Workers Vanguard No 716 - 09 July 1999

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 716 - 09 July 1999

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No.716

JULY 5-From the moment U.S.INATO troops beganrolling into Kosovo last month, the Serb and Gypsy(Roma) populations have been subjected to violentpogromist attacks aimed at driving them out of the province. In village after village, imperialist "peacekeepers"stood by as armed units of the Albanian nationalistKosovo Liberation Army (UCK) went house to housethreatening to kill Serbs if they did not get out, whilerevenge-seeking mobs looted and torched Serb andRoma shops and homes. Numerous Serbs, from elderlyvillagers to prominent academics in Pristina, have beenabducted and shot or beaten to death. In one week, some80,000 Serb and Roma residents were forced to fleetheir homes. Yet not once has this forced populationtransfer been described as "ethnic. cleansing" by theWestern capitalist media which acted'as the U.S.INATOm i n i s t r ~ of war propaganda in endlessly .etailing

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the plight' of the Kosovo Albanians under SiobodanMilosevic's Serbian regime.In denouncing the predatory imperialist "peace" dictated by the world's bloodiest mass murderers, wewarned last month: "It will place the Kosovars-Serbs,Gypsies and Albanians alike-under the direct thumb ofthe imperialists, exacerbating national hatreds in theregion" (WV No. 715, II June). This is now amply con- 'firmed in every respect. Three days ago, British troopsshot dead two Albanian revelers after one fired his riflein the air. While the UCK hopes to be a local gendarmerie under the NATO occupation, the imperialists havemade it clear that they will be calling the shots inKosovo. Western spokesmen have begun to take their distance from their wartime pawns, suddenly discovering,for example, that UCK leader Hashim Thaci has beencarrying out a "campaign of assassinations" against

9 July 1999

AFPAs NATO forces moved into Kosovo, tens ofthousands of Serbs were forced to flee as a resultof.pogromist attacks.political rivals (New York Times, 25 June). Washington isalso viscerally hostile to the UCK's demand for Kosovoindependence, fearing it could destabilize the region.Clinton Balkans envoy Christopher Hill declaims, "Wespent the 1990's worrying about a Greater Serbia. That' s. continued on page 12

Kurdish Leader Sentenced to Death in TurkeyFree Abdullah Ocalan!

Four months after his abduction andarrest in Kenya by Turkish securityforces, Abdullah (}calan, leader of theKurdistan Workers Party (PKK), was sentenced to death by a kangaroo courtin Turkey on June 29. The sentence wasa foregone conclusion. Held in strict isolation on a tiny island since his arrest,Ocalan was denied any real legal defense.

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His lawyers were repeatedly threatenedand physically attacked, including' inthe courtroom. As we did during thewave of international protests which followed Ocalan's arrest in February, contingents of the International CommunistLeague joined in protests against the verdict which have been held in variouscountries.

The arrest and sentencing of the PKKleader has fueled the forces of rightwing reaction in the Turkish policestate, underscoring how anti-Kurdishchauvinism is wielded as a weapon notonly against the long-suffering Kurdishmasses but against the whole of the working class in Turkey. Ocalan's arresthelped catapult the fascistic Nationalist

Action Party-whose paramilitary Grey'Wolves have murdered thousands of leftists, working-class militants and Kurdishnationalists-into the coalition government of "Democratic Left" prime minister Bulent Ecevit following electionsin April. Ocalan s' sentence met with anoutpouring of Turkish chauvinism andcontinued on page 9


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Indonesia: Bloody Assault on PRO DemonstratorsSYDNEY, July 3-0n July 1, police andmilitary forces launched a brutal attackon a hundreds-strong protest by thePeople's Democratic Party (PRD) outsidethe National Election Commission in theIndonesian capital of Jakarta. The PRDwas demanding that the ruling Golkarparty headed by B. J. Habibie be disqualified from the June 7 elections for voterigging and intimidation. When protesterstried to enter the building, police immediately opened fire. Protesters could notescape as hundreds of riot cops and military personnel fired indiscriminately,using trucks to block side streets. Manywere shot in the back. Of the estimated100 injured, 35 suffered gunshot wounds,some very serious. A young woman PRDleader, Dhyta Caturani, was pulled behindthe police lines, shot in the back andbeaten savagely. Two were taken to military hospitals, their fate unknown, while50 were reportedly arrested and remain incustody. Some 160 are missing. Today,the PRD office in Jogjakarta was smashedup by a group of armed thugs, leaving onemilitant in critical condition. These savageassaults on leftist political protesters mustbe condemned by the international working class.The June 7 elections, overseen bysome 500 "international monitors" from

various imperialist agencies, have beentrumpeted as some kind of democraticawakening. That this is a lie and a fraudis underscor.ed by the bloody attack onthe PRD and the fact that many PRDand trade-union leaders still rot in. theregime's prisons. As we warned lastyear when the despised Suharto wasreplaced by Habibie: "A 'reformed' /ndo'nesian capitalist regime will be just asrepressive and bloody as its predecessorand just as determined to force thecountry's toiling masses to pay for thecapitalist crisis" (WV No. 691,22 May1998). Free all PRD militants, trade-

Vanguard Party, Key toWorkers RevolutionReporting on the Fourth Congress of theCommunist International in 1922, Bolshevikleader Leon Trotsky stressed the key roleof the proletarian vanguard party demonstrated by the October Revolution of 1917.Despite numerous revolutionary opportunities-particularly in Germany in 1918-19

and 1923-the young Communist parties ofTROTSKY the West proved themselves too weak and' LENINinexperienced to lead the proletariat to statepower. With the failure of the October Revolution to extend to Europe, the subsequentbureaucratic degeneration of he Soviet workers state and the Communist Internationalushered in decades of Stalinist betrayals, culminating in capitalist counterrevolutionand a deep retrogression in proletarian consciousness internationally. This underscores all the more the need to forge Leninist vanguard parties to win the workingclass to the fight for new October Revolutions around the world.The working class must be ready for the overturn and capable of accomplishing it.The working class not only must be sufficiently powerful for it, but must be consciousof its power and must be able to apply this power. Today we can and must resolve intoits elements and render more precise this subjective factor. During the postwar years,we have observed in the political life of Euro that the working class is ready for theoverturn, ready in the sense of striving subjectively toward it, ready in terms of its will,moods, self-sacrifices, but still lacking the necessary organizational leadership. Consequently the mood of the class and its organizational consciousness need not always coincide. Our revolution, thanks to an exceptional combination of historical factors, afforded

our backward country the opportunity to effect the transfer of power into the hands ofthe working class, in a direct alliance with the peasant masses. The role of the party isall too clear to us' and, fortunately, it is (oday already clear to the West European Communist parties. Not to take the role of the PlY into account is to fall into pseudoMarxist objectivism which presupposes some sort of purely objective and automaticpreparation of the revolution, and thereby postpones the revolution to an indefinitefuture. Such automatism is alien to us. It is a Menshevik, a Social-Democratic worldoutlook. We know, we have learned in practice and we are teaching others to comprehend the enormous role of the subjective, the conscious factor that the revolutionary partyof the working class represents.

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-Leon Trotsky, "Report on the Fourth World Congress" (December 1922)

! ! ~ ! ! ! ! ' ! J ! l l . . ' ! ~ ! l ~ ! ! . ! EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Jacob ZornPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER; Mara CadizEDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor). Bruce Andre, Jon Brule, George Foster,Liz Gordon, Barry James, Walter Jennings, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour,Alison SpencerThe Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Co mmunist League (FourthInternationalist)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 SpartacistPublishing 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 a ddresschanges to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is July 6.

No. 716 9 July 1999

Jakarta, July 1:Riot cops attackPeople'sDemocratic Partydemonstration.

unionists and East Timorese independence fighters!The imperialists' talk of democracy inIndonesia is a cover for maintaining asystem of brutal exploitation enforcedthrough vicious military repression. Therecan be no genuine democracy undercapitalism in backward, dependent countries stfch as Indonesia, saddled by imperialist exploitation and grinding poverty.As Leon Trotsky, a leader with V.1. Leninof the 1917 workers revolution in Russia, explained in Marxism in Our Time(1939): "In its expanded manifestationbourgeois democracy became, and continues to remain, a form of governmentaccessible only to the most aristocraticand the most exploitive nations. Ancientdemocracy was based on slavery, imperialist democracy....,.-()n the spoliation ofcolonies."The toilers of Indonesia have alreadyexperienced the horrendous consequencesof looking toward self-proclaimed "democratic" and "progressive" bourgeoisforces. Suharto came to power in 1965through an anti-Communist massacre ofover 500,000 carried out by the militaryand reactionary Islamic gangs with thedirect involvement of the American, Australian and other imperialists. This wasthe bitter fruit of the Maoist IndonesianCommunist Party's Menshevik/Staliniststrategy of "two-stage revolution," whichrepudiated the struggle for workers rulewhile chaining the proletariat to thenational bourgeoisie-represented in thiscase by the nationalist Sukarno-in thename of a "democratic revolution."Today it is urgently necessary for theIndonesian working class to emerge asan independent revolutionary factor. Thisrequires the forging of an internationalistvanguard party committed to leading theproletariat to the seizure of state power.The proletariat must take its place at thehead of the unemployed poor, the ruralmasses, women, the brutally oppressedethnic and national minorities in a struggle for socialist revolution against allwings of the capitalist class. This is theonly way to satisfy the aspirations ofthe masses and break the stranglehold ofiniperialistexploitation and domination.

