan and friendly tothe Democrats since "clearly, their [theReaganites'] attitudes toward foreignpolicy are more in harmony with theAFL-CIO's strong anti-communismthan were the accommodationist [I]notions of the Carter administration."

At the convention the AFL-CIO topsdisplayed this strong anti-Communismby fulsome support to the only "tradeunion" in the world that Reagan likes,Poland's Solidarnosc. It was fitting thatthe fervently anti-Soviet leader ofSolidarnosc, Lech Walesa, was invited

.;';;"'''':;:;';';'_'~. 'w .~;"J

Labor Day 1981: Anger at the base against strikebreakers Reagan/Koch.

"friends of labor" three years from now.Through militant action. labor canbring down Reagan!

Democrats,Labor Fakers

Beat Anti-SovietWar Drums

By firing an entire national union andthrowing 12,000 air traffic controllerson the street, Ronald Reagan haslaunched the most aggressive assault onlabor rights since the rise of the CIa inthe 1930s. He wants to turn the clockback to the days before industrialunions when sweatshop conditions and14-hour days were the norm not just inlittle garment shops, but in steel, autoand the rest of American industry. HisHigh Noon confrontation with laborpushed the sellout union bureaucracy tomohihze at least a gesture of laboropposition on September J9 inWashington.

No doubt the turnout .for this, thelargest labor demonstration in U.S.history, far exceeded the expectations ofthe cowardly AFL-CIO tops, especiallygiven the refusal of the bureaucrats ofthe strategic industrial unions in theMidwest to build for it. The anger anddiscipline demonstrated by workers inWashington showed they werepreparedto fight. And so did the favorablereception received by the SpartacistLeague banner "Fight for Workers'Rights! Build a Workers Party! SmashReagan!" and the sale of over 8,000copies of Workers Vanguard with theheadline in defense of the air trafficcontrollers: "Labor Must Shut Downthe Airports!"

At the recent AFL-CIO convention inNew York City the labor traitors on theplatform only trumpeted their dedica­tion to a strategy that has led labor fromdefeat to defeat: back the Democrats inthe next election and support Reagan'smilitarist foreign policy. Reagan's waron the working class is part and parcel ofhis massive military build-up and wardrive against the Soviet Union. But theAFL-CIO tops from Kirkland to Fraserhave been in the front line of the anti­Soviet superhawks. They were beatingthe drums for the Cold War whileReagan was still making movies.

Now, as the economy falls apart andthe anti-Soviet war drive heats up, thegivebacks and austerity will be de­manded more openly as sacrifices forthe "national defense" against theUSSR. Race terror and witchhuntingwill be the domestic face of the ColdWar. Defense of the gains of the 1917October Revolution which overthrewcapitalism in Russia is key to the defenseof the workers' interests at home. That iswhy the struggle to unleash the power oflabor in its own interest must be apolitical fight to oust the Cold Warbureaucrats.

The labor movement has the power toturn back Reagan's attacks, but not byinstalling the old set of capitalist

Racist Provocation at Walne State

SYL: "Run Out Racist South End Editor!"DETROIT-An outcry at Wayne StateUniversity has been sparked by theracist "cartoon" published in the SouthEnd student newspaper November 18.The "cartoon" printed by editor E. DaleLee, entitled "How many honkies are inthis picture?" and depicting five stereo­typed black players dribbling basket­balls around a white-sheeted club­wielding KKKer, is a racist provocation.Last week the Spartacus Youth League(SYL) initiated a "Committee to OustRacist Editor Lee" at a meeting at­tended by over 30 black students, Arabs,Jews and socialists. The Committee hascalled a rally/demonstration at WayneState on Thursday, December 3 to runout the racist FBI-loving editor.

Activists in the Committee havealready been subjected to physicalthreats and attacks for protesting thisatrocity. An organized group of Lee'ssupporters repeatedly disrupted a No­vember 24 meeting to form the Commit­tee and refused to leave when asked to.At the meeting's end, a hefty white malethug in his forties suddenly burst intothe room and asked a Lee supporter,"Did you get it all down?" referring to

his copious note-taking at the meeting.When both men left, a photographer forthe Committee and a black Committeeorganizer sought to take a picture of theracist disrupters. Moments later thethug charged at the woman photogra­pher, trying to grab the camera andforcing her against a banister over atwo-story drop where she could havebeen killed. He then reached into hispocket as if he had a gun and repeatedlyphysically threatened the black Com­mittee member.

Last year the SYL initiated the AdHoc Committee to Oust South EndApologists for Klan/Nazi Murder, inorder to remove the editors of the SouthEnd who wrote an editorial cheering theacquittal of the KKK/Nazi killers inGreensboro, North Carolina. Now thenew editor Lee is an open sympathizerof the FBI. Lee not only brags he has agirlfriend working for the feds, but alsosports an FBI T-shirt and decorates hisoffice with FBI paraphernalia frommugs to an FBI target with authenticbullet holes. However,. many blacksknow the murderous history of FBIracism-from the COINTELPRO at-

tacks on Martin Luther King, Jr. to thesecret police involvement in the KKK/Nazi Greensboro massacre.

In response to the outrage, Leeprinted the cartoon again and comment­ed snidely, "I never had slaves and Idon't want them." "Racial discrimina­tion is more fallacy than fact," he added,and Detroit black mayor "ColemanYoung ... is racist." This business is nojoke. Lee's provocative racist "cartoon"fits neatly into a pattern of KKK/Naziattacks against blacks and other minori­ties in Michigan and throughout thecountry. Recently, Robert Guy of BattleCreek, a leader of the Coalition AgainstPolice Brutality, was killed in a bombexplosion. An SYL leaflet pointed out:

"Enough! The editor thinks 'racialdiscrimination is more fallacy thanfact.' This in Reagan's America wherethe Klan/Nazi terrorists are growing.Remember Cynthia Steele! She had herhand blown off when the KKK threw apipebomb into her home on Detroit'swest side last winter. Maybe Lee thinksthe Nazi death camps are a 'fallacy' too.Jewish concentration camp survivors inSouthfield tried to stop a l'azi provoca­tion there last spring. In October 1979.two foremen paraded around the Rouge

plant in KKK hoods. Later they claimedit was a big joke too. Thousands ofblack, white and Arab auto workersdidn't think so. They drove them thehell out of the plant. E. Dale Lee mustget the same treatment!"

Given the provocative and potentiallyexplosive character of the "cartoon"incident at this largely minority andworking-class school in the heart of blackDetroit, the campaign to oust racisteditor Lee has received wide attention.This included a front-page Detroit FreePress article and coverage in theHouston Chronicle which, given sky­rocketing unemployment in Detroit, iswidely read here for its want ads section.

The Committee rally is scheduled thesame day as a meeting of the studentcouncil which has called on Lee toappear to explain his "cartoon." Be­cause of the furor, the student councilhas tabled the budget of the South End.The Committee calls on all those whostand against racism, who want to stopKlan/Nazi terror, who defend demo­cratic rights for minorities and workers,to attend the rally and the studentcouncil meeting to ensure the ouster ofracist FBI-lover Lee.•

SL Court Suit Gains Supgort

Defeat California McCarihyite Smear!

WfJliKEIiSVANGIIARDMarxist Working-Class Biweeklyof the Spartaclst League of the U.S.EDITOR: Jan NordenASSOCIATE EDITOR: Charles Burroughs

PRODUCTION: Darlene Kamiura (Manager),Noah WilnerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Linda JarreauEDITORIAL BOARD: George Foster. LizGordon. Mark Kellermann. James Robertson.Reuben Samuels. Joseph Seymour. MarjorieStambergWorkers Vanguard (USPS 098-770) publishedbiweekly. skipping an issue in August and aweek in December. by the Spartacist PublishingCo.. 41 Warren Street. New York. NY 10007.Telephone: 732-7882 (Editorial), 732-7861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box1377. GPO. New York. NY 10116. Domesticsubscriptions: $5.00/24 issues. Second-classpostage paid at New York. NY.Opinions expressed in signed articles or lettersdo not necessarily express the editorialviewpoint.

SAN FRANCISCO, December 1­Congressman Ron Dellums has becomethe most recent endorser of the Sparta­cist League/Spartacus Youth League'scivil suit against California attorneygeneral George Deukmejian. Filed lastJuly, the suit demands that Deukmejianretract the inclusion of the SL/SYL inhis 1979 report on "Organized Crime inCalifornia-Part 2, Terrorism." Thereport wrongfully and viciously labeledthe SL/SYL as "terrorists" and as a"dangerous faction with which lawenforcement will have to deal," target­ing us for persecution and violence bypolice agencies and right-wing outfits.

Support for the suit by Dellums, anationally known black Democrat and aleading spokesman for Michael Har­rington's Democratic Socialist Organiz­ing Committee, helps gain a hearing forthe lawsuit in broader circles.

The Partisan Defense' Committee(PDC), which has undertaken to sup­port this case, has been meeting withpublic officials, civil liberties activistsand others who, while not sharing the

1221 OAK STREET' SUITE 536' OAKLAND. CAUFQRNIA 9046tZ' (.... ,5) 874-6751

November 25, 1981

the new McCarthyites. Already we arethousands of dollars in debt. This suit isimportant. Please help. Make thechecks payable to: PARTISAN DE­FENSE COMMIITEE."

Send contributions to: Partisan DefenseCommittee, P.O. Box 5555, San Fran­cisco CA 9410 I. •

BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

Dear Friend:

.~m<"OF .'• ..,.~o 0o ~. .

\o..~4Illu,o",..'\... ~

JG/emw

Ve y truly~

,~~~'" "J7~

Personally, I welcome the opportunity to support thiscase which I see as part of the fight against right-wing attackson civil liberties and the threat of a new McCarthyism in thisCountry. I trust that you will aid the efforts being made by thePartisan Defense Committee to bring this case to a successfulconclusion.

I have already endorsed the case, which demands thatDeukmejian retract his wrongful and defamatory characterizationsand publicize this retraction. On occasion, I have participatedin united front activities sponsored by these organizations - ­most recently by speaking at a public protest against the acquittalof KKK/Nazi members who shot dead five anti-fascist demonstratorsin Greensboro - - and I find Deukmejian's characterizations of theSL/SYL to be totally unfounded.

I encourage you to read the enclosed letter regardinga civil suit filed against Attorney General George Deukmejianby the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth League (SL/SYL).The case is in response to the Attorney General's annual reportentitled "Organized Crime in California - - 1979" in which, asthe suit states, the SL/SYL were falsely branded as "terrorists"and as "dangerous and violent'! organizations.

SL/SYL as 'terrorist/criminal' organi­zations will be a blow against renascentMcCarthyism of Deukmejian andReagan."Your generous support is urgentlyneeded to ensure that victory. The SL/SYL suit faces the resources ofthe Stateof California as well as right-wing agri­business tycoons who call the tune for

JOHN GEORGE

SUP£I'I'o'ISOR,rIFTM DISTRICT

SL/SYL's Marxist views, neverthelessknow by experience and reputation thatthe SL/SYL are neither "terrorists" nor"criminals." Not surprisingly given thetargeting of blacks and minorities byReaganite reaction, the case has evokedinterest and sympathy from blackspokesmen. Northern CaliforniaNAACP counsel Oliver Jones endorsedthe suit. Oakland City CouncilmanWilson Riles, J r. and Alameda CountySupervisor John George, both blackDemocrats, have also endorsed. Georgealso authored a letter (see accompany­ing box) to help raise the thousands ofdollars necessary to win the case.

PDC representatives also got a goodresponse from many of the delegates atthe statewide conference of the BlackAmerican Political Association ofCalifornia, held in Sacramento Novem­ber 6. A common reaction was thatDeukmejian's attacks threaten anotherperiod of McCarthyism. One blackSuperior Court judge who went to lawschool with Deukmejian said he wouldpersonally call the attorney generaldemanding the retraction be made.

With Deukmejian mounting an ag­gressive right-wing campaign for thegovernor's office in next year's election,there are many who know that Deuk­mejian's attacks are not limited to theSL/SYL. One state Democratic Partycentral committee member who hasassisted in the fund raising remarked,"Hell, Deukmejian's so right-wing hethinks we're terrorist!"

There may be a settlement in theworks, but the case has already costmany thousands of dollars. Your help isurgently needed. As the PDC states inits most recent fund appeal mailing:

"The Partisan Defense Committeebelieves it is of the utmost importancethat this suit be fought to a successfulconclusion. Reagan and Deukmejianmay dream of the post-World War IIperiod of loyalty oaths, McCarthy andUn-American Committees, but that isnot the same as getting it. The MoralMajority and Reagan/ Haig have notyet been able to mobilize nationalsentiment in favor of a McCarthyitewitchhunt. The time to fight back isnow. Retraction of the labeling of the4 December 1981No. 294

2 WORKERS VANGUARD

"Former" Agents Arm Qaddafi

The CIA's Libya Connection

To the Shores of Tripoli

At the center of the CIA's Libyanconnection are two of these "former"CIA agents, Edwin Wilson and FrancisTerpil. Beginning last summer the NewYork Times launched a major series on

On Company Time?

