Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1987 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
Markin comment:
I have posted this entry as a snapshot in time from this period (1980s)presented by a revolutionary whose real working class experiences in the 1960s are probably a little bit different from those of most of us who became serious leftists at that time.
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Down With U.S. Imperialism!
Sex, Race and Class in the "American Century"
On 22 November 1986 the Spartacist League held a forum in San Francisco called "Fight Reagan Reaction with Class Struggle!" We print below an edited transcript of the speech given by comrade George Crawford, an SL Central Committee member.
Tonight we're going to be talking about domestic reaction within the United States now—Reagan's war or, very importantly, the ruling class's war, against what is known as the Vietnam syndrome, which came from the U.S. defeat on the battlefield at the hands of the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants. Now, this is also an international phenomenon, there's America's military attacks on Libya, on Grenada, many evidences of this. But inside the United States you have what you could call a moral rearmament, which is an enforced social reaction coming from the government in league with and using what is known as the Moral Majority forces, religious fundamentalists. It's stepping up, becoming greater every day.
Everybody is constantly amazed that there's no opposition to this incredible crusade against every kind of democratic right; that the Democratic Party basically tries to out-Moral Majority the Moral Majority. And the point that I want to make in the talk is that this is not simply the Republican Party or Reagan. This is a war against the population by an entire ruling class, because something is seriously wrong from their viewpoint with America. Very important for them that, one, workers work for what they're paid and, two, most importantly, volunteer to die en masse when necessary. And if a ruling class does not have that, it's in trouble. And it doesn't have that now, it's a long shot from there.
The 1950s: The Bomb and the Red Purges
I want to go back and describe a little bit about the '50s. The U.S. won World War II and it came out of World War II as the strongest and the overwhelming imperialist. The other imperialists economically were destroyed through the process of World War II. But the Soviet Union also won World War II, and not only that, within a very few years it had the atom bomb. And so the U.S., you might say at the very pinnacle of what it had declared its century, looked over its shoulder and there was the Soviet Union with the atom bomb. The atom bomb was very important to the U.S., by the way, and was used. It's a matter of record that the atom bomb was used not for victory over Japan but to send a message to the Soviet Union for after the war. It was a calculated decision, to the point of even keeping Stalin totally in the dark; they did not want him to know what was going on in terms of the development and the dropping of the bomb.
So the U.S. lost its trump card within a very short time after World War II. Not only that, the U.S. had another problem. The original organizers of the AFL-CIO were in the main some kind of communists. They belonged to the Communist Party, they belonged to the Trotskyist party, they maybe were Musteites; but they were still there. And so in the late '40s, these people were neutralized. Either they were physically thrown
out of the unions, or they were isolated, or they were beaten up.
I remember when I went to work in '64, this was in a rubber plant in L.A., and it was about '69 when I started becoming political; and within about three years I met two guys, and I'd worked with the guys or around them for about eight years, and I had no idea that these people used to be political. Turned out that they were all, not members of the CP because there were no members of the CP left, they were supporters of the CP. One guy had three generations of union members which meant there were union members in his family before 1900. And the other one was a guy that, well, finally he told me that he had a full set of Capital locked away in his basement, which nobody else knew about. But then over a period of time he had convinced himself that communism's okay and all that, and Marx was right and all that, but the real question is the Catholics. And no one in the plant knew that these people were in the least bit leftist. They had not gone to a union meeting since the meeting in 1949 when they took the communist organizers out in the parking lot and beat them up.
Now, the '50s were pretty rough. One of the things in the '50s is that the population actually believed that this was the American Century, and that communism was, indeed, irrelevant—except as an external international phenomenon which was the enemy. But inside the U.S. there was a belief—and I'm not sure it was in all layers of the population, certainly less in terms of blacks—that U.S. imperialism is going to have things its way. And, after all, it had absolutely no competition from any other imperialist power in the '50s. U.S. Steel could produce at less than full capacity and simply dictate world steel prices, and pay incredible dividends (which paid off about 20 years later in plants that can't compete).
