Workers Vanguard No 705 - 22 January 1999

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No. 705 ... 22 January 1999

Behind the Exxon-Mobil Deal

In the wake of four days of murderousbombing raids by U.S. and Britain againstthe Iraqi population in December, U.S.military forces continue to rain missilesdown on Iraq. Meanwhile, in the face of

ever more vocal opposition from Franceand other imperialist powers, Washington

maintains its insistence on enforcing theeconomic embargo imposed under theauspices of the United Nations. In themore than eight years since it was firstimposed, the imperialist starvation blockade has led to the deaths of some oneand a half million Iraqis, overwhelmingly children, the poor and the elderly.In rallying to the military defense of

Iraq against the imperialist assault, wedemand: U.S./Britain, get your bloodyimperialist hands of f Iraq! Down with thestarvation blockade!

In a Spartacist League/U.S. leafletissued on 16 December 1998 (reprintedin WV No. 704, 8 January) and distrib-

uted at protest demonstrations around thecountry, we noted:

7

'The death and destruction being wreakedupon the people of Iraq right now show

what imperialism is all about, a rapacious system based on the exploitation,subjugation and murder of the workersand semicolonial masses in order toexpand the profits of a handful of filthyrich capitalists ...."What's behind the murderous attack onthe people of Iraq is Washington's aim ofintimidating through sheer terror andblackmail all the semi colonial peoplesover which it rides roughshod and maintaining its position as top dog against its

Repeated U.S. terror bombing of Iraq is aimed at intimidating semicolonialpeoples and maintaining American imperialist control of Gulf oil fields.

imperialist rivals, especially Japan andGermany ..."The blood of Iraqis is today beingspilled to cement U.S. control over vastoil and natural gas resources which arevital to Germany and Japan."

At the same time, we are seeing a further consolidation of the Anglo-Americanoil cartel on whose behalf the U.S. and its

Decembermergerannouncementby Exxon andMobil came withthreat to layoff9,000 workers.

,"

British ally police the Persian Gulf. Inearly December, Exxon and Mobil signeda merger agreement, which would createthe biggest industrial corporation in theworld in terms of revenue. And last summer, British Petroleum took over AmOCoto become the third largest oil companyin the world. The Anglo-American oilcartel used to be called the Seven Sisters.Now, a financial journalist quips, the Sisters are turning into three or four wellmarried dowagers.

The current merger wave in Big Oil is,predictably, intended to further enrichtheir executives and stockholders at theexpense of their workers. Mobil chairmanLlicio Noto stands to gain $3 to $5 million in stock options once the deal goesthrough. The new oil giant, to be calledExxon Mobil, has announced plans to lay

off 9,000 or more of its 123,000 workersworldwide.

These layoffs are timed with the merger, but that is not their. basic cause.Rather both the merger and layoffs weredriven by a more fundament{ll factor:the cyclical nature of capitalist production. The East Asian economic crisis hasdepressed oil prices and slashed profits.Since the East Asian boom went bust in

mid-1997, the benchmark price of crudeoil has plunged by 55 percent and is now$10 a barrel, the lowest level (adjustingfor inflation) in a quarter century.

So cost-cutting is the order of the dayin Big Oil. Not only the new ExxonMobil combine but also Royal Dutch!Shell, BP-Amoco, Texaco, Conoco et al.are all making substantial cuts in theirworkforce. Oil is not the only sector of

the American economy already hard hitby the collapse of its Asian markets. Thegiant aircraft manufacturer Boeing isplanning to layoff 48,000 workers-a

whopping quarter of its total laborforce--over the next two years.

The threatened layoffs in oil and aircraft manufacture pose a union fight to

defend jobs and workers' livelihoods. TheOil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union(OCAW) and the International Associa-

tion of Machinists (lAM) are potentiallyamong the most powerful unions in theU.S. Yet while mouthing "progressive"rhetoric-and, in the case of the OCAWbureaucracy, even talking of the needfor a party of the working people-the

union tops promote class-collaborationist

policies which tie workers to the capitalist exploiters, centrally through supportto the capitalist Democratic Party. Thefight to mobilize union power in defense of jobs, wages and working conditions is necessarily linked to a politicalfight within the unions against the procapitalist labor bureaucrats, based on aprogram of class struggle against the capitalist system as a whole.

Heirs of Rockefeller andSheiks of Araby

The stated aim of the Exxon-Mobildeal and other oil company mergers is toreduce costs by pooling facilities likerefineries, offices and gas stations. Noless important is pooling money-capital

to buy off government officials in oilproducing countries. The item listed as"costs of exploration and development"in the financial statements of the SevenSisters include in large measure payoffsto Arab sheiks, Nigerian and Indonesiangenerals, Venezuelan politicos and thelike.

Recently, Mobil was edged out byRoyal Dutch!Shell in bidding to construct a pipeline in the former SovietCentral Asian republic of Turkmenistan.That is, Shell shelled out more money tothe ex-Stalinist apparatchiks who nowrun this small but oil- and natural gasrich state for their own profit. But thenew Exxon Mobil combine will have aslush fund second to none. With this in

mind, a senior official of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation gleefully exclaimed:

continued on page 8



On Lincoln, Slavery and Habeas Corpus

Johannesburg25 December 1998

Dear Comrades,

tory in Manassas, they were emboldened.The army arrested the police chief, fourpolice commissioners, and scores of others. On April 21, Lincoln suspended thewrit. Secessionist mobs attacked andkilled Union troops (the 6th Massachusetts regiment). Among those arrested

and imprisoned in Fort Henry was thegrandson of Francis Scott Key whowrote the "Star Spangled Banner" and

John Merryman, a wealthy landownerand lieutenant in a secessionist county. Itwas racist judge Roger B. Taney (authorof the notorious Dred Scott decision),acting in his capacity as the senior judgeof the federal circuit court in Baltimore,who ordered Merryman's release anddenied Lincoln's right to suspend thewrit. Lincoln refused to obey and tookdrastic action against active counterrevolutionary elements for their "substantialand unmistakable complicity with thosein armed rebellion." Hail Lincoln forthis.

In the article "Abolish the Racist DeathPenalty!" (WV No. 703, 25 December1998), we observed that in 1871 PresidentGrant suspended the writ of habeas cor-pus in the fight against the KKK. In April1861 Abraham Lincoln also suspendedthe writ to crush the resistance of se

cessionists. It was one of his shiningmoments as he grasped the necessity of

waging ruthless class war against theslaveholders.

The four border states (Maryland,Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia) contained large and resolute secessionistminorities which offered potentially crucial support to the Confederacy. Maryland, which enclosed Washington onthree sides, presented an important challenge to Union resolve. According toCivil War historian James McPherson,secessionists in Baltimore rioted on 19April 1861 and after the Confederate vic- D. McClain

Anti-Native Racism in CanadaBoston24 December 1998

Dear Comrades:

Peoples" in WV703 [25 December 1998].I was reminded ofCanadian author FarleyMowat's books on the horrendous, andlargely unknown, 20th century genocideof the Ihalmiut, the now-extinct tundra

I read with interest the article "Canada:Labor Must Defend Rights of Native

Monopolies, Trusts andImperialism

By the beginning of the 20th century, the

world capitalist economy was dominated bymonopolies, trusts and cartels which effec-tively. controlled the governments in NorthAmerica, Europe and Japan. In 1914, these

imperialist powers went to war for the redi-vision of markets and spheres of exploita-tion. The frightful carnage of World War I

TROTSKY precipitated the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution LENIN

in Russia, the greatest historic victory for

the international proletariat. The ABC of Communism, a basic exposition of he prin-ciples and program ofBolshevism, explained the development of monopoly capitalismout of ''free market" competition.

Syndicates and trusts exercise an almost complete control over the market. They nolonger fear competition, for they have crushed competition. Its place has been takenby capitalist monopoly, that is to say, by the dominion ofa single trust.

In this way the concentration and centralisation of capital gradually lead to the suppression of competition. Competition has devoured itself. The more frantic the development of capitalism, the quicker did centralisation proceed, because the ruin of theweaker capitalists was more speedily effected. In the end the centralisation of capital,arising out of competition, proved fatal to competition. "FREE COMPETITION" HAS

BEEN REPLACED BY THE DOMINION OF CAPITALIST COMBINES, BY THE RULE OFSYNDICATES AND TRUSTS....

We can therefore say' that A CAPITALIST COUNTRY UNDER THE DOMINION OFFINANCIAL CAPITAL IS AS A WHOLE TRANSFORMED INTO AN IMMENSE COM-

BINED TRUST. AT THE HEAD OF THIS TRUST ARE THE BANKS. THE BOURGEOIS

GOVERNMENT FORMS ITS EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. The United States, GreatBritain, France, Germany, etc., are nothing but State capitalist trusts, powerful organisations of trust magnates and bankers, exploiting and ruling hundreds of millions of

wage slaves.

2

-N . Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, TheABC of Communism (1919)

! ! l w ! ! ! ! ! o ! ! . 4 ! ' ! ! ! ~ l ! ' ! . . EDITOR: Len Meyers

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Workers Vanguard (ISSN 0276-0746) published biweekly, except skipping three alternate issues in June, July andAugust (beginning with omitting the second issue in June) and with a 3-week interval in December, by the SpartaclstPublishing Co., 299 Broadway, Suite 318, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:[email protected] subscriptions: $10.00/22 Issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.

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The closing date for news in this issue is January 19.

No. 705 22 January 1999

dwellers of northern Canada (in The Des-perate People), and similar and relatedcrimes against the Innuit people on thecoast. One particular tale is so bone-chilling it is hard to forget. A group of Innuitliving happily and successfully on one of

Canada's subarctic islands was persuadedby ageilts of the Canadian governmenqomove to an uninhabited island even farther north, an island that the Canadiangovernment wanted inhabited in order tostrengthen its national claim to it. Thegovernment promised them a good life

and the government's support. The storyof their desperate struggle against starvation and the descent into madness as toldin The Snow Walker is one of history'smore horrific tales. On the scale of othercrimes perpetrated by the world's capitalist classes like the holocaust, international wars, the atomic incineration of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mass murder inNanking, and the diabolical oppression of

Letters

African-descended people in the UnitedStates, this story touched the lives of relatively few people. However, the entirestory of the destruction by governmentsponsored commercial interests of thelives, livelihoods and culture of Canada'snative peoples, a crime that includedthe racist genocide of the Ihalmiut bycommercial manipulation and callousneglect after luring them into commercialdependence in a terribly harsh environment, a crime that was perpetrated fromthe beginning of this century into the

1950s, is one that is largely unknown andthat deserves to be known. The Canadiancapitalist class, much junior to the capitalist class of the United States in terms of

power and world-threatening danger, isno less venal and cruel when it comesto the callous victimization of its ownindigenous peoples.

Robert F.

Marxism vs. Eco-RadicalismWe publish the following letter in full.

27 November 1998

Washington, D.C.Attn: WV editorial staff

RE: "Eco-Radicalism" Series(WV #695/696)

I read with much interest your serieson "Eco-Radicalism" explaining theTrotskyist position on Ecology issues.The presentations were very informativeand thorough specially in exposing theideological origins of the environmentalmovement as an expression of middleclass/"conservationist" soul-searching. You

opened my eyes on that point. I have totake issue with some of the commentsmade on part one of the article though ...

To begin with, not all Greens favorprimitivism. The neo-primitivist wing of

the ecology movement i!) (at best) a loud

minority; many Green activists (and Ihave worked with many over the pastfive' years or so in Texas, South Floridaand DC) favor the use of non-ToxicTechnologies and accept i n d u s t r i a l i z a t i o ~ as a flawed positive.

What Greens oppose is the misuse andmismanagement of Technology and Industry to serve anti-people and ecologically destructive ends.

Many Greens would agree that Technology and Industry could be utilized astools to achieve progressive ends (and by"progressive" I mean the democraticextension of economic rights and theguarantee of personal autonomy to ALL

members of society).

CHICAGO

Anti-Sex Witchhunt ThreatensRight to Privacy for Al l

Clinton Impeachment andU.S. Imperialism

Break with the Democrats andRepublicans: Capitalist Parties of

Racist Reaction! Forge aRevolutionary Workers Party!

Thursday, January 28, 7 p.m.

Cobb Hall, Room 116, 5811 S. EllisUniversity of Chicago

For more information: (312) 454-4930

LOS ANGELES

Women's Liberation and theStruggle for Socialist RevolutionThursday, February 4, 6:30 p.m.

3120 Rolfe Hall; UCLA

For more information: (213) 380-8239 or

[email protected]

I

The Green movement (a section of theoverall ecology movement) proposes theenactment of TECHNICAL REFORMSin the process of production to make itless toxic and more sustainable-with

the implicit understanding that the application of ecologically benign technologyis indispensable in course of achievingthis end.

I really think that labeling Green activists as "Ecofreaks" is out of line andoffensive.

Many individuals who work with theGreen Party (and with the ecology movement in general) do so out of a genuinecommitment to ensure the viable existence of a non-toxic ecology for futuregenerations (including future generationsof working class people).

Green activists-by the way-have

been active on issues of social and eco

nomic import (specially since 1996)beyond environmentalism . .! have participated in Clinic Defense Actions andGay Rights demos side-by-side withGreen organizers .. and during the UPSstrike many Greens joined Socialists andFeminist activists in supporting picketlines and strike related protests. The term"ecofreak" is a term of abuse, usuallyutilized by rightwingers to demonizeecologically aware persons. It has noplace in sober political discourse. Greenbaiting is as offensive as Redbaiting.