It is interesting that while theAmerican bourgeoisie is closing ranksbehind a campaign to patch up thetattered moral authority of the U.S.secret ,police. fOl:.U1e.,..ami"sQ-viet wardrive, the New York Times is pushing itsexpose of Wilson and Terpil. For yearsneither the government nor the bour­geois press wanted to bring attention tothis case. A Washington Post editorialnoted with some pique that "four yearsago reporter Bob Woodward disclosedinformation suggesting that at least asmall handful of former covert opera­tives, including a man named Edwin P.Wilson and some anti-Castro Cubans"had "gone into the terrorism business"for Qaddafi. "The same story, elaborat­ed, is enjoying a new life."

The case was forced into the open byone Kevin Mulcahy, a former CIA agentfrom a CIA-loyal family who workedfor Wilson in Libya in 1976. Afterdefecting from the operation, he went tothe U.S. government to demand theQaddafi connection be investigated. He

continued on page 9

school to teach the Libyans the latesttechniques in assassination and interna­tional terrorism."

The articles related stories of formerWilson/Terpil employees such as theCIA-trained bomb technician who toldhow Americans "had constructed alaboratory [in the former palace ofdeposed King Idris] and were manufac­turing assassination bombs disguised asrock formations, ashtrays, lamps andtea kettles." Wilson's arms buying forQaddafi, the Times reported, was runthrough a series of CIA-eonnectedbusinesses and long-time suppliers(among them J.S. Brower & Associatesin California, which illegally shippedover 20 tons of explosive plastique­almost the entire U.S. surplus availableat the time-to Libya on passengerflights, marked as "drilling mud").

The Wilson/Terpil affair is still news:Eugene Tafoya, currently on trial for theattempted assassination last year of aLibyan student opposed to Qaddafi,claims he was working for the CIA andthat Wilson was his agency contact.Tafoya stayed for four months at anEnglish farm owned by Wilson, andTafoya's bank, telephone and personalrecords all indicate his connectionto Wilson (New York Times, 2November).

<::::;;;::::

New York Times

.t1,~.~

;.:~~~>;..;~f:~h

1~li'According to the newly concocted

Cold War myth of Soviet "internationalterrorism," Muammar Qaddafi, theunsavory Islamic dictator of Libya, isbehind every terrorist bomb and bullet,and the Kremlin is behind Qaddafi.General Haig calls him the "patron saintof terror." The bible for this propagandacampaign is Claire Sterling's The TerrorNetwork, which devotes an entirechapter to Qaddafi, whom she calls the"Daddy Warbucks of internationalterrorism." This chapter was recentlyreprinted by The New Republic underthe headline: '~A murderer, a maniac­and Moscow's man." Hardly a weekgoes by without a new charge fromWashington of Qaddafi-sponsored ter­rorism: alleged plots against U.S.ambassadors in Europe and now evensupposed plans to assassinate Reagan(Newsweek, 30 November).

Haig has been repeatedly (and unsuc­cessfully) ordering reports on the Sovietmaster plot. But at last the evidence ofaQaddafi connection is in. Exposes in theNew York Times and other majornewspapers show where Libya getsexplosives, detonators and experts toturn them into sophisticated bombs­not to mention training terrorists andserving as hitmen against Qaddafi'sopponents-and where it got the planesto supply Libya's intervention in Chadlast year and the pilots to fly them. But itisn't the Russians who are exposed asthe Libyan connection. It's Wilson &Terpil, Inc.-described as just a coupleof home-grown entrepreneurs peddlingthe wares of Terrorism Made in U.S.A.And behind all the allegedly former CIAagents, munitions makers and GreenBerets involved there looms the wholemurky apparatus of what is called theV.S. "intelligence community."

Pushed into a federal investigation ofthe affair, a V.S. government confiden­tial report stated bluntly: "The UnitedStates, in effect, has become a majorsupplier of [military] hardware andtechnology in support of worldwideterrorism. Former Central IntelligenceAgency personnel, military specialforces personnel and U.S. corporationscombine to supply products and exper­tise to whomever can pay the price"(Boston Globe Magazine, 22 March).At a time when the supposed Russianinternational terror operation is theexcuse to "unleash" the CIA and the restof V.S. imperialism's secret agents, thisevidence is more embarrassing to the

"A Buck Is a Buck Is a Buck"The dirty details of the CIA agent

business have been compiled in thehistories of Edwin Wilson and FrankTerpil. Wilson made a fortune in thecovert action business, becoming amulti-millionaire while serving as aCIA operative and naval intelligenceagent. A member of Washington'sGeorgetown Club, he had purchasedhis 2,000 acre gentleman's farm inVirginia (currently valued at over $9million) before he officially left thesecret service. Here he entertained theWashington elite at fox hunts andbarbecues.

"I'm just a little man here, a littleman who runs a business," saysmillionaire Wilson from his Tripolibase. sounding like the Meyer Lanskyfigure in Godfather II. Wilson startedoff working for the CIA's office of

security in 1951, after a stint as amarine in Korea becoming a full-timeCIA contract agent in 1955. Early onhis assignment was as an officer of theSeafarers International V nion, whichhe described as "an unwitting V.S.labor organization" (New York Times,8 November). According to the Timesaccount, "In his capacity as a unionofficial, Mr. Wilson helped coordinatevarious c.l. A. activities against Cuba,including the Bay of Pigs invasion. Hesupplied foreign agents with arms andtook part in operations designed toharass Fidel Castro.... " He was alsoinvolved in the hunt for Che Guevarain Bolivia (Los Angeles Times, 28August).

In 1971 Wilson joined "Task Force157," a Navy covert action and spygroup, while simultaneously setting up

private businesses with CIA associatesand suppliers. There have also beenallegations that Wilson was involvedin the assassination of Chilean formerambassador Orlando Letelier. Ac­cording to Donald Freed (Death inWashington [1980]) an investigationby the Institute for Policy Studiessuggested Wilson as a. possible supplierof the blasting caps (C-4 plastiqueexplosive detonators) used by MichaelTownley in the murder of Letelier.Freed states categorically that "Town­ley met with Frank Terpil one weekbefore the Leteher murder. ... "

Wilson claims to have met Terpil,who set up the business with Qaddafi,at a party in 1976. A former CIAemployee supposedly dumped in 1971,apparently either for counterfeitingmoney in Tibet or smuggling liquorinto India, Terpil says, "A buck is abuck is a buck." He's patriotic, though:"If you're knocking off Americans it'llcost you 40 percent more," he toldundercover agents posing as South

American guerrillas. Didn't help: aNew York judge sentenced him inabsentia to 53 years in prison last Mayon gun-running charges. Besides hisLibyan operations, according to docu­ments found in Vgandan ex-dictatorIdi Amin's files after his overthrow,Terpil sold Amin $3.2 million worth ofequipment in August 1977, includingexplosives, tape recorders, remote­controlled radio detonators and a"variety of interrogation devices"(Boston Globe, 22 March).

Terpil told Mike Wallace on CBS's"60 Minutes" he sat through a statedinner in Uganda which began withAmin serving the severed head of anopponent on a silver platter. "Heserved the security problem on theplate," Terpil said with peculiarhumor. "I think it was the defenseminister, not too sure." The secondcourse saw another minister fall intohis soup, shot dead by Amin with a gunTerpil said he had given him.

4 DECEMBER 1981 3

"liberator" of a particular city or town.Already, Bor-Komorowski was prepar­ing for confrontation with the Soviets.On 19 April 1944 he wrote to theLondon government:

" ... we must be prepared for an opencollision between Poland and theSoviets, and on our part we would haveto demonstrate to the fulL in thiscollision, the independent position ofPoland."

-quotcd in Jan CicchanO\nki.The Warsaw Rising of 1944[ 1974]

The PreparationsBurza failed in the east. After the

Soviet army occupied Wilno and Lwow,the London Poles looked upon Warsawas the last chance for a major battle withthe Germans. The Warsaw Uprising wasto be a final confrontation with Stalin toassert the hegemony of the Horne Armyand prepare for the postwar return ofthe London government. When AKcommander Bor-Komorowski asked forauthorization from his political superi­ors the question was formulated:"Whether the representatives of theCouncil of National Unity believe thatthe entry of the Soviet troops intoWarsaw should be forestalled by theseizure of the capital by the HomeArmy'?" And General Monter, HomeArmy commander in the Warsawregion during the rising, later wrote:

"The political aim was to be achieved bythe seizure of the capital by our ownforces before the entry of the Red Army.In the liberated capital of the.sovereignstatc, power over the entire country wasto be assumed by the legal authori­ties.... The idea was to manifest to theentire world that the Government wasin its place and that there was no needfor the installation of candidates im­ported from the East to govern thecountrv."

-=-quoted in ibid.As for the timing, according to

Ciechanowski: "Bor-Komorowski andhis staff feared that procrastination ontheir part might lead, at the moment ofthe Red Army's entry into the city, to aspontaneous or Communist-inspiredoutbreak of fighting, impossible forthem to control or exploit." Or, as oneof the AK commander's chief lieuten­ants put it, "After five years of bloodyGerman occupation the hearts of theinhabitants of the Polish capital wouldhave been open to temptation"-ofsupporting a Communist-led Soviet­backed insurrection. A participant inthe uprising recorded in his diary theresponse of Home Army soldiers to an

Der Spiegel

1943 declaring: "The Germans haveceased to be the No. I enemy.... Thestruggle against communism is todayour essential task and perhaps even ouronly task." And AK's confrontationswith the Communists were not restrict­ed to a political level.

In 1943 Home Army commanderGrot-Rowecki advocated anti-Sovietmilitary operations-sabotage activitiesin the east, destroying lines of communi­cation as far as the Vistula and San,pitched battles against the Soviets inareas where even minimal opportunitiesfor success existed. In the event ofdecisive Soviet victory in the east Grot­Rowecki felt that the Home Armyshould refrain from fighting the Ger­mans, remain underground and awaitfurther developments. This was the verytactic that the pro-London Poles ac­cused the Russians of carrying out inWarsaw!

By the spring of 1944 a campaign of"intensified diversionary activity,"code-named Burza (Tempest) was un­derway in the east under Home Armycommander Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski(who succeeded Grot-Rowecki after hiscapture by the Gestapo in July 1943).Commanders were to carry out opera­tions independently of Soviet forces:coordination with the Red Army wouldreduce the political impact that AKunits would gain by posing as the

Polish Red Army Marshal Rokossovsky in liberated Lublin, 1944.

gp'loding the Anti-Soviet My!b

The Warsaw Upriofl

Storm Against the East

The political strategy which mo­tivated the Home Army's WarsawUprising had been formulated longbefore. The "doctrine of two enemies,"namely against both Germany andRussia, had ,been articulated by AKcommander Grot-Rowecki as the strate­gy of the internal resistance even whilethe London exile government wasformally allied with the USSR againstthe Hitler regime. Fearing the assump­tion of power by a pro-Moscow regimein postwar Poland, the pro-London AKcommanders refused all cooperationwith the Polish Workers Party (PPR)­established in 1942, some years afterStalin had dissolved the CommunistParty of Poland on charges ofTrotskyism-and with the PPR's parti­san force, the People's Army (AL).

When the "doctrine of two enemies"was first put forward, the Nazis hadcomplete control of Poland and werepushing to the gates of Moscow,Leningrad and Stalingrad. But as heroicbattles by the Soviet Red Army againstthe German imperialist attack drove theWehrmacht back, the Home Army'spolicy became openly one-sided ...against the Soviets. The internal resis­tance issued a statement on 8 September

Communist gamble that backfired­with horrendous consequences.

Ullstein 8ilderdienst

300,000 dead, 90 percent of Warsaw devastated by Nazis: anti-Communist Polish "Home Army" leadership mustshare responsibility,

In Poland today, history has becomea. political battlefield of the classstruggle. American liberal academ­ic Robert Darnton reported that

"when the strikers in Gdansk met toassess their victory over the governmentlast August [1980], they discussed notonly practical questions about how toorganize their new union but also theneed for a 'new history'" ("PolandRewrites History," New York Review ofBooks, 16 July 1981). "New history"turns out to be an interpretation of thePolish past to reinforce the presentnationalist, pro-Western and anti­Soviet fervor of Solidarnosc.

One of the most controversial ques­tions, reports Darnton, is the WarsawUprising of 1944:

"A film shown every day in the WarsawHistorical Museum shows Germantroops leveling the city after the uprisingof 1944. Finally the Soviet troopsliberate the rubble, having been de­tained on the east bank of the Vistula, asofficial history would have it, byoverextended lines of communication.According to accounts that circulate byword of mouth, the 'liberators' let theGermans do their dirty work for them,in order to encounter no oppositionwhen they extended their empire to thewest. That version is generally acceptedin the West, but nothing could be moreheretical in Communist Poland ...."

This "history" is anything but new.Rather, it is an old anti-Soviet mythwhich has been peddled for years by"captive nations" emigres and RadioFree Europe. Stanislaw Mikolujczyk,premier of the Polish capitalist exilegovernment in London during WorldWar II, gives the standard version in hisbook, Rape of Poland. Mikolajczykrefers to the Red Army as being "in thesuburbs of Warsaw from which itwouldn't budge." He implies that ifthe)'had wanted to the Russians could haveeasily captured Warsaw and saved thecity from destruction, also saving thelives of many of the 300,000 Poles whodied in the two months of fighting.