There was no pill, of course. You know, this "Just say no"? Boy, we grew up with this "Just say no." You know, it brings one to rage. And for the most part you unfortunately had to say no. Was it because you wanted to be a good citizen or a good Catholic? No, it was fear! Because 15 percent of your graduating class of women were pregnant in high school and they didn't graduate. And you had two choices: in L.A. either you sent your girlfriend or went with her to Tijuana, and since you couldn't speak Spanish you stood out in the avenue with a $20 bill and you ended up with a woman dying or horribly mutilated with infection because the only person that stops is a cab driver. So that wasn't an option. Or you went to one of these incredible homes where the women put their babies up for adoption. And of course the third thing was marriage. So your life's over. At 18, forget it. That's it. The woman doesn't graduate from school, maybe you graduate from school. If you're lucky you've got an old man working in a unionized job and gets you a job, if you're not lucky it's gas station mechanic forever. There's a good film about this called Fat City, a John Huston film.
And so you did not get an enormous amount of questioning about options, what do I want to do in life, what will I do next year in life? It was there, you just did it—or it did it to you. And left politics, or politics per se was not even an alternative. And I'm sure where I grew up was a bit worse, because it was one generation away from the South, a Southern working-class area, but there was no option, one could not conceive of thinking about becoming a revolutionary politician. I mean, the political debate that was going on was whether the Democrats sold out Eastern Europe and China, and if you were a Republican you said yes and if you were a Democrat you said no and that's as far as it went. And that's what the ruling class liked a lot. Because the workers did not create a hell of a lot of trouble. They were economically combative, that is true, but the politics one would say were at an all-time low.
The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War
What happened to change all this? First of all, you had the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was very, very powerful because here is a fundamental democratic right that should exist by the very underpinnings—and formal underpinnings, and agreed by all, in the Constitution—of our society. Yet it was impossible and did not happen and the civil rights movement was a failure. Right now they try to pass off what a success it was. At the time we all knew it was a failure, and that what was happening was simply tokenism, and what was happening was that the real leaders of the civil rights movement were being butchered and murdered by the state.
And the second thing of course that happened was the Vietnam War. I want to tell one story about the Vietnam War. We were talking about the Vietnam syndrome and I think this story makes it actually clear. In 1969 I was just beginning to become involved in organized politics and just by chance dropped by Newsreel, a kind of New Leftist group, and they were involved in military organizing on the West Coast. Now, the main and only training camp for the Marines on the West Coast is called Camp Pendleton, it's a critical camp. It's got some of the greatest real estate in the western United States. To get into Camp Pendleton you literally have to go to Oceanside. Well, that's Marine property, basically—it isn't, but it is.
And so there was a demonstration by an organization called the Movement for a Democratic Military. Now the organizer was a black sergeant, supporter of the Black Panther Party. There was a bus with Black Panther Party members going from L.A. to Oceanside for the rally. So I decided to go down with various people to this rally. And I got down there, and there's this little amphitheater right on the ocean, like in a hundred little seaside towns, and you've got an audience of about 500 Vietnam vets or about-to-be Vietnam vets because they're sitting there waiting for demobe orders home. Black and white, overwhelmingly from the South, Marines, sitting in there listening to all the antiwar speakers, including the Black Panthers! And the Black Panthers had a position that the Viet Cong should win the war—long live the revolution of the Viet Cong. And so around the edges of the amphitheater, of course, you've got the other Marines singing the Marine anthem and burning the Viet Cong flag. They had that Green Beret guy that was against the war and various other people, a woman and a doctor and all that, and they spoke for a while. After about an hour and a half, we were approached by military Movement guys who said, "You really ought to leave about now because something's going to happen soon." And so as we were leaving on the only road out of Oceanside, I looked back and fights were starting and the streets of Oceanside became one big melee that night.
Now, first of all, one does not want to say that this is revolutionary integrationism because there was no consciousness of class, there was no place for this to go because there was no mass party. We were too small. But in a little, not insignificant way, class war was beginning a little bit that night in Oceanside. And for the bourgeoisie and everybody who has an interest in capitalism, including the labor bureaucracy, this is the height of their horrors. They can't stand this. This must be reversed no matter what.