It is not true that "all" Green Radicals"deny" that Judeo-Christianity is a pillarof western Bourgeois Ideology. On thecontrary, many Greens are aware that

VANCOUVER

Capitalism, Communismand the

Fight fo r RevolutionNext classes: January 27, PermanentRevolution and the Fight forSocialism In Asia; February 10,Free Mumla Abu-Jamal! Abolishthe Racist Death Penaltyl

Alternate Wednesdays, 7 p.m.UBC, Buchanan Building, Room B330

Information and readings: (604) 687-0353

NEW YORK

Revolutionary Marxism:The Fight for a Socialist FutureNext class: February 9Marxism: A Guide to Action

Alternate Tuesdays, 8 p.m.Loeb Student Center, Room 511, NYUInformation and readings: (212) 267-1025 or

[email protected]

WORKERS VANGUARD



Judeo-Christian beliefs are at the core of

the kind of Anthropocentric value system

that views the planet and other life formswithin it as raw material for our use anddisp6sal.

The truth is that the planet does not

exist FOR us ...we simply exist IN IT. Weare NOT the center of the universe (andneither is "God"). Greens view the universe as centerless. We exist as biological beings in context of nature. Greens

understand that our collective-social survival as a species depends on the nontoxic preservation of the planetary/ecological context.

In the article it is stated that "Radicalenvironmentalism as an ideology has aquasi-religious character...... The same

has been said about Marxist-LeninismTrotskyism. Greens might be spiritual,but not religious.

Many Greens identify with wiccainspired NaturalistlNeo-Pagan spiritualities (in opposition to both Pure Atheism and Judeo-Christian monotheism),some Greens are Atheists and a fewstill identify with Christianity (speciallywith Franciscanism); but overall Greensare opposed to establishment Judeo

Christianity as exemplified by the ReligiousWRONG.

The Green Party does not impose areligious line on its members. Individual activists and organizers are free topursue the spiritual activities of their

choice so long as those activities do notcontradict the 10 key values of the movement (i.e. Ecological Wisdom, SocialJustice, Grassroots Democracy, NonViolence, Decentralization, Communitybased economics, Feminism, Diversityand GloballPersonal Responsibility). Iwould argue that Ecology is fundamentalto the Proletarian Revolution. It is in theinterest of working class people that theecological context remains a functioningphysical/material basis for the future

construction of Socialism on a planetaryscale.

It is usually overlooked on the MarxistLeft that Socialism cannot be built on aToxic wasteland.

Either working people take control of

the Industries and Technology and putthem to use in a non-Toxic manner or

Corporate Capitalism will end up consUlning our planet.

WVReplies:

Sincerely,John M.Socialist Party Member

John M. is right that not all environmental activists should be called"ecofreaks," and we do not do so. "Eco

Radicalism and Bourgeois Politics",(Young Spartacus pages, WV Nos. 695and 696, 28 August and 11" September1998) began by indicating that thereare two distinct wings of the present-dayenvironmentalist movement in the U.S.There is a thoroughly bourgeois wingrepresented by the Audubon Society,Sierra Club and Democratic Party vicepresident Al Gore. At the other extremeare radical primitivist types, mainly

student-youth and lumpenized intellectuals, represented by groups like EarthFirst! and Friends of the Earth.

Between these two wings lies a gamutof groups and individuals which can bedescribed as left-liberal environmentalists. Representative of this current are thevarious Green parties, which are bourgeois or petty-bourgeois parties. The

program of what John M. calls the Greenmovement is indistinguishable from the

German Green Party

leader Joschka

Fischer is nowforeign minister of

Europe's strongestcapitalist state,

linchpin of thenuclear-armed NATO

alliance.

liberal wing of the Democratic Party of

American capitalism, except for a greateremphasis on environmental issues and

local self-government. The Green Partyin Maine demands:

"We must raise the minimum wage,strengthen our educational system, support sustainable neighborhoods and communities, create an affordable healthand dental care system, reinforce themeaning of family and respect for ouryouth and elders, and assure religiousfreedom."

There is nothing here that is not also saidon occasion by mainstream DemocraticParty politicians, including imperialistCommander in Chief Bill Clinton.

Most American Greens look to theGreen parties in Germany and France assuccessful political models to be emulated. German Green leader JoschkaFischer is now foreign minister of themost powerful capitalist state in Europeand the linchpin of the NATO militaryalliance. The Green Party in New Jerseyissued a statement on 1 October 1998enthusing: "We want to express ourcongratulations to the members of Germany's Green Party upon taking the historic step of entering a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party."

There are enough nuclear weaponsdeployed by the NATO forces in Germany to exterminate_humanity and manyother species on the planet. To maintain

a shred of his former pseudo-pacifist credentials, Fischer cautiously suggestedthat NATO declare it would not be thefirst to use nuclear weapons in a war.Such a statement, of course, would in noway prevent the American or West European imperialist powers from doing justthat. Remember that the U.S. A-bombedHiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, whenJapan had no nuclear weapons. WhenWashington angrily rejected Fischer's

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"no first use" proposal, the world's foremost Green politician immediately abandoned what is supposedly a basic principle of this movement.

The main difference between theGreen parties in the U.S. and in Germany or France is that the latter have asufficiently large following so that thecapitalist class finds it expedient to coopt their leaders into the government.I f the Green movement in the U.S.

F. Darchinger

achieved comparable political weight, itsleaders would act just like Joschka Fischer and his colleagues.

As Marxists, proletarian revolutionaries oppose the environmentalist movement not because we deny that theexisting organization and use of industrial technology, governed by the worldcapitalist market, degrades the environment. For example, the burning of hydrocarbons-coal and oil-as the primarysources of energy pollutes the atmosphere and may have other harmful longterm effects. What we deny is the liberalreformist illusion that the existingAmerican and West European states can

be agencies for bringing about an "ecologically benign technology," to use JohnM.'s term.

In recent years, the U.S. government,including environmentalist vice president Al Gore, has killed well over a million Iraqis to keep the Persian Gulf safefor Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and Texaco.As we wrote in Part One of "EcoRadicalism and Bourgeois Politics":

"Capitalist governments will never sacrifice the profits of large 'corporationsand banks to 'protect the environment;no matter how piously they pay . ip service to it.. . Control over major ecological problems such as air and water' pollution can be achieved only withinthe framework of an internationallyplanned, socialist economy. This in turn

'requires workers revolutions to take thefactories, transport systems, oil fields,mines and other means of productionfrom the privately owned and profitmaximizing corporations and banks whichnow dominate the world economy."

Left-liberal and radical environmentalists commonly point to the former SovietUnion to argue that socialist planning isjust as destructive of the environment ascapitalism. However, the ecological disasters which occurred in the USSR

Letters

resulted from the mismanagement of itscollectivized economy by the parasitic

and corrupt Stalinist bureaucracy. Wenoted after the tragic accident at theChernobyl nuclear plant in 1985 that"Soviet safety standards have beenundermined by the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution" (WV

No. 403, 9 May 1986). A Soviet government based on workers democracy, representing the interests of the workirfg

Der Spiegel

people, could and should have, for example, prevented the pollution of the Caspian Sea. Likewise, the ,struggle to keepLake Baikal pristine was important.

But we approached such questionsfrom the standpoint of strengthening,developing and extending the planned,collectivized economy and technological

progress. The capitalist counterrevolution which destroyed the Soviet Union in1991-92 has certainly "improved" theenvironment, and some Green radicalsmay welcome the closing of Russia'ssteel smelters and other factories, sincethey no longer poison the atmosphere.But the complete devastation of Russia'sindustrial economy has brought with itan enormous rise in the death rate and asharp decline in longevity due to widespread malnutrition and rampant disease.

John M. balks at our reference to thequasi-religious character of radical environmentalism. But in opposition to scientific socialism (Marxism), both traditional religion and Green radicalism holdthat society should be governed by laws

laid down by higher powers, god in thefirst case, an idealized nature in the second. The Judeo-Christian ethic is "goforth and multiply," which is not so goodfor the environment. Meanwhile the people of China are supposed to be punishedwith a lower standard of living for

encompassing a quarterof

the world'spopulation.

For most of human existence life hasbeen, in the famous words of the 17thcentury English political philosopherThomas Hobbes, "poor, nasty, brutish andshort." This condition can be transcendedonly by the development of the productive forces through the application of science and technology under the international rule of the proletariat •

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3



We reprint below a January 1999

leaflet issued by the Spartacist League of

Australia which was widely distributedat the national conference of the Demo-cratic Socialist Party (DSP) held earlierthis month at the University of WesternSydney. Confirming the truth of what theleaflet says about the DSP, conferenceorganizers summoned security guards

behind whom startd the capitalist state'scops-to evict our comrades from ihecampus in a vain attempt to shield itsmembers from our Marxist politics.Appealing to the enemies of the working

class and the oppressed is indeed thestock in tr.ade of these visceral anti-

communists.

What kind of "socialist" organisation:• defends notorious Croatian Ustasha

fascists, WorldWar II butchers too bloodyeven for the Nazis; -

• hails the murder of the heroic Vietnamese Trotskyists who led the 1945 Saigon insurrection against French and British imperialism;

• supports reactionary, anti-woman"movements" from the "Iranian Revolution" of Ayatollah Khomeini to PolishSolidarnosc, counterrevolutionary instrument of the Pope, the CIA and Westernbankers;

.upholds the jackal white racist Aus

tralian imperialist rulers as potential"friends" of the oppressed from PapuaNew Guinea to Irian Jaya to East Timor?The polar opposite of revolutionary Marxism, the program for emancipation of theworking class and all the oppressed, theseare some of the hallmarks ofthe "socialism" preached by the Australian Democratic Socialist Party.

From the very beginning of the Marxist movement, revolutionaries have had towage unyielding political battle againstself-proclaimed "socialist" and even "revolutionary" organisations whose fundamental political tenet is the inevitable andcontinued existence of capitalism. Buteven among the long line of such reformists, the DSP stands out for its truly

boundless opportunist appetites._The DSPleadership has proven willing to adoptalmost any political posture if they per- .ceive the possibility of gaining "influ- "ence," as they have pursued "unity" withan endless array of organisations whosestated political positions are not only atsharp variance from those of the DSP butwith each other (from Stalinists to "Eurocommunists" to ostensible Trotskyists).

While openly declaring its oppositionto Trotskyism, the DSP falsely claims toadmire Marx, Engels and Lenin, andworks overtime to distort them as purveyors of its own special brand of pettybourgeois radicalism. In this, insofar asthey have an impact among militantyoung proletarians and leftward-moving

student youth, the DSP does yeoman'sservice for the Australian imperialistswho fear above all socialist revolution intheir "backyard." The Australian imperialists have time and again sought todrown the insurgent masses across Asiain blood: the drive to crush the MalayanCommunist Party in the so-called "Emergency" of the 1950s; the Korean War;the 1958 CIA-backed "Outer IslandsRebellion" in Indonesia; the 1965 massslaughter of Indonesian leftists and oth-"

ers. That the DSP includes among itsleaders one Max Lane, whose "foreignservice" career included a posting as second secretary in the Australian Embassy

4

in Jakarta, Indonesia, speaks volumes.What became the DSP grew out of the

Sydney University Labor Club, becoming the Socialist Workers League (SWL)in 1972 and the Socialist Workers Party(SWP) in 1976. Falsely claiming adherence to Trotskyism, early on they hookedup with the hardened, if eccentric, reformists of Jack Barnes' U.S. SWP, onewing of the misnamed "United Secretariat of the Fourth International" (USec).In 1982, Barnes explicitly repudiatedTrotskyism and carried out a purge, targeting as well the Australian SWP leader

shipof

Jim Percy who then broke off

aries. Against the likes of the DSP, theInternational Communist League proudlystands on the program and tradition of theCommunist International under the leadership of V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky.

. DSP Resurrects MenshevikIStalinist Betrayals

The DSP's "repudiation" of Trotskyism is nothing other than a repudiationof the program for proletarian revolution. The first "major political error"of Trotskyism, according to the DSP, isthe theor), of permanent revolution, the

cornerstoneof

proletarian revolutionary.

bourgeoisie, and later a socialist revolution. Lenin's Bolsheviks were closer toTrotsky's view-they insisted that theRussian bourgeoisie was incapable of

leading a democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks argued for an alliance betweenthe working class and the peasantry, culminating in the "democratic dictatorshipof the proletariat and the peasantry."

The victorious October Revolution of

1917 was the permanent revolution inreality. It completely refuted the Menshevik idea of the revolution as stagist andtranscended the limitations of the "demo

cratic dictatorshipof

the proletariat and

LA. TImes Reuters

Reformist DSP promotes illusions in Third World bourgeois nationalism, from Cory' Aquino's U.S.-backed "peoplepower" movement in the Philippines in 1986 (left) to Javanese-Chauvinist Megawati in Indonesia today.

relations with the Barnesites, denouncingthem as a "seet." By July 1984 the Percyites declared they too had "repudiated"Trotskyism (and in 1985 split from theUSec altogether). Having never in factbeen revolutionary Trotskyists, this wasthe SWP's announcement that even thefaintest hint of an association with theTrotskyist program of international proletarian revolution was anathema.

To underscore the point, in 1989, as theBerlin Wall fell amidst unfolding capital

ist counterrevolution in Eastern Europe,the SWP changed its name to DemocraticSocialist Party and renamed its newspaper Green Left Weekly (from DirectAction). It is entirely appropriate that thisgroup adopted the name "democraticsocialist," the banner under which proimperialist social democrats have longwaged war against Marxist revolution-

strategy in countries of belated capitalistdevelopment, which they denounce as"ultraleft" and "sectarian."