But it is not just the Pilsudskiteemigres who push this tale. TheLondon-Polish version is acceptedwithout qualification by "third camp"social democrats, like those of theBritish International Socialists:

"Stalin's fear of any kind of spontane­ous action was demonstrated clearly inAugust 1944 when an armed insurrec­tion against the Germans broke out inWarsaw. Although the initial decisionwas taken by Poles exiled in London,the rising was a magnificent display ofcourage and mass activity. Not onlydid Stalin refuse to alter the plans ofthe Red Army to liberate Warsaw; heeven refused to allow British planes touse Russian airfields to bring arms andsupplies to the insurgents. The Germanswere given a free hand to burn andmassacre. The callowness of the Rus­sian leaders can be explained only bythe fact that they were concerned toprevent at all costs the emergence of anyanti-Nazi movement that was not undertheir political control."

-Ian H. Birchall, WorkersAgainst the Monolith (1974)

What is the truth? The evidenceindicates that it was heavy Germancounterattacks, not conscious Russiansabotage, that prevented the Sovietsfrom entering Warsaw in early August1944. Whether the Red Army couldhave smashed through the panzer ringto link up with the insurgents whilefighting was still underway in Warsaw isless certain. What is clear, however, isthat this did not begin as a spontaneousrevolt. The Polish bourgeois exilegovernment in London and the pro­London leadership of the Home Army(Armija Krajowa-AK) launched acriminal adventure whose purpose wasto prevent the Red Army from liberat­ing Warsaw. They wanted to receive theSoviets as a sovereign authority, restingon the laurels of a victory won (ostensi­bly) by a people in arms, in order toassure the capitalist politicians ofprewar Poland a place in a postwargovernment. But at no point did theHome Army possess the strength todefeat or even hold the Nazis militarily;their only hope was a German collapseor a Red Army victory. It was an anti-

4 WORKERS VANGUARD

Soviet-sponsored Polish army reaches devastated Warsaw, 1945.

Cannon vs. "Third Campism"on the Warsaw Uprising

announcement by Radio Moscow thatthe liberation of Warsaw was at hand:"We have been sitting here for almost aweek, and now the Communists aregoing to beat us to the fight" (JulianKulski, Dying We Live [1979]).

The political purpose of this actionwas clear, but what of the militarysituation? On 14 July 1944 the AKcommander reported to London, "Inview of the present state of the Germanforces in Poland and their anti­insurrectionary preparations ... the ris­ing has no prospect of success." Theirarms were wholly inadequate-almostno mortars and antitank guns of anysort, and a large part of their stock ofsubmachine guns and ammunition hadbeen sent east for the failed Burzacampaign. Yet on 21 July 1944, Bor­Komorowski ordered AK troops on a"state of alertness for the uprising." Thisdecision coincided with the formation inLublin of the Polish Committee ofNational Liberation, which was support­ed by the Polish Communists andbacked by the Soviet Union. The Lublincommittee would act as a provisionalgovernment and nominal head of a newPolish army resulting from a mergerbetween Polish forces recruited inRussia and the Polish Communists' AL.

On July 26 Mikolajczyk in Londonauthorized the Home Army to launch ageneral insurrection when appropriate.On July 31 the Home Army commandmet to discuss the possibility of begin­ning operations in Warsaw. Bor­Komorowski reported on the militarysituation: in view of the state of theGerman forces in Warsaw, estimated at12 first-class divisions (including twocrack SS armored divisions), and theHome Army's lack of weapons andammunition (only enough for 3-4 days),operations planned for the last day ofthe German retreat were not feasible inthe immediate future. Yet later that dayBor-Komorowski issued the order toprepare the rising after receiving areport (incorrect as it soon turned out)that Russian tanks were already arrivingin Praga, the eastern suburb across theVistula from Warsaw.

The decision to act was influenced bythe false assumption that the Germanswould abandon Warsaw under the first

The initial response of the Trotsky­ist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) inthe United States to the WarsawUprising was an editorial (Militant. 5August 1944) hailing the Warsawworkers who "have not fought for thepredatory interests of British imperial­ism and its Polish henchmen of theLondon 'government-in-exile.' Norhave they battled in order to submit tothe reactionary rule of Stalin's bu­reaucracy and his Polish puppets." Asecond Militant (19 August 1944)editorial, entitled "Warsaw Betrayed,"claimed:

"No sooner did the Red Armyapproach the outskirts of Warsaw,than the Warsaw proletariat rose upand arms in hand, launched a full­scale battle to drive out the Nazioppressors...."Undoubtedly, the Warsaw prole­tariat expected that the Red Armywould hasten its assault on the city,and thus through their joint efforts,from within and without, the Nazityrants would be driven out anddestroyed."But instead of launching moreenergetically the military onslaughtand redoubling their efforts. the RedArmy attack was brought to a sud­den standstill, by order of Stalin'sgenerals ...."The Warsaw proletariat must drawthe lessons.... Only through theirindependent revolutionary actionswill they be able to organize fraterni-

4 DECEMBER 1981

Soviet attack. The London leadersthought the Nazi regime was on thepoint of collapse, that the defeats in theEast which had led to the destruction of25 German divisions, Anglo-Americansuccesses in Normandy and an attempton Hitler's life in late July signaledcatastrophe for the Germans. But theywere wrong.

The UprisingThe success of the Warsaw operation

depended on the Polish victory beingsecured by the Red Army. The timing ofthe rising was therefore critical, andclose military coordination between theHome Army and the Soviets was of thegreatest importance. But the Polesdeliberately had no communicationwith the Russians. In fact they had cutall lines to the PPR-led partisans inWarsaw. It was from Mikolajczyk (whowas in Moscow at the time for talks withStalin) that the Russians first learned ofthe Home Army's plans for Warsaw onJuly 31, three hours after Eor­Komorowski had given the order tobegin. Not even the command of thePeople's Army detachments in Warsawhad been informed of the uprising, buttheir units immediately joined the fightonce it had begun.

Bor-Komorowski's call to armscoincided, not with the crossing of theVistula by the Red Army, but withheavy German counterattacks on theadvancing Soviet troops. The Wehr­macht command decided to throw in allits reserves to stop the Russians. On July30 the right flank of the First Byelorus­sian Front clashed with the Germans onthe approaches to Praga, east of theVistula. On August I the Second SovietArmored Army was forced to break offits attack here and go on the defensive.The left flank of the First ByelorussianArmy managed to cross the Vistula 60kilometers southeast of Warsaw. Ger­man attacks did not dislodge theRussians, but they were unable toextend the bridgeheads.

In the next weeks, 50,000 Polishcombatants fought alone in desperateconditions. The Soviet army wasthrown back from Praga by the Germancounteroffensive "nearly 100 kilome­ters" (65 miles) according to the Soviet

zation with the Red Army soldiers andhelp the Soviet masses to settleaccounts with the bloody Bonapartistdictatorship of Stalin."

This line, which uncriticallyaccepted Western accounts of theWarsaw Uprising, put forward inparticular by Churchill, was sharplychallenged within the party. A letterwritten on 16 August 1944 by anassociate of James P. Cannon (thefounder of American Trotskyism, thenimprisoned for the SWP's revolution­ary opposition to the imperialistSecond World War) was sent to thePolitical Committee protesting thisabandonment of the party's uncondi­tional defense of the Soviet Union:

"In our opinion, the editorial onPoland in the August 5 Militant fallsinto error through a tendency to leapover the incompleted stage of Europe­an events-the Soviet Union's life anddeath struggles against the armies ofHitler. 'With their own armed forcesthey [the Polish workers] must contin­ue their independent revolutionarystruggle' the editorial states, and addsin a later paragraph 'against all theagents ... of the counter-revolutionaryStalinist bureaucracy.' This sweepingstatement can be understood asimplying armed struggle against theRed Army .... We must not forget thatas long as the Red Army remainslocked in combat with the armies of acapitalist Germany, our slogan 'Un­conditional defense of the Soviet

r·~1t\4"",,~~

•'J,

commander, Marshal Rokossovsky.Moscow refused to allow English andAmerican aircraft to land on Sovietterritory after dropping supplies to theAK insurgents because it "did not wishto associate themselves either directly orindirectly with the Warsaw adventure"(Foreign Minister Vyshinsky). How­ever, the British did not intend to sendsupplies and Bor-Komorowski wasinformed of this two days before theuprising (Ciechanowski, The WarsawRising of1944). The first supplies fromthe West were air-dropped only threeweeks after the outbreak of the fighting,and 2,000 Polish paratroopers in Eng­land who volunteered to go to Warsawwere refused permission (Militant, 25November 1944). From mid-SeptemberSoviet airplanes dropped considerablearms, food and other materiel onWarsaw, but by then it was too late.

The Red Army finally captured Pragaon September 14, and between

Union' retains its full content, regard­less of Stalin's counter-revolutionarypolicies in occupied areas beyond theSoviet borders,"

A second letter from Cannon'sassociate dated 23 August 1944protested:

"The August 19 Militant editorial,'Warsaw Betrayed: goes even furtherafield than the previous editorial wewrote about in muddling up our line of'Unconditional Defense of the SovietUnion' in the struggle against theNazi-imperialist invaders. To callupon the revolutionary Polish work­ers to 'organize fraternization' withthe Red Army soldiers, as the editorialdoes, is to think in terms of establish­ing contact with the rank and file of ahostile military force. But the Polishworkers must be the allies of the RedArmy in its war against Hitler'sarmies, no matter how reactionaryStalin's policy is... , The editorial alsotakes for granted a version of theWarsaw events about which there islittle information, none of it reliableand many uncertainties. A full-scalebattle against the Nazis by the Warsawproletariat is assumed, as is the 'orderof Stalin's generals' in halting the RedArmy attack on the city. The Moscowcharge that the London 'Polish gov­ernment in exile' ordered the uprisingwithout consulting the Red Armycommand is brushed aside withoutbeing clearly stated, much less anal­yzed in the light of the current Soviet­Polish negotiations. No considerationis given to the question of whether or

Eastfolo

September 16 and 19 General Z.Berling, commander of the new Soviet­sponsored Polish army, managed to putacross the Vistula and into the Czernia­kow district of Warsaw six battalions.These battalions were instructed tomake contact with the insurgents in thatdistrict, carry out reconnaissance andcreate a bridgehead. But Warsaw is anatural strong point, situated on bluffsoverlooking the floodplain of theVistula, and overwhelming Germanartillery fire prevented their success. Theforces that had been able to cross werebeaten back to a narrow strip along theriver, and on September 21 MarshalRokossovsky decided to withdraw theforces with heavy casualties.

The initial Home Army attack withinthe city itself was met with blisteringGerman resistance. The AK sufferedheavy losses and was forced to call offthe attack. As early as the second day it

continued on page 10

not the Red Army was able at themoment to launch an all-out attack onWarsaw in view of its long-sustainedoffensive, the Nazi defensive prepara­tions along the Vistula, the necessityto regroup forces and mass for newattacks after the not inconsiderableexpenditure of men and material inreaching the outskirts of Warsaw, thefact that there was a lull alongvirtually the entire Eastern frontconcurrent with the halt before War­saw, etc. Nor does the editorial take upthe question of the duty of theguerrilla forces-and in the circum­stances that is what the Warsawdetachments are-to subordinatethemselves to the high command ofthe main army, the Red Army, intiming such an important battle as thesiege of Warsaw. On the contrary, theeditorial appears to take as its point ofdeparture the assum\Jtion that a full­scale proletarian upnsing occurred inWarsaw and that Stalin deliberatelymaneuvered to permit Hitler to crushthe revolt."

It is remarkable how these two letters,described in an SWP Internal Bulletinas written "in the name of Martin[Cannon] and his collaborators,"focus precisely on the crucial fallaciesof the anti-Soviet myth of the WarsawUprising. Most important, however, isthe political heart of Cannon's cri­tique.

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 posedone of the first battles between theTrotskyist majority ofthe SWP, led byCannon, and the Goldman-Morrowminority which had succumbed to thedemocratic pretenses of Anglo-Amer­ican imperialism. A. Roland (JackWeber) explains the background of theMartin (Cannon) letters on the War­saw Uprising: "Those members of the

continued on page 10

5

Trotskyism and the Labor Party Question

"Dump the BureaucratslFor aWorkers Partyl"

"While we fight for socialist policies asthe program of a workers party,Trotskyists must critically support theformation of a mass workers party, evenif that party initially lacks a clearsocialist program."

-Fighting Worker, July 1981

For the RWL, a labor party, even ananti-communist reformist lab0l." party, isa necessary stage which the Americanworking class must go through. Andhere they are in direct contradiction toTrotsky, who wrote in 1932:

"I will never assume the responsibilityto affirm abstractly and dogmaticallythat the creation of a labor party wouldbe a 'progressive step' even in the UnitedStates, because I do not know underwhat circumstances, under what guid­ance, and for what purposes that partywould be created. It seems to me moreprobable that especially in America,which does not possess any importanttraditions of Independent politicalaction by the working class (as Chart­ism in England, for example) and wherethe trade union bureaucracy is morereactionary and corrupted than it was atthe height of the British Empire, thecreation of a labor party could beprovoked only by mighty revolutionarypressure from the working masses andby the growing threat of Communism.It is absolutelv clear that under theseconditions the labor party wouldsignify, not a progressive step but ahindrance to the progressive evolutionof the working class."