And so actually as a postscript to what happened in Oceanside, the Movement for a Democratic Military tried to sustain their organization, and they had a little storefront in Oceanside, and every night or every other night, they got shotgun blasts into their storefront for about six months. And then the cops ran a massive provocateur operation on them, and then some months later there was a massive indictment of antiwar guys and the indictments were held in Arizona. They pulled them all out to Arizona and they resurrected some anti-IWW laws that hadn't been used since the early 20th century.
The other thing is that for the first time the soldiers in the war watched TV almost every night and so they got to hear the total crap that was being put forth on American TV news about how "we are winning the war," and they knew it was all lies, total lies. So in a sense what you had was a snapshot, like a very bright flash bulb, on the real nature of this class society, stripping away all the hypocrisy.
"Ethnic Purity" Carter Paved Way for Reagan
After that the bourgeoisie knew they were in trouble. And so a wing of the bourgeoisie adopted a defeatist position on the war. Now when the SL said that at the time, everybody laughed at us because they were all in the popular front with this wing of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie wanted to get out of this war, they wanted to get out of an impossible situation before it got worse. (They actually did that, they were able to co-opt the antiwar movement in the U.S. Along the way they had to dump Nixon because he wasn't the guy that was going to reinstill faith in anything, it was quite clear.) But what you had was a generation of people that looked at life and figured, what do I really want to do with my life? Sex was one of the answers, there were a lot of answers. But the point of it is that since then the initial reaction to Washington and the government regardless of the power is "Bullshit! What are they trying to do to us now?" And that exists today.
Now, I remember after Watergate reading in the New York Review of Books about how liberals were very upset about Watergate, and they were very pissed off at Nixon. And liberals said: the major problem with Watergate is that it damaged the imperial presidency, possibly beyond repair; and we as liberals know that all progress for the common man must come through the United States imperial presidency. And so this moral rearmament became urgent for them. So you get Jimmy Carter, the born-again, "ethnic purity" Democrat, and that was his purpose.
First of all, you should remember that Jimmy Carter wasn't just an ass. One time in his life he was a nuclear sub officer. So he had to have something going for him that was not obvious. Jimmy Carter, in his anti-Communist crusade, the "human rights" crusade, installed the boycott of the Olympics. It was under Carter that we got the establishment for the first time of religious fundamentalists in Washington; it was under Carter that leftists in Greensboro were slaughtered, an action that was organized by the FBI, like many if not most of these Klan executions in the South are. But he blew it pretty good—the killer rabbit and everything. Some nuclear sub officer!
So what we got was Reagan and Meese. The first thing they did is they got PATCO, the air controllers. Now, these people are so educated and are so white-collar that they were the tip of the top layer of the labor aristocracy. They come out of the service, they're at the top. And so these guys decided their work was impossible—which everybody knows it is—and they needed more money and they needed better working conditions. So they went on strike.
Now, the money demands were irrelevant. There are not that many of these guys. Any other administration would simply pay them off. But rather than pay them off, Reagan fired them all, got two union leaders, put leg irons on them and paraded them across the country, making sure there were lots of photographs. And if he can do this, and does want to do this, and is so proud of doing this to those guys, what the hell is he going to do to the rest of us? That was the message.
Then there was the MOVE bombing, just total fire-bombing, genocide of blacks, children, simply because MOVE didn't fit in, simply because they were different. They were no threat to anybody, everybody knows that. It was genocide, straightforward. State-enforced social reaction targeting everybody they suspect of not being in sympathy with a white, Christian fundamentalist, English-speaking America where deviants will not be tolerated.
Now, Rambo. This is Reagan's hero, this is the Reagan administration's movie. What is Rambo? First of all the guy's kind of short, second of all he was a draft dodger, third of all he's an ex-porn star. And this is the guy that kills 5,000 Vietnamese in 45 minutes? It's incredible, nobody believes it, it's just a simple lie. It has no power at all. And the viciousness of this enforced reaction with Reagan is because nobody believes. So the only way forward for Reagan is terror against the American population.