Developed prior to 1917 as a projection of the likely course of the RussianRevolution, the core of permanent revolution is that in the imperialist epoch, incountries where the national bourgeoisieis tied by a thousand strings to the imperialists, solving the most basic democratic tasks-national liberation and theagrarian question, for exam ple- requ ires

socialist revolution, the seizure of powerby the proletariat at the head of all theoppressed. To open the road to socialismrequires the extension of the revolutionto the advanced capitalist countries.

The Russian Mensheviks asserted thatthe revolution would occur in distinctstages: first a bourgeois-democratic revolution under the leadership of the liberal

Australasian Spartacist

Spartacist contingent at 1997 Melbourne protest against Suhartodictatorship. Sign in Indonesian reads: "Independence for East Timor! ForWorkers Revolution in Indonesia! Down With Australian Imperialism!"

the peasantry." The agrarian-democraticrevolution was realised, not as a stagebefore the proletarian seizure of power,but as a result of it. It was the Stalinists(who betrayed and ultimately strangledthe Bolshevik Revolution) who resurrected the Menshevik two-stage strategyas a defeatist corollary to their nationalist schema of building "socialism inone country." Applying it to the ChineseRevolution of 1925-27, the Cominternordered the young Communist Party to

liquidate into the Guomindang, party ofthe national bourgeoisie. The result wasthe defeat of the revolution. The Guomindang drowned the Chinese working classin blood (see "Permanent Revolution vs.the 'Anti-Imperialist United Front': TheOrigins of Chinese Trotskyism," Spar-tacist [English-language edition] No. 53,Summer 1997).

Far from the essence of Leninism, asthe DSP claims, the two-stage schemahas brought terrible defeats for the proletariat, and the physical destruction {)f thecommunists. But for the DSP, the manybloody defeats that have flowed fromthis bankrupt program count as nothing.Falsifying Lenin, Trotsky and history ingeneral, John Percy claimed in his 1992

A History of the Democratic SocialistParty:

"Well, if any programmatic position hasbeen thoroughly tested and been foundcorrect in the light of the living experiences of the working-class movement; itmust be Lenin's two-stage strategy ofrevolution in the industrially backwardcountries."

On the contrary, the October Revolution fully confirmed Trotsky's position.Lenin's slogan for the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the pei1s-

" antry" was flawed in any case as it projected the creation of a state defendingthe interests of two different classes,and in April 1917 he rejected it. In his

WORKERS'nNGUA'RD



"Letters on Tactics," Lenin stated: "Theperson who now speaks only of a 'revolu- _tionary-democratic dictatorship of theproletariat and the peasantry' is behindthe times, consequently, he has in effectgone over to the petty bourgeoisie againstthe proletarian class struggle; that personshould be consigned to the archive of'Bolshevik' pre-revolutionary antiques."Thus Lenin fought against those (including Stalin) who wanted to support thecapitalist government issuing out of theFebruary Revolution, supposedly the"first stage" of the revolution.

The DSP occasionally revises the tim

ing of the Menshevik/Stalinist version oftwo-stage revolution. Instead of the firststage being the February 1917 Revolutionand the second stage the October Revolution, the DSP defines the "first stage"of the Bolshevik Revolution as "fromNovember 1917 until June-July 1918."They say this was "a peasant-democraticrevolution carried out under proletarianpolitical leadership, which grew over,in its second stage from July throughto October 1918, into a proletariansocialist revolution" (The Activist, February 1996). They deliberately obscurethat the agrarian-democratic revolutionand the expropriation of the bourgeoisiewere carried out by the dictatorship of heproletariat following the seizure of state

power in October 1917 by the proletariatsupported by the peasantry.The DSP is refuted by Lenin himself!

Immediately after the seizure of power heproclaimed to the Congress of Soviets,"We shall now proceed to construct thesocialist order." It is the dictatorship ofthe proletariat which the DSP opposes.The proof of their opposition is that inevery country they unfailingly preach theMenshevik program of placing confidence in the imperialist-dependent bourgeoisie as the vehicle for liberation.

Permanent Revolution:Nicaragua

According to Percy, it was the 1979Nicaraguan Revolution that "toppled ourTrotskyist theory that socialist revolutions were one stage affairs" (A History).

This is, on the face of it, absurd. The Sandinista leaders truthfully denied that theyhad any intention of abolishing capitalismfollowing the overthrow of the U.S.backed tyrant Somoza by the Nicaraguanmasses. The FSLN, agreeing with Cuba'sFidel Castro, refused to undertake athorough-going social revolution, leadingdirectly to the defeat of the revolution.

Against the petty-bourgeois Sandinistas' social pact with the "antiSomoza" .bourgeoisie in the name of"political pluralism," we stressed that defence of the Nicaraguan Revolutionrequired that it be completed throughexpropriation of the capitalist fifth column and extended throughout the region.Far from confirming the "stagist" conception, the Nicaraguan Revolution tragically illustrates that short of the proletarian seizure of power, the most basicdemocratic tasks cannot be solved. Aswewrote in 1990 when contra candidate Violetta Chamorro took office, "In the face ofunremitting imperialist hostility, seeingno road to revolutionary victory anddemoralized by the FSLN's increasinglypro-capitalist policies, the Nicaraguanmasses sought a respite from their suffering by bringing in Washington's woman"(WVNo. 501, 4 May 1990).

Opposing permanent revolution, astrategy for proletarian power, the DSPhas no need of a prolenirian revolution

ary party-any petty-bourgeois nationalists will do. The DSP was so enamouredof the Sandinistas that they denouncedthe U.S. SWP, who were and are hardlyshy about tailing anti-proletarian forces,for not going far enough in lauding theSandinistas as revolutionaries. They alsoone-upped the Barnesites, claiming that"the Castro leadership were revolutionary Marxists even before taking power inCuba" (A History).

The ICL fundamentally opposes thedoctrine proclaimed by Maoists and others which rejects the vanguard role of theworking class and substitutes peasantbased guerrilla warfare as the road to

«I F 2 . ~ ( ~ f \ t . l N ~ ~ X ~ ~ ~ : I

Leon Tro t s k y

1HE PERMANENT

REVOLUTIONLeon Trotsky'sprogram ofpermanentrevolution

of "democratic" Australian imperialism,demanding that these imperialists "withdraw recognition of Indonesia's takeover of East Timor" ("People BeforeProfits," 1996). These are the very forceswhich have armed· and trained the Indonesia army of occupation. Against thesecalls on "democratic" imperialism, wesay independence for East Timor now!

AP

socialism. As we wrote in our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" (Spartacist [Englishlanguage edition] No. 54, Spring 1998):

"In Cuba, a petty-bourgeois movementunder exceptional circumstances-theabsence of the working class as a contender for social power in its own right,the flight of the national bourgeoisieand hostile imperialist encirclement, anda lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union-did overthrow the old Batista dictatorship and eventually smash capitalistproperty relations. But Castroism (orother peasant-based guerrilla movements) cannot bring the working class topolitical power."Under the most favorable historiccircumstances conceivable, the pettybourgeois peasantry was only capable ofcreating a bureaucratically deformedworkers state, that is, a state of the sameorder as that i ~ s u i n g out,of the politicalcounterrevolution of Stalin in the SovietUnion, an anti-working-class regimewhich blocked the possibilities to extendsocial revolution into Latin America andNorth America, and suppressed Cuba'sfurther development in the direction ofsocialism. To place the working class inpolitical power and open the road tosocialist development requires a supplemental political revolution led by a Trotskyist party. With the destruction of theSoviet degenerated workers state andconsequently no readily available lifelineagainst imperialist encirclement, the narrow historical opening in which penybourgeois forces were able to overturnlocal capitalist rule has been closed,underscoring the TrotSkyist perspectiveof permanent revolution."

Permanent Revolution: Vietnam

The SWP's condemnation of permanent revolution led them in short order toembrace bloody Stalinist terror in the service of imperialism. In 1945 at the end ofWorld War II, the Vietnamese Trotskyistsled an insurrection in Saigon to opposethe reinvasion of Vietnam by the Britishand French imperialists. Under the banner of the Fourth International, theyfought for slogans such as: Down withImperialism! Long Live World Revolution! Long Live the Workers and PeasantsFront! People's Committees Everywhere!Long Live the Arming of the People!

Land to the Peasants! Nationalisation ofthe Factories under Workers Control!Toward the Workers and Peasants Government! The Vietnamese Stalinists, inline with the Soviet 'bureaucracy'sappeasement of the "democratic" imperialist Allies, "welcomed" the colonialists'return. They crushed the Saigon uprising,murdering hundreds of Trotskyists, including Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau.

The SWP, in a 1984 pamphlet byAllen Myers (The Vietnamese Revolution

and Its Leadership), grotesquely praisedthis slaughter of communists, retailingdeadly Stalinist Moscow Trials-typeslanders:

"I t was at this time that leaders of theTrotskyists and of the bourgeois and pettybourgeois nationalists were executed ...."The Trotskyists and their nationalistallies had made a major contribution tothe near-destruction of the revolution inthe South. Preventing further damage, ifnecessary by physical repression, wasimperative."

Fighting for the Marxist program ofpermanent revolution, the heroic Vietnamese Trotskyists had significant rootsin the proletariat and led tens of thousands of workers in the Saigon insurrection. The Stalinists, bowing before theFrench imperialists, destroyed the mostclass-conscious militants, paving the wayfor 30 years of imperialist war against theVietnamese. Infamous for their "peaceful,

T. . . .M . s ..

'If---

....

was confirmedby OctoberRevolutionof 1917.

legal" kowtowing before the Australianruling class, safe at home the DSP, red intooth and claw, stands with Stalinist murderers of revolutionary internationalists.

IndoneSia, Philippines:More Betrayals

The "stagist" program peddled by thelikes of the DSP was the program of theIndonesian Communist Party (PKI). Basing itself on the Menshevik/Stalinistschema of "two-stage" revolutionwhich amounts to mobilising the workersto bring the bourgeois nationalists topower in the first "stage" and ends in themassacre of workers and Communiststhe PKI opposed the fight for proletarianrevolution. They preached "national unity"with the bourgeois-nationalist rulers ledby Sukarno, banned strikes, suppressedpeasant protests and preached confidencein Sukarno and his generals.

Politically and militarily disarmingthe Indonesian working class, the PKIopened the road to the bloOdy defeat of1965-66 in Indonesia. Suharto came topower through an anti-Communist massacre of over 500,000, carried out by the

In the Philippines, the DSP are promoting a new reformist outfit, the Sosyalistang Partido ng Paggawa (SocialistParty of Labour-SPP) whose programstates they are for "the principle ofuninterrupted revolution, from national

democratic to socialism" (Green LeftWeekly, 9 December 1998). But "uninterrupted" is just a cover for an explicitly stagist program as made clear bySonny Melencio, a leading light of thenew party, who openly defended classcollaboration in a speech to a 1997 DSPconference. Raising the question of"whether or not to include the bourgeoisliberal forces in a broad front, form anelectoral bloc with them and supportthem in elections," he falsely claimedthat Lenin argued "precisely for sucha tactic" in "Left-Wing" Communism-

An Infantile Disorder (Links No.8, JulyOctober 1997).

It was not Lenin's Bolsheviks but theMensheviks who promoted political blocs

with the bourgeoisie, and Lenin opposedthem down the line. As we wrote in "HowPhilippine Fake Leftists Falsify Lenin"(WV No. 703, 25 December 1998):

"In polemicizing against u l ~ r a l e f t i s t s who rejected temporary tactical allianceswith reformists or bourgeois liberalson principle, Lenin noted, 'Prior to thedownfall of tsarism, the Russian revolutionary Social-Democrats made repeateduse of the services of the bourgeois liberals.' He referred parenthetically to thefact that around 1907, in areas where theBolsheviks were a minority to the Men-

Quatrieme Internationale

Vietnamese independence fighters jailed andexecuted by French colonial troops in late 1945after Stalinists suppressed Trotskyist-led Saigoninsurrection. DSP hails Stalinist assassins ofTrotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau (inset).

military and reacti'onary Islamic gangs,with the direct involvement of the American CIA and its Australian jackals.This horrendous slaughter, in which thePKI, the largest Communist Party in thecapitalist world, was crushed, was a bitter lesson in the deadly danger of classcollaboration.

Today the DSP act as press agents forthe petty-bourgeois Indonesian PeoplesDemocratic Party (PRD) which hasopenly pushed alliances with bourgeoispoliticians like Megawati Sukarnoputriand Islamic leader Amien Rais. Demon

strating the truth ofTrotsky's understanding that the bourgeoisies in countries suchas Indonesia are incapable of winningeven bourgeois democracy, Megawati isa Javanese chauvinist who is for the incorporation of East Timor as the 27thprovince of Ind"nesia.

Far from opposing the bourgeoisie, thePRD turns to their imperialist masters.They demand that the UN, that imperialist den of thieves and their victims, "begiven full authority to resolve the issueof East Timor" (PRD "Resolution onEast Timor," 22 July 1996). The DSPgoes even further with its calls for "freedom" for East Timor under the auspices

sheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, they had agreed to theMenshevik policy of according votes tothe Cadets (bourgeois liberals) 'duringsecond rounds of elections.' Where theBolsheviks had a majority, Lenin heldthat they should either vote for socialistcandidates or, if given no other choice,abstain ..."Lenin fought for the political independence of he proletariat. At the time, how-ever, Lenin considered the Bolsheviksand Mensheviks to be two factionswithin a common party. Lenin's view onthe party question evolved over time.After the Bolsheviks formed a distinctparty in 1912, they never supportedbourgeois· formations politically."