-"Letter from Prinkipo"

But one can't accuse the RWL ofignorance. Its Healyite "method" ofcalling on the present union bureaucra­cy to form a reformist labor party comesstraight from Bryant, who once wrotethat "Trotsky's initial perspective to­wards the Labor Party question wasvery similar to the sectarians of theTrotskyist movement today" (LaborNews, January 1976).

Over the years, Bryant has consistent­ly opposed any "sectarian" program forhis Meanyite labor party-even busingfor school integration! Today the

ReSTAUR~ "'." '~_ ". ,'i.-~~').).-e t~'.tW~(' ~'\q;

iiml~n PartY!Smash Re2ga~,' ~

SPQiACiS! l.£~~VE

WV Photo

NYC Labor Day march, September 7: SL called on labor to shut down theairports.

AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer JohnHenning endlessly threatens to "consid­er" a labor party while remaining a closeally of Democratic governor JerryBrown. Last year Machinists leaderWilliam Winpisinger theatricallywalked out of the Democratic conven­tion (wearing a "Kennedy in '84"button!), and instantly reformists fromthe CP to the now anti-Trotskyist SWPheralded Wimpy's cheap talk about alabor party (see "Social Democrats'Labor Party Hoax," WV No. 269, 28November 1980). And this September,when the union tops mobilized 500,000demonstrators in Washington to listento empty anti-Reagan rhetoric, virtuallyevery fake-socialist in the countrywaved the "labor party" as theirsolution-devoid of a class-struggleprogram against the sellout bureau­crats, of course.

Meanwhile, the ghost of "labor-partyparties" past has emerged in the shape ofthe Revolutionary Workers League(RWL), a centrist-posing lash-up of theAnn Arbor cult/sect of Peter Sollen­berger and a tiny ex-Healyite clot in theBay Area, Steve Bryant's now-defunctSocialist League Democratic-Centralist(SL-DC). The Sollenbergerites are wontto lift Spartacist slogans out of WV,while carefully stripping away thecommunist cutting edge. Thus anRWL/SL-DC joint leaflet for the May 3El Salvador demonstrations repeatedthe SL call to dump the bureaucrats,break with the Democrats and build aworkers party. But one of their fusiondocuments, "Resolution on the Strugglefor a Labor Party in the U.S," containsonly a pro-forma criticism ofsections ofthe union bureaucracy, and elevates thelabor/workers party from a tactic to a"decisive question for the Americanworking ciass." Regardless of historicalcircumstances, the RWL is committedto a labor party:

some seven or eight years ago-whetherwe should favor a labor party or not,whether we should develop initiative onthis score-then the prevailing senti­ment was not to do It, and that wasabsolutely correct. The perspective fordevelopment was not clear. I believedthat the majority of us hoped that thedevelopment of our own organization[would] be more speedy. On the otherhand I believe no one in our ranksforesaw during that period the appear­ance of the CIO with this rapidity andthis power."

-"Discussion in Mexico City,April, 1938," in Leon Trotskyon the Labor Party in theUnited States

The Trotskyists underlined that thelabor party slogan wasinseparable froma revolutionary program. As Trotskyhad put it, "A Marxist, a proletarianrevolutionist, cannot present himselfbefore the working class with twobanners. He cannot say at a workers'meeting: 'I have a ticket for a first-classparty and another, cheaper ticket for thebackward workers'" ("Letter fromPrinkipo, Turkey, May 19, 1932"). Inraising the call for a labor party in 1938,the SWP did so on the basis of "aprogram of revolutionary transitionaldemands":

"We propose, in order to advance theLabor party movement toward classstruggle and not class collaboration,that you [the workers] adopt a programcalling for workers' control of produc­tion, for militant Labor Defense Guardsto protect our democratic rights andcombat fascism, for the expropriationof the industrial and financial dictatorsof the country, etc., etc."

-James Burnham and MaxShachtman, "The Question of aLabor Party," reprinted in WVNo. 248,25 January 1980

This program retains its validity todayin the struggle to break the stranglehold()f the pro-capitalist labor traitors on theworkers movement. Under presentconditions, the labor party tactic isessentially a propagandistic expressionof working-class independence, as partof the struggle for a workersgovernment.

For the many varieties of reformistsand centrists, however, the labor partyslogan has commonly been applied as away to capitulate to the union bureauc­racy. In the early 1970s the Healyitepolitical bandits of the Workers League(WL)-whose rightward motioneventually took them out of the workersmovement altogether to becomemessengers of Libyan Islamic dictatorQaddafi-ludicrously projected a "la­bor party" based on complaints againstthe Democratic Party from GeorgeMeany and Steelworkers head I.W.Abel. A typical headline of the WL'sBulletin (17 July 1972) trumpeted:"AFL-CIO Tops Threaten Labor Partyat Miami." No matter to these cynicsthat Meany/Abel represented the mostreactionary wing of American laborofficialdom, protesting that the Demo­crats had been invaded by commies,pinkos, homosexuals and women'slibbers! The Healyites' call was for aparty of racist Cold War anti­Communism.

Recently there has been a flurry of"labor party" talk from some union topsas they found it difficult to sell theunappetizing bourgeois "alternatives,"Reagan and Carter. In California, state

WV Photo

Fake-lefts tall Democrat "socialist"lAM president William Winpisinger,who talks "labor party" whilestabbing PATCO in the back.

,party." As labor struggles picked up, in1934 there were three citywide generalstrikes (Minneapolis, San Francisco,Toledo) led by ostensible socialists andcommunists. But then came the rise ofthe mass industrial unions, and in 1938the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party(SWP) revived the labor party slogan.Even so, Trotsky did not repudiate theirearlier stand:

"When for the first time the League[Communist League of America, theU.S. Trotskyist organization in theearly 1930s] considered this question,

We reprint below a transcription of atalk on the labor party question given bycomrade James Robertson of theSpartacist League Central Committeeat a 5 October 1972 internal youtheducational in Boston. The speechcenters on the SL slogan, "Oust theBureaucrats! Build a Workers Party, toFight for a Workers Government!" andis directed against various reformistsand centrists who look to the Americanunion bureaucracy to form a reformistlabor party. This program is not onlyabsurd (the Meanyite gang of laborfakers will never break with the bour­geois parties), it is reactionary.

The "labot party question" has longengendered controversy in the Ameri­can socialist movement. As pointed outbelow, it is the American version of theunited front, a tactic for revolutionariesto gain authority through the strugglefor proletarian unity against the capital­ist class. The slogan was suggested bythe Comintern in 1922 as a way to bridgethe gap between the small size of thecommunist vanguard in the U.S. and theneed for an independent political partyrepresenting the interests of the workingclass. However, this correct objectivewas soon perverted as opportunistleaders of the CP used it to justify theirreformist maneuvering for a "farmer­labor party" in 1924. After this fiasco,the labor party slogan was shelved untilthe 1930s.

At the beginning of that decade theexpelled Trotskyist Left Opposition ofthe CP rejected the call for a labor partyin the belief that American workerscould make a leap over the heads of thearch-reactionary AFL craft union lead­ership. In contrast, theformerCP RightOpposition, the Lovestoneites, ,werealways agitating for a labor party "ingeneral"-so much so that they werecommonly dismissed as the "labor-party

6 WORKERS VANGUARD

Monad

SWP trade-union leader Farrell Dobbs meets Leon Trotsky In Mexico: "Whatcounts is the content of the labor party"-Trotsky.

RWL's Bay Area Committee for aLabor Party spends its time trying to getJohn Henning to run for public office.But a reformist labor party led by theHennings and Winpisingers wouldmean a stab in the back for the aircontrollers, the miners and any otherworkers who dare to wage militant laboraction. A class-struggle workers partywill be built over the political corpse ofthe "labor lieutenants of the capitalistclass."

This report is intended to be apresentation of a series of interlockedhome-truths and a comment on thesearch for deviations, of which in ahardened way we seem to have dis­covered only two. Its origins are that inthe West Coast Labor Day pre­conference discussion the issue of thelabor party quite thoroughly dominatedthe discussion. A great deal of uncer­tainty, confusion and a very consider­able spread of opinion on the laborparty question presented themselvesthere, and we had to thrash them out.

At this point the slogan which I havebeen defending and want to defend hereis the slogan "Dump the Bureaucrats!For a Workers Party Based on theTrade Unions." Another slogan whichwas debated and which presents anaspect of rank and file-ism, of syndical­ism, would be the slogan "For a LaborParty Without Bureaucrats." Now thatslogan lacks the contradictory tensionof a struggle and suggests simply rankand file-ism and possibly, by implica­tion, the development of an organized,mass workers party counterposed to thetrade unions: perhaps the politicalequivalent of the red unions of the CP'sthird period.

I gather that on the Coast there isperhaps a comrade who objects to thefirst part of the slogan, "Dump theBureaucrats," and just wants to have aslogan "For a Labor Party Based on theTrade Unions." In New York there is acomrade who just wants to have theslogan "Dump the Bureaucrats! For aCommunist Party."

There is a great deal ofconfusion. Theconfusion centers along two separateaxes, and that's why it's a great deal ofconfusion, or rather, complicated con­fusion. Furthermore, in the last debatein New York, I spent all my time in thedecisions of the Third and FourthCongresses [of the Communist Interna­tional]. I'm going to evade that this timeand simply point out that the laborparty slogan is the current Americanversion of the issue of the united front.It's posed in the absence of a massivepolitical expression of reformism orStalinism in the United States. Rather,with the organization of industrialunions with a deeply committed pro­capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, it istoward them [that] the issue of proletar­ian unity and the process of communisttriumph in struggle is centered on thelabor party question.

There are two axes of confusion overthe labor party. One is the importance ofrealizing that this is a propagandisticdemand for us today, which has norelationship to what will happen in thefuture. That is, today, the WorkersLeague to the contrary notwithstand­ing. the idiots who think that Meanybecause he does not like Negroes,homosexuals or abortion laws is there­fore building a labor party in order tocarry out the~e anti-capitalistdemands-it's nonsense. There has to bea sense of proportion, which theCommunist Party originally lost in1924. In the first place, the labor party isnot the issue for propaganda. Theworkers government is. Now we stum­bled into this. If you read the early issuesof JVorkers' Action, you will find outthat the final, triumphant, ultimatestatement of position in the J'Vorkers'Action program was for a labor party,Vh-uh. We are for a workers govern­ment, in the unions, in the plants and in

4 DECEMBER 1981

our general education and approachingstudents with the conception of prole­tarian power. The dictatorship of theproletariat is a formulation whichsuffers certain problems. A popularunderstanding of the dictatorship of theproletariat is that the workers are goingto be put into concentration camps, likein Russia. If you talk of some kind ofsocialism, you get an image of happySweden maintaining its high alcoholismand suicide rates through victoriouslystaying out of two world wars. [Laugh­ter] But what should be clear in everyway, over every kind of issue, is that theworking people need their owngovernment.

But-how do you get a government?That implies a political party of theworking people-a class party. And it isas a subordinate element of the achieve­ment of a workers government, which isan algebraic expression, as the sayinggoes, for the concrete realization of thedictatorship of the proletariat, that theyrequire a workers or a labor party,which in its concrete, arithmeticalexpression is a revolutionary laborparty: a Bolshevik party.

That's a propaganda presentation.Now what's really going to happen in

this country? Who knows? .. Only[NCLC guru] Lynn Marcus. [Laughter]I'll give you some variants.

One is: we have an unpolitical,extremely combative working class,with a bureaucracy that at present andwithout the aid of a thousand YSAers, isincapable at any serious level of struggleof controlling this class. Part of theresidue of the enormous class strugglesin Europe is the presence of an extreme­ly sophisticated, able, political bureauc­racy in depth. Can you imagine thecapacity of a George Meany to copewith an American general strike the waythat the CP did in France in '68? It's

Trotskyists leadMinneapolis

General Strike,1934.

impossible. Which is where [SWPhoncho] Jack Barnes and his gang thinkthey've got their opening.

So it's entirely possible now, asindicated in the fundamental premisesof the Transformation Memo, now thatAmerican hegemony has been lost,reducing the United States to merely avery effective, the most powerful of thecapitalist/imperialists and with thefundamental preconditions for severesocial crisis laid down on the planet, thatthe American working class may beimpelled into massive political actionswithout a party, without a revolutionaryparty, without any party at all andoverwhelm the bureaucracy. That willbe in the best case a fruitful catas­trophe, rather akin to the Paris Com­mune and the 1905 Revolution. It is notsomething, therefore, that we work for.But as a smaller propagandistic groupwe'll do our job. If it comes to that, if weare unable to have the capacity asrevolutionists to place ourselves at thehead of insurgent masses, we will fightanyhow, even if we have to go throughan experience as the Spartakusbund didin 1918/1919. The next time around itwill be different, then.