Reagan's Soldiers:
Religion in the Service of Reaction
Now, I want to talk for a few minutes about the nature of Reagan's soldiers, the cutting edge of Reaganism in terms of the active domestic policy, and that's the religious right, the Moral Majority, whatever you want to call them. These people have always been around. First of all, these people are not the Jehovah's Witnesses, who are very sincere in their religious beliefs and suffer for it. These people are not the Amish in Pennsylvania. These people are not particularly religious. I'm not saying that they're enlightened or advanced. What they are demagogues, and they use religion.
These people are also always used, historically. And who are they always historically used by? They're used by the Southern upper class. There was a movie some time ago called Advise and Consent. And always you have the Senator who gets down there and it's the Sam Ervin type and he's got this drawl and he's just the country boy and all, except he's got a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard, he's got the Oxford scholarship, his family goes back three hundred years in the South, one of the old slave-owning families. And he's the master. He's the master not simply in that sense for blacks but also for the Southern poor whites, who he calls "Southern white trash," which is the layer you're talking about in terms of these revivalists and such in the South.
These fundamentalist leaders have always served their master. And what these guys are all about is money. Now there was a line from Prizzi's Honor. Some woman has ripped off the Mafia for money, you know, it's not too smart. Jack Nicholson is going with that woman and so he's got trouble now. And he looks at her and he says: You know, Italians like money more than they like their sons, and they like their sons an awful lot. Well, these guys like money more than the racism, and they like the racism an awful lot.
The people that take these guys really seriously are sort of like the types you would see going out on Saturday night to a professional wrestling match and taking it really seriously. I'm sure they must have more people but what I'm trying to say is they are not on their own a significant percentage of our society in terms of power or anything else. Maybe in Alabama, yes, but only if a Huey Long was in office, you see. That's their relationship, always. So they are powerful because of the Reagan government but most of all they are powerful because they serve a need that the entire bourgeoisie has right now, which is this terror on the American people to restore in the population unquestioning loyalty in preparation for the anti-Soviet war drive. That's what purpose they serve.
You could say, well, this doesn't make any sense at all, why is it critical to go after sex videos for this question? Isn't this creating problems? You're going after people, they're not leftists, they just want to be left alone. Why isn't there something like a Brave New World where you've got those pleasure pills and all that sort of stuff, and then you've got total totalitarian society? Because class society doesn't work like that, because it's class; because reaction takes particular historical forms. In Germany, there was Hitler; in this country it takes the form of the Ku Klux Klan.
And so what these people's ideology represents is classical—the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan in this country. If you're talking about fascism and how the bourgeoisie needs fascism at a certain point and turns around and uses these dogs, that's what's going on now. Not in the sense that these people have taken power, no. Not in the sense that the Reagan government is fascist, no. But in the sense of using these people and using this ideology, that is certainly going on.
I want to talk a little bit about their ideology. (I want to use Gore Vidal because Gore Vidal really hates Christianity. As he says, his secret hero is Herod, Herod and the Apostate Julian, the last pagan.) Of course, they pick and choose from the Bible what they want, even though they'll tell you that every word in the Bible is god. Except they fight over which Bible. For example, as the Jews will tell you, the Bible bars shellfish, the Bible bars pork, etc. Well, somehow those things are not effected. They're not effected because Paul sold out on those issues in order to get a hearing from the Romans.
But to them what the Bible is, very important, is a justification for their racism. The whole thing about the descendants of Ham is used by these people. In secular terms, when you hear the cry of "law and order" or "cut welfare" or "the death penalty" those are simply code words for "get blacks." And as for Jews, "these are the people that killed Christ, these are the Christ-killers." And it will never change.
And sex, well, the main teacher for them is Paul, that's the main guy that they swear by. As a comrade said last night, the Catholics call him Saint Paul and for those who have met him personally they call him Paul. The twice-born, the third-born, the people who talk in tongues, who have visions nightly; no priests, they do it—personally.
So, anyway, Paul had a position on sex: forget it. His position was that sex under any circumstances regardless was a sin. It was a departure from purity. You should go out in the desert and wait for God to come to this earth. And God was going to come in six months. God didn't come in six months. Well, God was going to come in nine months. God didn't come in nine months. And he's having trouble with his people, right? Certain things are happening and they're getting upset. And he finally said: it's better to marry than burn. And he wasn't talking about the fires of hell when he's talking about burn. So he will let you marry, but that's as far as it goes.