In 1986, the Filipino left liquidatedinto a bourgeois movement against theMarcos dictatorship. Following suit, thethen-SWP tailed the "people power"movement ofwealthy landowner Corazon("Cory") Aquino; serving as local promoters for the reformist Bayan groupwhich praised Aquino's policies as"very progressive and promising" (DirectAction, 12 March 1986). Such "leftists"foisted on workers and peasants dangerous illusions that bourgeois liberals weretheir allies, and that capitalism could bereformed. The upshot, as always, was that

continued on page 6

5



DSP. ..(continued from page 5)

a mass plebeian uprising was deflectedinto bourgeois political movements aiming to put a prettier face on the continuedrule of the bloody bonapartist, capitalistdictatorships. The proof is the Philippinestoday.

Against this deadly class collaboration,in the Philippines and throughout Southeast Asia, it is necessary to forge Leninist vanguard parties rooted in proletarianinternationlj.lism and armed with the Trot

skyist program of permanent revolution.Socialist revolution in the Philippineswould necessarily have to link up with thestruggles of the working people in Indonesia, South Korea and elsewhere in theregion-and would act as a powerfulimpetus for proletarian political revolution in China and for socialist revolutionin Japan, Asia's economic powerhouse.

Little Aussie NationalistsThe Communist Manifesto declared,

"The working men have no country ...Workers of all countries, unite!" I f thereis a consistent thread in the DSP's political history, it is precisely rejection of thisABC of communism.

This was graphically illustrated in

1995 when the Australian imperialistswhipped .uP a chauvinist frenzy againsttheir French rivals in the South Pacificunder the guise of opposition to France'stesting of nuclear weapons. Fully backing this vile Australian nationalist campaign, which included protests targetingFrench restaurants and individual Frenchdescended residents, the DSP urged "allunions to place industrial bans on allFrench goods and services," and demanded the Australian government bantrade with France (Green Left Weekly, 26July 1995). Enthusing over the anti-FrenchBastille Day "national unity" mobilisations, the DSP was silent about the disgusting, racist calls to "nuke the frogs"which were a feature of these actions.

In a joint statement, the SpartacistLeague of Australia and the Ligue Trotskyste de France proclaimed:

"The orgy of chauvinism in Australiaand France touched off by the disputeover renewed French nuclear testing inthe Pacific underlines how capitalism inits epoch of imperialist decay leads inexorably through trade war to world war,unless the problem is destroyed at itsroot by socialist revolution. The enemyof the workers and oppressed is not 'the

French' or 'the Australians' but the rapacious capitalist ruling classes whichdream of plundering the whole worldwhile turning the screws on their 'own'

workers in the interests of profit. Thereal and terrible danger of war will onlybe ended by the workers of all countriesjoining together, rejecting all the divideand-rule capitalist machinations parrotedby the current misleaders of the working

class, to throw out their exploiters andtake the future in their own hands ... The

main enemy is at home!"-Australasian Spartacist

No. 157, Summer 1995-96

The DSP's crawling before the Australian imperialist rulers has a long history.For nearly three decades they have peddled the dangerous lie that white Australian capitalism can be pressured intoplaying a "progressive" role, especiallywhen the Australian Labor Party (ALP)social democrats rule on behalf of thebosses. When the Vietnamese workers

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Spartacist ANZ Publishing Co.

GPO Box 3473, Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia

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military armedand trained byAustralia and

the U.S.

and peasants were handing a humiliatingmilitary defeat to U.S. imperialism andits lackey allies, including Australia, inthe early 1970s, the DSP's predecessor,the SWL, opined: "Australia and likewise New Zealand can play an extremelyimportant role in opposing the UnitedStates and its warmaking efforts" ("U.S.Out Now!" undated leaflet).

During the mid-1980s they were at itagain, demanding, "The Australian government should encourage a peacefulsolution to the Central American crisis."This was at the height of the U.S.imperialists' efforts (under Ronald Rea

gan) to drown in blood the leftist rebelsof El Salvador, a key component of thedrive to roll back the Cuban Revolution,part and parcel of Cold War II againstthe Soviet Union. In line with thepetty-bourgeois nationalist guerrillas' pro-

capitalist leadership, the SWP denouncedclass-struggle opposition to imperialismin the name of pressuring various capitalist countries to pressure the U.S. Thusthey sought to mobilise impotent peacecrawls crafted to attract c h u r c h m ~ n , pacifists and-anti-Communist liberals. They

spilled gallons of ink attacking our effortsto build "Anti-Imperialist Contingents"that drew the class line in Central America and defended the USSR. In an antiSoviet frenzy, they. carried out a vicious,premeditated physical assault on our contingent in Sydney in 1981. For these selfproclaimed socialists, calling the copsagainst communists was "perfectly justified" ("Sectarians Try to Disrupt SydneyEI Salvador March," undated leaflet).

In its pamphlet What is the DSP?, theselittle Aussie nationalists declare: "Wefight for Australia to have a progressive

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foreign policy." It was the anti-Marxistrenegade Karl Kautsky, enemy of the1917 Bolshevik Revolution, who decreedthat imperialism consisted merely of a setof policies that the capitalist rulers couldembrace or reject. In his book imperial-ism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,Lenin exposed Kautsky's line as opencapitulation to his own bourgeoisie. Forcommunists, the imperialists' drive to putall the world under their yoke throughwar, starvation and terror is not the resultof moral failings or a bad choice of "foreign policy" but the inevitable outcome of

the capitalist system in its death agony

that can only be ended with victoriousinternational proletarian revolution.The DSP leadership tells its members

that we Spartac.ists are "too extreme onforeign policy." The DSP has consistentlysupported racist Australian imperialism's

1927-Shanghaimassacre,marking bloodydefeat of 1925-

27 ChineseRevolution, wasprepared byStalinists'support tobourgeoisnationalistGuomindang.

military adventurt<s under the guise of

providing "humanitarian" assistance fromSomalia to Cambodia ..Scandalously, theDSP said Australian military interventionin Irian Jaya was "welcome" (Green LeftWeekly, 13 May 1998), even while admitting it would directly benefit the murder

ous Indonesian military!The DSP so deeply believes in thereformability of capitalism that its 1996election platform calling "For a democratic foreign policy" offers heart-feltadvice to the imperialists that they should"renegotiate" the debt that draws the lifeblood out of the peoples of the world andthey should "restructure" internationalagencies such as the International Monetary Fund whose brutal hand has drivenmillions to the brink of starvation.

We inscribe on our banner: Not oneman, not one penny for imperialism! Themain enemy is at home! The heroic German Communist Karl Liebknecht (latermurdered with Rosa Luxemburg at thebehest of the Social Democrats) was tried

for treason in 1916 for his anti-militarismand opposition to the German ruling classamid the carnage of World War I. At hiscourt martial he proclaimed:

"He who does not attack the enemy,imperialism, face to face, but insteadattacks those far away, those outside hisshooting ra nge . .is no Socialis t, but amiserable lackey of the ruling class."

"Democratic" Anti-CommunismFrom the moment the working class

took power in Russia in October 1917,the bourgeoisie and its social-democraticfrontmen railed against the Bolsheviks,denouncing the dictatorship of the proletariat as "totalitarian." In the words of

Kautsky, the contrast between the Bolsheviks and the non-Bolsheviks is "thecontrast between two radically differentmethods: the dictatorial and the demo-

cratic." For our part, we stand with theBolsheviks who fought to defend theproletarian state power against counterrevolution at all costs.

Firmly in the camp of Kautsky and therest of the pro-capitalist social democratswho have proclaimed themselves "democratic socialists," the DSP breathes not aword about the' necessity for proletarian revolution to overthrow capitalism.Wrapping themselves in bourgeois liber

alism, they declare the "DSP stands forthe universal appliCation of the principleof democracy." For them "socialism"means "extending the principle o fdemoc-racy to all spheres of life" (What is the

DSP?).

Lenin's The Proletarian Revolution

and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) directlyaddressed this "democratic" claptrap:

'''We: the revolutionary Marxists, never. made spe eches to the people that theKautskyites of all nations love to make,cringing before the bourgeoisie, adaptingthemselves to the bourgeois parliamentary system, keeping silent about thebourgeois character of modern democracy and demanding only its extension, only that it be carried to its logicalconclusion.' ' 'We' said to the bourgeoisie: You, ex

ploiters and hypocrites, talk about democracy, while at every step you erect thousands of barriers to prevent the oppressedpeople from taking part in politics. Wetake you at your word and, in the interests of these people, demand the extension of your bourgeois democracy inorder to prepare the people for revolu-tion for the purpose of overthrowingyou, the exploiters. And if you exploitersattempt to offer resistance to our proletarian revolution we shall ruthlessly suppress you; we shall deprive you of allrights; more than that, we shall not giveyou any bread, for in our proletarianrepublic the exploiters will have norights, they will be deprived of fire and

water, for we are socialists in real earnest, and not in the Scheidemann or

Kautsky. fashion."

Deep in the grip of "democratic" impe

rialism, in the 1980s the then-SWP wasnotorious for its embrace of Polish Solidarnosc, agency of the Catholic church,CIA and imperialist bankers for counterrevolution against the bureaucraticallydeformed Polish workers state. In December 1981, they marched side by sidewith fanatical anti-Communist East European nationalists-the sinister "CaptiveNations" gang-at the Polish consulatein Sydney. Proclaiming themselves "themost c l o s ~ l y aligned to Solidarity inAustralia" (Sydney Morning Herald, 13

January 1982), the SWP put out wallposters featuring a quotation from andpicture of the anti-woman, anti-Semitic,capitalist tool Lech Walesa. No doubt tothe SWP's chagrin, they were in no posi

tion to compete with the real "Solidaritywith Solidarnosc" forces-the clericalreactionaries1ed by the now-dead B.A.Santamaria who in the 1950s ran a sinister operation to purge the union movement of any hint of Communism.

Despite the economic devastation,clerical reaction, anti-Semitism and thecrackdown on abortion wreaked by Solidarnosc' capitalist counterrevolution inPoland, in 1992 the DSP was still toutingits grotesque "solidarity actions" withanti-Communist scum. In "defendingdemocratic rights in the Stalinised states,"they were happy to march "with anyone,"including, as they fatuously put it, people"who didn't understand the need to defend the Polish socialist state against

imperialism" (A History).The "Russian question" has been thedefining political question of the 20thcentury: the October 1917 Russian Revolution took the Marxist doctrine out of

the realm ;of theory and gave it reality,creating a society where those wholaboured ruled through the dictatorshipof the proletariat. The pressure of imperialist encirclement, the devastation of theRussian working class in the Civil Warand the isolation of the Russian Revolution enabled a bureaucratic layer headedby J.V. Stalin to usurp poJitical power ina poli*al counterrevolution in 1923-24.The Trotskyists alone upheld Lenin's

WORKERS VANGUARD



Lech Walesa's PolishSolidarnosc,

counterrevolutionaryinstrument of CIA

and Vatican. Bannerof Australian SWp,

predecessor of DSp,was prominent at

December 1981 proSolidarnosc rally of

anti-Communist

reactionaries.

program of proletarian internationalism-the understanding that the survivalof the October Revolution depended onits extension through working-class revolution. In the Soviet degenerated workers state. and in the bureaucratically deformed workers states of Eastern Europe,we Trotskyists stood for unconditionalmilitary defence of these states againstinternal counterrevolution and imperialist attack, and for proletarian politicalrevolution to oust the bureaucratic castesand place the working class in politicalpower and open the road to socialist

development.We thus opposed Solidarnosc' drive

to capitalist restoration in Poland. Proclaiming "Stop Solidarnosc Counterrevolution!" we said that this threat must becrushed at all costs and by any means·necessary. We fought for Polish Trotsky-ism, for proletarian political revolutionto oust the Stalinist bureaucracy whichat every turn undermined the defence of

the planned, socialised economy and theconsciousness of the Polish proletariat.The DSP was on the other side of thebarricades.

It was precisely under the pressure of

anti-Soviet Cold War II that the SWP inJuly 1984 junked what had always beenits empty pretence to Trotskyism. Prov

ing, as Stalin said. that paper will takeanything written on it, the SWP pronounced that the other "major politicalerror" of Trotskyism was "an overestimation of the place, within the tasks confronting the workers states and withinthe world revolution, occupied by political revolution against the ruling castes inthe bureaucratised socialist states" (AHistory).

What the SWP was really on about wasremoving any perceived obstacle to sucking up to various nationalist formationsaround the world who claimed inspirationfrom the Cuban and Vietnamese Revolutions. They "distinguish" between thesegovernments, who. they falsely claim,"act in the working people's interests"(What is the DSP?) and China and NorthKorea-which are rather. less "popular"and, more to the point. particularly targeted by the Australian imperialists.

The SWP's selective "Stalinophilia"also allowed them to be as one with thesocial democrats and liberals infatuatedwith the emergence of Russian leaderMikhail Gorbachev. Proclaiming "marketsocialism," he began to dismantle thecentrally planned Soviet economy as heopenly capitulated to imperialism, frompulling out of Afghanistan to handingover East Germany. .

When in August 1991 Boris Yeltsinstaged his countercoup against the impotent "Gang of Eight"· who had movedagainst Gorbachev. the DSP rallied withthe rest of the traitorous left to cheeron capitalist counterrevolution. On 28August 1991. Green Left Weekly editorialised: "The defeat of last week's disastrous attempt by the Stalinist old guard toturn back the clock opens a new politicalphase in the USSR. In particular, it marksthe first big victory for mass politicalaction over the repressive bureaucracy."