That's a possibility-that's if themotion at the base in the classaccelerates.

It is possible to go to the otherextreme-given an orderly, stretched­out intensification of social crisis, thecapacity of the growing communistmovement to keep ahead of develop­ments, a thing which had begun tosuggest itself classically in 1934 in thiscountry when three [ostensibly] com­munist organizations led three city-widegeneral strikes (in Toledo, San Francis­co and in Minneapolis): the possibilitythat the communist party could simplygrow in linear fashion.

The other possibility would be the

realization of a labor party either of arevolutionary or of a reformist charac­ter. That is, under the accumulatedmounting pressures of social struggle,the bureaucracy begins to be tornasunder through the pressure frombelow, [from] developing class antagon­isms, and it becomes stretched. With asuccessful communist agitation at thesame time, the labor party could beformed in what will be a very convulsiveact.

What is behind so much of theconceptual garbage that the WorkersLeague puts out is that the labor party isan easy thing. (By the way, there's abook by Henry Pelling, Origins of theLabor Party, which is useful for guide­lines.) If you study the history of theachievement of political class conscious­ness by any proletariat, you'll see that itis a convulsive, historically monumentalact-sometimes compressed, sometimesstretched out-but always enormous incharacter, even if the outcome after thedust begins to settle is the restabilizationof a pro-eapitalist bureaucracy. Theimpact of ripping the mass of theworking people away from capitalism,so that the assertion is: we need a societyin which the working people govern, theproductive property is nationalized, isenormous. And on top of this is laid thereformist and Stalinist labor skates.That will be a convulsive period inAmerican history, substantially largerthan that of the sit-down period from '35to '37.

But what will happen bears noparticular relationship to our presentadvocacy, which is a way to pose thequestion of working people becomingthe government and developing thepolitical instrument to achieve this, tolink up that objective, fundamental needwith the present consciousness of thebulk of trade-union-eonscious Ameri­can workers. The attempts to telescopewith "what ifs," as though th_ere is aparticular relationship, a linear connec­tion, between what we say today andwhat will happen in mass motion is thesource of a great deal of confusion anderror.

I left open the question of theoutcome, of the character of the laborparty in the third case. In the Bay Areasomebody said, "Ah, but how can therebe a revolutionary labor party? Obvi­ously by definition it's reformist." Andimmediately there came to mind theexamples of the transformations of theItalian and French mass Socialistparties into Communist parties and,more engagingly, because of the similar­ity in name and origins, the RussianSocial Democratic Labor Party (Major­ity) is commonly taken to be a revolu­tionary labor party. But that depends on

continued on page 8

7

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determine its program.Yeah, we'd accept such a bloc and

we'd fight-we'd seek such a bloc. Theproblem with a bloc is the nice oldphrase of Bismarck that every allianceconsists of two components-the horseand the rider. [Laughter] So that I donot know how we would realize the blocbecause I'm afraid our projected horsewould bolt. And the Communist Partyclearly was doing the donkey work-orproposing simulating doing the donkeywork for the trade-union officialdomexcept that they also wanted organiza­tion control by the Communists plus areformist program. This is not in aid ofanything, and that's the basic reasonwhy they got such a mess out of it.

So that in reviewing the historicalexperience-we aren't ever for aFarmer-Labor Party-we oppose it.[But] a Farmer-Labor Party-it's notgoing to happen in America. Aninteresting point that James Burnhammade in 1938: he said, "Comrades, theTransitional Program says that weshould be for a workers and farmersgovernment in the United States." Buthe observed already then, 1believe, thatthere were more dentists than farmers inthe United States, and therefore why nota workers and dentists government?[Laughter] Comrade Gordon waxesirate with me because I find the formulaof a workers and "x" government veryuseful while on national tour. Youknow, there's a workers and studentsgovernment if you're speaking on acampus-you go out to the militarybase, it's a workers and soldiers govern­ment, you know, and you graduallymove through all sections of thepopulation. I suppose in Berkeley a fewyears ago it would have been a workersand women's government. The finalachievement is one that boggled my ownmind. The Argentine Pabloists came outa few years ago for a workers andpeoples government. [Laughter]

Well. we're for a workers and "x"government, all right, the problem withmotley America is that "x" stands for awide variety. But behind that is a truism:that the dictatorship of the proletariatwill be centrally, but not simply orpurely, proletarian. There is a wide layerof oppressed sections in Americansociety-racially, ethnically, sociallyoppressed, ranging from old people toLatins, blacks, students, soldiers. This isquite real, it's quite true, although aworkers and peoples government is notexactly the formulation that one wants.But it senses something that's particu­larly important: if one says a labormovement or a labor party right now,there is very good reason to see it rightnow in the most encrusted, aristocratic,racist, chauvinist, George Meany-likefashion. It's extremely important andone of the reasons for the formulation"Dump the bureaucrats! For a WorkersParty!"

There's no difference in conceptionbetween a workers party based on thetrade unions and a labor party basedon the trade unions, except that theterminology projects a somewhat differ­ent conception.•

posed by comrade Seymour's article onthe labor party, I think, because it's nota clear-cut case and it shows someproblems in actual application. Andthat's the experience of the CommunistParty in 1923-24 with the Farmer-LaborParty and the Federated Farmer-LaborParty and the general issue of thepossibility of a bloc between thecommunists and, as Cannon put it, theprogressive section of the labor move­ment. You know, apparently it is nevertoo late to learn something, becauseafter 25 years, while reading Seymour'spiece, it suddenly occurred to me,Farmer-Labor Party-wait a minute,that's a two-class party, we're opposedto a two-class party, what the hell are wedoing in a two-class party situation?"One step forward .... " Furthermore,the thing has got to be reformist:because if you think, what kind ofinterests of both workers and farmerscould be contained within a commonprogram? The farmers produce theircommodities, they sell them themselves,they're interested in high prices, squeez­ing out the middlemen, getting to theexport market directly, all this kind ofstuff is the economic program of thefarmers. Sometimes of course farmerscan be pretty restless and make a lot oftrouble. But those interests of theworkers that you could possibly puttogether could only be extremely nar­row, the circumscribed interests of theAmerican working class, even if you justsat down and said, "Let's cook up aFarmer-Labor Party." Necessarily itwould have to be episodic and limited ina reformist way because there are a lot ofantagonisms between petty- and not sopetty-bourgeois producers, which iswhat farmers are, and the proletariat.And that's the key to what was wrong in1924 with the Communist bloc with theChicago Federation of Labor. From theoutset it was preordained that thestruggle was going to be for a reformistlabor party, i.e., throwing in thefarmers to boot. And it was on that basi~that a bloc was constructed then: thatthe Communists would simulate areformist party hoping to maneuver onthe inside, courtesy of Brother Pepper.It's on that basis and probably from thatexperience that Shachtman wrote hisexcellent article in 1935, where he asked,"Who needs a second-class, fake,reformist, hidden Communist Party?"

Now we, for our part, should have noreason to be opposed to a bloc with asection of the labor movement, includ­ing the labor officialdom, providing thatbloc goes in the direction we want it togo.

But looking back to 1923, on whatbasis for heaven's sake is this ChicagoFederation of Labor going to give uswhat we want? That is, an agreement tostruggle for a labor party together in thefirst place and in the second place tostruggle with each other over thecharacter of its program and its cadres.On that basis we'll make a bloc withpeople. If Meany says, "I'm for a laborparty-you guys are for a labor party,"fine: we'll all go and organize for alabor party and we'll fight like hell to

ew york Times

George Meany, Lane Kirkland, Thomas Gleason. Reformists call on AFL­CIO superhawk Cold Warriors to form a labor party.

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to the workers government slogan,which is the purpose of the labor partyagitation, we should be clear what ismeant by a workers government. It isnothing other than the dictatorship ofthe proletariat. There have appearedsome speculations or projections eitherin a hypothetical way or at one point asan ephemeral possibility in history thataworkers government is not simply asynonym for the dictatorship of theproletariat. Interestingly enough, in theformulations of the Fourth Congress ofthe Communist International, wherethere was a vagueness and an abstrac­tion about the projection of the condi­tions under which a workers govern­ment would be achieved, both HalDraper and Joe Hansen zeroed in onthat material as they did on a phrase inthe Transitional Program in order to"prove" that from the British LabourParty [government] of 1945 to [BenBella in Algeria] to Fidel Castro'sCuban government-[all] were workersgovernments.

The concrete possibilities that Trot­sky posed in the Transitional Programwere roughly of the following formula­tion: it is conceivable that under massrevolutionary pressure reformist ele­ments might go much further in thedirection of a workers government thanthey ever conceived they would at theoutset. That was a "what if" question, ageneralization on the following condi­tion that took place in the RussianRevolution between February andOctober: the slogan of the Bolsheviksaddressed to the Provisional Govern­ment, which was a coalition governmentof Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks,the minuscule Trudoviks of Kerenskyand the Kadet Party, that is, theConstitutional Democrats, the effectiveliberal bourgeois party, was the slogan"Down with the ten capitalist ministers,form a government purely of theworkers parties," coupled of course withthe social and political and economicdemands that the Bolsheviks wereraising. Posed in a "what if" way, thequestion is, what if under mass pressurethe Kadets had been thrown out of thegovernment? You would have a murkyperiod at that point, something not verystable, in the context of what already isinherently a historical episode of a dualpower situation between a bourgeoisgovernment and the existence of organ­ized nationwide soviets. What thatwould represent is not a workersgovernment separate and apart from thedictatorship of the proletariat, but anepisode immediately on the way. But ofcourse the centrists make much out ofnon-viable episodes possible in thehistories of revolutions in order to try toconstruct a sort of third camp betweenthe dictatorship of the proletariat andthe administration of a bourgeois stateby the reformists.

Now another question's been raised,just lately: a useful question has been

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Labor Party...(continued from page 7)the relationship of forces in the develop­ment between the revolutionists and thereformists who associate themselveswith such an insurgent move on thepolitical plane-approximately thesame way that John L. Lewis and asection of the AFL bureaucracy did withthe CIO industrial organizing in 1935.So that's on~ kin~ of confusion.

The other axis of confusion is over thequestion of why advocate a labor partyand what is the relationship between theadvocacy of a labor party and itspolitical character? Will it represent thegeneral historic interests of the proletar­iat, i.e., be a revolutionary labor partyor will it represent special, partial,narrow, limited, aristocratic, chauvinistand nationalist appetites within theproletariat, i.e., [be] a reformist laborparty? And therefore, why advocate alabor party at all since it seems to havea kaleidoscopic character?

There is, of course, a perfectly goodcircumstance in which [our] presentpropagandist and limitedly agitationaladvocacy of a labor party would beabandoned. And that is if we began tosee that a communist party began to berecognized by advanced sections of theproletariat, not even very large ones butsignificant layers, and had the capacityto struggle in a linear way, by bootstrapoperation, to become the authentic andliteral vanguard of the class. At thatjuncture we would probably see asection of the bureaucracy form a laborparty very fast in an attempt to head thisoff. The progressive wing of the bu­reaucracy would counterpose the devel­opment of a labor party. And it wouldbe necessarily, from its birth its essentialpurpose would be that of an anti­communist labor party. We would fightsuch a thing in every way. We would tryto united-front it to death, we woulddenounce it to death, we would raid it todeath, we would do everything we couldto smash it in the egg at every step.

But that is a far cry from the presentsituation. It is literally not possible byqualitative orders of magnitude-notjust one, but qualitative orders ofmagnitude-to advance at this juncturethe Spartacist League as the answer tothe felt mass problems of the proletariat.But those felt mass problems exist.[And] what does exist in a mass way isthe trade-union movement. Thereforeone can point out (and should!) that thetrade-union movement, the economicorganization of a section of the workingclass, has the responsibility to offer thepolitical as well as the economic answersto the plight of the working people. Andso it is an address made to that oneinstitution that exists in the UnitedStates-the organized labor movement.

Now I've got a couple of other pointsto make in this connection. Togo back

8 WORKERS VANGUARD

Labor: Protest Killer COPE

Black Outrage in L.A:s "Signal Hell"I~

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Marxist Working-Class Biweeklyof the Spartacist League

WfJRKERSVANGUARD

The sadistic badge-toting killers inblue are spawned by the capitalistsystem. Their job is to keep labor andminorities down, to protect the life andproperty of the rich. Only through thestruggle for socialist revolution againstracist American capitalism can thedeaths of Ron Settles and thousandsof other victims of cop terror heavenged. Jail the killer cops! For labor/black mobilizations against racistterror! •

CIA, now Reagan's ambassador at largeto Latin American dictators, last yearmade $300,000 for his role in oneweapons deal. As far as attempts torestrict Wilson/Terpil activities, this topspy sounds like the white knight of theBill of Rights: "I think that would be arestriction on the individual's freedom"(Nev.,. York Times, 22 September). Andeven Alexander Haig, recently con­fronted with the Wilson/Terpil Libyaconnection at a House Foreign Rela­tions Committee hearing, replied thatafter all it was a "free society."

