Bush/Obama and the Bank Bailout

Workers Vanguard No. 1011	26 October 2012

Bush/Obama and the Bank Bailout

During the 2008 election campaign, we called Barack Obama a “Wall Street Democrat” when the bulk of the left was openly or backhandedly pushing his candidacy. During the intervening four years, Obama has amply confirmed our characterization. Nevertheless, right-wing demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck castigate Obama as a “socialist,” and Mitt Romney and other Republican politicians denounce him as “anti-business.” On the other side, some leading Democrats are using pseudo-populist rhetoric in attacking the Republicans for favoring the rich. At the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Joseph Biden lambasted the GOP for opposing “even one dollar—one cent—in new taxes for millionaires.” Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senatorial candidate in Massachusetts and a hero in liberal circles, declaimed: “Republicans say they don’t believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends.”

In reality, the Obama administration has been just as subservient to Wall Street bankers as its Republican predecessor. That reality is described in a factually detailed, firsthand account: Neil Barofsky’s Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (Free Press, 2012). Barofsky is the former Special Inspector General for the bank bailout program, initially called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). His efforts to impose somewhat more stringent conditions on the banks receiving hundreds of billions in government money—greater transparency, limits on executive pay—were continually opposed and obstructed by Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, and his cohorts. With the fervor of the newly enlightened, Barofsky exclaims:

“I had no idea that the U.S. government had been captured by the banks and that those running the bailout program I’d be charged with overseeing would come from the very same institutions that both helped cause the crisis and became the beneficiaries of the generous terms of the bailout.”

As a liberal, Barofsky believes that the U.S. government can and should serve the interests of the American people even at the expense of Wall Street. His assertion that the government “had been captured by the banks” implies that this was a relatively recent development, a notion currently widespread among liberals and reinforced by many reformist “socialists” who have cheered on the populist Occupy movement. However, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels stated in the Communist Manifesto over 150 years ago: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In capitalism’s imperialist epoch, which emerged in the late 19th century, the bourgeoisie as a whole is dominated by the lords of finance.

The financial abuses that concern Barofsky are but a small aspect of the system of exploitation, immiseration and oppression that is capitalism. Even if all of the policies advocated by him had been implemented and strictly enforced, they would have had little effect on the worsening conditions of the working class and poor amid the deepest and most prolonged global economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Here one can clearly see the destructive irrationality of the capitalist system. To overthrow that system and with it the political rule of the bourgeoisie, under both the Democrats and Republicans, requires a social revolution carried out by the working class allied with the impoverished black and Latino masses, establishing a workers government. Such a government would expropriate the productive wealth now in the hands of the capitalist class and establish a planned socialist economy, one based on meeting social needs, not maximizing private profit.

The Bipartisan Financial Elite

When the financial crisis hit Wall Street in the fall of 2008, Barofsky was a senior federal prosecutor, specializing in mortgage fraud, at the office of the U.S. Attorney in New York City. He was then offered the job of “SIGTARP,” special inspector general of the newly established TARP, by the outgoing Bush administration. Barofsky was surprised that as a known Obama supporter he was selected by this right-wing Republican administration for a supposedly important financial post.

In its own way, Barofsky’s appointment illustrates how the two capitalist parties, despite their sometimes heated rhetorical exchanges, collaborate when the vital interests of the capitalist ruling class are at stake. Bush’s treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs (the country’s premier investment bank), needed support for the bailout from the then Democratic majority of the House of Representatives and Senate. He was willing to pay a small political price by making one of their own the program’s “watchdog.” As it happened, this particular “watchdog” was rendered toothless by the subsequent Obama administration.

The top government financial officials, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, are mainly drawn from the same small pool of the Wall Street elite. A good example was Barofsky’s immediate boss, Herb Allison, head of TARP under Obama. A former CEO of Merrill Lynch, he was brought to Washington by Paulson during the financial crisis in late 2008 and made head of Fannie Mae. A giant government-sponsored corporation involved in mortgage finance, Fannie Mae was effectively nationalized to prevent it from going bankrupt. When the Obama team took over, they retained Allison, shifting him to another component of the government’s bailout of finance capital.