Now, the position on women for the entire Judaic-Christian tradition is one of the most backward positions there is. It's that women exist simply as a repository of the sacred sperm, that a woman is commanded to serve and obey her husband as he is in turn commanded to serve and obey his temporal, Bible-quoting master. And Constantine, when he was having trouble with the Roman Empire, figured out that Christianity was the best thing that he had. So he made it the state religion. It wasn't actually that big, it certainly was no threat. But it was used, it was the greatest thing for state reinforcement of ideology. Been that way ever since.
Gore Vidal talks about homosexuality in the Bible. And it turns out there's quite a bit of homosexuality in the Bible. Vidal talks about the stuff with David and Jonathan, and it's quite clear. David's always talking about his love for Jonathan. And Vidal talks about Ruth and Naomi. He says, it's quite clear about their emotions toward one another, that this would be the basis for joint ownership of a pottery shop in Laguna Beach.
But then you get to Leviticus. And Leviticus on homosexuality is something like, if one man lie with another man, thereby he be put to death. Real hardcore stuff, from then on.
And Paul of course was dealing with Leviticus. Why does Paul hate sex so much? Aside from maybe he was a little peculiar and he had his problems, why does he hate sex so much? What is the political reason? Well, what Paul was competing against was the Roman gods, the pagan religions. And the greatest god of the pagan religions was the Goddess of Fertility. And, of course, when they went to a Sunday ceremony, they got it on. And they really got it on. The hardest teachings of the Bible against homosexuality and against sex in general come right after what is known as the Babylonian captivity, where the Jews were forced to live in the city of Babylon for a period of time. And it turns out that Babylon was the Paris of the B.C. world. It's sort of like in the First World War, once the farm boys see gay Paree, that's it, boy, ain't never goin' back to the farm. Well, once the Jews got to Babylon they really didn't want to go back to that desert. Not only did they have as much sex in ways that they could never conceive of (human sex, not goats) but indoor plumbing, everything, it was a very advanced city. And the Jewish ruling class had a problem, they somehow had to get the Jews back into the desert. And so you get all these moral strictures on sex. In other words, what was going on in sixth century Palestine was very similar to what they're trying to pull off today. Sex is bad; go out and get killed or live in the damned desert. So, the Bible is a historical document.
"Moral Rearmament" Is Enforced Social Conformity
What are the issues that are coming up today? First of all, women. For what the bourgeoisie is talking about socially, it's essential that women get out of the factory, certainly that women get out of the trade unions. They don't want women to have class consciousness, that's a no-no. They want to get them out of the productive process, back into the home. They want to eliminate their rights. They want to eliminate day care. They want to eliminate abortion. And they're simply doing that by abortion-clinic bombing and terror. What they'd like to do is eliminate the pill, but only the Pope thinks he can pull that off. Their key slogan for women is: Defeat ERA and Save the Family.
There is a study that's just come out that said: For 20 years, the federal government before the Reagan administration had systematically destroyed the family; we have and are going to reverse every one of those policies. What were those policies? The biggest one was welfare. So we're going to save the family by cutting off welfare. Now, figure 20 years back from where Reagan got in office. What do you get? The beginning of the civil rights movement. It's not an accident.
Sex. The Supreme Court has made sodomy illegal, i.e., you will go to jail for sodomy. The point is the way the ruling is formulated: it's illegal because it is against historical Christian-Judaical principle. Well, where does that stop? They can say blacks are unequal because of historical Christian-Judaical principle. (And the head of the Supreme Court turns out to be a racist vigilante.) There's no limit to this. It's a total elimination of separation of church and state. Our position on sex is: government out of the bedrooms, let people figure it out themselves.
AIDS. The first thing you've got to understand is that these people think that AIDS is the greatest thing that's ever happened. As long as it doesn't get in a massive way into the heterosexual population, it's like god speaking. The more homosexuals die, the better it is. So, of course, they do not fund AIDS projects. And, of course, Dianne Feinstein is not going to release needles to drug addicts so AIDS would not be spread many, many times over by using dirty needles. This should be an enormous scandal.