In spite of mass arrests and cop violence, recent months have seen a wave ofworker protests as the capitalist economic crisis continues to drive tens ofmillions into destitution. On June 17,500 workers from the Mayora Indah biscuit factory were arrested for protestingthe firing of 1,000 workers. On the outskirts of Jakarta, 600 garment workers onJune 21 occupied the Arista Latinindofactory demanding that nine co-workersfired for union activity be rehired. InEast Java, 2,000 cigarette workers protested to demand wage increases. Ominously, just days before the attack on thePRD, armed forces Commander in ChiefGeneral Wiranto warned there will be"no gatherings of the masses!"

With its militant reputation, the PRDhas grown in this volatile situation. Yetdespite the great courage of its activistsin the face of heavy state repression,the PRD's program of petty-bourgeoisnationalism is an obstacle to the neededstruggle to mobilize the proletariat in

its own class interests. During the elections, the PRD sought to build a "unitedfront" against Golkar through pressuringMegawati Sukarnoputri's bourgeois Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle andthe parties of Islamic reaction-AmienRais' National Mandate Party and Abdurrahman Wahid's National AwakeningParty-to fight for "democracy." Far fromopposing the capitalists and their state,the PRD accepted election funding of 150million rupiah ($21,000) from the verygovernment whose cops and militarywere to bloody their militants.Consistent with its illusions in the"democratic" credentials of a wing of theIndonesian bourgeoisie, the PRD alsopushes illusions in the good offices of theimperialists, calling for a "UN-sponsoredreferendum" on East Timor. This is adirect appeal for imperialist intervention.Indeed, on July 2 in Darwin the Australianimperialists paraded their largest displayof armoured military power since theVietnam War, a demonstration of theirreadiness to mount a large-scale militaryoperation to "keep peace" not only inEast Timor but in Indonesia, too. Revolutionary Marxists say: UN, all imperialists: Hands off! Independence now forEast Timor!In response to the bloody repressionof PRD militants, a class-struggle laborleadershi{> in imperialist countries such asthe U.S., Australia, Japan and Germanywould organize trade-union boycotts ofarms shipments to the blood-drenchedIndonesian military and demand freedomfor the many leftist and trade-union activists now languishing in jail. But thatrequires a struggle against the unionmisleaders and the likes of the Australian Labor Party who embrace the aimsof their imperialist masters. The proimperialist Australian union bureaucratsare demanding a military force of 5,000Australian troops to "protect" the EastTirriorese. The American AFL-CIO topsbleat about "multinational" low-wagesweatshops in Indonesia, but they do soonly in order to push protectionist chauvinism and otherwise further the interestsof U.S. imperialism. The U.S. laborbureaucracy is notorious for supportinganti-labor regimes from Southeast Asiato Latin America in the name of anticommunism.Emancipation from the yoke of imperialism and the achievement of nationaland social justice for all the peoples inwhat is today Indonesia requires the proletarian seizure of power. But to consolidate proletarian rule in the face of hostileimperialism and lay the foundation forsocialist economic development in backward Indonesia means a struggle forsocialist revolution internationally, inimperialist U.S., Japan and Australia,and throughout the Asian region. That isthe perspective of the International Communist League. For workers revolutionin Indonesia!.

CHICAGOThursdays, 7 p.m.July 15: Imperialism and WarJuly 22: The Russian RevolutionJuly 29: Stalinism-Gravedigger 01RevolutionsAugust 5: Black Oppression andRevolutionary Integration sm328 S. Jefferson St., Suite 904Information and readings: (312) 454-4930or [email protected]

NEW YORKAlternate Saturdays, 3 p.m.'July 10: The Principles of Marxismand the StateJuly 24: Revolution vs. Reform: TheRussian Revolution-How theWorking Class Took Power299 Broadway, Room 31'6Information and readings: (212) 267-1025

WORKERS VANGI,JARD


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"Workers Rearguard"?We reprint the following letter as wereceived it via the Internet.June 14, 1999Dear Editor:Your reply (28 May 1999) to my letter

re: ILWU's April 24 West Coast shutdown for Mumia (as the ILWU newspaper, The Dispatcher called it) is rivetedwith distortions and inaccuracies. I f intentional, this retlects a deeply-imbeddedpolitical cynicism. I f unintentional, itindicates just how alienated you are fromlongshore workers. I' ll address only a fewof the more egregious distortions.

longshore workers showed solidaritywith locked out stevedores in Australiawhen, in the face of maritime employersrailing against "illegal dock actions,"longshore workers honored a picket lineof labor activists for two weeks againstthe ship Columbus Canada, refusing towork its scab Aussie cargo.Another "unofficial and illegal" solidarity action which you disparage, wasthe 1997 picket of the Neptune Jade inOakland in support of the Liverpooldockers, considered by them to be one ofthe highlights of their militant 28 months'

Labor Organizatigns CalliU for a New Tri.lfor MlIgjia Abu-jamalon tb.:ocusion or the MilliOlt$ for MUllliamarches, April 14, 1999

Ilad"''' ' ' 'al labor ~ p A A r s S ! ! ! ! D t l (.,at1;.J lIf.)

Labor faker Jack Heyman spoke from platform of April 24 "Millions forMumia" rally, endorsed call for "new trial" aimed at appealing to DemocraticParty.The Spartacist League, to its credit,was an early defender of Mumia Abu

Jamal having covered.his case for some12 years in the pages of Workers Van-guard. You claim to "have fought for aclass-struggle defense strategy centeredon mobilizing the social power of theintegrated labor movement, requiring itspolitical independence from the capitalist parties." What class-struggle actionshave SL supporters in transit unions inChicago and New York called for? In thenearly four pages of the WV reply you .never respond to this critical point of myletter. Why? Because SL trade unionsupporters don't implement the politicalposition published in WV? That's foryour readership. Yet, when the ILWUshuts down all West Coast ports indefense of Mumia, WV denies that itwas a work stoppage! SL hypocrisy andhot air knows no limits! .What is the source of the SL slandersagainst the ILWU action? WV admits itcame from "a spokesman for the bosses'Pacific Maritime Association (PMA)."PMA boss Joseph Miniace in a letterto the editor of the SF Examiner onApril 23, the day before the shutdownfalsely claimed the ILWU just shiftedits contractually-provided union meetingdate, agreed to by PMA companies. Trying to minimize the impact, Miniace preposterously predicted "minimal" disruptions knowing all ports would be shutdown for 10 hours! He then sneeringlyreferred to ILWU's action in defense of"Mumia Abu-Jamal, .....convicted of killing a police officer (and is on death rowin Pennsylvania)." That a maritime bosswould seek to distort and minimize animportant labor action for Mumia isunderstandable, but why would an ostensibly Marxist organization echo himuncritically? The fact is that PMA in LosAngeles, the largest West Coast port withhalf the cargo, objected vehemently tolongshoremen and clerks stopping workon April 24 because they'd already hadtheir monthly stop-work meetings onApril 1. Despite PMA objections, thelongshore union prevailed and all portson the West Coast were shut down todemand: 1) Stop the Execution and 2)Free Mumia! Last year, Los Angeles9 JULY 1999

struggle. Although PMA's arbitrator onthe second day ordered longshore workers to cross the picket line of labor activists, they refused, initiating an unprecedented solidarity action that followed theNeptune Jade to ports in three countries.The ILWU shutdown the Coast withstop-work meetings in solidarity with theLiverpool dockers' struggle two timesin 1997. These actions were roundlyapplauded by nearly all in the workersmovement internationally, including theSL. In an article -cheering the ILWUeight-hour work stoppage, WV #660 24January 1997, "West Coast Ports ShutDown in Solidarity With LiverpoolDockers" you stated "ILWU members onthe day shift attended 'stop-work' meetings rather than loading and unloadingsome 50 ships at'key ports ...."Yet, when on April 24, we took thesame action for Mumia, a political prisoner facing state execution, WV refusesto.call it a work stoppage. Do you thinklongshore workers have short memories?It is no wonder that longshore unionactivists refer to your newspaper as"Workers Rearguard"!Before our April 24 union meeting,Local 10 stewards, including myself, hadto restrain members-angry about WV'sdistorted coverage of our union's action-from chasing off your salespeople.Furthermore, you continue to blackout any coverage of the teachers' workstoppage in the state of Rio de Janeiro,Brazil, surely an important development in the defense of Mumia internationally. Why? Because this laudatoryaction was initiated by the Liga QuartaInternacion.alista do Brasil (LQB), ypurpolitical opponents.~ h e SL did not march to free Mumia inthe April 24 mobilization. You could havecarried your own banners criticizing theDemocratic Party and the demand for anew trial. Others did. Abstaining fromclass' struggle is surely a sign of politicaldegeneration. I remember a SpartacistLeague that used to fight against beingexcluded from anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, even those with capitalist partypoliticians.For labor action to free Mumia!Jack Heyman