There is now talk of laws to restrictthe actions of "former" agents. Thetargets of this legislation are not Wilsonand Terpil, but Philip Agee and otherex-CIA agents who publicly blow thewhistle on their former employers.Hence the consummate hypocrisy of theruling class striving to protect and coverup their dirty work, not least theirblunders and stupidities. The more"mature," now geriatric, British rulerscodified all this in their "Official SecretsAct." Now the CIA wants theirs. Downwith secret police terror!.

Wilson's activities, questions lingerabout unofficial links between Mr.Wilson and senior agency employees.Some federal investigators believe thatMr. Wilson may have received tacitapproval from agency officials toestablish his ties to Libya in the hopethat they would produce intelligenceunavailable from other sources." Andthe CIA's own "plausible denial" on theWilson/Terpil affair was practically anadmission: "The investigation estab­lishes that there was no official encou­ragement or involvement by the c.l. A.,"said the agency statement (New YorkTimes, 27 August). But what is officialand unofficial in the underworld of"dirty tricks" by the imperialist spyagency? And what does it matter?

It has always been convenient for themurderous and illegal work of the CIAto maintain people of authority on andoff its official payroll. To paraphrase thevoice on the "Mission Impossible"tapes, it is understood that if caught theagency denies any responsibility. Thishas become more difficult as disaffectedagents have begun to tell what theyknow. Moreover, after 1975, followingthe post-Watergate exposes of some ofthe CIA's dirty work, the agency wasrequired by law to inform a leakyCongress about its covert actions. TheCIA found it useful to maintain contractagents and a semi-permeable network ofagents symbiotically connected to vari­ous "private" gun runners and business­men, who it was generally understoodhad the blessings of the CIA. WithWilson and Terpil types the CIA hascomplete deniability.

And the "intelligence community"guards this practice very jealously. Thesame agency for whom no. job ofinternational terror is too large or small,from tapping phones and opening mailto the assassinations of heads of stateand junta coups, becomes very con­cerned about the rights of citizens to sellC-4 plastique explosives, detonationtimers and terrorist training on theinternational market. General VernonWalters, former deputy director of the

. .'-~ ". f').~ '" l\tIJ.r- wv Photo

SL/SYL protests Ron Settles murder in demo outside DA's office in LosAngeles, October 27.

done. Signal Hill is surrounded by theintegrated industrial city of Long Beachwith its docks and refineries. Labordemonstrated its strength last summerwhen 20,000 workers shut down LongBeach and San Pedro ports for one dayto protest Reagan cutbacks. The power­ful labor unions-ILWU, OCAW,Teamsters-many of them with largeminority memberships, must lead theghetto masses in the fight against racistmurder.

knowledge, if not participation, in thescheme.... Two civilian engineersconducting top-secret research for theCIA and other government agencieswere given leaves from their jobs at theChina Lake Naval Weapons Station inCalifornia to go to Libya, and laterreturned to their posts. And finally, aGreen Beret at Fort Bragg was alsogiven a leave from active duty to go toLibya, and military intelligence person­nel at the base were thoroughly briefedon the affair at all times."

There is plenty of evidence to back uptheir suspicion of official complicity.• Putting together a deal for somethousands of delayed-timer devices forexplosives for Libya, Mulcahy andWilson had meetings with Theodore G.Shackley, the deputy director of CIAclandestine operations.• When the Libyan operation needed300,000 timers, Wilson arranged ameeting at a Virginia bar. Mulcahy metthere with long-time CIA supplierScientific Communications Inc. At thismeeting was William Weisenburger, abranch chief in the CIA. At the bar thatnight Wilson sat with senior CIA officialThomas Clines, with Mulcahy spendingthe night "table-hopping" as the planswere worked out.• Kurkjian and Bradlee report that oneof the Green Berets involved in settingup the military training camp in Libyabecame suspicious that the Wilson/Terpil operation might be the work ofagents provocateurs, so he informedmilitary intelligence at Fort Bragg oftheir overture. The Globe article quoteshim: "I was told they had checked theoperation out and there was nothingwrong with it.... They said it was legaland aboveboard and to go ahead andpursue it. I assumed that they meant Iwas going to do a job for the (CIA). Ilaid out the story to a colonel and he saidto me, 'You're working for the agency'."To participate in the project, the GreenBeret was immediately granted a 30-dayleave.

Even the New York Times (14September) acknowledged that "al­though the agency has repeatedly deniedany knowledge of or involvement in Mr.

ney Van de Kamp still refuses toprosecute the killer cops. He says heneeds two more months to review theevidence. Actually the DA just hopesthat with a little more time the publicityand demonstrations will die down, andyet another cop killing of a black youthcan be swept under the rug. In the last 29years not a single policeman in LosAngeles has been prosecuted formurder.

A Countywide Coalition for Justicehas called a march on Signal Hill forDecember 5. But cries of outrage are notenough-the issue is how to fight racistmurder. Michael Zinzun, one of themain organizers of the protests, talksabout black self-defense and thencynically helps organize a movement to· .. replace the DA. Stokely Carmi­chael's black-nationalist AARPR callsto "pick up the gun or pick up the pen"to write your congressman! And onceagain Zinzun's Coalition Against PoliceAbuse along with the reformist Com­munist Party raises the impotent call fora civilian police review board. Investiga­tions, boards, letters will do nothing.The killers are known. The point is tostop this racist cop terror.

The Spartacus Youth League (SYL)has active Iy participated in protestsaround the Settles murder. The SYLpoints out that in Reagan's America,cop terror is on the rise as union bustingand race hate go hand in hand with theimperialist war drive against the SovietUnion. We call for labor and blacks tomobilize against racist attacks. It can be

LOS ANGELES-Black outrage con­tinues to boil over the cop murder ofRon Settles last July in the mean littleoil town of Signal Hill. Settles was a 21­year-old black college football star whowas killed in his jail cell by local copsafter being picked up for speeding.Scores of blacks and Chicanos suffer thesame fate every year in the L.A. area.But Settles was not just another name­less, faceless victim of police terror. Fivemonths after his death, protest demon­strations continue to draw hundreds ofangry minority students and youth whoare fed up with beatings and murder bythe racist cops.

Now even the bourgeois press treatsthe Ron Settles murder as front-pagenews. They're afraid that this cold­blooded killing could trigger anotherWatts upheaval, so they try to head itoff. They have reported the viciousbrutality of Jerry Lee Brown, theuniformed thug who arrested Seqles.They have documented the racism of thelocal police, the town's history of one­family rule. They want to make SignalHill cops look like an isolated excep­tion. But they are only small-townimitations of the notorious LAPD,which has killed more than a hundredvictims (most of them black and Latin)in the last several years.

Even though a coroner's jury ruledthat Ron Settles' death was homiciderather than the suicide claimed by theSignal Hill police, even though severalcops have been granted immunity inexchange for testimony, district attor-

Libya ...(continued from page 3)

hit a stone wall. The case was deliberate­ly ignored as Wilson and Terpil ex­panded their activities in Libya. Amountain of evidence was available toprosecute Wilson and Terpil on obvi­ously criminal charges. But the govern­ment refused to prosecute. Fearing forhis life, Mulcahy blew the whistle soloud the government took up the case.

Yet it took four years to finally indictthe pair in 1980 on federal charges thatincluded illegal export of explosives aswell as conspiracy and solicitation tocommit murder. And even after Wilsonand Terpil became fugitives they contin­ued to travel freely in and about theU.S., Europe, Africa and the MiddleEast observed by many people, butnever picked up. Wilson was even seendining within a famous Washingtonrestaurant with former employees.Terpil was able to jump bail. Hershwrites that the embittered Mulcahy is"deeply disturbed by what he regards asa monumental lack of resolve, compe­tence and communication within theFederal Government in handling thecase." Mulcahy and the Times arecareful not to offer the more obviousexplanation of a government cover-up.

Much of the story as presented by theNew York Times is an attempt to showthat former agent Mulcahy thought hewas still working for the CIA, but thatWilson and Terpil were not agency. just"former" CIA agents. Thus the mediacampaign to "expose" Wilson/Terpilserves to limit the damage of this case tothe U.S. secret police. For the ever­"responsible" Times the vexing problemis what to do about "rogue" retirees suchas Wilson and Terpil. The Boston Globearticle by Stephen Kurkjian and BenBradlee, published some months priorto the Times series, throws the samefacts in a much sharper light:

"In the murky world of intelligence. fewthings are certain. but several elementsof this case point to government

4 DECEMBER 1981 9./

WarsawUprising...

(continuedfrom page 5)

was clear that only the entry of theSoviet troops could save the city. But asa result of the treacherous adventure ofthe Home Army leaders, the populationnow had no choice-it was fight to theend or die on their knees. Hitler orderedhis commanders to wipe Warsaw off theface of the earth, which they proceededto do. The Warsovians heroicallycontinued the battle for two monthsdespite terrific odds and extreme short­ages of weapons, ammunition, food andwater. When on October 2 Bor­Komorowski surrendered to the Ger­mans he had only 10,000 soldiers left.

Three months later, the Russianscrossed a now solidly frozen Vistula andentered a city of graves and ruins. Threehundred thousand had been killedduring the fighting and nine-tenths ofthe city destroyed.

Stalin and the Warsaw Uprising

According to the London Polishgovernment in exile, the Russians couldhave prevented this massacre, if theyhad wanted to. The Stalinist bureaucra­cy certainly did want to control and evenavoid a popular rising, in favor of iron­fisted Russian military and bureaucraticcontrol. But the~estruction of Warsawand its population was not part of theirplan-it cost millions of rubles torebuild the Polish capital. In response toa joint appeal from Roosevelt andChurchill warning Stalin of the reper­cussions of world public opinion "if theanti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effectabandoned," Stalin replied on August22:

"Sooner or later the truth about thegroup of individuals who have em­barked on the Warsaw adventure inorder to seize power will become knownto everybody. These people have ex­ploited the good faith of the inhabitantsof Warsaw, throwing many almostunarmed people against the Germanguns, tanks and aircraft. Asituation hasarisen in which each new day serves, notthe Poles for the liberation of Warsaw,but the Hitlerites who are inhumanlyshooting down the inhabitants ofWarsaw."From the military point of view, thesituation which has arisen, by increas­ingly directing the attention of theGermans to Warsaw, is just as unprof­itable for the Red Army as the Poles."

-quoted in George Bruce, TheWarsaw Uprising

Stalin's comments in themselves arehardly decisive, but they are repeatedeven more emphatically by MarshalRokossovsky, a Pole who had joined theRed Army during the 1918-21 RussianCivil War and was now commandingSoviet forces on the threshold ofliberating the capital of his homeland.On August 26 he said that the Russianswould have taken the city earlier in themonth if it had been possible to do so."A fearful mistake was made by the AKleadership," he went on:

"Bar-Komorowski and the peoplearound him have butted in-kak ryzhyv tsirke-like the clown in the circuswho pops up at the wrong moment andonly gets rolled up in the carpet. ... If itwere only a piece of clowning itwouldn't matter, but the political stuntis going to cost Poland hundreds ofthousands of lives. It is an appallingtragedy, and now they are trying to putthe blame on us. It makes me pretty sickwhen I think of the many thousands ofmen we have already lost in our fight forthe liberation of Poland."

-quoted in Alexander Werth,Russia at War

German accounts of the WarsawUprising corroborate the Russians'.General Heinz Guderian, then chief ofthe German General Staff, wrote in hismemoirs (Panzer Leader [1951]): "WeGermans had the impression that it wasour defense which halted the enemyrather than a Russian desire to sabotagethe Warsaw uprising." He added, "ThePolish uprising ... had, from the enemy'spoint of view, been begun too soon."Most significantly, some later state-

10

ments by leaders of the Home Armyagree with this assessment. According toCiechanowski, officers of AK GeneralOkulicki's staff in October 1944 "un­equivocally ascribed the Russian failureto take Warsaw to 'the general collapseof the Soviet offensive on the Vistula''';in 1965 Bor-Komorowski wrote that theGermans had managed to "check theRussian attack on the capital" byAugust 5.

Once before, the Red Army had beenstopped on the banks of the Vistula-in1920, under Lenin and Trotsky, whenno one doubted their will to takeWarsaw and defeat Pilsudski's French­backed anti-Soviet regime (see "TheBolsheviks and the Export of Revolu­tion," Spartacist No. 29, Summer 1980).Contrary to the anti-Soviet myth whichhas the R~d Army leisurely waiting onthe east bank while Warsaw freedomfighters were mercilessly slaughtered byGerman firepower during August­September 1944, this period saw someof the bloodiest fighting of the last yearof the war. Between August I andSeptember 15, the First ByelorussianFront took 166,000 casualties in Po­land; in August alone the SecondUkrainian Front lost 122,000 men.Altogether 600,000 Red Army soldiersdied fighting for the liberation ofPoland from the Nazi yoke.