In his own naive way, Barofsky reveals the cynical manipulation of public opinion by the Democrats as well as Republicans. After Obama was elected but before he took office in January 2009, his main economic point man, Lawrence Summers, urged Congress to release the second $350 billion cache of the TARP funds. In doing so he said that the new administration would impose tougher conditions on the recipient banks. Barofsky recounts a conversation at the time with Neel Kashkari (also a Goldman alumnus), who was head of TARP in the lame-duck Bush administration:

“Kashkari dismissed the point, saying ‘Those new conditions are purely political. And I strongly suspect, even if they’re adopted, the new administration may not want you looking too closely at them.’ I was somewhat surprised that Kashkari was essentially accusing his incoming bosses of making false promises to Congress just to get their hands on the second cache of TARP funds. But he was ultimately correct; those ‘commitments’ never saw the light of day.”

Barofsky implicitly assumes that unlike the cynical Republican financial operative Kashkari many members of Congress, presumably mainly Democrats, were taken in by Summers’ “false promises.” They really weren’t that gullible. The main thing driving Obama’s men was to dampen popular opposition to and even outrage over the bailout of the bankers amid increasing immiseration for working people.

Barofsky looked forward to the new administration only to be bitterly disappointed by the replacement of the Republican Paulson by Democrat Timothy Geithner: “Whereas Paulson appeared to view SIGTARP as a potential ally that could help protect TARP and enhance its credibility, Geithner was utterly dismissive.” Geithner is another example of the bipartisan character of the financial elite. A career government functionary, Geithner started out at a think tank established by Henry Kissinger, a major Republican power broker. He then became a protégé of Summers, who served as an economic consigliere in the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Under Bush II, Geithner was president of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve (U.S. central bank). Along with Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, he initiated and organized the massive bank bailout.

An early instance of Barofsky’s disillusionment with Geithner’s Treasury Department concerned executive pay for the bailed-out firms. An especially egregious case was that of AIG (American International Group). A global insurance giant, AIG was a major provider of so-called credit default swaps (CDSs), a kind of insurance against the default of various types of bonds. When the financial crisis hit, AIG could not pay off the hundreds of billions it contractually owed to Goldman, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and other banks that had purchased its CDSs. The Treasury Department and Federal Reserve duly “rescued” the fallen insurance giant to the tune of $170 billion, money that went to pay off the holders of its CDSs.

In March 2009, Treasury officials approved $168 million in annual “retention bonuses” for executives in AIG’s Financial Products division, in Barofsky’s words, “the very unit whose reckless bets had brought down the company.” Pointing to the AIG bonus scandal, Barofsky comments:

“The Wall Street fiction that certain financial executives were preternaturally gifted supermen who deserved every penny of their staggering paychecks and bonuses was firmly ingrained in Treasury’s psyche. No matter that the financial crisis had demonstrated just how unremarkable the work of those executives had turned out to be, that belief system endured at Treasury across administrations.”

The Treasury officials’ dogged defense of the “staggering paychecks and bonuses” of Wall Street executives is not, however, motivated by the ideological biases that Barofsky ascribes to them. Rather, the false ideology—“these executives are worth every cent they make”—acts as a rationale for their material self-interest. The top officials of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and other government financial agencies typically come from and return to the boardrooms and executive suites of the big Wall Street firms. For example, when Neel Kashkari resigned as head of TARP, he moved on to a senior position in PIMCO, the world’s largest investment fund specializing in corporate and government bonds.

The Bank Bailout and Other Financial Scams

The official justification for the bailout was that it would enable and encourage banks to start lending again, especially to businesses, and thereby pull the economy out of the sharply deepening downturn. At the time, we predicted that was not going to happen. Right after Obama was inaugurated we wrote:

“Bank executives are fearful that additional loans will become additional losses. Through the massive sell-off of financial stocks...capitalist investors are forcing bank executives to rebuild their capital base however they can, including by reducing their outstanding loan volume. So any government bailout money is going to be hoarded, used to pay down the bank’s own debt or to take over weaker, failing competitors.”