LetterLabor Opportunist, SquirmsWVReplies:Jack Heyman totally dodges the central political point we made in replyingto his earlier letter in "Labor Opportunism, the Democratic Party and theDefense of Mumia Abu-Jamal" (WV No.714,28 May): that he worked to providea labor f a ~ a d e for pro-Democratic Partyclass-collaborationist politics, centeredon appealing to the capitalist state for a"new trial" for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Themotion introduced by Heyman in theILWU called for the union to support theApril 24 "Millions for Mumia" mobilization for a new trial, while tacking on theslogan "Free Mumia" as a fig leaf aimedat deceiving the workers about the realpurpose of this rally.Heyman can 't deny that both the ILWUleadership and he personally endorsed thecall for a new trial, sowing illusions incapitalist "justice." He can't deny thatwhen he spoke :gom the platform on April24 he uttered not one word of criticism ofthis call-the central demand of therally-nor of the Democratic Party politicians with whom he shared the platform. He can't deny that at a "Millionsfor Mumia" press conference the weekbefore he hailed San Francisco LaborCouncil head Walter Johnson-a pillar ofthe Democratic Party in the city and astaunch supporter of Democratic mayorWillie Brown's re-election bid-as "oursecret weapon." He can't deny any ofthese facts documented in our reply. So,instead, he continues his attempt atdeception of the WV readership and theILWU Local 10 membership by throwingout a bunch of straw-man arguments andblowing a lot of smoke.Like the labor bureaucrat he is, Heyman resorts to slimy insinuations about aPMA "source" to detlect our revolutionary criticism. The March issue of the Dispatcher itself reported that the stop-workmeetings were called "to discuss the status of the upcoming negotiations, and toparticipate in the national actions forAbu-Jamal," noting that "in effect noships will be worked from 8:00 a.m. to6:00 .p.m." (all emphases added). Sobecause the stop-work union ~ e e t i n g wasshifted to Saturday, the day shift waskilled. But Heyman's attempt to createthe illusion that it was a politichlstrike todemand Mumia's freedom is just onemore deception. Not only was the ILWUaction explicitly tied to the demonstrationcalling for a "new trial"-a sloganintended to,appeal to liberal Democratsbut there was little attempt to politicallymobilize the membership behind Jamal'scause at all.Heyman's claim to the contrary, WVnever denied that the ILWU action on

April 24 was a work stoppage. But, aswe wrote:"The tremendous potential impact of thelongshore work stoppage was indeedminimized in every way. It was consciously organized to avoid violating 'thecontract, under which the ILWU bureaucrats have for many years agreed to a nostrike clause for the life of the contract.. .."More importantly, there was no realattempt either before or at the unionmeetings that day to politically mobilizethe membership in Jamal's behalf."

As they emerged from the April 24Local 10 stop-work meeting, several ofthe lower seniority "B-men"-who haveno voice or vote in union meetings andmet separately from the "A-men"-toldWV salesmen that nothing had been saidat the meeting about Jamal's case. Wedon't know about Heyman having to"restrain members angry about WV'sdistorted coverage," but with 150 or solongshoremen there at the peak of theApril 24 stop-work meeting we sold 47copies of our issue with the article"Mobilize the Power of Labor! FreeMumia Now!" (WV No. 711, 16 April),where we in fact motivated the need forclass-struggle defense of Jamal.That Heyman doesn't even refer to thedivision of the union between "A-men"and "B-men" shows just how distant he isfrom a class-struggle perspective. Wayback before he made his peace with capitalism, when he was still animated by theTrotskyist program, Heyman opposed theB-list category, which ghettoizes a largesection of the ILWU membership, andfought for full union rights for all longshoremen. But, as we wrote in our exchange, "now his loyalties lie elsewhere."That seems to be clear to the Local 10ranks as well. Here's what one of ourcomrades reported after selling the WVwith our exchange with Heyman toLocal 10 members in May:"Jack Heyman doesn't have manyfriends in Local 10. We saw less than100 longshoremen, and engaged onlywith those interested in talking to WVsalesmen, maybe 40, overwhelminglyblack. When we showed them theexchange with Jack Heyman, with oneexception everybody said 'I don't likeJack Heyman: This was not a case oftelling us what we wanted to hear; wegot into his politics after. Mostly peoplethink he's a phoney and not to be trusted.One man said 'I've known Jack Heymanfor many years and I wouldn't let thatmonkey near my wallet' ."Unable to answer our political criticisms-because he has no defenseHeyman tries to shift the ground withhis "recovered memory" of SpartacistLeague history during the Vietnam antiwar movement. We'll refresh Heyman'smemory. In 1965, we walked out of the- continued on page 13

PAM Releue: SPARTACJSTSPARTACIST BREAL" WITHNEW YORK PARADE COMMITl'BB November-December 1965i

At the third meetinr of the Committee for FifthAvenue Vietnam Peace Parade, held 01\ September 29,1966, Albert Neioon speaking for S.,artaciat announcedSparlaci.t'. withdrawal from the Committee on thebull th.t it W88 politicnlly dominated by rlrht-willlpaciftllta and lilleraia and had _tabU.heeI policy ofexclu.ion of all but the " " " ,t mode .. . viewpoints Inthe IlChedulecJ aetivitlea of October 16.

The heritage Heyman distorts:SL fought for revolutionary strategyin Vietnam antiwar movement,opposed popular-frontist coantionswith bourgeois liberals.3


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USWA Tops Choke Newport News StrikeJULY 6-While news of the threemonth-old strike by United Steelworkers(USWA) Local 8888 against NewportNews Shipbuilding in the Virginia Tidewater area has been deep-sixed by thecapitalist media and played down bythe USWA International and AFL-CIObureaucracy, this is the biggest laborbattle in the U.S. today. Even as the U.S.was waging an imperialist war againstSerbia, Newport News workers walkedout against a shipyard which producesand repairs nuclear aircraft carriers andsubmarines. The outcome of this strike byan 8,00D-strong integrated union local iscrucial to the future of organized labor,especially in the racist "open shop"South.

Local 8888 in Peril

Management is trying to sow divisionswithin the union by proposing separatepay scales for different job categories,a move aimed at undermining the strongindustrial union structure ih the yard. Butwhile most strikers are holding firm, theUSWA bureaucrats refuse to organize themass picket lines needed to shut the yarddown tight ~ n d win the strike. Insteadthey appeal to the enemies of labor-thecapitalist politicians and, most recently,even the shipyard owners. On June 25, athousand workers were bused to a stockholders meeting in Richmond as part ofa "corporate campaign" strategy. Suchridiculous appeals to the capitalists whocare only about profits and diyidends area diversion from class struggle.

in peril: "Shortly after the 4th of July ourmembership is just going to drop. Theonly ones who'll be out here are the oneswho have been on strike before. Westruck to get the union then."Local 8888 was forged as an integrated industrial union through a bitterthree-month strike in 1979 that defiedthe state's anti-union laws and an armyof scabherding cops. Now the USWAbureaucracy is endangering that important victory and subsequent gains made

made in past contracts. Also posed here isa battle against Virginia's "right-to-work"laws and against racist discriminationby the Newport News bosses. This strikeshould be a cause throughout the Tidewater area and for the entire U.S. workingclass. But the union misleaders-fromthe USWA International bureaucrats inPittsburgh down to the local officershave contained this labor action, limitingdemands to economic issues and tailoring strike strategy strictly in accordance

Strikers are angry that the bureaucracy's mishandling of the strike has ledto hundreds of workers scabbing. A 23-year crane operator reported: "I made itknown to people higher up in the unionthat there are three or four thousandpeople out there at New Market [a mallwhere workers collect strike assistance]and there aren't any more than four orsix people [picketing] at each gate." Withreports afoot that federal mediators areleaning on the union leadership to startup negotiations with the company again,this worker is concerned that the strike is

Bitter strike in 1979 against Newport News Shipbuilding forged Local 8888as integrated industrial union.in recruiting Newport News workersincluding many whites-to the union.This strike is not only for higherwages, a livable pension and adequatebenefits to make up for union concessions

with laws which were enacted to defeatstrikes and prevent unions. As one riggerwith 24 years in the yard told WV,"Because of these 'right-to-work' laws,what we need is a union where if you're

North Carolina Textile Mill OrganizedBig Win for Unions in "Open Shop" South

No Illusions in the NLRB!In an area where the unions have failedto make headway for decades despitemany bloody struggles, workers at Fieldcrest Cannon in Kannapolis, North Carolina voted in late June for the 5,200 workers at their six-plant textile complex-thelargest in the country-to be organized bythe Union of Needletrades, Industrial andTextile Employees (UNITE). This is asignificant victory for labor throughoutthe country. The fight to unionize Cannonbegan 93 years ago. Kannapolis" locatednear Charlotte, exemplifies the racist"open shop" South. Built by Cannon Millsas a company town, Kannapolis still has ,tiny wooden houses 'originally constructed for its workers which stand adjacent tothe huge plant rising out of former cottonfields. And Fieldcrest still runs it like aplantation, with workers getting $100 amonth pension after 30 years' service.

. to a long, drawn-out organizing effortand will now give the company time tochip away at the workers' hard-won gain.Workers at Fieldcrest Cannon must bevigilant that the UNITE tops do notsnatch defeat from the jaws of victory.What distinguished this latest votefrom four previous union representation

SpartacistLeague bannerat March 1977protest outsideJ.P. Stevensheadquartersin NYC. Formilitant, massorganizing drivethroughoutthe South!