DSP leader Renfrey Clarke was· onYelstin's barricades, joining those imbued, in his own words, with "vehementanti-Communism" (Green Left Weekly, 4September 1991). He also spent a nightinside the "White House" trying to help a

22 JANUARY1999

Scottish Labour MP deliver a letter of solidarity to Yeltsin from British LabourParty leader Neil Kinnock, infamous forknifing the heroic British miners strike of

1984-85.. This abject service to socialdemocratic anti-communism exactly sumsup the political essence of the nsp.

Today the DSP vociferously deniesthey supported the Yeltsinite "democrats."

. But the nsp's hailing of capitalist counterrevolution as a "lesser evil" to Stalinism is unambiguous: "Our central conclusion is that the collapse of the Stalinistregimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR

and of the political influence of Stalinismin the West represents an enormous stepforward for the struggle for socialism"(The Collapse of 'Communism' in theUSSR. 1992).

Far from the anti-communist fictions of

the nsp, the ascendency of counterrevo-

lution in the former USSR was an unparalleled defeat for working people all overthe world. As our ICL "Declaration of

Principles" states: "We Trotskyists stayedat our posts and fought to preserve andextend the revolutionary gains of he working class while every other tendency onthe planet capitulated to the ideologicalpressure of imperialist anti-communism.Above all our defense of the USSR wasexpressed in our fight for new OctoberRevolutions around the world."

We continue to stand, as we did withthe USSR and the deformed workersstates of Eastern Europe, for unconditional military defence of China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba against imperialism and internal counterrevolution,and for proletarian political revolutionto oust the narrow, nationalist Stalinistbureaucracies whose continued misrulethreatens further defeats for the international working class.

Not so the DSP, which upholds theCuban Stalinist regime as a model. Thisis pretty rich given that the capitalistcounterrevolutions that ravaged EasternEurope and the Soviet Union have left theCuban Revolution economically prostrateand at the mercy of the imperialist powers. As the Castro regime undermines thevery foundations of the revolution byintroducing the dollar economy and foreign capital investment while welcomingthe Pope of counterrevolution. the Trotskyist program of proletarian politicalrevolution is more urgently posed thanever._ With the destruction of the SovietUnion. the imperialists have set theirsights on China and have found powerful

Der Spiegel

allies in the Stalinist bureaucracy, sections of which seek to become the .newcapitalist exploiters. looking to the wholesale dismantling of what remains of theplanned economy of the deformed workers state. The extreme nationalist ideology pushed by the Stalinist bureaucrats isa direct bridge to capitalist restoration.China stands on the brink of proletarianpolitical revolution or capitalist counterrevolution. The DSP champions the likesof Han Dongfang, editor of the ChinaLabour Bulletin which advocates "independent" trade unions in China. He is

regularly featured on Radio Free Asia,an official anti-communist mouthpiecefor U.S. imperialism. We urgently seek tointervene as the subjective factor whichwill make the difference in the Chineseproletariat becoming a class for itselfby bringing revolutionary internationalist

August 1997:Strikingtransportworkers blocktraffic in Quezon

City, Philippines.Proletarian classindependencefrom all wings of

bourgeoisie iskey to strugglefor socialistrevolution.

class consciousness t() the workingmasses in China and in the large Chinesediaspora.

Anti-Communists for Hire'The DSP hasn't hesitated to stir up the

bloody brew of nationalism and anticommunism in Australia, too. In the early1980s, the SWP worked intimately withthe sinister Croatian Movement for Statehood (HDP). This outfit openly proclaimed its goal of dismembering theYugoslav bureaucratically deformed workers state as they lauded some of the mostbloodthirsty of the Ustasha butcherswhose bestiality in World War II in murdering Serbs, Jews, Roma and manyCroats gave even the Nazis pause. TheSWP produced a special four-page supplement to its newspaper (July 198J) to

Available in Chinese

Declaration of PrinCiples and

Some Elements of ProgramInternational CommunistLeague (Fourth Internationalist)

Adopted in 1998 at theThird International Conferenceof the ICL.

$1 (20 pages)

Make checks payable/mail to:Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377GPO, New York, NY 10116

Australasian Spartacist

declare "the Ustasha was not a fascistmovement" while alibiing the mass murderer Ante Pavelic who ran the Nazi satellite state of Croatia.

This is the kind of trash that usuallycomes from the mouths of Nazi apologists who claim the Holocaust never happened. Youth in Australia attracted to thensp's loudly proclaimed "anti-racism"might ask themselves how it would feelto join arm in arm with the likes of theHDP. And all the nsp's quotations fromTrotsky about "defence of the workersstates" will not and cannot cover up their

obscene hailing of the 1971 murder of aYugoslav diplomat by a fascist terroristas an "act of struggle against nationaloppression" (see Australasian SpartacistNo. 103. August/September 1983).

The nsp proclaims itself for women'srights, for gay rights, but this is evidentlya program for Australians only. FromIran to Poland they have backed forcesof reaction that have trampled mercilessly on the rights of women and gays.In 1979, the SWP, with most of the left,tried to paint the Iranian mullahs whodecreed death to "adulter:ous" women,homosexuals and national minorities as"anti-imperialists." A short time later,even as the mullahs in Khomeini's Iranwere torturing their own erstwhile com

rades, the SWP upheld "the Iranian revolution" and denounced our proletarianopposition to the Islamic fanatics as"counterrevolutionary."

The imperialists have long cultivatedIslamic fundamentalism as a weaponagainst communism. In 1950. John FosterDulles, who later became U.S. secretaryof state, pointed to a "common bond"with the "religions of the East," whose"spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciledwith Communist 'atheism and materialism." This view was chillingly echoedby SWPer Andrew Jamieson who, in asigned statement dated 27 June 1979,declared:

"We would support the Muslim massesin so far as they were against the Stalinist

practices of the PKI in Indonesia in1965."

Indonesian and other leftists take heedthe DSP has had no compunction aboutsupporting the darkest forces of reactionif they are "popular."

Anti-Proletarian, Anti-Leninist,Anti-Trotskyist

The DSP outright rejects the elementary working-class principle of not votingfor the parties of the class enemy. These

continued on page 11

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7.



Big Oi1...(continued from page 1)

"There is no question consolidation of

the oil industry is a good thing for mostof us ... . The big companies. will have themoney, and we have the oil."

The current wave of megamergers inthe world oil business is governed notonly by the particularities and presentconditions of that industry but expressesa basic law of the capitalist system. Inthe mid-19th century, Karl Marx discerned that the effects of market competition, combined with economies of scale

in production and distribution, wouldnecessarily lead to ever greater concentrations of capital: "The expansion of

capitalist production creates the socialdemand here, the technical requirements

there, for those gigantic industrial enterprises, which depend for their realisationon a previous centralisation of capitals"(Capital, Volume I).

Business historian Ron Chernow writeswith studied irony in a recent biography of John D. Rockefeller, the greatgrandfather of Exxon and Mobil:

"When he railed against cutthroat competition and the vagaries of the businesscycle, Rockefeller sounded more likeKarl Marx than our classical image ofthe capitalist. Like the Marxists, he believed that the competitive free-for-all

eventually gave way to monopoly andthat large industrial-planning units werethe most sensible way to manage aneconomy."

- Titan: The Life of John D.Rockefeller, Sr. (1998)

The difference, of course, is that weMarxists fight for a rationally planned

socialized economy under a workers state,

governed by and for the working people.Rockefeller organized monopolies andcartels for the benefit of their wealthyowners at the expense of the workingclass.

"Trustbusting": A Liberal FraudFinancial journalists have pointed to

the historical irony that the two biggestsuccessors of the old Standard Oil Trust,Exxon (formerly Standard of New Jersey)and Mobil (formerly Standard of NewYork), are getting together again. "Rockefeller Revived," headlined the London

Financial Times (27 November 1998).The Standard Oil Company was the

main target of the trustbusting fervorof the "progressive era" identified withTeddy Roosevelt. John D. RockefellerIwas intensely and widely hated for his

ruthless brutality not only toward hisworkers but also small and middlingbusinessmen who got in his way. Ida Tar

bell, author of the famous 1904 muckraking attack The History of the Stan

dard Oil Company, was the daughter of

the owner of a small Pennsylvania oilrefinery who was driven out of businessby Rockefeller and his partners, the railroad magnates.

Yet in a way, the public vilification

of Rockefeller strengthened rather thanweakened American capitalism politically. All economic ills were blamed ona handful of "robber barons" like Rocke

feller and Wall SJreet banker J.P. Morgan, who supposedly violated the normalcapitalist rules of the game. Trustbustingwas promoted as a liberal alternative to

8

the socialist program of nationalizingindustry.

Furthermore, by branding Rockefellerand his cohorts "the biggest criminalsin the country," Theodore Roosevelt enhanced his own authority as an imperialpresident who purportedly defended theinterests of the American people against arapacious plutocracy of wealth. In reality, the bully boy in the White House

committed crimes on behalf of American capitalism of an even greater magnitude than the titan of the oil trust. WhileRoosevelt was vice president and thenpresident, U.S. military forces in the

Philippines killed tens of thousands of

people in suppressing the struggle fornational independence after the U.S.seized that colony from Spain in the1898 war. In 1903, Roosevelt seized anddetached northern Colombia in orderto build the Panama Canal. This was

of enormous strategic importance for

Saudi Arabia'sKing Ibn Saudmeets withU.S. presidentFranklin D.

Roosevelt duringWorld War II.Control overPersian Gu lf oilfields gives U.S.

imperialism _enormous strategiCadvantage overmain rivals,Germany andJapan.

emerging U.S. imperialism in becominga Pacific power and challenging theEuropean and Japanese imperialists inthe Far East.

The 1911 Supreme Court decision

ordering the breakup of Standard Oil washailed as a great triumph for the trustbusting campaign. But this liberal reform inno way changed or softened the bru-

. tal exploitation of the American workingclass by Rockefeller and his ilk. This wasgruesomely demonstrated a few yearslater by the 1914 Ludlow massacre.

Rockefeller had extensive holdings inaddition to Standard Oil. Among thesewas Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI), whichowned 24 coal mines that provided cokefor its own steel mills. In his biography,Chernow described conditions in the Colorado coal fields as "raw capitalism suchas Karl Marx pictured it: dangerousmines run by harsh bosses and policed byarmed guards in a desolate, hellish place."

At one point, 74 workers were killedin a m i n e ~ e x p l o s i o n . While the CFI managers predictably blamed the disaster onthe miners' own c a r e ~ s s n e s s , even theColorado Bureau of Labor Standards

charged the company with "cold-bloodedbarbarism."

Rockefeller had a fanatical hatredtoward trade unions which he bequeathedto his son John Jr., who oversaw the CFIoperation. When, in 1913, the UnitedMine Workers launched an organizingdrive in the Colorado coal fields, Rockefeller Jr. and his henchmen brought inprofessional gun thugs who were deputized as county sheriffs. In September,

National Guard

.;eID

and company thugskilled 19 strikers

"and familymembers in 1914

Ludlow massacre.John D. Rockefellerbuilt Standard Oiltrust throughruthless brutalitytoward workersand bankrupting of

small competitors.

9,000 CFI miners went on strike. Thestrikers and their families were evictedfrom company housing and were forcedto set up tent colonies in the surroundingarea, the largest concentration being at aspot called Ludlow.

As the strike expanded and becameincreasingly hard fought, the governor ofColorado sent National Guardsmen intothe coal fields to "restore order." In April1914, the Guardsmen, many ofthem CFIgun thugs, opened fire with machine gunson union pickets at Ludlow. They then setthe tents ablaze, burning to death twowomen and eleven children. The Ludlow

massacre revealed the true nature of theAmerican capitalist state-consisting atits core of armed bodies of men committed to defense of capitalist propertyand profits-which the bourgeois reformers who led the trustbusting campaignagainst Rockefeller and Standard Oilsought to obscure.

In recent decades, trustbusting hasplayed a far lesser role in the ideologyand program of American liberalism thanat the beginning of the era of monopolycapitalism. However, the Exxon-Mobil

deal has evoked echoes of "ProgressiveEra" politics. A Mobil refinery workerin Beaumont, Texas, fearful of losinghis job, exclaimed: "It's a revival of theStandard Oil Company. It's going to put20 or 30 thousand people out of work. Ithink the Justice Department should stepin and stop it" (New York Times, 30November 1998).

While such a view is understandable,it is wrong. First, there is no reasonwhatever to think that the layoffs atMobil would be any fewer if the company merged with a smaller oil companylike Texaco or Conoco, or remained in

dependent. Texaco and Conoco are planning to reduce their workforces in the

coming year by about the same percentage as the new Exxon-Mobil combine.Most recently, ARCO has announced a

new. round of jobs cuts.More fundamental is the illusion that

the federal government is or can be anagency for defending the interests of

working people against corporate capital.One of the few bourgeois politicians whocultivates a liberal populist image, Minnesota Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, explained why there is no opposition in Washington to the Exxon-Mobilmerger. "The biggest reason is the mix of

money and politics," he said. "For bothparties, these are heavy hitters, the moneyed interests who have a huge impact on

the tenure of people in Congress. Not toomany people want to challenge them"

(New York Times, 6 December 1998).The U.S. government is not, as Well

stone implies, merely a passive observerof mergers between large industrial and

financial corporations. Washington oftenpromotes such deals, especially for strategic military purposes. A good exampleof this is the merger between Boeing andMcDonnell Douglas in 1997, intended to

strengthen the U.S. aircraft industry inrelation particularly to the giant European Airbus monopoly.