— “Obama: CEO of Bankrupt American Capitalism,” WV No. 930 (13 February 2009)

Barofsky, who closely monitored how banks were using the bailout money, substantiates this prediction:

“Banks were beginning to talk to the press, and they were saying that they were using their taxpayer-supplied funds for just about everything other than increased lending that had been Treasury’s justification for CPP [Capital Purchase Program]. Buying securities, great; buying other banks, no problem; saving it for a rainy day, sure; but lending? It wasn’t happening.”

One of the few financial programs instituted by the Obama administration that was supposed to directly help working people hurt by the economic downturn was HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program). Announcing the program immediately after taking office, Obama claimed that it would enable up to four million homeowners to modify their mortgages to avoid foreclosure. To begin with, excluded from this program were people who were faced with losing their homes because they had lost their jobs and couldn’t find another one. To qualify for HAMP required a certain level of income from current employment.

Barofsky explains how this program mainly benefited the banks and their underlings, an especially sleazy type of financial operator called mortgage servicers. The latter collected the mortgage payments and, after taking their cut, transferred the money to the banks. Under HAMP there were two levels of mortgage modification (reduction): trial and permanent. A trial modification was much more lucrative for the banks and servicers than a permanent one. Under a trial modification all mortgage payments, even if made on time, were legally considered “late” because the amount was less than the originally scheduled amount. Participants were therefore charged a late fee that was waived only if the trial status was made permanent.

Servicers naturally used every means available to them, including outright fraud, to prevent trial modifications from becoming permanent. Many families were subjected to a lengthy trial period only to be denied permanent status. The banks then demanded they pay a huge “deficiency” bill—the accumulated difference between the reduced and original mortgage amount—plus late charges. Many families lost their homes because they participated in HAMP! Barofsky writes: “Borrowers who might otherwise never have missed a payment found themselves hit with whopping bills that they couldn’t pay and now faced foreclosure. It was a disaster.”

The HAMP scam demonstrated on a small scale the different ways by which the Democrats and Republicans serve the interests of Wall Street. The Republicans openly express hostility to and contempt for the working class, poor and oppressed minorities. Witness Romney’s recent rant against almost half the U.S. population because they “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing.” The Democrats claim to stand for the interests of working people, sometimes even at the expense of financial capitalists. But that claim is fraudulent.

In opposition to both parties of capital, we stand for a revolutionary workers party, part of a Leninist-Trotskyist international dedicated to fighting for socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist order worldwide. This will lay the basis for a rationally planned international economy. Only then will productive forces be developed and utilized such that poverty, scarcity and want are eliminated, creating the conditions for an egalitarian and harmonious society. 

SYC Protests NATO at CCNY

Workers Vanguard No. 1011	26 October 2012

SYC Protests NATO at CCNY

(Young Spartacus pages)

On September 27, City College of New York (CCNY) president Lisa Coico and her administration rolled out the red carpet for war criminal Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The New York Spartacus Youth Club protested outside Shepard Hall where Rasmussen, who presided over the 2011 NATO war on Libya, gave his talk “Why NATO Matters for You.” The slogans for the SYC speakout were: Protest Anders Rasmussen at CCNY—Secretary General of Blood-Soaked NATO War Alliance! U.S./NATO Forces Out of Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa! Imperialist Hands Off Syria! Down With Imperialist Sanctions Against Iran!

An SYC speaker addressed the protest: “The U.S.-dominated NATO alliance was forged after World War II—after the Soviet Red Army’s victory over Hitler’s Third Reich—as part of the imperialists’ drive to ‘roll back communism’.” She emphasized that in the post-Soviet world, NATO has served as an all-purpose tool for the imperialist subjugation of dependent capitalist countries, from Serbia in 1999 to Afghanistan and Libya today. Another SYC speaker called for all cops and military recruiters off campus and for abolishing the university administration.

A leading activist for Freedom Road Socialist Organization conspicuously stood apart from our protest and refused to join it. A supporter of the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) did join and take up some of our chants against imperialism. But the fact is, the LRP was in the same camp as NATO against the Soviet Union when it counted. By contrast, we communists gave unconditional military defense to the Soviet Union and fought for political revolution to oust the corrupt Stalinist bureaucracy. U.S./NATO hands off the world! 

California Prop 32 and Labor’s Ties to the Democrats-No on Prop 32!