But this victory remains fragile andreversible. Workers face a major battle towin a contract from th.e company, whichhas already challenged the union recognition vote with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This is the samegovernment agency that the UNITE leadership has relied .on in organizing theKannapolis complex. Looking to theNLRB-whose very purpose is to bindthe unions to the capitalist state-has led4

elections was the role played by thegrowing number of Hispanic immigrantworkers. In the 1970s, coming off the turbulent struggles of the civil rights movement, the company started hiring blacksin what had formerly been a lily-whiteplant. When the black workers demonstrated a militant, pro-union stance, thecompany started hiring immigrants-whomanagement believed would be moredocile because of their vulnerable legalstatus. This too backfired, as the His-

not in the union you don't work!"Many Newport News strikers recognize that "the government is in cahootswith the company," as Navy personnel gothrough the gates to work with scabswhile local and state police have beendeployed against the picket lines. ~ u t it isnecessary for strikers to understand thatthe patriotic sloganeering pushed by theunion tops-like "Our ships defend thecountry"-is no less deadly to labor'scause. Waving the flag lines workers upbehind the bosses' government and leavesthe union vulnerable to strikebreaking inthe name of "national defense." The U.S.military defends capitalist profits andpower, enforcing brutal exploitation ofworking people in the "Third World" andprotecting the investments and interestsof the American bourgeoisie against itsGerman, Japanese and other rivals.Glorifying the traitorous policies ofthe pro-capitalist union officials are fakesocialists like the Communist Party,whose People's Weekly World (26 Junepromoted the appeal to stockholderswhile exhorting workers to "caIl yourcongressional representative and senators." The Socialist Workers Party cheerswhatever the union bureaucrats are doingand has excused scabbing by "non-unioncontract workers, many of whom faceimmediate termination if they do not gointo work" (Militant, 26 April).In contrast, in Workers Vanguard theSpartacist League has advanced a classstruggle strategy and warned against thesellout policies of the labor bureaucrats,who coIlaborate with the class enemybecause they uphold the capitalist profitsystem. We fight for the complete independence of the unions from the capitalist state and the capitalist political parties, the Democrats.and Republicans. Wefight to forge a workers party which willlink the struggle to defend union rightsand workers' livelihoods to the fight forsocialist revolution to smash the grinding,murderous capitalist system, the basis ofracial and women's oppression.

panic workers turned out to be no lesspro-union.The struggle for union recognition atKannapolis underlines the nt!ed for all oflabor to combat anti-immigrant racismand to demand fuIl citizenship rights foranyone who has come to this country. Instead, the chauvinist AFL-CIObureaucracy has appealed to the racistcapitalist government to attack immigrant workers, which helps fuel attackson blacks and all minorities. The seizureof thousands of foreign-born workers inthe South by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the 1995 "OperationSouth PAW" ("Protect American Workers") came after the union tops in AtlantacaIled for raids against undocumentedworkers there.Speaking of a drive by the United AutoWorkers to organize a Mercedes plantin Alabama. a Detroit labor academic, recently commented: "In a right-to-workstate, you have to have a lot of courage tobe a union supporter." This was dramatically driven home by a KKK-style crossburning outside an Alabama processingplant on the eve of a union recognitionvote in June 1995.With their legalistic, pro-DemocraticParty policies, the AFL-CIO misleadersare incapable of undertaking the kind ofmilitant, mass organizing drive needed tounionize workers throughout the South,where the racist cops and KKK lynchers have been instrumental in keepingunions' out. It is necessary to unleash thesocial power of the working class, beginning with existing beachheads of integrated union power in the South-frommainly black longshoremen in tbe Southeastern and Gulf ports to shipyard workers and Teamsters truckers.

WORKERS VANGUARD

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Steel Workers: Reject ProtectionistPact with Steel Bosses!For the past year, the United Steelworkers (USWA) leadership has runpoint for the steel corporations in a chauvinist "Stand Up for Steel" campaignagainst foreign competition. Negotiations on the union contract expiring July31, which covers 60,000 workers at fivemajor steel producers, were delayed asthe companies and the USWA topswaited to see if the Clinton White Houseand the Congress would act to curtailsteel imports. But after imposing a series

of punitive tariffs earlier this year, onJune 21 Clinton got the Senate to kill ameasure for protectionist quotas passedby the House.Now, after mobilizing the union'sresources behind a class-collaborationistcampaign to fatten the profits of American steel bosses, the USWA misleadersare trying to sell steel workers anotherbill of goods: a rotten contract deal withUSX (formerly United States Steel) andBethlehem which was announced morethan a month before the old six-year contract expires and is aimed at setting thepattern for workers at the other thcee bigsteel companies. The proposed offer,which is to be voted on by mail ballotlater this month, includes a measly $2 anhour raise over five years and weakensthe existing no-layoff clause.

cent of all steel workers. Today fewerthan half of the country's 170,000 steelworkers are unionized. Since 1987, theUSWA has lost 100,000 jobs. In the lastfive years, over 15 million tons of s t e e l ~ making capacity has come on line, all ofit in non-union mini-mills. Even in unionized mills, the companies are literallyextracting profits out of steel workers'blood: 52 USWA members have beenkilled on the job since January 1996.That's more than one industrial murder.per month!But the USWA still has enormouspotential power. Steel is at the core of

of anti-union laws.A class-struggle fight to defend jobsand organize the unorganized is counterposed to the flag-waving class collaboration and legalism of the union bureaucracy. An April 27 statement of theUSWA's Basic Steel Industry Conferencecomplains, "All of the large integratedsteel companies have to one degree oranother used the extended period of laborpeace associated with the most recentcontracts to build or buy into non-unionoperations." But it is the union misleadersthemselves who enforced that extendedperiod of "labor peace." Refusing to take

anti-union terror-are deadly dangerous.A serious campaign to organize plants inthe South means mobilizing union powernot only to win economic demands butto actively defend black rights and stopthe KKK nightriders who are murderousenemies of integrated labor struggle.The AFL-CIO bureaucracy's chauvinist protectionism not only poisons theneeded international solidarity betweenworkers in the U.S. and their class brothers and sisters abroad but also fuelsracism against black and immigrantworkers here. The USWA tops refuse towield the union's power to fight rampantdiscrimination against young and minority workers. Despite company pledges toend discrimination in skilled jobs following a court-ordered "consent decree" inthe 1970s, those who work the cokeovens and other dangerous and backbreaking unskilled jobs at USX in Garyremain heavily black and Hispanic.These workers-who are cut off frommost of the extra "incentive" pay thatother workers get for tonnage produced--continue to be all but frozen outof skilled trades training, while the company hires skilled workers off the streetas helpers at less than top pay. Againstsuch racist discrimination, the USWAmust demand union-run recruitment andtraining programs especially reachingout to minority workers.Reflecting pressure from union members, the USWA district director for theChicago area had vowed before the settlement to recommend a strike to keepthe no-layoff clause. USWA members atanother steel giant, LTV, are bristlingover its 50 percent stake in the non-unionTrico mill in Decatur, Alabama, and

USWA tops run point for steel bosses in chauvinist "Stand Upcampaign, as in recent West Virginia rally.The "Stand Up for Steel" campaign isa quintessential expression of the liepreached by the entire AFL-CIO bureaucracy that there is a "partnership" betweenlabor and capital. This class collaborationfinds political expression in the laborbureaucracy's support to the capitalistDemocratic Party. The fundamental starting point for mobilizing the integratedlabor movement in defense of its ownclass interests and those of blacks, immigrants and other oppressed minoritiesis the understanding that this societyis divided between' two classes whoseinterests are irreconcilably counterposed:workers who are forced to sell theirlabor power in order to survive and theproperty-owning capitalist class to whomtheir labor power is sold.

. Ispat Inland's new owner is notorious asa corporate "cost cutter." A USX workerin Gary, Indiana told WV that most workers in his unit. intend to vote against thenew offer.Steel workers should rip up the proposed sellout! But to fight the attacks ofthe steel barons through a solid nationwide strike, the USWA has to be inde-pendent from the corporations, notworking in collusion with them. As oneeconomic analyst remarked of thecompany-union protectionist campaign,"The last thing you wanted was a strike ata time you are trying to get quotas-onimports" (Wall Street Journal, 28 June).The labor bureaucr!lcy's protectionist appeals promote the lie that workersin the U.S. share common interestswith their "own" exploiters against theAmerican capitalists' foreign rivals-andagainst workers in other countries. Yetwhile railing about jobs going overseas,the USWA officialdom has allowed a proliferation of non-union mills in the U.S.The USWA once represented over 90 per-

the country's industrial economy-frommilitary hardware to construction andcars. And the capitalists are doubly fearful of a steel strike right now, as the September 1 expiration of the United AutoWorkers cont ract poses the possibility ofa shutdown in that strategic industry.Straining to avoid a strike, the USWAleadership offered to engage in earlynegotiations with any company thataccepted two conditions: a common expiration date for all contracts and a newcontractual clause holding the major steeloutfits to "neutrality" in organizing drivesat non-union plants partly owned bythem. The way to get a common expiration date is by mobilizing all USWAsteel workers to walk out together on thepicket lines. That's also what's needed toorganize non-union shops: such boldaction asserting the power of the unionwould demonstrate to the tens of thousands of unorganized steel workers whatthe union can do to fight for their interests. But that would mean stopping scabsthrough mass, militant pickets and defying the cops and the government's battery

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on the major steel corporations, theUSWA tops have all the more readilyabandoned a series of local strikes, turning them into desperate, drawn-out andisolated battles-from the ten-monthWheeling-Pitt walkout in 1996-97 to thestrike against Oregon Steel in Pueblo,Colorado, which has d r a g ~ e d on since1997.The very notion of company "neutrality" is belied by the h istory \of; hard,sometimes bloody class battles it took tobuild the unions. The 1937 Little Steelstrike against Bethlehem and other companies, which laid the basis for theUSWA, is a case in point: 18 strikerswere killed, scores wounded and hundreds jailed as company thUgs, policeand the National Guard were mobilizedto crush the Steel Workers OrganizingCommittee. Many if not most of the newsteel jobs are in the "open shop" South,where pervasive racist terror and "rightto-work" laws have kept wages downand unions out. Here in particular, illusions in the "neutrality" of the capitaliststate-whose cops and courts enforce

There must be a fight inside the unionsto oust the pro-capitalist misleaders andreplace them with a new, class-struggleleadership, one committed to the classindependence of the proletariat from thecapitalists, their government and theirpolitical parties. To put an end to unemployment and racism requires seizingindustry from the capitalist class andthe creation of a planned, socialist economy. Those who labor must rule! Fora workers party to fight for a workersgovernment!

Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist Leagueo $10/22 issues of Workers Vanguard 0 New 0 Renewal(includes English-language Spartacist and Black History and the Class Struggle)international rates: $25/22 issues-Ai rmail $10/22 issueS--:-Seamaiio $2/6 int;oductory issues of Workers Vanguard (includes English-language Spartacist)o $2/4 issues of Espartaco (en espana ) (includes Spanish-language Spartacist),Name __________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Address ________ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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Capitalist Russia in the"New World Order"Last month's stand-off at the Pristinaairport in Kosovo between 200 Russianparatroopers and a British contingent ofthe NATO occupation forces provided asnapshot of current relations betweenBoris Yeltsin's 'capitalist Russia and theWestern imperialist powers, chiefly theU.S. One British soldier said, "They had

PART ONEbeen telling us for weeks about the Serbsand Albanians, but nobody explained wehad to fight Russia."In the end, the confrontation was defused through a deal to incorporateRussian troops into the U.S.INATO-IedKosovo occupation force. To drive homewho's in charge, the U.S. would onlyallow further Russian troops into Kosovoafter an overall NATO command structure was fully worked out. The Kosovoarrangement is similar to the one whichhas been in place in Bosnia since 1995.Indeed, the image of Russian troopsjointly policing the region alongside andeffectively under the corrnnand of NATOforces-like that of Yeltsin envoy ViktorChernomyrdin jetting between Belgradeand Western capitals in an attempt topush through NATO's "peace" diktatprovide yet other, very different, snapshots of Russia's current relations withthe imperialist powers.For years, Yeltsin's Russia has beenplaying a cynical double game in the Balkans. On the one hand, the Russians havepostured as the "great power" protectorsof their "little Serb brothers," occasionally denouncing American bellicosityand "superpower" arrogance. At the sametime, the Yeltsin regime has acted asa "soft cop" v i s - a ~ v i s the Serbs on behalfof the Americans and Germans. As in Bosnia four years ago, Moscow was instrumental in brokering a deal between theNATO powers and Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic over Kosovo. Only a fewdays before publishing alarmed reports onthe Russian military move in Pristina, theNew York Times (9 June) had laudedMoscow's diplomatic efforts, headlining"Moscow Envoy's Peace Efforts, Praisedin West, Are Panned at H o m ~ . " YeltsinlChernomyrdin's efforts on behalf of the U.S. and NATO were indeedwidely reviled in Russia. Nor is Russianhostility to the U.S. limited to traditionalanti-Western nationalists like the Communist Party of the Russian Federationand its fascistic bloc partners in the"'red'-brown coalition." In the past, theRussian populace was generally indifferent to the wars precipitated by the counterrevolutionary breakup of Yugoslaviaand Moscow's maneuvering in the Balkans. But the terror bombhlg of Serbiaproduced a sea change in the politicalclimate in Russia, generating an intenseand widespread fear of and hostility towardAmerica. The New York Times (12 April)quoted an unemployed truck driver inMoscow: "Now Yugoslavia, next us; that'swhat I think." Such views were in no wayunusual. A supporter of the InternationalCommunist League who was in Moscowduring the first week of the war reported:

"There is a great deal of just rage in Russia at NATO bombing. If the 17 August1998 financial crisis put the final nail inthe illusions of many Russians in marketcapitalism, the Balkan War has convinced them that the u.s. is a truly eviland rapacious power. The problem is thatthe answer being offered is not Leninand Trotsky's communism but pan-Slavic militarism." -When Yeltsin, having taken over theKremlin with U.S. baclcing, announced6

the dissolution of the Soviet Union inDecember 1991, the American rulingclass triumphantly proclaimed victoryin the Cold War and the "death of communism." Washington politicians of both theRepublican and Democratic parties evenpromised a "peace dividend": a big reduction in military spending to free upmoney for other govemment programs andto allow for tax cuts. In a joint statementwith U.S. president George Bush in February 1992, Yeltsin declared: "Russia and theUnited States do not regard each other aspotential adversaries. From now on, therelationship will be characterized by friendship and partnership founded on mutual

trust and respect and a common commitment to democracy and economic freedom."Seven years later, the same Yeltsinthundered: " I told NATO, the Americans,the Germans, don't push us toward military action. Otherwise, there will be aEuropean war for sure, and possibly aworld war." At the height of the air waragainst Serbia-particularly after Washington pushed through a call for a navalblockade of oil shipments, including fromRussia-the possibility of a military confrontation between Russia and NATO wasbeing talked about not only by politiciansand generals in Moscow and Western capitals but also among the public at large.Tensions between the U.S. llnd Russiahad been ratcheted up to a point thatthe cover of the London Economist (17April), house organ of Anglo-Americanfinanciers, bluntly poses the question: "ANew Cold War?" Why is this happening?From Cold War toCounterrevolution

The origins of the Cold War lay in theOctober Revolution of 1917. In leadingthe working class of Russia to the seizureof state power and the consolidation of itsown class rule through workers councils(soviets), supported by soviets of poor

peasants and soldiers, the Bolshevik Partyof V. I. Lenin and L.D. Trotsky tookthe Marxist doctrine of proletarian revolution out of the realm of theory and gaveit reality, creating the dictatorship of theproletariat-a society where those wholabored ruled. From the outset, the capitalists around the world, aided by theirreformist lieutenants within the labormovement, sought to strangle the Sovietworkers state, beginning with the bloody1918-21 Civil War pitting the Red Armyagainst imperialist intervention forcesand Russian counterrevolutionaries.The devastation of the most consciouslayer of the proletariat in the Civil War,

Crowley/NY Times

Russian troopsconfront NATO forcesoutside Pristina inJune, after Yeltsinregime helped imposeNATO diktaton Serbia.Russian envoy'ViktorChernomyrdin (far left)with German defenseminister RudolfScharping.

the pressure of imperialist encirclementon the isolated and economically backward workers state and the failure ofthe young Communist parties of theWest to seize on manifold revolutionaryopportunities-particularly in Germanyin 1918-19 and 1923-set the stage for apolitical counterrevolution in 1924, asa conservative, nationalist bureaucraticcaste headed by Stalin usurped politicalpower. The Stalinist bureaucracy's falsedogma of building "socialism in onecountry" meant in practice an accommodation to imperialism and a betrayal ofthe proletarian, revolutionary, internationalist program of Bolshevism. Thatprogram was carried forward by theInternational Left Opposition, and later theFourth International, organized by Trotsky.Nonetheless, the social foundationsof the workers state--embodied in theplanned, collectivized economy and themonopoly on foreign trade-remainedintact, mandating the need for unconditional military defense of the Sovietworkers state, despite its bureaucraticdegeneration, against imperialist attc:tckand internal counterrevolution. This iswhat the ICL fought for right throughto the final undoing of the October Revolution in 1991-92. In contrast, every

pseudo-revolutionary tendency on theface of the planet capitulated to the imperialist anti-Soviet war drive of the 1980s.Trotsky warned in his 1936 book, TheRevolution Betrayed, that the Stalinistbureaucracy would ultimately devourthe workers state if it was not oustedthrough a proletarian political revolution. From East Germany to the USSR,the ICL sought to mobilize the proletariat against capitalist restoration, stressing the need for political revolution tooust the treacherous nationalist Stalinistbureaucracies. Having systematically destroyed the revolutionary-internationalistconsciousnessof he Soviet proletariat, theStalinist bureaucracies did finally devourthe workers states. 'In 1991-92, the American capitalistclass and Russia's would-be capitalists,largely drawn from the decomposingKremlin bureaucracy and the intelligentsia, shared a common interest: thedestruction of the Soviet Union and itscollectivized economy. However, theirsubsequent goals and expectations werefundamentally different. Russia's newrulers expected to be showered withmoney by their new "partners" in WallStreet and Frankfurt. They also expectedWashington's support in establishingRussia as a regional imperialist powerexercising political-military hegemony inthe territory of the former USSR. In 1993,Yeltsin demanded: "The time has comefor the relevant international organisa

tions, including the UN, to grant Russiaspecial powers as a guarantor of peaceand stability in the former Soviet Union"(quoted in Bruce Clark, An Empire's NewClothes: The End of Russia's LiberalDream [1996]). While the Clinton administnltion supported Yeltsin's war of suppression against Chechen separatists inthe Caucasus, by and large Americanimperialism not only rejected Russianimperialist ambitions in the region buthas actively opposed them.With the demise of the USSR, theAmerican ruling class saw itself assupreme master of a "one superpowerworld." Washington disdainfully treatedYeltsin's Russia as if it were an impoverished Third World country. At one pointthe U.S.-dominated International Monetary.Fund (IMF) cited as a precedent forloan conditions to the Russian government the terms it had recently imposedon a loan to Guatemala!But American ruling circles know perfectly well that Russia is not Guatemala.They expect and fear the re-establishmentof a strong Russian state, moreover, onevengeful over its recent humiliation atthe hands of the West. In 1994, leadingCold War strategist Zbigniew Brzezinskidenounced the policies of the Yeltsinregime as "proto-imperial." To make sureMoscow's imperial aspirations remain"proto," he advocated extending NATOinto East Europe, as has recently beendone. The U.S.INATO war against Serbiawas in part intended to forestall Russia'sre-emergence as a major European powerwith its own client states in the Balkans.Post-Soviet Russia and theNew "Co,ld War" Propaganda

The increasing tensions between theU.S. and Russia have resulted in a reinterpretation and rewriting of the Cold Warby the ideological spokesmen for American imperialism. They used to describethis global conflict as one between. "democracy" and "communist totalitarianism," or between "free market" capitalism and a Marxist "command economy." Now, however, the Cold War isWORKERS VANGUARD