Liberal Democrats like Wellstoneoccasionally offer criticis'ms of big business in order to enhance their credentialsas supposed "friends of labor." Such illusions are avidly promoted as well by thelAM and other AFL-CIO bureaucrats. Infact, the Democratic Party is a party of

big business no less than the Republicans.

For their part, the OCAW uniontops, notably Tony Mazzocchi, pretendto offer an alternative to the AFL-CIObureaucracy's ties to Clinton's Democrats. In an article in the union journal,OCAW Reporter (NovemberlDecember1998), opposing global mergers in thechemical industry, OCAW official JoeDrexler proclaims:

"Finding the proper political path to confront corporate power will not be foundwithin the two-party structure in the U,S.We need a different way to think and adifferent way to act. We need to replacemarket needs with worker needs. That's

why we need a party of the working class.

That's why we need a Labor Party."

What the OCAW tops have in mind isnot a workers party forged in militantstruggle against the capitalist profit system but a wretchedly pro-capitalist reformist formation on the model of TonyBlair's British Labour Party, which is currently administering the capitalist state onbehalf of the City of London financiers.Despite its (increasingly attenuated) tiesto the trade unions, Blair's Labour Partyis viciously anti-working-class and racist.From the terror bombing of Iraq tobloody repression against the Catholicminority in Northern Ireland-which hasonly intensified as a result of the imperialist "peace" fraud imposed by Blair lastyear-Labour enforces the dictates of

British imperialism.And the sham Labor Party promoted

by the OCAW tops (as well as a hostof reformist "socialist" outfits) does not

even offer an electoral alternative tothe capitalist Democrats. Since its formalfounding at a 1996 conference of LaborParty Advocates, the Labor Party has yetto run a slate of candidates in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans,including in the 1996 presidential elections. Indeed, Labor Party Advocateswas formed explicitly in order to pres-sure the Democrats, as Mazzocchi madeclear in 1991 when he stressed: "Organizing Labor Party Advocates is not goingto retard the re-birth of the Democrats.On the contrary, it will encourage it"(Labor Party Advocate, August 1991; see"Why 'Labor Party Advocates' Doesn'tAdvocate a Labor Party," WV No. 622, 5May 1995). We fight to break workersand minorities from the partner parties of

capitalism in the struggle to forge a revo-lutionary workers party.

The Caspian Oil Bonanza andthe East Asian Economic Crash

Underlying the current megamergersin Big Oil are three fundamental developments shaping the world today: thedestruction of the Soviet Union throughcapitalist counterrevolution; the intensifying rivalry between the three majorimperialist powers-the United States,

Germany and Japan; the collapse of theEast Asian economic boom, including aprolonged and deepening recession in

Japan.With the disintegration of the USSR in

1991-92, a major oil (and also naturalgas) producing region came up for grabsby Western imperialism for the first timesince the discovery of oil in the PersianGulf in the 1920s and '30s. The smallstates surrounding the Caspian Sea werenow run by men, mainly former Stalinistbureaucrats, who wanted nothing morethan to become well-paid agents for theSeven Sisters. In fact, the current primeminister of Kazakhstan was "trained" at

W O R ~ R & 1 ' { ~ t , l R ~ ~ ~ D



Chevron's headquarters in California.However, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and_Turkmenistan are landlocked countries along way from the main oil markets inWest Europe and East Asia. Integratingthe Caspian region into the world oilindustry therefore requires a massive investment in constructing new pipelinesand upgrading existing ones.

In 1992, Chevron bought up a majority interest of the Tenghiz oil field insouthwestern Kazakhstan, one of the tenlargest in the world. Chevron then sold abig chunk of its share to Mobil. The twoU.S. partners (both descendants of the

old Standard Oil trust) have pledged toinvest $25 billion in Kazakhstan over thenext 20 years. In 1994, the oil fieldsin the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan were taken over by an international consortium including Exxon, British Petroleum, Amoco, Pennzoil andothers. The companies involved promised the Baku regime $8 billion over thenext few decades.

The American and British oil companies have no interest in expanding themarketed supply of petroleum and naturalgas for its own sake. On the contrary, thebasic aim of the international oil cartel,ever since the days of John D. Rockefeller, has been to limit production inorder to prop up prices. However, in the

euphoric ideological climate followingthe destruction 'of the Soviet Union,Western capitalists, including oil executives, believed that good times werehere for good. The International EnergyAgency, which represents the governments of North America, West Europeand Japan, projected a steady rise inworld oil consumption from 68 millionbarrels a day in 1994 to over 90 millionbarrels in 2010. In particular, oilmenexpected demand in East Asia for petroleum and natural gas to continue growing at more than 10 percent a year wellinto the new millennium.

The investment boom in Caspian oilwas in large measure geared to the EastAsian economic boom just as this was

about to go bust. From the end of 1996through mid-1998, oil consumption inJapan fell by over 20 percent. Duringthis period total world demand declinedby three million barrels a day in theface of a quite substantial expansion of

productive capacity in the oil industry.The Tulsa-based Oil & Gas Journal (28

December 1998), an authoritative industry organ, now writes that with the collapse of Asian oil demand, "somethingof structural upheaval-a sea change-is

under way in the oil industry." Partof that structural upheaval is an evengreater concentration of capital thanbefore.

Big Oil and

Imperialist RivalriesOil is not just another commodity. It is

the source of more than 40 percent of theworld's energy. True, the generation of

electric power using petroleum and natural gas could over time and at greatexpense be replaced by coal or nuclearenergy. However, modern means of transportation (cars and trucks, railroads andairplanes) and military hardware- tanks,fighter planes and many naval vessels

run on oil, for which there is no practicalsubstitute. Access to oil, especially cheap

. '22· JANUARY 1995' , 1

oil, is thus of vital strategic importancefor modern capitalist states.

Unlike coal, which is found in abundant supply in many countries, petroleumand also natural gas deposits are highlygeographically concentrated. About twodozen mammoth fields-known in theindustry as "elephants"-supply most ofthe world's' oil. Saudi Arabia, Kuwaitand the small sheikdoms in the Arabian peninsula have three-quarters of theworld's proven reserves. And petroleumfrom the main Persian Gulf fields can beextracted for about $2 a barrel, or onefifth the current, historically low price.

Ever since the 1920s, control over thePersian Gulf oil fields has given Americanimperialism, with Britain as its ally andjunior partner, an enormous strategic advantage over its main rivals, Germany andJapan.

This was clearly demonstrated duringthe Second World War. When the warbroke out in Europe in 1939, Germanywas cut off from its main oil supplies inthe Western hemisphere and Near East.The German war economy resorted to thehydrogenation of coal to produce gaso-

. line. But this was a very expensive process which absorbed a huge fraction of

Germany's material and labor resources.By contrast, the U.S. expanded its domestic oil production by 30 percent during

the war using but a small fraction of itsindustrial capital and labor-force. Germanimperialism's drive to seize the Baku oilfields was a key immediate factor motivating the Nazi invasion of the SovietUnion in June 1941.

In July 1941, the United States, Britain and Holland embargoed oil shipments to Japan without which it couldnot survive. It was this act of economicwarfare which drove the Tokyo regime toattack the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, thereby launching the Second WorldWar in the Pacific, which ended with theA-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasakiby U.S. imperialism and the defeat andoccupation of Japan. Trotskyists-revolutionary Marxist s-opposed all sides in .

this interimperialist conflict while callingfor unconditional military defense of theSoviet Union, a bureaucratically degenerated workers state.

The U.S. emerged victorious fromWorld War II as the pre-eminent imperialist power. And the USSR, defeating theNazi juggernaut at a cost of more than 26million Soviet lives, emerged from thewar as the second strongest industrialmilitary power in the world. Commonhostility to the Soviet Union then formedthe basis for the U.S.-dominated ColdWar imperialist alliance which includedGermany and Japan. But with the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR,the three major imperialist powers haveincreasingly sought to gain advantage at

the expense of one another.The American ruling class is deter

mined not to give up in the slightest itsenormous strategic advantage of effectivecontrol over the Persian Gulf oil fields.As the USSR was fast falling apart in1990-91, the U.S. launched a devastatingwar against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, formerly a Moscow client state. Since the1991 Gulf War, the U.S. has imposed astarvation blockade against Iraq repeatedly punctuated by terror bombing. Thisis intended as a message to the other Arab

RoyalDutch/Shellpropped upmurderousmilitarydictatorship inNigeria.

The merger agreement betweenMobil and Exxon has generated aspate of stories on the two U.S. oilgiants in the financial press. However,an article titled "What Did MobilKnow?" in Business Week (28 December 1998) is very different from the

usual analysis of costs, prices, profits,stock options and the like.

The article begins by describing thehorrible torture of Teungku Bintara atan Indonesian military prison camp inthe northern Sumatran province of

Aceh in 1990-91. It then goes on:"Bintara's gruesome experience unfolded only a few hundred yards fromthe chemical plants and white storagetanks of P.T. Arun, a liquified naturalgas (LNG) producer in which Indonesia's state-owned oil monopoly, Pertamina, holds a controlling 55% stakeand Mobil Corp. owns 35%."

A mass grave near the former militarycamp is located on Pertamina-ownedland that is less than three miles froma Mobil gas-drilling site.

Mobil's management were not justpassive and silent observers of theseatrocities. According to survivors of

the camp and other investigators, theU.S. company supplied the Indonesianarmy with heavy earth-moving equipment to dig mass graves. A Mobilspokesman admitted that the companyprovided the Indonesian army withexcavators-which it supposedly believed were being used only for,"projects beneficial to the community."During a visit to Jakarta in earlyNovember, Mobil chairman LucioNoto pleaded that the company had"no contml" over the army's actionsand echoed earlier management denials of any knowledge of "human rights

abuses" in the area. Yet for decades theregion has been the scene of repeatedterror campaigns by the Indonesianmilitary against Acehnese separatistinsurgents.

As came out in the course of anextensive investigation conducted byBusiness Week, which surprisingly onoccasion engages in old-fashioned lib-

oil states and Iran not to defy the will of

Wall Street and Washington . .} ! is alsointended as a message to Germany andJapan not to challenge American hegemony in the Persian Gulf, for example, bycultivating their own client states in the

region.Notably, the U.S. launched an earlier

war buildup in the Gulf region, in 1997,only days after the French oil giant Total,joined by Russian and Malaysian firms,had signed a $2 billion contract with Iranto pump offshore natural gas. The NewYork Times decried the deal as a "directchallenge to the United States" and theClinton administration threatened to impose punitivee<::onomic sanctions againstTotal and its partners. Washington hasitself since tried to improve relations withTeheran, seizing on the installation of thesupposedly more liberal clerical regimeof President Mohammad Khatami.

While Israel remains U.S. imperialism's chief ally and gendarme in the

region, the Zionist rulers' expansionistappetites and brutal subjugation of thePalestinian people are a constant irritantin Washington's efforts to consolidate itsinfluence among the Arab bourgeoisregimes. For its part, the Zionist lobbyin the U.S. views Big Oil as fanaticallypro-Arab. Divisions within the American bourgeoisie over Near East policyare reflected in the ongoing clash overwhether to release Jonathan Pollard, aformer Pentagon employee serving a lifesentence for spying for Israel.

Britain, predictably, has been acting asthe main U.S. ally in the Near East andelsewhere. Ever since the late 19th cen-

.,AFP

Victims' remains from mass gravenear Mobil Oil operations on theIndonesian island of Sumatra.

eral muckraking, Mobil managerswere told by local contractors thathuman body parts had been foundclose to company sites and the useof company equipment to dig massgraves was a common topic of discussion in the Mobil cafeteria. BusinessWeek also interviewed a former Mobilemployee at the site who had beenwarned by subcontractors not to use acertain road leading to a Mobil-operated gas field. "Don't go there," hewas told. "Don't you know the army iskilling people and burying them inmass graves with Mobil equipment?"

From the CIA's role in providinghit lists for the mass slaughter of

Indonesian leftists and workers duringthe 1965-66 anti-Communist bloodbath to Mobil's collusion with themilitary dictatorship-these are themeans by which the U.S. capitalistssecure the fabulous profits extractedfrom the semi colonial masses.

tury, when many a daughter of the American plutocracy married into the Britishupper classes, the bourgeoisies of the twocountries have developed close financialties. This was the economic basis for thealliance of the U.S. and Britain against

Germany in both the first and secondimperialist world wars.

The links between American and British capital are nowhere closer and moreclearly manifest than in the oil industry.In the late 1920s, at a secret meeting in aScottish castle, Royal Dutch/Shell andBritish Petroleum joined with their fivelargest American counterparts to formthe famous Seven Sisters cartel.


Spartacist LeaguePublic Offices

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Bay AreaSaturday: 1·5 p.m.

.......

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New York, NY Phone: (212) 267-1025

'9



Teach-in...(continued from page 12)

and are damned dangerous, they have noplace in Oakland. We will not tolerateoutlaws" (San Francisco Chronicle, 12January). A day after the shooting, members of the OEA's representative councilvoted 48 to 42 to continue with the teachin, an act which took some guts in theface of the outpouring of support to thecops from the city's rulers.

In a letter that day to the OEA, Mumia

wrote from death row:"I am encouraged and quite pleased thatyour union has chosen to include mycase among others in critical discussionsof the American death penalty andthe so-called 'Criminal Justice System.'While I remain innocent of any crime, acritical discussion raised by my case willonly serve to open young minds to thebitter realities of black life in America atthe end of this century."