Workers Vanguard No. 1011	26 October 2012

California Prop 32 and Labor’s Ties to the Democrats-No on Prop 32!

We print below, excerpted and edited for publication, the remarks of a Spartacist League supporter in the discussion at the L.A. forum on the elections. Proposition 32, cynically dubbed the “Paycheck Protection” act, is an anti-union initiative on the ballot in the November California state election.

The union bureaucracy has been pushing really hard for a no vote on Prop. 32. This proposition would make it illegal for any corporation or labor union to “make a contribution to any candidate” or to give money for a candidate’s use. As well, it would make illegal any payroll deductions for political purposes.

We say: vote no on Prop. 32! Government hands off the unions! We oppose this proposition because we oppose any and all intervention by the capitalist state—which is a machinery of repression defending the tiny class of exploiters against the working class—into the labor movement. The capitalist state has no business telling the unions what they should or should not do with their money. State intervention only works to subordinate the unions to the bosses’ government and to weaken their ability to wage class struggle.

For the misleaders of the unions, Prop. 32 is the devil because it undermines their entire strategy: support to the Democrats as illusory “friends of labor.” As one union paper stated, “If we are unable to support our political friends and fight our political foes, then the hard-core anti-union, anti-working people conspiracy will work to destroy the prevailing (union) wage, our benefits, and our pensions.” Of course, whom they see as their political “friends” are the Democrats and “foes” the Republicans.

The union bureaucracy’s strategy is actually a direct route to the graveyard. In fact, the Democrats today are in the forefront of the attacks against the unions. In California, it’s been [Governor] Jerry Brown and [L.A. mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa who have led the charge against teachers as well as public workers generally. Villaraigosa recently celebrated a success for his agenda: the city council increased the retirement age and decreased pensions for new city workers.

What is necessary is a fight for the complete independence of the unions from the state agencies and political parties of the class enemy. The question of where a union sends its money is a fight that must be waged within the union, as part of a political struggle to oust the labor misleaders and replace them with a revolutionary leadership committed to the fight to build an independent party of the working class. Such a party would not be an electoral vehicle but an instrument for leading a socialist revolution.

Students Must Ally With The Working Class

Workers Vanguard No. 1011	26 October 2012

SYC Presentation at Bard College

Students Must Ally with the Working Class

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below an edited presentation given by comrade Irene Gardner to students and campus workers at a May 9 Student Labor Dialogue meeting at Bard College in New York State. Although the liberal Occupy movement has dissipated during the 2012 drive to re-elect Obama, the central illusions propagated during these protests are still commonly shared among young activists.

Thanks for inviting us to speak with your group. Since you are interested in supporting workers, we are here to address the question: how to bring about the end of the exploitation of workers, of wage slavery, and bring about the liberation of all humanity? Well, you can’t do it by trying to fundamentally reform the capitalist system, by putting Band-Aids on it, by trying to pressure capitalist parties like the Democrats or by carrying out civil disobedience. The only way to ensure jobs and decent living standards, including free, quality medical care and education for all, is by seizing the wealth from the hands of the capitalist class through proletarian socialist revolution.

In 1848, Marx and Engels indicted the bourgeoisie as “unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society.” If the bourgeoisie of that time was unfit to rule, the imperialist rulers today have long passed their “sell by” date. It is high time that working people, who create the wealth in this society, run this society! We need an all new ruling class—the workers! Labor must rule!

A question that comes up a lot these days is what is the definition of class. A Marxist analysis is that social class is defined by your relationship to the means of production, not from a state of mind, nor how rich or poor you are. For example, a unionized worker in the building trades may make as much or more income than a yuppie supervisor in an office. Nevertheless, the worker still has an economic interest in overthrowing his capitalist exploiter, while the supervisor is an accessory to capitalist production and thus bound to its ongoing material success. The real, fundamental division in capitalist society is between the working class, which sells its labor power to survive, and the capitalist class, which is actually a very small fraction of the “1 percent.” In order to survive, workers have no choice but to sell their labor power as a commodity to the capitalists, who own the banks and the means of production, such as factories and mines.