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increasingly presented in national tenns -as a conflict between two "great powers":America as "leader"of the Western worldand a Russia eternally striving to dominate the Eurasian land mass from easternEurope to eastern Siberia.Henry Kissinger, for example, assertsthat the ideological doctrines professedby the Kremlin's rulers-whether Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Slavophile nationalism or Marxism-Leninismand proletarian internationalism-weremerely legitimation for Russian imperial expansionism. In his i994 opus,Diplomacy, Kissinger quotes the 19thcentury Russian Slavophile writer Mikhail Katkov:"The Russian tsar is more than the heirof his ancestors; he is the successor ofthe caesars of Eastern Rome, of theorganizers of the church and its councilswhich established the very creed of theChristian faith. With the fall of Byzantium, Moscow arose and the greatness ofRussia began."Immediately following this quote, Kissinger writeS: "After the Revolution,. thepassionate sense of mission was transferred to the Communist International."So according to this self-styled master ofglobal realpolitik, the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky was but asecular version of the Eastern Orthodoxchurch!A variation on the same theme wascomposed by another prominent American Cold War ideologue, Samuel P. Huntington. According to Huntington, despitethe demise of the Soviet Union, Westerncivilization still confronts a world ofpotential enemies-the Islamic states ofthe Near East, "Confucian" China, Eastern Orthodox Russia-based on ullalterable and unbridgeable differences innational cultures:"The great divisions among humankindand the dominating source of conflictwill be culturaL Nation states willremain the most powerful actors in worldaffairs, but the principal conflicts ofglobal politics will occur betweennations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will

dominate global politics. The fault linesbetween civilizations will be the battlelines of the future."- "The Clash of Civilizations?"Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993In Europe, Huntington maintains, thatfault line is the "eastern boundary ofWestern Christianity."Huntington's views-though not, ofcourse, his loyalties-are identical tothose of anti-Western Russian Slavophilenationalists who see the U.S.INATOwar against Serbia as militant Protestantexpansionism. "This is a clash of civilizations," exclaimed Alexei Podberezkin, aninfluential member of the Russian Duma(parliament). "They offer us an aggressive and virtually Protestant model ofdemocracy-no, they impose it on us.What is happening in Yugoslavia andwhat is happening in Bosnia and Croatia is an attempt to impose the Western understanding of values" (New YorkTimes, 2 May).The identity of views, and indeed oflanguage, between well-known spokesmen for American imperialism andfor nascent Russian imperialism, whileironic, is perfectly understandable. Bothoppose, as they must, the universalismand rational humanism of the Enlight-

V. Deni and M. Cheremnykhenment which underlies the Marxist principles of the Bolshevik-led workers revolution. And, in fact, the present tendency of both American bourgeois andRussian nationalist intellectuals is to denythat Marxist principles had anything todo with the Bolshevik Revolution andinstead claim Red October for Great Russian nationalism and imperialism. Inthe past few years, American and British journalists and academics have beenchurning out books asserting an essential continuity of the Russian statetsarist, Communist and post-Sovietand its antagonism to the West: BruceClark's An Empire's New Clothes: TheEnd of Russia's Liberal Dream, Jonathan Steele's Eternal Russia: Yeltsin,Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democ-racy, Robert Donaldson and JosephNogee's The Foreign Policy of Russia:Changing Systems, Enduring Interests.Jonathan Steele, veteran Moscow correspondent for the London Guardian,presents a somewhat different argumentfor an essential continuity between theSoviet Union and post-Soviet Russia,claiming that the same old Communistsare still running the show, only nowthey've become capitalists:

"By comparison with 1917, the Yeltsin'revolution' was less of a change. Manyof his political team, including Yeltsinhimself, as well as many of the newentrepreneurs who emerged iJ;! the transition to a market economy, were membersof the old elite. There was no great redistribution of wealth and power."The above passage contains an important element of truth, but it obscuresan even more important truth. To be sure,many, perhaps even a majority, of Russia's big-time capitalist operators and topgovernment officials were apparatchiks

during the regime of Leonid Brezhnevin the 1970s. Viktor Chernomyrdin epitomizes the transition from Stalinist bu'reaucrat to capitalist mogul. When theeconomy was denationalized followingcapitalist counterrevolution, Chernomyrdin parlayed his position as ministerof gas production to become CEO ofGazprom, one of the largest corporationsin the world, and make himself one ofthe wealthiest individuals in the world.Such developments were anticipated by

, ~ P A A T A C J S T p t l @ @ f j21MbidU#!! ~ @ ' l i f j ; M i i , j , i l Spartacist pamphletHow the Soviet WorkersState Was Strangled

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Was Sirangled

Gigory DukorSoviet cartoon after Bol shevikRevolution shows Lenin sweepingaway kings, priests, capitalists.Boris Yeltsin hosts Russian OrthodoxPatriarch Alexy II after capitalistcounterrevolution.Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed.Speaking of the corruption of the Stalinist regime and the appetite of the bureaucrats to ensure their privileged statusthrough legal ownership of the means ofproduction, Trotsky noted that "a bourgeois restoration would probably have toclean out fewer people [in the state apparatus] than a. revolutionary party."But Steele's use of the vague, generictenn "elite" to describe both bureaucratsin the fonner Soviet Union and capitalistentrepreneurs in Russia today serves thesame ideological purpose as when rightwing demagogues in the U.S. denouncetrade-union officials as labor "bosses,"thereby identifying them with capitalistexploiters. In the case of Russia, it serves

of East Europe (and Cuba, China, NorthKorea and Vietnam) as "state capitalist"in order to justify their refusal to defendthose states against imperialism. Writing of the capitalist counterrevolutionswhich swept East Europe and the SovietUnion-and which it "celebrated"-theISO declares: "The revolutions in EasternEurope were a step sideways-from onefonn of capitalism to-another" (SocialistWorker, 23 April). Any worker in the former USSR who was told that he had simply taken a "step sideways" in the lastten years would simply spit in the ISOer'sface, or worse.One-third of the urban labor force inRussia today is effectively unemployed;75 percent of the population lives belowor barely above the subsistence level and15 million are actually starving. Malnutrition has become the nonn amongschoolchildren. Some two million chil-:dren have been abandoned by familieswho can no longer support them. Lifeexpectancy, especially for men, has fallensharply, while the overall population hasactually declined by two million since1990.In the chaotic condition of post-SovietRussia, the laws of capitalism have resulted in total economic collapse: grossdomestic product has fallen at least 50percent since 1991, capital investment by90 percent. Statistics alone cannot convey the scale and intensity of immiseration in Russia today. The infrastructuresof production, technology, science, transportation, heating and sewage have disintegrated. Once-eradicated diseases areagain becoming epidemics."State capitalism" is an ignorant, antiMarxist notion intended only as aflimsy "theoretical" justification for the

Moscow street market. Restoration of capitalism has brought terrible.immiseration to the working people.to minimize the monumental historicalfact that a capitalist counterrevolutionoccurred.Steele's argument is paralleled by ahost of fake-leftist groups who likewiseseek to downplay or deny the significance of capitalist restoration-in orderto amnesty their own support to counterrevolution. An example is the Britishcentrist Workers Power group, whichcheered on the pro-imperialist "democrats" on Yeltsin's barricades in 1991 andhad earlier supported an array of antiCommunist forces from Polish Solidarnosc to the fascist-infested Lithuanian Sajudis. To this day, Workers Powercontinues to deny that capitalist counterrevolution has triumphed in the SovietUnion, ludicrously labeling it a "moribund workers state." In any case, thiscentrist gobbledygook has no programmatic import: Workers Power likewisecalled Milosevic's Serbia a "moribundworkers state" while embracing the U.S.!NATO imperialist war cry over "poor little Kosovo."The refonnist tendency headed byTony Cliff's Socialist Workers Partyin Britain, represented in the U.S. bythe International Socialist Organization(ISO), explicitly denies that there hasbeen a capitalist counterrevolution in theSoviet Union and East Europe. The Cliffites described the Soviet Union and thebureaucratically defonned workers states

Cliffites' embrace of social-democraticanti-Communism.An industrial managerin the USSR obeyed fundamentally different economic imperatives than a Russian capitalist today even if they happento be the same individual. The goal of acapitalist is to maximize profits, i.e., thedifference between labor costs and marketprice. The main goal of a Soviet factorydirector, on which his future careerdepended, was maximizing the plannedoutput of goods although often to the detriment ofquality and variety. The systemthus generated full employment. In fact,Soviet enterprises were typically overmanned. And despite bureaucratic mismanagement and corruption, the planned,collectivized economy provided for universal medical care, housing, educationand child care. The working masses ofRussia now look back on the Brezhneviteera-for all its inequalities, shortages anddrabness-as a "golden age."Russian Tsarist. Reaction andWestern Imperialism

The currently fashionable notion of acenturies-old, deeply rooted antagonismbetween Russi;t and the West is a historical falsification. In the mid-19th century many Western liberals, among themAbraham Lincoln, detested tsarist Russiaas the embodiment of an oppressivetyranny under the sway of medievalcontinued on page 147