I saw this liberal program on AIDS the other night. I was listening for one of these liberal doctors to get up and say, "We need money. We need massive funding." And they wanted to say it, it's quite clear, but for some reason they didn't say it. But they said everything else. They got the hottest researcher around (he's from Scotland, actually) and he said: AIDS as a virus is very difficult medically, what needs to be done now is massive experimenting; we can sit around, we could talk about it forever, but what needs to be done is trial and error in an international sense. And in the next scene they talk about the technical problems, and the man who narrated says: the problem that scores of researchers are running into across the country— "Scores" of researchers are working on the vaccine for AIDS across the country, that's it! And we're talking about a screaming national health emergency. But the government is coming from a totally different direction on this AIDS question. They want to politically exploit it, it's good for them.
Death penalty. The death penalty simply means: kill blacks. The death penalty was temporarily ruled unconstitutional in 72, largely as a result of the U.S. bourgeoisie trying to clean up its act in terms of how it was seen internationally. By the way, this country is one of the few countries that actually has the death penalty; most of the European countries don't. The interesting thing about the death penalty is that it's a forbidden topic for debate now. We just had a major election in California over [State Supreme Court chief justice] Rose Bird, over the death penalty. Her right-wing attacker's every other word is: she doesn't believe in the death penalty. I saw a number of her commercials; she didn't have the guts to get up and say: I oppose the death penalty. I think it's barbaric, inhuman. And the majority of the world, and the state, and the ruling class of the world agree with me. No, politics has gone so far to the right that she didn't even say that. She said: well, um, I oppose the judiciary being political. You try to figure out what that means.
In fact, the entire election was absurd. All these justices say they're friends of labor. Not one of those guys mentioned unions throughout the entire campaign. Reagan's Central America policy is very unpopular with the population. Why didn't [Democratic Senator] Cranston run his campaign on opposition to Central America? It's because he's got Reagan's position on Central America. He didn't want to make Central America an issue. That's what we're talking about, bipartisan support to the war drive. Also, bipartisan support to this social crusade against you.
The drug witchhunt. The ruling class has declared a war on drugs. Total hypocrisy. The ruling class has pushed and made money from drugs I don't know since when. The British used drugs as one of their ways to conquer China; Hong Kong was founded on the profits of the opium trade. And who ran drugs all through the Vietnam War and before that out of the Golden Triangle? It was the CIA. Who provided the planes? It was CIA airplanes. When they talk about landing in those paddy fields, what do you think they were loading? It wasn't all orphans.
And in the cities. As just one example, you have the movie The French Connection, the biggest bust in heroin that's ever happened in New York City. They had the trial years later, not one speck of that heroin was left. They couldn't find it, it was all gone. It'd all been sold. It's obvious and has been documented—it's the cops. The cops either hold the pushers up for their cut and then the pushers charge that much more; or they just take the entire thing and sell it themselves. So what you get between the pushers and the cops is combat for profit. And that's the vice squad.
So this war on drugs is simply a tool to build the police department, to eliminate democratic rights so the police can go anywhere to terrorize black kids. And not only that. The conditions of capitalism in the ghettos are so severe with generational unemployment, with no possibility of getting out for these kids, no possibility of jobs, so why not take drugs? A black mother in the ghetto knows that there's a struggle every day, second by second, to save her child from that damned pusher. So what you get is the black hustlers like Jesse Jackson that come up and say to this black woman, "Yeah, you've got to support your cops, that's the answer." It's a rotten shell game.
Now, we're opposed to laws against what they call "crimes without victims." Basically it's a matter of personal rights. We feel that if somebody wants to take drugs, that's his own right. What kind of sex people want, that's their own right. We're against the state intervening in any of these questions. Now, it doesn't mean that we don't give a damn about a generation of ghetto kids that become addicts. But how do you fight that? How you fight that is by struggling against the ruling class and the conditions they impose by which the kids become addicts.