Consciously or not, labor seeks to resist capitalist exploitation. It seeks to maintain and even raise its standard of living. It comes into constant conflict with the uncontrollable drive of capitalist production, which is the drive for the accumulation of more and more capital, and the production of more and more profit. This is the basis for class struggle: the irreconcilable class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These class interests are counterposed and cannot be harmonized.

Uniquely, the international working class possesses the social power—its ability to shut off the flow of profit by withholding its labor—and the collective interest to expropriate the bourgeoisie and reorganize society globally on a socialist basis. The intermediate social layers are part of the petty bourgeoisie—a heterogeneous class encompassing professionals, shopkeepers, students and others—who have no direct relationship to the means of production. Lacking social power, the petty bourgeoisie cannot provide an alternative to capitalism and, depending on which way the wind is blowing, will align either with the workers or against them. If the working-class leadership shows that it has the resolve and program to lead society out of its crisis, it can pull much of the petty bourgeoisie behind the workers in struggle.

For International Workers Revolution!

V. I. Lenin, who along with Leon Trotsky led the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, described how modern capitalism in the late 19th century reached its highest stage—imperialism. He described how the means of production came to be monopolized by fewer and bigger conglomerates with ever-growing needs for investment funds and other financing, leading to the dominance of finance capital, centrally the giant banks. As the capitalists in the advanced industrial countries strove for newer markets to exploit, they carried out wars to redivide the world and secure spheres of exploitation in less-developed countries. In their competition for world domination, the imperialist powers engulfed people around the world in the barbarism of World Wars I and II and waged countless bloody wars in colonial and semicolonial countries.

Reformist left groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Workers World Party raise the demand, “Money for jobs & education, not for war.” These slogans simply build illusions that mass protest can somehow pressure capitalism to stop being imperialist by somehow redirecting the budget. This is a total fallacy. As long as capitalism survives, there will be imperialist wars of depredation like Iraq and Afghanistan. The only way out of the endless cycle of capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars was shown by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, when workers took power in their own hands, expropriating the bourgeoisie and establishing the Soviet workers state.

Today the bourgeoisie uses every opportunity to proclaim that the destruction of the Soviet Union in the early ’90s proved Marxism to be a “failed experiment.” But the collectivized economy in the Soviet Union worked! Despite its isolation in a world dominated by imperialism, the Soviet Union, arising from deep backwardness and the destruction of world war, civil war and imperialist intervention, became an industrial and military powerhouse, even under Stalinist bureaucratic misrule.

When the capitalist world was in the midst of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union actually increased its industrial output. Now, two decades after counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet degenerated workers state, many in Russia long for the days when they were guaranteed a job, education, housing, health care and vacations, regretting that they were taken in by the myth of capitalist “democracy.” What undermined the collectivized economy, and ultimately laid the basis for the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, was the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, which beginning in 1923-24 robbed the workers of their political power and vainly sought to appease the imperialists by selling out workers struggles in other countries.

As Trotskyists, we continue to defend the existing bureaucratically deformed workers states—China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Laos—against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. These are countries where capitalism was overthrown and the economies collectivized. But they are run by nationalist, Stalinist bureaucracies that need to be thrown out by workers political revolution to institute workers democracy under the banner of revolutionary internationalism.

The Myth of “Pure Democracy”

Many of you may be involved with the Occupy movement, which raises calls for classless “democracy” and liberal reform, especially of the financial sector. But what is democracy in a class-divided society? Under capitalism, it is democracy for the ruling class, the owners of the means of production who construct and carry out laws to defend their private property. There are no laws that will establish equality between the capitalists and the working class. We fight against any attacks on democratic rights for the oppressed under capitalism, but it is futile to call for classless “democracy.” Real democracy for the working class, black people, immigrants and the poor can only be accomplished by the proletariat smashing the rule of the bourgeoisie and establishing its own class rule.

The Occupy protests have tapped into the widespread anger against the increasing destitution brought on by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But the populist notion that the struggle is about “reclaiming our democracy” from greedy bankers and corporate magnates is erroneous. This country was founded on the enslavement of black people and the genocide of Native Americans. Its history is riddled with the bodies of working-class fighters killed at the hands of the police or the courts. The banks and corporations didn’t “hijack” the government in the last couple of decades or with the onset of the Wall Street crash. The purpose of this government has always been to defend the property and profits of the ruling class.