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7rotskyism VS.PHH NationalismWe reprint below a 24 June supple-ment to Spartakist, newspaper ofour com-rades of the Spartakist Workers Party ofGermany (SpAD).The hair-raising image of the chainedand humiliated Abdullah Ocalan following his capture by the murderous Turkishstate in February highlights the continuing national oppression of the Kurdish people. Hounded from country tocountry and refused asylum by the

social-democratic governments of Britain, France, Italy and Germany, theleader of the Kurdistan Workers Party(PKK) was seized by Turkish elite commandos in Kenya. Incarcerated in thenotorious prison island Imrali in theMarmara Sea, Ocalan has now been puton trial by the bloody Turkish regime,which threatens him with the death penalty. We demand: Freedom for Ocalan!For decades, the Western imperialistshave propped up the Turkish state, givingit military and political assistance to suppress the Kurds. The U.S. connived withits Turkish clients to get Ocalan, providing intelligence that led to his abduction.For its part, German imperialism deliversweapons to Turkey and trains Turkishelite troops at the Bundeswehr leadershipacademy. Fearing instability in the NearEast, where they hope to reap fabulousprofits from oil and natural gas pipelines,the German capitalists support theirTurkish ally's every move against thePKK and the Kurds. And by whipping upa racist anti-immigrant campaign againstKurdish workers, the German bourgeoisie works to divide and weaken the multinational working class at home.Just weeks after the Turkish regimekidnapped Ocalan, NATO forces, spearheaded by the U.S. and including Germanwarplanes, launched a massive -bombingcampaign against Serbia in the phonyguise of providing "humanitarian" sup- .port to the Kosovo Albanians against"ethnic cleansing" by Slobodan Milosevic's Serb forces. Justifying terror bombing in the Balkans in the name of "humanrights" is the height of imperialist hypocrisy. Milosevic's despicable nationalismtoward the Kosovo Albanians pales incomparison with the barbaric and murderous treatment dishe


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the term 'Kurdish' was such a bogey thatthe law found a form of words to makeits prohibition explicit without mentioning the offending word." Kurdish namesthat contradicted the "national culture,morality and traditions" and "insultedthe public" were outlawed. By the mid-1980s, almost 3,000 villages in Adiyaman, Gaziantep, Urfa, Mardin, Siirt andDiyarbakir had been renamed.State repression skyrocketed. BetweenSeptember 1980 and September 1982, atleast 81,000 Kurds were 'locked away inTurkish prison hellholes. Meanwhile, thearmy deployed two-thirds of its troopsin Kurdistan, increasing the number to200,000 by the early 1990s. Dead set ondestroying the Kurdish nation, the Turkish military destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages, prompting huge forced population transfers and killing tens ofthousands. Numbering 25 to 30 millionthroughout the region, the Kurds are oneof the world's largest people without astate of their own. Consisting overwhelmingly of hideously downtrodden peasantsand landless sharecroppers, the Kurdish,masses in southeastern Turkey have historically been under the heel of the aghas(the Kurdish landed gentry), the Sunniclergy and the bloodthirsty Turkish military. Kurdish society it self is highly classstratified-in the early 1990s, 8 percentof farming families owned over 50 percent of the land, and 38 percent werelandless.Reinforcing economic inequalitiesbetween Turks and Kurds is one reasonfor the Turkish regime's reign of terrorin eastern Anatolia. Per capita incomein the southeastern Kurdish Iegions inthe early 1990s was 42 percent of thenational average and a quarter of that inthe AegeanlMarmara region. Literacy inmany Kurdish provinces was less than 50percent compared to the national averageof 77 percent because education wasconducted in Turkish, a foreign languageto most rural Kurds.Behind the unremitting national oppression suffered by the Kurds is the driveof the bourgeois rulers in the Near Eastto create nationally homogeneous statesby depriving the Kurds of their ownnationhood. The very acknowledgment ofKurdish identity threatens the stability ofthe bourgeois regimes in the region. Forthis reason, it is unthinkable that theKurdish people can achieve national selfdetermination in the framework of thecapitalist nation-state system.As Marxists who forthrightly defendthe equality of nations and combat allmanifestations of nationalism and chauvinism, we emphasize that the rights ofthe Kurdish people can only be guaranteed by proletarian socialist revolutionsto smash the capitalist states whichoppress them-Turkey, Iran, Iract andSyria. To achieve this, it is necessary tobuild Leninist-Trotsky'ist parties whichunite the working people of differentnational and ethnic backgrounds. Suchparties will inscribe on their banner thecall for a Socialist Republic of UnitedKurdistan, part of a socialist federationof the Near East.This perspective is a concrete expression of Leon Trotsky's program of pennanent revolution, the only road to theemancipation of the masses in the semicolonial world from pre-capitalist' slaveryand capitalist exploitation. In countries ofbelated capitalist development, the tasksof the bourgeois-democratic revolutionaccomplished long ago in the West cannot be solved by the local bourgeoisies,which are entirely dependent on imperialism and fearful that any move towardsocial progress will encourage the workers to overthrow them. In these countries,the unsolved tasks of the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution-such as agrarianrevolution, women's rights and nationalIiberation-can only be achieved throughthe dictatorship of the proletariat at thehead of the peasant masses. In order tosurvive and flourish, socialist revolutionsin the backward countries must beextended to the advanced capitalist statesof the West and Japan, whose economic,technological, and scientific technique is9 JULY 1999

;APIn its war of extermination against PKK, Turkish regime has razed over 3,500Kurdish villages and driven over three million from Kurdish area of south-eastern Turkey. Below: Kurds protest police repression in Istanbul, March 21.

essential to raise the "Third World" to theeconomic level of the "First."PKK Nationalism:Dead End for Kurds

Defense of the right of self-determination for the Kurdish people is a crucialobligation for would-be communists- inTurkey. The Turkish working class must 'be won to a perspective of upholding thenational rights of the Kurds, defendingthe PKK and other Kurdish organizationsagainst state terror, and championing fulland equal rights for the Kurdish language. Only by fighting all manifestations of Turkish chauvinism and nationaloppression, ca!1 the road be opened forjoint struggle by the Turkish and Kurdishworkers against their common capitalistoppressors.. As Lenin stressed, communists inan oppressor country must emphasizeopposition to the chauvinism of their"own" bourgeoisie, while communists inthe oppressed country must in particularcombat petty-bourgeois nationalism, fighting for the unity in struggle of the workers of both nations:"People who have not gone into thequestion thoroughly think that it is 'contradictory' for the Social-Democrats ofoppressor nations to insist on the 'freedom to secede,' -while Social-Democratsof oppressed nations insist on the 'freedom to integrate.' However, a littlereflection will show that there is not, andcannot be, any other road to internationalism and the amalgamation of nations,any other road from the given situationto this goa\." '- "The Discussion onSelf-Determination SummedUp" (July 1916)

Thus, while defending the right ofself-determination of the Kurds, communists strongly oppose the petty-bourgeoisnationalist program of the PKK. Arisingin response to the all-sided oppressionof the Kurds, the PKK was formed byOcalan (nicknamed Apo, or "uncle")in the mid-1970s. The movement thatwould adopt the name PKK in 1978- claimed to be "Marxist-Leninist," reflecting Ocalan's urbanized roots as a studentin Ankara" where he had been a sup-

Winter/NY Times

porter of the leftist youth group Devrimci Genc at a time when Maoism waspopular among radicalized youth.Its "Marxist-Leninist" rhetoric notwithstanding, the PKK never had anything' to do with genuine Marxism.Rejecting the struggle for a revolutionaryLeninist party based on the growingTurkish and Kurdish proletariat, Ocalan,like many Turkish and Kurdish leftists ofthe late 1960s and early 1970s, embracedThird World guerrillaism. Alienated bythe Turkish left's rotten, chauvinistrefusal to champion the caus,e of Kurdishliberation, Ocalan and his' supportersretreated to the countryside, abjuring theworkers of Istanbul, Ankara, Sivas andAdana. This was doubly criminal, forunlike other Kurdish groups the PKKdrew its support from proletarian elements who hated the class domination ofthe Kurdish aghas and merchants.Although its supporters hate the landlord and feudal hierarchy of the Kurdishvillage, the PKK itself has engaged incrass clan-based politics, playing onefamily or village off another in theAnatolian backwater. McDowall writes:

Ocalan ...(continued from page 1)anti-Kurdish provocations, including anominous march by some 1,000 Turkishmen through the main Kurdish city ofDiyarbakir.Backed by the U.S. and Germany, theTurkish bourgeoisie has waged a warof extermination against the PKK andthe oppressed Kurdish national minority(see "The Fight for Kurdish Liberation:Trotskyism vs. PKK Nationalism," page8). Yet it is to Turkey's imperialist sponsors that the petty-bourgeois nationalistPKK appeals for support. At a June 29Vancouver protest against the sentencingof Ocalan called by the PKK and joinedby the Trotskyist League of Canada andthe Worker-communist Party-Iraq, a

"Rather than assaulting the agha class asa whole, the PKK operated with fine calculation, exploiting blood feuds wherethese existed, helping to create themwhere they did not." One close associateof Ocalan remarked that whenever thePKK won one person from a family ortribe, "the whole family or tribe came toour side."