That was exactly what the school authorities and their bosses feared, Just hoursafter the OEA vote, school superintendentCarole Quan, at Gallo's bidding, issuedorders to cancel the teach-in assembliesplanned at two Oakland high schools.

OEA president Sheila Quintana,appearing on KPFA radio on January 12

alongside Shannon Reeves, repeatedly

urged that the teach-in be postponed andthat nothing be done that would takeattention "away from the family andfrom the city's focus on the grief that weshare, because we work very closelywith the police department." Referring toJamal as "a convicted killer," Quintana

who herself had taught about Jamal'scase in her American government classes- told listeners that she'd called theEO.P. in Pennsylvania for their side of

the story! She also issued a complaint tothe union's executive board against BobMandel, the OEA member who had initiated the teach-in, for putting out theproposal on OEA letterhead.

The actions and accusations of theschool board and the OEA leadership

have thus adopted the capitalist rulers'equation of Mumia Abu-Jamal with a copkiller, while the racist cops and rulersseek to reconvict Jamal in the press. OnJanuary 14, 2,000 cops closed down thestreets of Oakland for the funeral in amassive demonstration of force, with amiles-long cavalcade of motorcycle copsand squad cars and police helicopters flying overhead. Like similar funerals heldthroughout the U.S., this was a demonstration for police bonapartism, as thecops assert their power to act as judge,jury and executioner on the city streetsindependent of all constraints. To thoseteachers who went ahead with class discussions on Jamal's case and the deathpenalty, a police spokesman ominously

warned, "We believe this is a slap in theface to law e n f o r ~ e m e n t here and aroundthe country" (San Francisco Examiner,

14 January).

Big Oil ...(continued from page 9)

In the post-Soviet period, Britain, withWashington's backing, has sought toobstruct Germany's drive for hegemony-notably through the establishment of asingle European currency-in Europe.The recent launching of the euro is not,

as widely advertised, a decisive step in

the formation of a European capitalist"supersta te." As we wrote a few years ago:

10

"Since capitalism is organised. on thebasis of particular national states, itselfthe cause of repeated imperialist wars toredivide the world, it is impossible tocohere a stable pan-European bourgeoisstate. A European imperialist 'superstate 'can be achieved only by the methodsof Adolf Hitler, not those of JacquesDeiors, the French social-democraticarchitect of Maastricht. Should the Maastricht project for a common Europeancurrency come into being, it wouldamount to only a brief, conflict-riddenepisode."

- "For a Workers EuropeFor Socialist Revolution!"WV No. 670, 13 June 1997

On the eve of the cop funeral, about 70people joined Bob Mandel and othermembers of the OEA in a press conference to support their freedom to proceedwith teaching their students about Jamal'scase. But academic freedom in capitalistsociety is an illusion-schools exist toincu kate bourgeois values and discipline,and to provide education for the privi-

leged few. The run-down school buildingswith few supplies and not enough teachers are little more than warehouses for theghetto poor. Having abolished affirmative

action and bilingual education, the rulingclass has made it clear it deems wholelayers of minority and working-classyouth-with no jobs for the vast majority- a n expendable population which it isnot profitable to educate.

The pious proclamations by ShannonReeves that schools must stick to subjectsthat prepare students for integration intothe economic life of this country are acruel .hoax. Reeves worked overtime towhip up opposition to the OEA when itwent on strike in 1996 for minimal wageincreases and smaller classroom sizes,declaring it was "educational treason totell students not to come to school." Onthe KPFA program in which Reevesspoke against the teach-in, one caller

asked him, "I wonder .. who you meanwhen you say 'we,' 'we are opposed tothis'?" The "we" is the conservative blackmiddle-class NAACP, proponents of

black capitalism who seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the ghetto poor.

What has motivated everyone whoclamored against the desire to teach students about the frame-up of Mumia AbuJamal is the fear that explaining his caseto the ghettoized poor in Oakland's public schools will explode the myth of

American democracy. Young people aretaught that the U.S. is the best democracy in the world, that "we, the people"have fair and regular elections for a government-that represents and serves its citizens, that there is freedom of expres

sion, equality before the law and a rightto a jury of one's peers. But the bitterreality that working people, blacks andimmigrants face is not what the capitalist

What the euro is, is a move by Germany, backed for the present by France,to create a currency rivaling the dollar ininternational trade and finance. As WallStreet's junior partner, the City of London has refused to go along with theeuro. Likewise, Britain was the onlyEuropean NATO power to join the U.S.in the latest military attack on Iraq lastmonth. This was the military counterpartof the BP-Amoco merger and the recent

closer cooperation between Royal Dutch!Shell and Texaco. 'In controlling the Persian Gulf oil

fields, American imperialism has usednot only the stick but also the carrot.While the stick is the cruise missilessmashing into Baghdad, the carrot is thetens of billions of dollars in the treasuries of the American and British oilcompanies. And the bigger they are, themore money they have. In an op-ed piecein the New York Times (5 January) onthe Exxon-Mobil deal, Rockefeller biographer Ron Chernow pointed out that"one motive for the Exxon-Mobil mergerwas to combine Mobil's Saudi connec-

rulers want people to believe.America is a capitalist society in which

a small minority owns the wealth whichthe vast majority produces. The state-at

its core the cops, army, prison system andcourts-is not a neutral body but aninstrument of organized violence to keepthe ruling class in power and protect itsproperty and profits through repression of

1996 Oaklandteachers strike,which won widesupport amongworkers andminorities, wasdenounced bymiddle-classNAACP leadershipand stabbed in

back by Bay Arealabor bureaucrats.

the working class at home and aggressionagainst its imperialist rivals abroad. Theracist death penalty is at the pinnacle of

this system of capitalist repression. The

Democrats and Republicans are the dualface of racist c-apitalist rule, which can notbe reformed or pressured into defendingthe rights of the working class.

Jamal's case exemplifies these truths:The cops fabricated a "confession" twomonths after his arrest and coerced witnesses to change testimony which implicated someone other than Jamal; the prosecution was allowed to systematicallyexclude blacks from the jury; the judge,an honorary member of the PhiladelphiaF.O.P., denied Jamal's court-appointedlawyer more than $150 each for an investigator and medical and ballistic experts;and the death sentence was secured on thebasis of Jamal's political views. (See"Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the

Racist Death Penalty!" Black History andthe Class Struggle No. 15 for full detailsof the frame-up.) The fact is that Jamalwas denied even the semblance of "dueprocess"-this innocent man didn't get afair _trial, and the state and its institutionswill not and cannot be "fair" now. That iswhy we don't call for a new trial, butrather demand his freedom now.

Jamal has been targeted by the Phillycops and the FBI since he first became amember of the mack Panther Party at age15. Ex-Panthers in Oakland today, likecurrent City CouncHcandidate DavidHilliard, who hails the bourgeois politician Brown as a "progressive mayor,"long ago made peace with racist capitalism. But the Black Panther Party repre

sented at one time a challenge to theracist capitalist rulers-unlike MartinLuther King Jr., who accommodated theracist status quo but is today nevertheless

tions with Exxon's capital to strengthenits bargaining position with the desertkingdom."

The day after the merger agreementwas announced, the Times quoted oneHassan Yassin, described as a Saudi businessman with oil interests: "Exxon, Texaco, Chevron and Mobil have been goodfriends of Saudi Arabia for decades. It isnatural they will be first in line and thebigger they are, the better it is for us." In

this way the further consolidation of BigOil serves to maintain the hold of American imperialism over the Persian Gulfregion, its resources and its people.

From the Ludlow massacre to the terror bombing and starvation blockade of

Iraq, Rockefeller and his heirs have purchased their wealth with the blood of

countless victims. The rational utilization of oil and natural gas to provideenergy for the mass of humanity, as wellas the development of safer and moreefficient forms of energy, can be attainedonly through an internationally planned,socialist economy. And for that to beestablished the heirs of Rockefeller and

revered even by ostensible leftists. Jamalwas framed up not because of some mistake in the workings of American "justice" but because he is seen as a blackrevolutionary, and the ruling class in thiscountry is deathly afraid of the combination of black and red, the spectre of socialrevolution.

The young black and Latino studentsof Oakland's public schools don't have alot of illusions in the cops and courts;they're subject to racist harassment fromthe state every day of their lives. Onestudent in a class where. the teacher

refused to participate in the teach-in saidof Jamal, "I f he's freed, it would make agreat example for us, to show how youcan beat the system" (San Francisco

Chronicle, 15 January). But both OEApresident Quintana, who climbed on thepro-cop bandwagon, and the liberal proponents of the teach-in like Bob Mandelwho have tried to reduce the question toone of academic freedom, share a fundamental belief in the democratic credentials of the state. Liberals point to whatis the norm under American capitalism

the brutality of the cops and injustice inthe courts-and label them "aberrations"that must be "cleaned up." The distrustof the state shared by many minority students must be generalized into an under

standing of the need for a proletarianrevolution to overturn the capitalist system. It is precisely this understandingwhich such liberal teachers act to preventby peddling the myth that the state canbe pressured into acting on behalf of theoppressed.

Officials of the OEA endorsed theemergency united-front demonstrationinitiated by the Partisan Defense Committee to stop the execution of Jamalin August 1995, and members marchedunder their union banner. Those laborcentered protests pointed to the potentialpower of the multiracial workers movement. But to mobilize this power requires a revolutionary workers party thatwill wage a political struggle against the

leadership of the unions who embracethe strikebreaking racist cops as fellow"city workers" and tie the workers totheir class enemy, largely through support to the Democratic Party. One cannotfight for Mumia's freedom while upholding the tenets of the system that framedhim up.

As we said in "Free Mumia Now!"(Black History No. 15);

"In taking up the fight for Jamal's freedom,the working class will be strikinga blow against an entire system predicated on the brutal exploitation of laborand rooted in theracist repression ofthe black population. And in doing thatthey will be taking steps down the roadto the emancipation of all of the workingpeople and oppressed through a victorious socialist revolution that smashes

the chains of capitalist exploitation anddegradation."

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish theracist death penalty! •

sheiks of Araby must be swept into thedustbin of history through proletarianrevolution.•

WORKERS VANGUARD



Chicago ...

(continued from page 12)

amalgamating leftists into this database.When AK Small was pulled over for atraffic violation following an October1997 protest against police brutality, hefound that his name was on the "gang"database, appearing on an "Officer SafetyAlert." His name was listed with the notation, "gang mime/Communist Party"!

The sinister attempt to designate leftists as criminals or "terrorists" is not new.In 1981, the Spartacist League won a suitagainst the State of California for listing

our Marxist party-alongside the KKKand Hell's Angels-in a 1979 "Report onOrganized Crime in California." In fighting this "new McCarthyism," as we calledit, we wrote: "We were falsely labeled asdangerous people, to be dealt with militarily, mad dogs to be shot down. It was amurderous effort to set us up for the samekind of campaign of government violencethat destroyed the Black Panther Party"(WV No. 296, 8 January 1982).

The RCPIRCYB is in the cross hairsof the state repressive apparatus becauseof its vocal and persistent defense of

public housing residents, those whosevoices are rarely heard. But revolutionary rhetoric aside, in practice the RCPdespairs of the possibility of mobilizing

the working class as an agency for anykind of social change, much less forsocialist revolution. Instead, they pushreformist politics like low-level community organizing aimed at pressuring thecapitalist government.

One of their liberal coalitions, the"October 22, 1998, National Day of

Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation," by its very name embodies illu

sions that cop violence can be stoppedunder capitalism. The cops are the armeddefenders of private property whose jobis to keep the working class in line: thewords "police" and "brutality" cannot beseparated. Denying this elementary fact,the RCP's do-good community activism

leads them right into coalitions ... withcops. The October 22 coalition wasendorsed by· Ron Hampton of theNational Black Police Association. Andduring the campaign to save black deathrow political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamalfrom an impending execution warrant inthe summer of 1995, the Refuse & Resistgroup associated with the RCP went so

OSP. .•(continued from page 7)

charlatans claim to have learned this classtreason from Lenin, who, they write, "ofcourse, never held that it was impenn.i"s

sible for socialists to call for a vote in aparliamentary election for a bourgeoisparty" (A History). Their "evidence"? In

1920 Lenin called for a vote to the Brit

ish Labour Party (BLP)! Anyone the leastfamiliar with Lenin's "Left-Wing" Com

munism-An Infantile Disorder knowsthis tactic, of support "in the same way asthe rope supports a hanged man," was

explicitly a call for a class vote "for the

Labour candidate and against the bour

geois candidate." Not for the DSP-:-Uteyincredibly claim that for Lenin the BLP

was a bourgeois party!For Lenin, the BLP was contradictory.

It was "a thoroughly bourgeois party,

because, although made up of workers, itis led by reactionaries, and the worstkind of reactionaries at that, who quite

act in the spirit of the bourgeoisie." Onthe other hand, these leaders "are agentsof the bourgeoisie in the working-classmovement." Lenin termed the BLP "a

special kind of labour organisation of

four million members, which is halftrade union and half political and isheaded by bourgeois leaders" ("Speech

on Affiliation to the British Labour

Party," August 1920). The task of communists was and is to win the masses ofworkers away from the pro-capitalist

22 JANUARY 1999

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Illinois pOlice database lists AK Small's "gang affiliation" as "CommunistParty." Chicago Red Squad worked hand in hand with FBI chief J. EdgarHoover in murderous COINTELPRO vendetta against Black Panthers.

far as to appeal for a "debate" with thePhiladelphia Fraternal Order of Police,which has spearheaded the crusade forJamal's legal lynching.