The wealth of this country is actually overwhelmingly concentrated in the handful of families—far less than 1 percent of the population—that own the corporations and the banks and whose profits are derived through the exploitation of labor. This capitalist class runs both the Democratic and Republican parties, whose main difference is not what they do but how they do it. The Republicans make no bones about being the party of “big business” in viciously going after the labor movement and minorities. The Democrats lie and do the same thing. The “choice” at election time is simply which capitalist party will oversee the brutal repression of the working class and oppressed at home and prosecute U.S. imperialism’s bloody wars and occupations abroad.

The ubiquitous slogan of the Occupy movement—“We are the 99 percent”—is based on a populist notion of the “people,” which falsely lumps together everyone except for a small, rich elite, the so-called “1 percent.” According to this outlook, workers and the oppressed supposedly share common interests with the managers who fire their employees, cops who gun down black people and religious leaders who preach obedience to authority. This “99 percent” populism dissolves any understanding of the fundamental class line between workers and their capitalist exploiters.

Especially in the beginning of the Occupy protests, there were lots of illusions in the cops, with slogans like “NYPD is a layoff away from joining us.” Cops are not workers. The police are an essential part of the repressive state apparatus that exists (along with the prisons, courts and military) to defend the interests and rule of the capitalist class against workers and the oppressed. They break strikes, terrorize black and Latino youth and carry out vicious police repression of political movements. Contrary to illusions built by the reformist left and others, no amount of civilian review boards, “community control” or federal oversight is going to change that. We call for cops, prison guards and security guards out of the unions!

No Substitute for Labor’s Power

It’s good that many Occupy activists want to solidarize with labor, but for the most part workers are seen as simply another victimized sector of the “99 percent.” Protesters have been led to believe that solidarity with workers means setting up community pickets to shut down port operations (like on the West Coast), or calling for a “General Strike” (like on May Day with the call for no school, no work, no shopping). To be clear, these Occupy protests were not genuine strikes, and they did nothing to advance the workers’ consciousness of their power as a class. In a real general strike, workers actually shut down production and run various aspects of society themselves, thus posing the question of which class shall rule.

Some anarchists, like the Black Orchid anarchist collective in Seattle, openly try to pit Occupy against the unions, saying that Occupy represents a “new movement of the working class.” The unions, which were built in this country through hard class battles, must be defended, and there is no substitute for waging a political fight within the unions to build a new class-struggle leadership. During the Great Depression, when there was a brief upturn in the economy, workers began to engage in hard-fought battles to organize industrial unions. The sit-down strikes, mass pickets and other actions that built the CIO and the mass movement for integrated industrial unions were ignited by the 1934 San Francisco general strike and mass strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis the same year. All of those strikes were led by reds. New Deal social programs such as Social Security were implemented to head off the threat that continuing class battles would challenge capitalist rule. Following World War II, Cold War red purges in the unions drove out socialists and communists, including the Stalinist Communist Party which had channeled workers’ discontent into support for Roosevelt’s Democratic Party.

It will take a leadership committed to the political independence of the working class to pull the struggle forward. At times, the union tops can be pressured by labor’s ranks or by provocations of the bosses into carrying out strikes and other work actions. But within the labor movement, the proletariat is saddled with a pro-capitalist, protectionist union bureaucracy that promotes the lie that the interests of labor and capital are compatible. Instead of mobilizing in struggle, they tie working people and the oppressed to the capitalist system, especially through support to the Democratic Party. The trade-union tops poured a whopping $450 million into the 2008 elections, backing capitalist politicians like Obama as a “friend of labor.” Even though the Obama Democrats have stomped on unions, the trade-union officialdom will do the same thing this time around.

Reformist groups like the ISO argue that “many labor leaders have correctly seen Occupy as a key to a revival of the union movement” [“The Unions Weigh In for Occupy,” socialistworker.org, 10 November 2011]. To the contrary, the labor tops embrace the Occupy movement not to revive workers struggle but to divert workers’ discontent once again into the Democratic Party. This was put clearly in a [seiu.org, 16 November 2011] statement by SEIU president Mary Kay Henry: “We agree, all across SEIU, that we need to stand for a 99 percent agenda and re-elect our president, Barack Obama, and that those two steps are on the same path…so that we can make the 2012 election about the agenda for the 99 percent.”