To be sure, the petty-bourgeois nationalist PKK has waged a heroic militarystruggle against the far better equippedTurkish army, winning mass supportamong the Kurdish people in TurkishKurdistan, the urban centers of westernTurkey and the diaspora in West Europeand elsewhere. Nevertheless, the PKKuses guerrilla war only to fight its way tothe bargaining table, where it hopes tocompel the Turkish bourgeoisie to grantconcessions. At the same time, it seeks toput pressure on the Western imperialists tothen pressure their Turkish NATO allies.The PKK's strategy is in line withthat of other petty-bourgeois nationalistmovements like the Palestine LiberationOrganization (PLO) and African NationalCongress (ANC). Since the nationalistperspective of these movements is emphatically not linked to a fight for proletarian revolution in the developed capitalist countries, they necessarily look to thegood graces of Western imperialismwith disastrous consequences for theoppressed,masses. Today, following U.S.brokered "peace" accords, Yasir Arafat'sPLO has sold itself as police auxiliariesto the racist Zionists in Israel. In SouthAfrica, the now-bourgeois nationalistANC presides over a neo-apartheidsystem where the black masses are just asexploited and oppressed by the Randlordsas they were under white racist rule. I f hePKK were to cut a deal with the Turkishhenchmen, it would strive to use its newly,found position to exploit its own peopleand would serve as Kurdish gendarmesfor the Turkish state. In his speech beforethe Turkish court, Ocalan laid out such aperspective, which was endorsed by thePKK.During the Cold War, when the SovietUnion faced hostile encirclement by theimperialist countries, petty-bourgeois. nationalist forces like the PLO and ANCwere often politically and militarilybacked by Moscow, giving them someroom to maneuver. The PKK, for its part,enjoyed a modicum of military supportfrom Soviet-friendly Syria, where Ocalanfound a safe haven and established PKKguerrilla bases. After the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in199 I -92, however, the petty-bourgeoisnationalists were left suspended in midair. The PLO responded by looking evermore openly to Washington to broker a"peace" deal, which has not relieved thesuffering of the Palestinian masses oneiota. Without Soviet backing, Syria succumbed to pressure from Turkey, whichthreatened to invade its Arab neighbor ifit continued to harbor the PKK leader andhis guerrilla units. Last year, Syria knuckled under to this provocation and Ocalanwas forced to leave the country.

continued on page 10

PKK banner read: "NATO Fights EthnicCleansing in Kosovo. NATO SupportsEthnic Cleansing in Kurdistan. HowLong Do You Accept This Double Standard?" Addressing such illusions in the"humanitarian" pretensions of the NATOimperialists, a TLC speaker declared:

"The fact that the Western imperialistsunswervingly back the Turkish rulersillustrates that there is no such thing as'f\umanitarian' imperialism. They mayclick their tongues h y p ~ ~ r i t i c a l l y againstthe death penalty for Ocalan, but theycarry out deportations, political repress,ion and racist state terror against immigrants at home. As Marxists who forthrightly defend the equality of nations andcombat all manifestations of nationalismand chauvinism, we emphasize that the_ ights of the Kurdish people can only beguaranteed by proletarian revolutions tosmash the capitalist states which oppressthem. For a Socialist Republic of UnitedKurdistan! Free


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~ l . ~ " (Islamic Movement). More recently,~ ~ ' L ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ (continued from page 9)All this has impelled the PKK to intensify its overtures to the archenemies ofKurdish freedom: the Western imperialists and the Turkish state. Wooing theEuropean bourgeoisies, the PKK declaredlast year: "The PKK can solve the Kurdish question either by continued fightingin the mountains or with an appeal toEurope" (Kurdistan-Rundbrief, 2 December 1998). It has also offered up the Kurds

as pawns in the rivalry between the European Union (EU) and U.S. imperialism:"The lack of a political approach to theKurdish question on the part of the countries in the EU ... us t like the passivity onthe Yugoslavia problem, means onceagain giving the USA the occasion to getthe upper hand" (Kurdistan-Rundbrief, 10February).Ocalan has been no less shameless inhis appeals to the U.S. In a report delivered on the Kurdish station Med-TV on15 October 1998, he implored Washington: "Assume that all the power lay inyour hands, would you then grant theKurds any right to peace? Would yougrant them a few democratic rights? Yourpartner is there, I give you my word.Make the preparations for a political solution, I will riot make any pre-conditions."In this craven kowtowing to the big powers, the PKK is following in the footstepsof the large, aristocratic Barzani andTalabani clans in Iraqi Kurdistan, whichhave always sold their services to achanging spectrum of regional powers

and Western imperialists in exchange formilitary and political backing.Implacably hostile to the perspectiveof uniting the Kurdish and Turkish workers against their common class enemies,the PKK has progressively tailored itspolitics to the reactionary climate ofthe post-Soviet world, replacing even itsformal call for the independence ofTurkish Kurdistan with the demand for"autonomy." It has ,even offered to aid .the murderous Turkish rulers in theirexpansionist drive to control the Turkicspeaking lands of Central Asia, declaringin Kurdistan-Report (lanuary/February1998):"The solution in Turkey is a regionalsolution, That should not worry Turkey.It would mean a secure bridge to theNear East and Central Asia up to theTurkmanian countries. For the first timein its history Turkey could be, thanksto this Kurdish bridge, a very strongpower,"

The more pronounced the PKK'sappeals to the imperialists and the Turkish state have bec9me, the less use it hashad for the "Marxist-Leninist" verbiageand secularism that animates many of itsmembers. Although the PKK has criticized women's oppression in its publications and is known for placing womenunder arms in its guerrilla groups, itspetty-bourgeois outlook and contemptfor Turkey's proletarian masses have ledit to turn to the most reactionary forcesin the Turkish political landscape: elements of the Sunni clergy and NecmettinErbakan's Welfare Party (now called Virtue), a mass Islamic organization.In the late 19808 and early 1990s, thePKK established a group led by a cleric'in Bitlis and was associated with the Partiya Islami Kurdistan and Islami Harekat10

bers of Ocalan's exile parliament. ThePKK pushes the reactionary lie that "theIslamic movements need us and theybreathe through our struggles. We do notforget that the workers party aspires togenuine Islam" (Junge Welt, 20 November 1995). In his Med-TV report, Ocalanasked of the Virtue Party: "Where is yourloyalty to Islam, how can you describe asIslamic your attitude of supporting thewar under all circumstances? Where isthe Islam in that?"Religion serves to chain the oppressedto the old order by imbuing them withsuperstitions and conservative morality.Nowhere is this truer than in the Islamicworld, where the Koran and the reactionary weight of the family keep hundredsof millions, particularly women, in astate of isolation, ignorance and hideousSUbjugation. In embracing Turkey's reactionary Muslim parties, the PKK is signaling to the clerical establishment that itcan be trusted to tighten the hold ofIslam on the Kurdish masses, which isalready very strong in the backwardregions of Turkish Kurdistan.Kurdish militants confronted with thebankruptcy of PKK guerrillaism andits blatantly reactionary politics mustgrapple with the fundamental differencebetween the PKK's petty-bourgeois strategy and the Marxist perspective that onlythe working class-Turkish, Kurdish,Arab, Persian, and Hebrew-speakinghas the social power, numbers and organization to topple all the bourgeois states inthe Near and Middle East through social-

Anti-womanIslamicreactionariesmarch in Istanbul,December 1997.

ist revolution. Only this road is capable offreeing the oppressed Kurds from thechains of national oppression and guaranteeing their right to self-determination.The PKK's nationalist program is a deadend-only the Trotskyist strategy of p e r ~ manent revolution can liberate the Kurdish masses.'SPD: Bourgeois Workers Partyof Racism and War

In Germany, tens of thousands ofKurdish workers belong to large tradeunions together with their Gem1an andTurkish class brothers and sisters. TheTurkish and Kurdish workers in Europecan be a living bridge linking the fightfor Kurdish independence and socialistrevolution in the Near East to workersrule in the industrialized West. Germanand ethnic Turkish workers must take astand in defense of the rights of Kurdishorganizations. This is particularly urgenttoday, as the racist German state will useits attacks on the PKK to go after allimmigrants and the workers movementmore generally. However, the socialdemocracy and the trade-union bureaucracy are obstacles to m o b i l i ~ i n g thepower of the proletariat against racistdeportations, fascist provocations andaggressive attacks on the working class.Since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the absorption of the EastGerman deformed workers state (DDR)into the Fourth Reich in the early 1990s,sharply intensified interimperialist rivalries have propelled the German bourgeoisie to intensify its attacks on the workingclass in order to better compete with itsimperialist rivals. To do so, the rulingclass has sought to cripple proletarian

Bernhard Rudolph Der SpiegelCOPS unleashed on refugee home by SPD state government in Hamburg,March 1998. Fascist firebomb ing of Turkish home in Molin in 1992 killed threepeople.struggles by infecting the workers withthe poison of chauvinism and racism.Screaming that "the boat is full"-theracist war cry that Germany has too many"foreigners"-the rulers have sought tocreate the ideological climate in whichrefugees and other immigrants can bedriven out with impunity.Fed up with almost 17 years of Christian Democratic governments headed byHelmut Kohl and' the increasing antiworking-class onslaught, millions ofworkers voted for the SPD in the lastnational elections, bringing the SocialDemocrats to power for the first timesince 1982. Doing the bourgeoisie's bidding, the SPD took the reins of the capitalist state to shove the givebacks demanded by the rulers down the throats ofthe powerful trade unions, whose bureaucratic misleaders have prevented theworkers from defending their livelihoods.In administering the bourgeois state, theSPD pursues no less reactionary, racistpolicies than the COU. The unbridledrepression meted out to Kurdish protesters in the streets of Berlin, Hamburg andKOln is but one example of what the SPDgovernment of Gerhard Schroder is allabout.Having definitively gone over to theside of German imperialism in World WarI by voting for the war credits that sentcountless workers to die in the trenches,the Social Democrats have devoted themselves ever since to chaining the proletariat to its class enemy. In \1992, the SPDonce again proved its fealty to the Frankfurt bankers by voting to abolish the rightto asylum, which encouraged the Nazis tounleash a raging pogrom against immigrants in Rostock. In Hamburg andSchroder's own state of Lower Saxony,SPD governments have orchestrated furious police sweeps against Africans andother immigrants. Now the SPD and theirGreen coalition partners have bombed thepeople of Serbia, in the largest militaryconflict in Europe since World War II. Inlast year's

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Workers Vanguard No 716 - 09 July 1999