This historic achievement was madenot by Stalin-who had repeatedlysought to conciliate the imperialists,both fascist and "democratic"-but by aSoviet army founded by Trotsky whichfor the second time fought a terrible warto defend the achievements of theOctober Revolution from obliteration.Many of its top officers were amongthose who held firm while Stalin, thegravedigger of revolutions, sabotagedthe defense of the USSR. MarshalRokossovsky, who commanded theSoviet troops at Warsaw, had beenpurged along with Tukhachevsky andother top Soviet generals in 1937. Laterrehabilitated, he was among those whosounded the alarm in June 1941 whenStalin refused to believe Hitler wasabout to attack. And in October 1941when the Generalissimo panicked andfled Moscow, it was Rokossovsky whosaved the Soviet capital by throwing inthe last reserves as they disembarkedfrom the troop trains. This authenticSoviet war hero remarked: "Do youthink that we would not have takenWarsaw if we had been able to do it? Thewhole idea that we are in any senseafraid of the AK is too idioticallyabsurd" (Werth, Russia at War).

But it was the Stalinists who ruled inthe Kremlin, not Lenin and Trotsky,and the policy they dictated was that ofnationalist bureaucrats rather thaninternationalist communists. The ad­vance of the Red Army through Nazi­occupied East Europe unleashed revolu­tionary hopes among the workingmasses-and Stalin, along with the restof the usurpers, feared an upheaval ofthe proletariat would "infect" the Sovietworkers and threaten their own privi­leged . position atop the socializedeconomic foundations of the bureau­cratically degenerated workers state.That is why Stalin sold out the Greekrevolution, tried to do the same inYugoslavia and why the program of theMoscow-backed Lublin Committeepledged to uphold capitalist property.

We will never know the full truthabout the Warsaw Uprising until theSoviet (and imperialist) militaryarchives are open. Certainly it wasGerman armor rather than Stalinisttreachery that prevented the Russiansfrom taking the Polish capital in earlyAugust. It is indisputable that theuprising was called for counterrevolu­tionary purposes. But once the fightinghad begun, the existence of the Warsawproletariat was at stake. This wasnothing to a Stalin, a bonaparte whorelied on the army's guns not theworkers' will and ability to fight. ForTrotskyists, however, the preservationof the proletariat is a vital goal; agenuine communist leadership would

have committed itself to relieving thecity-if that were possible. Had theysucceeded, the Red Army would havebeen welcomed with open arms-andthen the AK generals would have tastedproletarian justice for their monstrouscrime. Instead they became martyrs, tobe used 35 years later by a newgeneration of anti-Soviet Polish nation­alists in the service of capitalistcounterrevolution.

Prologue-Epilogue

It was the politics of the LondonPoles and the anti-Communist HomeArmy leadership which led to thebloody massacre. They must share re­sponsibility for the Nazi destruction ofWarsaw and its inhabitants. Their hy­pocrisy in blaming the Russians is dra­matically underscored by events whichtook place the year before. During theWarsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 theHome Army was guilty of the very act ofwhich it later accused the Russians. AKofficers stood by and watched theextermination of Warsaw's Jews.

Then Home Army commander Grot­Rowecki argued that to rise against theGermans to help the Jews would resultin terrible losses and only help theSovieJs. This argument was merely ashallow cover for the virulent anti­Semitism of many of the Polish under­ground leaders. A bulletin published byAntyk (acronym for Anti-CommunistAgency-an organ of the undergroundadministration) in 1942 at the time ofthe great liquidation of the Warsawghetto (the transport of thousands ofJews to the gas chambers of Treblinka)said that Poles must not save "Jewishbrats" or "curly Benjamins" and that theliquidation of the ghetto was bound toweaken the Communist movement inPoland and was therefore a "positivedevelopment" (Reuben Ainsztein, TheWarsaw Ghetto Revolt [1979]). Antykalso published the names and addressesof Poles belonging to the Home Armywhose crime was to take part in the workof the Council for Helping Jews. Thisinformation might as well have beenturned over to the Gestapo directly.

Only under pressure from Jewishorganizations abroad and the threat ofpublicity in the British press, did Grot­Rowecki recognize the Jewish FightingOrganization (ZOB) which led the anti­Nazi resistance in the ghetto. In Decem­ber 1942, after repeated pleas, the HomeArmy command ordered ten (!) pistolswith a small amount of ammunition tobe supplied to the ZOB. Grot-Roweckiargued that providing the Jews withweapons was a waste since theywouldn't know how or have the courageto use them! The rescue of 30 Jews fromthe ghetto sewers by an unknown HomeArmy detachment is the only knowncase confirming Bor-Komorowski'sclaim that the AK saved some of theghetto fighters.

When the Warsaw Uprising of 1944broke out, Isaac Zuckerman, as com­mander of the ZOB, offered the servicesof the ghetto survivors to the HomeArmy command. After waiting 24 hoursfor a reply, Zuckerman was told thatthere was no roQm for Jews in the AK.As many as 2,000 Jews fought in thisnew uprising against the Nazi butchers.But those who fought in the HomeArmy units did so almost withoutexception under false names which theyassumed when they became "Aryans."

• • • • •The agony of the Warsaw uprising

has been portrayed in Andrzy Wiazda'sfilm Kanal: the tragedy of a hopelessbattle, which ended in the sewers just asin 1943; the heroism of many fighters(despite the perfidious calculations oftheir commanders, which are nevermentioned). The epilogue is seen inanother Wiazda film, Ashes and Dia­monds, which tells of a student veteranof the AK underground who (on orders)assassinates a popular Communistofficial in the turbulent days followingliberation. In the months after theSoviets swept the Germans out of

Poland, this was a common occurrenceas the Armija Krajowa became anetwork of anti-Communist terrorists.Bor-Komorowski's successor, Okulicki,formally dissolved the Home Army inJanuary 1945, but it was replaced by thesecret NIE (for Niepodleglosc­Independence) organization, stillheaded by General Okulicki, which wasresponsible for the murder of over 100Soviet army men and scores of officialsof the PPR/Lublin Committee. TheNIE was gradually mopped up; Oku­licki was captured and tried in Moscow,but amnestied in 1946 as part of thenegotiations for a short-lived coalitiongovernment. Only three years after theSoviet army's victory did Stalin finallymove to expropriate the Polish capital­ists and landlords and carry out abureaucratically controlled social revo­lution from above, in response toWashington's Cold War offensive whichbegan even before Germany and Japancapitulated.

This is the history of the Warsawuprising that neither Solidarnosc northe Stalinists will tell..

"ThirdCampism"...(continued fron~ page 5)

[Political] Committee who still held tothe old line, who did not know what hadtranspired at the center [because theywere locked up in Sandstone FederalPrison!], immediately recognized thatthere had been a change, one with whichthey disagreed" ("We Arrive at a Line,"[SWP] Internal Bulletin, December1944). The "old line" was that of Sovietdefensism against imperialism, despitethe reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy.The "new line," was, as Roland put it,that due to Red Army victpries "ourunconditional defense must begin toretire to the background." So a goodyear before the defeat of Hitler, thisrevisionist tendency wanted to "retire"the defense of the USSR!

This anti-revolutionary program wasnot limited to East Europe. TheGoldman-Morrow faction claimed thatthe main danger in the Fourth Interna­tional was ultraleftism. Predicting aperiod of bourgeois-democratic illu­sions among the masses, based on the"less rapacious" character of Americanimperialism, they stressed "more de­mocracy." Their program for Italy wassummed up in the slogan for a republic(Felix Morrow, "The Political Positionof the Minority in the SWP," FourthInternational, May 1945). Thus whilecalling for armed struggle in EastEurope "completely apart from, and inopposition to, the Stalinists" at a timewhen the Soviet Army was fightingcrucial battles against the Nazis, in WestEurope they considered calls for soviets"ultraleft" even as France and Italy werein the throes of revolutionary crises, thefascist and collaborator regimes in ruinsand the economy shattered. It took thecombined resources of American capi­talism and Stalinist treachery to putWest European capitalism back on itsfeet.

The Goldman-Morrow faction, rep­resented by the Militant's August 1944editorials on the Warsaw Uprising,capitulated before "democratic" imperi­alism. It was not surprising, therefore,to find that they had engaged in secretdiscussions with Max Shachtman'sWorkers Party, which refused to defendthe USSR with the line that it was nolonger a workers state of any sort. InMay 1946 Goldman and Morrow leftthe SWP to join Shachtman's WP, andafter a brief sojourn went over to thebourgeoisie directly-Goldman politi­cally, by joining the Cold WarriorSocialist Party, and Morrow financiallyin a quest for cash. Thus the politicalstruggle over the Warsaw Uprisingpresaged a general battle for the Marxistpolitical program of the Trotskyistmovement. •

WORKERS VANGUARD

Racist Cop Terrorin Battle Creek

Reagan...(continued from page 1)

real take-home pay for the averageworker has fallen 4.5 percent underReagan, what about the incredible 14percent decline under Carter betweenlate 1978 and mid-1980! This nearlyunprecedented fall in the living stan­dards of U.S. workers was the work ofunion leaders who imposed "voluntarywage restraints" on their own membersin the face of rapidly acceleratinginflation. Such was the cost, in dollarsand cents, of the labor movement'ssupport to the Democratic Party.

Bosses Demand Givebacks

The founding father of Americanbusiness unionism, Samuel Gompers,once summed up his philosophy of thelabor movement as "more." Today inlabor negotiations it is the capitalistswho are demanding more from theunions and getting it. The New YorkTimes (12 October) observes:

"Confronted with managementassertions that jobs, plants and perhapsthe viability of industries are at stake,labor unions are agreeing at whatappears to be a record rate to reopencontracts and to accept reduced wagesand benefits for their members."

The class traitors on the platform atthe AFL-CIO convention have run thepowerful American labor movementinto the ground. Union membership,which was 25 percent of the workforcein 1970, is less than 20 percent now.Strikes are at the lowest level in decades,emboldening the bosses' anti-laborassault. The once-powerful United AutoWorkers now has more than a quarter ofits membership on the dole!

Pointing to the UAW's concessions inthe 1979 Chrysler bailout, Ford and GMare now demanding that the unionaccept wage and benefit reductionsmaking labor costs comparable to thosein Japan. Other depressed industrieslike steel and rubber are extortingsimilar givebacks. Even the Teamsters,which used to posture as a toughbusiness union which really deliveredfor its members, has offered to foregoany wage increase in its upcomingmaster freight contract (with inflationthis means a real wage cut).

In contrast to the union bureaucrats,social democrats and Stalinists who tiedthe workers' fate to a bankrupt Chryslerand relied on the capitalist governmentto bail it out, the Spartacist Leagueadvocated militant class struggle todefend the workers' interests. While thereformists called for the bourgeois"nationalization" of Chrysler, the SLsaid, Workers: Seize the plants! IfChrysler's broke, then sell it off andkeep the proceeds. The seizure ofChrysler by its workforce could havesparked a class-struggle response tocapitalist austerity, layoffs and plantclosures.

Oust the Bureaucrats

Today the policies that built the

Spartacist LeaguelSpartacus Youth League

Public Offices-MARXIST L1TERATURE-

Bay AreaFri.: 5:00-8:00 p.m., Sat.: 3:00-6:00 p.m.1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)Oakland, California Phone: (415) 835-1535

ChicagoTues.: 5:30-9:00 pm, Sat.. 2:00-5:30 p.m.523 S. Plymouth Court, 3rd FloorChicago, Illinois Phone: (312) 427-0003

New York CityTues.: 6:00-9:00 p.m.Sat.: 12:00-4:00 p.m.41 Warren SI. (one block belowChambers SI. near Church St.)New York, N.Y. Phone: (212) 267-1025

Trotskyist Leagueof Canada

TorontoSat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m.299 Queen SI. W., Suite 502Toronto, Ontario Phone: (416) 593-4138

4 DECEMBER 1981

DETROIT, November 25-A courtinquest last week placed the stamp ofapproval on the racist murder ofprominent black activist RobertGuy, Jr. in Battle Creek, Michigan.Guy, head of the focal Coalition toEnd Police Brutality, was killedAugust 3 I in an explosion outside theEI Grotto Lounge. An all-white juryof the Calhoun County district courtclaimed that Guy died at his ownhands, supposedly when a pipe bombhe was said to be carrying blew up inhis face. But Coalition spokesmeninsist he was killed in a plannedassassination. According to theMichigan Chronicle (24 October):

"A woman companion told police,as they pulled into the EI Grotto lotthey noted three men in a black car.One got out and went behind a grayvan, she said, and as Guy ap­proached the Lounge, she heard aloud explosion and saw Guy fall.The man then re-entered the car andthe occupants drove away laughing."

Robert Guy's death was theculmination of a long campaign ofpolice violence and terror directed atGuy and other black activists inBattle Creek, a company town insouthwestern Michigan owned lock,stock and barrel by the Kellogg Cor­poration. The racist police force isheavily infiltrated by the Klan-copsregularly stop black youths, put onKKK hoods and then beat them to apulp. Even conservative black minis­ters, NAACP and city officials-aswell as the Guy family-have hadcrosses burned on their front lawns.Guy's Coalition had futilely askedthe Justice Department to interveneto curb the racists in blue. Indeed,things were so bad that the FBI put

industrial unions in the 1930s areurgently necessary to prevent a throw­back to the days when unionists wereshot down with impunity. But the AFL­CIO's alliance with the DemocraticParty is predicated on the union leaders'willingness to prevent proletarian mili­tancy. Now this alliance cannot evenpromise crumbs for the poor: it meanslayoffs, wage cuts, givebacks and warbuild-up. Working-class self-defenserequires a struggle to break with theDemocrats through ousting their agentsin the labor movement, the Kirklands,Frasers and Winpisingers.