Today the RCP seeks to organizeminorities into liberal coalitions including the sworn enemies of workers and theoppressed. In the past, the RCP's forebear, the Revolutionary Union, lined upwith outright racists in opposing racialintegration. In 1974, they crassly capitulated to the white racist anti-busing

mobs in South Boston, proclaiming "People Must Unite To Smash Boston BusingPlan"! (Revolution, October 1974). Defense of busing became a pivotal battleground in the struggle against blackoppression in general. The SpartacistLeague supported busing as a minimalmeasure of integration offering somechance of an education for the black poorand called for laborlblack mobilization todefend schoolchildren against the racistmobs. At the same time, we stressed thatthe government's busing plan was totallyinadequate to redress school segregation.As part of our fight for quality integratededucation for all, we demanded: "Extendbusing to the suburbs!" and "Free universal higher education!"

Black and Red-

The Way Forward

The increasing disparity between the 1percent of the population which owns 40percent of the wealth in society and themass of the population lays the basis fortrelllendous social upheaval. The strengthening of the apparatus of state repression

leaders, that is, to split such a "bourgeoisworkers party."

Weaffi rm Lenin's position that criticalsupport to a social-democratic party, suchas the BLP or the Australian Labor Party,is to be used as a tactical weapon, afford

ing a revolutionary party an opportunity toexploit the contradictions between thatparty's bourgeois program and workingclass base. Against the bulk of the fakeleft, however, we oppose the view that itis the duty of revolutionaries to invariablysupport the social democracy, critically ornot. In the 1998 federal election, the ALPpledged continued attacks on the workingclass, women, Aborigines, immigrantsand youth. We said, "No vote to Labor"the tactic of critical support was notapplicable, as it has not been for manyyears.

In 1984, the SWP blithely declaredthat the ALP, of which they had beenpractically an organic component, wasand had been since its inception an out

right capitalist party. Not born of leftistimpulses, this crass revision of the c l ~ s s character of the social democracy was aploy to advocate support to the bourgeois

Nuclear Disarmament Party in 1984-into which the SWP threw itself "wholeheartedly." As they put it themselves:"Once we had broken with Trotskyism,

and once we had corrected our analysisof the ALP, the way was open for ourparty to contemplate a much wider rangeof political options. The possibilitiesemerged for seeking different types of

regroupments with other political forces,and for having a much more flexible tac-

is an attempt by the ruling class tosquelch social protest before it happens.The bourgeoisie plays the race card aswell to foster divisions within the working class and oppressed, undermining thepossibility of united class struggle. As wenoted in "Deadly Threat to Labor, Minorities-Chicago Cops Dust Off RedSquad" (WVNo. 669,30 May 1997):

"The government habitually covers bidsfor increased repressive powers by singling out relatively marginal or vulnerable elements. But in fact, the target of

police red squads in this country is ultimately the organized labor movement.Among the 77 organizations listed in the1974 lawsuit against pOlice spying werethe United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, Teamsters and other unions."

The ruling class uses many weapons toweaken and destroy the organized labormovement, from Red Squads to RICO("racketeering") laws to scabherding Pin

kertons. But its most effective servantsare the labor lieutenants of the tradeunion bureaucracy who bind the proletariat to its class enemy, particularly throughthe capitalist Democratic Party. Thesechains must be broken in a political struggle against the pro-capitalist trade-unionmisleaders. This is the key to forging arevolutionary party to lead the fight for

proletarian power, imbuing the multiracial working class with the consciousnessof its historic task, to become a class foritself and overturn capitalist rule.

The SL understands that t h ~ fight forblack freedom and the fight against thegrinding exploitation of labor in thisracist capitalist society must be joinedtogether in order for either struggle to

tical approach towards parliamentaryelections" (A History). For the DSP, theirbrand of reformism does not depend onthe ALP as its agent, and they haverepeatedly supported capitalist parties inAustralia such as the anti-immigrant

Greens and the Democrats, whom theDSP claimed were no different from theALP for whom they continued to vote.

The DSP opposes the struggle forsocialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Their maximumdemand is that "the main assets of societymust be publicly owned and democratically managed" (Resist!, 28 August 1998)and they openly say that a "revolutionarygovernment" in this country "will requirea multiclass alliance" (The ALP and theFight for Socialism, 1985). Their "red andgreen" petty-bourgeois "community" andsectoralist politics are manifestly antiproletarian in orientation.

In contrast to these opportunists, weTrotskyists-revolutionary Marxists-are

guided by political principle and programmatic constancy, the precious theoretical and strategic acquisitions of theinternational workers movement paid forthrough bitter experience. As the program of the Spartacist League states:

"We seek to bring the ICL's powerful revolutionary Marxist program into theworking class, infusing the class with thenecessary understanding of its historictask: the seizure of state power in athorough-going workers revolution. Ardently championing the rights of theterribly oppressed Aboriginal peoples, ofwomen, youth, and homosexuals, of immigrants and all the other exploited andoppressed, the working class will be

Yoichi Okamoto

move forward. We fight for revolutionary

integrationism, the full integration of

blacks into an egalitarian, socialist society. On November 21, some 250 protesters-largely black trade unionists, aswell as youth, socialists and other antiracists-rallied in defense of MumiaAbu-Jamal and against the racist deathpenalty at the Federal Building in downtown Chicago. This united-front demonstration, called by the Partisan DefenseCommittee, tapped into some of the

potential social dynamite in the combination of red and black. As the SLspeaker at the protest said:

"Racism, the race-caste segregation ofblacks at the bottom of this society, isa primary obstacle to the mobilizationof this potential. The t r a d e ~ u n i o n movement, significantly black at its core, hasthe social power and potential to becomebattalions in the struggle against racismand exploitation, if mobilized in a revolutionary party operating to oppose allinjustice, as the tribune of all the people,to overturn this decaying imperialistorder. Black liberation through socialistrevolution!"

The defense of the arrested RCP/RCYBers is about defending the elementary right to organize. Make nomistakeif they can go after the RCYB they can go

after you! All those who would seek toprotest injustice have a stake in theirdefense. The next court appearance forAK Small and Shawn Wall is February17-All out to defend them! To contribute to the legal defense, send checks payable to "Law Offices of Doug Shreffler"to RCYB2 Defense Committee, c/o 3449N. Sheffield, Chicago, IL 60657. •

transformed from merely a class in itself,to a class/or itself, and in the process willutterly smash this racist, misogynist andviolent capitalist system and open thedoor to the future international socialistsociety."

- "For a Workers Republic of

Australia, Part of a SocialistAsia!"

What is the DSP? "Made-in-Australia"opportunists of the most unbridled variety

lacking even the most rudimentary loyalty to the cause of the working class.Their scouring the world for co-thinkersand bloc partners can only be described,in Oscar Wilde's words, as "the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible."It is thus entirely appropriate that they

despise Trotsky's Fourth International,describing it as "a farce, a centralisedworld organisation built on nothing but

small propaganda groups united around awritten program" (A History). With thesneer of the arrogant petty-bourgeois,they mock Trotsky'S statement in 1938

that "today there is not another revolutionary current on the face of the planetworthy of the name."

This was simply a true statement:against the social democrats and Stalinists, against all varieties of centrism,Trotsky's Fourth International alone carried forward the program of the Bolsheviks and the Communist International,the fight for international proletarian revolution. That is the struggle carried on

today by the International CommunistLeague who fight for a reforged FourthInternational, indispensable world party

of socialist revolution. •

11



JIll

- ' l ; 1 r ' k ~ I t ' ~ " ' l t l i " " I t ' " Amid Ominous Cop- Mobilization

Oakland Teach-In for Mumia Abu-JamalSuppressed by Racist Vendetta

January 14 was slated to be a day of

teach-ins in Oakland's overwhelminglyblack public schools on the death penalty,exemplified by the case of black politicalprisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocentman who has spent 17 years behind bars,framed up on charges of killing a cop andrailroaded to death row because of hisoutspoken opposition to police brutality.

But the case of Jamal exposes the lietaught in' civics and social science classes

that the racist capitalist state is a neutralbody which metes out justice in a blind

and evenhanded manner. This was broughthome with a vengeance when the teachin was squelched in the wake of theshooting of an Oakland cop on January10, which touched off an hysterical mobilization of support to the racists in blue.In a town where cops routinely brutalizeghetto youth and have gunned downblack unionists with impunity, a pledge of

fealty to the police became as mandatoryas the pledge of allegiance in the schools.

The frenzied vendetta which led tothe cancellation ofthe Oakland teach-in isnot an isolated act. From the moment

the Pennsylvania Supreme Court turneddown Jamal's appeal last October, theracist state authorities and their mediamouthpieces have geared up their campaign to prepare public opinion for Jamal'slegal lynching. The gutter press regularlyruns editorials which could be liftedstraight from the Fraternal Order of Police (EO.P.) calling for Jamal's execution.On December 9, ABC-TV's 20/20 aired a25-minute segment which was simply a

rehash of the prosecution's lying brief.When it was announced that proceedsfrom a January 28 New Jersey Meadowlands concert featuring Rage Against- theMachine and the Beastie Boys will go

toward Jamal's legal defense, racist radioand TV "shock jock" Howard Sternlaunched a rabid campaign to silencepublicity for the concert. In a chilling

threat against Mumia's supporters, the

New York Post(19 January) foams: "Concert Benefits a Cop-Killing Vermin."

The Oakland furor was triggered by aNew Year's press release with a syllabusfor teachers on topics related to the deathpenalty put out by members of the teachers union, the Oakland Education Association (OEA). The proposal met with aracist ()Utcry from the beginning. Leaked

to the press by the school board before

Free Mumia Now!

WVPhoto

Spartacist/PDC contingent at November 1998 San Francisco protest followingPennsylvania Supreme Court ruling upholding frame-up of Jamal.

the OEA had completed a review, theteach-in proposal was sneeringly labeled"Ebonics II," evoking the racist derisionthat met the 1996 proposal by the schoolboard that "black English" be taught inthe Oakland school district. School boardpresident Noel Gallo railed against "turning students into political pawns," according to the Oakland Tribune (1 Janu

ary). Shannon Reeves, the anti-unionRepublican president of the Oaklandchapter of the NAACP, denounced theOEA for taking time away from basicstudies, suggesting that a teach-in on thestock market would be more appropriate!

The OEA rushed to assure criticsthat the subject would be taught withcomplete "neutrality," and acceded to theschool board's insistence that it be voluntary and that parents could take their kidsout of such classes. Satisfied that the subject would be taught in a manner thatcomported with the views of the cops andthe racist rulers that hire them, the schoolboard gave the nod for the teach-in to proceed. The killing of the Oakland cop,with the funeral set for the same day as

the teach-in, exploded the compromise.Following the shooting, the press

spoke ofthe "somber mood ... tinged withpride that Oakland residents provided tipsin the case." Setting the pace for the racist"law and order" hysteria, newly electedmayor Jerry Brown, seen by most liberalsand many blacks as the man who willbreathe life into the impoverished city,ranted, " If they don't work, carry guns


Chicago Cops Retool Sinister Red SquadAs the Chicago Police Department

pushes for official sanction to carryon

spying and sabotage of leftist, labor andblack groups, activists of the MaoistRevolutionary Communist Youth Brigade(RCYB) and Revolutionary CommunistParty (RCP) have been caught in thecops' cross hairs. RCYB supporters Bill"AK" Small and E. "Shawn" Wall faceup to a year in jail on bogus charges of

disorderly conduct, interfering with a

police officer, obstructing an officer andresisting arrest. The charges stem from aprotest by residents of the black CabriniGreen public housing complex and theirsupporters against plans to raze theirhomes. This is part of a federal program,cynically named "HOPE VI," to makeway for yuppies by flattening 100,000public housing units, including some onprime lake front property which havealready been destroyed.

As the arrests of Small and Wall makeclear, the Chicago bosses are determinednot to let anyone get in the way of their

devastating plans. On January 6, two oth-

12

ers were arrested while distributing theRCP paper Revolutionary Worker at the

Cabrini-Green complex. Drop all chargesagainst the RCPIRCYB supporters!

These arrests are part of a drive bythe Democratic Party administration of

Mayor Richard M. Daley Jr. to revive the

Residents of

Cabrini-Greenhousing projectare subjected to.

incessant copharassment.

Mayor Daley'scrusade against

"gang activity"seeks to

criminalizeminority youth,targets leftists.

notorious "Red Squad," known in the1960s and '70s for its infiltration and

murderous subversion of labor, black andleft organizations. Working hand in handwith J. Edgar Hoover's FBI CounterIntelligence Program (COINTELPRO)operation, the Red Squad set up the cop

murders of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on Chicago's West

Side 30 years ago. The Red Squad wasformally disbanded a result of a 1974lawsuit against police spying, thoughits subversion and harassment of dissident groups never stopped. A January 7statement announcing a press conferenceprotesting the arrests the day beforereported how one of the cops exclaimed,

" If Hoover and us had done our jobs ear

lier, we wouldn't have to be dealing with'these' people now."

The city is now seeking to modify a1981 consent decree which set restrictions on police spying operations, inorder to further strengthen the machineryof the state. As part of this, and particularly to criminalize minority youth, theDaley administration is trying to whip up'hysteria over "gang activity." The IllinoisState Police "gang" database, containing68,000 names, gives license to the Chicago cops to "shoot now, ask questionslater." Ominously, the nolice have been


22 JANUARY 1999

Documents

Workers Vanguard No 705 - 22 January 1999