Now, in the black movement, there's always been two wings. One, the Jesse Jacksons and George Washington Carvers, the Uncle Toms, who say what you've got to do is, don't ask for anything from the white man, improve yourself in the eyes of the white man, and if you're good and good long enough, then you'll get something. And basically what it does, it accepts the terms of the racism of the oppressor. Jesse Jackson's recent statement is that drugs kill more than Klan ropes—does he want a united front with the KKK against drugs? Or what about a united front with the local racist politician against drugs? And then you've got Farrakhan who pushes the same stuff, except in his case, even worse—anti-Semitism, hustling black shampoo.
And then you have the wing of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois which fights against the conditions, and fights against the racists, and fights for equality. Our position is for revolutionary integrationism, black liberation through socialist revolution.
In California there was an "English-only" proposition on the ballot. Now, this is simply vengeance. Everybody who's had any contact with immigrants knows that the first thing they want to do and have to do is learn English. And by and large they always do learn English. It's critical for them obviously in terms of making money. What this stuff is of going after English-only and destroying bilingual education is to eliminate the possibility of immigrants learning English, to eliminate the possibility of them Irving a decent life in the United States so they don't come here.
Now, of course, one must understand that there are two classes of immigrants. There's the people who come from right-wing reaction, the states which are overwhelmingly supported by the U.S. government, like the Haitians. They don't get in. And then there are the exploiters, the people like [South Vietnam's Marshal] Ky, the protégé’s of the U.S., the U.S. stooges. Not only do they get in, but they get everything.
Dictatorship of the Property Party
Everybody talks about the two-party system in the United States. There's not a two-party system, there's a one-party system. And that party is the property party. The people that belong to that party are less than one percent of the population of the United States, and they own the United States. And they own the government; they run the Republican and the Democratic parties.
The only difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is how they do things, not what they do, and not where they're going. Basically when you become a politician in the Republican or Democratic parties, you get a job. And you don't go to your constituents and get a job. No, you go to the businessman, at whatever level, and get hired, get his endorsement. You're a hireling of the bourgeoisie. Capitalist politicians are generally not the top people around. These are the people who are not good enough to make a great career in the professions, law or things like that. So, you know, you've got a big mouth and you're not particularly successful, not real smart and you don't mind being a prostitute and saying whatever somebody tells you, you become a politician. The property party is what really makes the difference, that's what calls the shots in this country. The class nature of this country is that the people who own this country are the people who run this country. It is their dictatorship.
There is a major economic crisis, it's a crisis that capitalism's had since its inception. What you've got in this country is a question of overproduction in every major field. Protectionism is coming up over the question of U.S. cars, or whatever, and this is reactionary and we're opposed to it.
And you've got overproduction internationally, in steel, in cars, in computer chips. What happens when you get overproduction that exceeds the market's ability to buy? These things are not sold. You get bankruptcies. Economies go under. Now, what happens if you're the U.S. bourgeoisie, you can't sell your stuff, and you've become a weak country economically, but because of a quirk of history you have the strongest military forces, aside from the Soviet Union, in the world? Do you just sit there and say, well, we're not going to sell anything this year, so I think this country is simply going to go down the drain and I'm going to lose everything I got? No, you use your cards. You use your ace, and your ace is your military card. It's the only card the U.S. has right now. So you go into various countries or various areas of the world and you seize those markets. What that is is war. And capitalism has never resolved an overproduction crisis yet through any other agency except war.
Why do we always talk about the anti-Soviet war drive? Why can't there be coexistence, why can't they just disarm? Why can't they recruit some Democrats, maybe they'll get along? They can't get along for two reasons. One, the very fact of the existence of the Soviet Union as a workers state, however degenerated, threatens capitalism. But, two, you've got to sell your goods. And one-sixth of the world's humanity, if you can open it up for private property, that's an enormous market. That would give capitalism a new lease.
In the Communist Manifesto Marx says that the history of man is the question of class struggle, and that where one class cannot triumph over another in a clear way, sooner or later it leads to the ruination of both classes. So what we are facing is barbarism. The only alternative to that is the international proletariat taking power, and the critical aspect is not the lack of a working class or the lack of militancy or anything like that. We've seen plenty of that, we've seen strikes historically and even in the recent period. The question is leadership. And that's the Spartacist League."
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