Reagan's assault on the working classis linked directly to his anti-Soviet wardrive. His attacks on the unions and thepoor cannot be fought without con­fronting head-on his drive to overthrowthe lasting gains of the October Revolu­tion. But most of the American leftjoinsLane Kirkland in hailing SolidarnosC'counterrevolution in Poland. Defenseof the Soviet Union against imperialismis integral to the defense of labor rightsagainst Reagan's domestic war drive!

"Pure and simple" union militancy isno alternative to the bureaucrats' classcollaboration. As the capitalist govern­ment gets more and more directlyinvolved in the business of unionbusting and war against the SovietUnion, every workers' struggle becomesa political fight requiring class-struggleleadership. Union militants must there­fore link the fight to oust the labormisleaders to the building ofa party thatcan serve as a revolutionary vanguard.

In 1934 the Trotskyists showed what aworkers party with a revolutionaryprogram could do, when they led theMinneapolis labor movement in apowerful and victorious general strike.Today such a mass workers party wouldorganize to shut down the airports tightuntil the air controllers were rehired andall their demands met. It would lead a

the Battle Creek cops under "surveil­lance" for several years.

The cop vendetta against RobertGuy began several years ago when hisbrother Larry started investigatingincidents of police brutality. Then amember of the youth group of theNAACP, Guy came across anautop­sy report that revealed a black manhad been shot in the back, contrary topolice reports. Two years ago LarryGuy was beaten into unconscious­ness by five cops who then planted agun on him and sent him to prison forfive years on a phony concealedweapons charge. Shortly after, twopolicemen were caught in the act ofplacing a car filled with explosivesoutside the Guy home. According tothe Chronicle:

"Former police officer Larry Shoul­dice admitted that he and anotherofficer, Bruce Harvey, had plannedto throw dynamite on Guy's frontlawn and shoot him when he cameout of the house. As a result theywere both asked to resign."

The two cops incredibly got offwithout legal action, and one is now acop in Grand Rapids!

With Robert murdered and Larryin jail on frame-up charges, the Guyfamily has now received severalanonymous phone calls threateningthat "the rest of you" are next. This ishow they stop courageous blackactivists from protesting cop terror inKellogg's town. But these fighters ofracist cop terror in Battle Creek mustnot stand alone! Michigan is a laborstronghold, and the unions-fromthe Grain Millers to the UAW withits many thousands of black mem­bers in the Detroit area-must takethe lead in fighting the racists in whitesheets and blue uniforms.

labor drive into the open-shop South,mobilizing black and white workers in ajoint struggle to smash the remnants ofJim Crow. It would mobilize tens ofthousands to crush the Klan wherever itcame into the open. It would preventblack and labor cities like Detroit fromturning into ghost towns by organizingplant seizures against mass layoffs.

A class-struggle workers party wouldsmash the Reagan/Democratic wardrive and fight any imperialist attemptto restore capitalism in Cuba, Poland orthe Soviet Union. It would fight for aworkers government to expropriatecapitalism and end once and for all theirrational social system that turns theenormous industrial wealth squeezedout of the blood of the working classinto misery, poverty and the threat ofglobal nuclear holocaust. For workers'action to bring down Reagan! For aworkers party to fight for a workersgovernment! •

Nicaragua...(continued from page 12)

America is the hottest spot in the anti­Soviet Cold War.

Conservative columnist William Sa­fire recently noted that the administra­tion will have to look to labor for"support for the mining of Nicaragua'sharbors" as well as for "wage restraint"when the economic crisis "begins to bitenext year." If it depends on LaneKirkland, Reagan won't be disappoint­ed. The AFL-CIO convention lastmonth passed a resolution condemningthe Sandinistas for trying to establish a"Marxist-Leninist totalitarian dictator­ship" that would be "more oppressive"than the Somoza tyranny. While hypo­critically criticizing the ban on strikes(the two AFL-CIO-affiliated labor

federations in Nicaragua are closelylinked to the CIA), these veteran ColdWarriors naturally say nothing aboutthe arrest of more than 100 CommunistParty militants in the Sandinistas' futileattempt to carve out a "middle road"between capitalism and workersrevolution.

The American workers movementmust militantly oppose the war plans ofU.S. imperialism. Reagan wants to givethe PATCO treatment to everyone fromHarlem welfare mothers to Salvadoranguerrillas, Nicaragua's Sandinistas andthe Cuban and Soviet deformed/degenerated workers states. Labormilitants must call for and implement aboycott of all military goods to EISalvador and other Central Americanright-wing dictatorships. We demand:Down with Reagan/Haig war threats!No Cold War blockade! Hands offNicaragua! Military victory to leftistinsurgents in EI Salvador! For workersrevolution! Defense of Cuba and theSoviet Union begins in CentralAmerica!.

ReformistsCall Cops...(continued from page 12)

Fedayeen su'pporters to lock arms in anattempt to separate off the SL contin­gent and its banner "For WorkersRevolution Throughout Central Ameri­ca! Hands Off Nicaragua! No Block­ades!" To no avail. In Chicago a spirited50-strong Spartacist contingent con­trasted sharply with the miserableturnout of the official coalition. Eventhough we made up one half of the entiredemo, the organizers refused a speakerto the SL. But as the rally broke up, anSL spokesman took the podium, callingfor defense of the gains of the Cubanand Soviet revolutions and for workersand peasants governments to expropri­ate the bourgeoisie throughout CentralAmerica.

As the reformist flops call the cops,they only show their treacherous colors.Bringing in the class enemy against aworkers organization is gross provoca­tion, particularly at a Latin Americandemonstration where the police couldgo after undocumented Latins. Now ofcourse the SWP would like to slide outof taking responsibility for blockingwith the cops-the racist enemies of allworkers-against the revolutionaries.No doubt the SWP is scurrying aroundlooking for others to blame it on. Whatothers? The SWP's own front groups?The Communist Party, whose mobiliza­tion for this demo was obviouslysubminimal? In any case the SWP hasn'teven managed a hypocritical objectionin its press to the use of the cops. Howdifferent it would be if somethinggenuinely unauthorized had occurred.Imagine, for instance, that an SWP­built demo had been the occasion forsome adventurist types to throw bricksthrough UN windows. Does anybodydoubt the SWP's Militant would haverushed into print with a condemnation?The SWP and all its bloc partners standcondemned by their deeds and by theirsilence.

For the past year the reformists havetried in vain to seal off the movementfrom the revolutionary politics of theSpartacist League. But it will not work.We alone have told the plain truth, andfought Reagan/Haig's anti-Soviet wardrive instead of trying to pretend itdoesn't exist. Everybody knows therecan be no deal with the butcherDuarte-in EI Salvador the leftist rebelsmust win or they will die. And today theimperialists are openly saying that whiletheir Cold War sights are trained on EISalvador and Nicaragua, they aretargetting the "source": the deformed/degenerated workers states of Cuba andthe Soviet Union. Now more than ever:Military Victory to Salvadoran Leftists!Defense ofCuba and USSR Begins in EISalvador! •

11

W(J/tIlE/tS ,,1N'(JI1R'

Stop' Reagan/Haig Cold War Blockade!

Hands Off Nicaragua!

SL: "Defense of Cuba, USSRBegins in EI Salvador!"

Reformists CallCops on Reds

WV Photo

November 12, NYC: Reformists use cops to exclude SL contingent, whichcalled for defense of Cuba, USSR against imperialist war threats.

nists. When the SL protested, the police listelling to desultory speeches, Sparta-went back to the "Emergency Cam- cist salesmen and supporters permeated.paign" spokesmen who once again the crowd, making dozens of contactsappealed to the armed thugs of the class and drawing them into animated discus-enemy to cordon offthe revolutionaries. sions around the SL literature table.

But at the rally site, the 70-strong Many protesters were upset at the copSL contingent marched in with our exclusion and a number of peoplered flags flying, alongside the Cuban crossed the police barricades to join us,flag and the FMLN banner of the including some high school studentsSalvadoran insurgents, chanting "No from Brooklyn and a group of collegeCold War Blockade, Workers Bring students from Queens..Down Reagan/Haig!" "Our Political In San Francisco some 600 demon-Solution":-Workers Revolution!" and strators picketed and marched under a"Junta Butchers on the Run, Leftist steady rain. At one point "monitors"Rebels Need Russian Guns!" While the dispatched a half dozen Stalinist and600 or so demonstrators stood around continued on page 11

The Reaganite warhawks' threats ofmilitary action against U.S. imperial­ism's enemies in the Caribbean intensi­fied last week as top administrationspokesmen warned, in the words ofGeneral Haig (on ABC's "This Weekwith David Brinkley," 22 November),that "the hours are growing rathershort" to stop Sandinista Nicaragua's"drift toward totalitarianism." In acoordinated "message," the samewords were used on the same day bytop presidential aide Edwin Meese 3d,interviewed on CBS' "Face the Na­tion," who said that the "hour is late"in Nicaragua and, "Whether we'dutilize a naval blockade or not woulddepend on circumstances." War secre­tary Weinberger (on NBC's "Meet thePress") was a little cagier, talking of"anumber of options" for military movesin Central America.

Small demonstrations were heldacross the country over the weekend ofNovember 21 to protest Reagan/Haig'sthreats of blockade and other militaryaction against Cuba and Nicaragua. Butas defense of Cuba and Nicaragua isnow placed at center stage of worldpolitics by the war threats of U.S.imperialism, the reformists and popularfrontists are doing everything they canto avoid siding openly with "the enemy."The various sponsoring coalitions evenrefused to call for "Hands Off Cuba"and called on the cops to exclude therevolutionaries, so concerned were theopportunists to keep their movement"Ready for Teddy" Kennedy and theother imperialist "doves."

At EI Salvador demonstrations lastspring they violently opposed ourdemand "Military Victory to LeftistInsurgents," even attempting to physi­cally block protesters at the May 3march on the Pentagon from attendingan Anti-Imperialist rally sponsored bythe Spartacist League (SL). Against ourcall that "Defense of Cuba and USSRBegins in El Salvador" they screamed"provocation." And after their anti­communist exclusions failed, they ap­peal to the guns and the clubs of theimperialist state to do their dirty work.They did it in Chicago May 30 and again

Trying to head off a public outcry,Reagan at his Novem ber 10 pressconference said the U.S. had no"plans" for sending American groundtroops into combat. Presumably theintended victims are supposed to bethankful that they are facing gunboatdiplomacy, large-scale naval maneu­vers, a "quarantine" on arms ship­ments or a full-scale blockade. Mean­while, Haig calls on the "forces offreedom" in Nicaragua and "especiallythose in neighboring states" (Salva­doran death squads, the Honduranarmy and Somozaist mercenaries) towork with the U.S. in "security areas."A week later Meese again said ablockade "has not been precluded."When a reporter asked if all thisbluster might make Washington looklike a paper tiger if not carried out,Meese replied, "I don't think we'll look

in New York November 21.Last week's "Stop U.S. intervention"

demonstrations were a pathetic re­sponse to the war threats emanatingfrom Washington. This was in part dueto the squabbling and maneuvers oftheir reformist sponsors. The SocialistWorkers Party (SWP) after boycottingMay 3 figured it would steal a march byinitiating the November 21 demos. Butthe Communist Party (CP), WorkersWorld and various EI Salvador solidari­ty committees countered by refusing tomobilize. The only thing they couldagree on is keeping out the reds.

Thus in New York the organizers ofthe "Emergency Campaign AgainstU.S. Intervention in Central Americaand the Caribbean" called in the policeto keep the Trotskyist politics of the SLout of their liberal peace crawl. As theSpartacist contingent arrived at theTimes Square assembly point, CP/SWPgoons ineffectually tried to block us andforce the SL to the other side of thestreet. When this didn't work represen­tatives of the Antonio Maceo Brigadeasked us to take down our banner,"Defense of Cuba and USSR Begins inEI Salvador," but backed away whenmet with a flat refusal. Thereupon"Emergency Campaign" spokesmencalled the cops to keep out the commu-

like a paper tiger."It is crystal clear that the threats

against Nicaragua are aimed at Cubaand the Soviet Union, falsely labeledthe "source" of arms for Salvadoranleftist rebels. Reagan/ Haig are tryingto bring down the petty-bourgeoisSandinista regime installed after theoverthrow of the hated U.S.-backedSomoza dictatorship. In the latestepisode of this campaign of "destabili­zation" by starvation, Washington justthis month canceled a $30 million loanfrom the Inter-American Develop­ment Bank. The problem for Yankeeimperialism is that the more it tries to"punish" the Sandinistas, the morethey are forced to seek help from Cubaand the Soviet Union. Thus, with EISalvador in flames and Nicaraguaunder the Pentagon's guns, Central

continued on page 11

,:O'i't,rii

SL demands "Break with thebourgeoisie! Workers to power!"

f

~

12 4 DECEMBER 1981