It is absolutely necessary to forge a workers party to mobilize labor in struggle for its class interests; to fight against all forms of discrimination and for full citizenship rights for immigrants (and we’re not talking about a party like France’s Socialist Party or the British Labour Party, parties that administer the capitalist system). A revolutionary workers party is the critical instrument for leading the battle to sweep away capitalist class rule through proletarian socialist revolution.

Students can play an important role by allying with the working class and helping to build a revolutionary party. Student struggle can also provide a spark for broader social struggles. But there is no such thing as genuine “student power”—during the ’60s and early ’70s there were massive student strikes across this country against the Vietnam War, but in fact the bourgeoisie escalated the war. What ended the Vietnam War was the military defeat of U.S. imperialism by the Vietnamese workers and peasants.

Student power illusions are usually tied to the idea that the universities can become morally pure “ivory tower” communities isolated from the exploitation of bourgeois society if students apply enough pressure. But as university administration union-busting campaigns across the country show, capitalism doesn’t stop at the campus gates—immigrants and all workers are still exploited at institutions of higher education.

Under capitalism, colleges and universities serve an irreplaceable function: training the future administrative, technical and ideological personnel of bourgeois society. For the most part, children of the working class and minorities are excluded from quality higher education. We are for nationalizing private institutions and making them open to all, free of charge, with a state-paid living stipend so that all working-class youth have access to higher education. We also call for abolishing the administration, including the Board of Trustees—colleges and universities should be run by those who work and study there.

To conclude: the crisis of capitalism will not in and of itself catapult the proletariat to power. It is crucial that we build a revolutionary vanguard party that will bring the critical element of consciousness to the working class, to transform it from a class in itself to a class for itself, to do away with this entire system of wage slavery. The Spartacist League and its youth section, the Spartacus Youth Clubs, part of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), are committed to this task. Check us out, and join us in the fight for a socialist future! 

The Class Struggle and the Fight Against Reformism

Workers Vanguard No. 1011 26 October 2012 TROTSKY LENIN The Class Struggle and the Fight Against Reformism   The explosion of strikes in South Africa points to both the combativity of the proletariat and the role of the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy in subordinating the workers to the bourgeois state. In the 1938 founding document of the Fourth International, commonly known as the Transitional Program, revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky stressed the need for communist intervention into the wide range of class struggles in order to forge revolutionary workers parties worldwide. The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy. He fights uncompromisingly against any attempt to subordinate the unions to the bourgeois state and bind the proletariat to “compulsory arbitration” and every other form of police guardianship—not only fascist but also “democratic.” Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is successful struggle possible against the reformists, including those of the Stalinist bureaucracy.... At the same time, the Fourth International resolutely rejects and condemns trade union fetishism, equally characteristic of trade unionists and syndicalists. (a) Trade unions do not offer, and, in line with their task, composition, and manner of recruiting membership, cannot offer, a finished revolutionary program; in consequence, they cannot replace the party. The building of national revolutionary parties as sections of the Fourth International is the central task of the transitional epoch. (b) Trade unions, even the most powerful, embrace no more than 20 to 25 percent of the working class, and, at that, predominantly the more skilled and better-paid layers. The more oppressed majority of the working class is drawn only episodically into the struggle, during a period of exceptional upsurges in the labor movement. During such moments it is necessary to create organizations ad hoc, embracing the whole fighting mass: strike committees, factory committees, and, finally, soviets. (c) As organizations expressive of the top layers of the proletariat, trade unions, as witnessed by all past historical experience, including the fresh experience of the anarcho-syndicalist unions in Spain, developed powerful tendencies toward compromise with the bourgeois-democratic regime. In periods of acute class struggle, the leading bodies of the trade unions aim to become masters of the mass movement in order to render it harmless. This is already occurring during the period of simple strikes, especially in the case of the mass sit-down strikes which shake the principle of bourgeois property. In time of war or revolution, when the bourgeoisie is plunged into exceptional difficulties, trade union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers. —Leon Trotsky, “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International” (1938)

From The Pages Of Workers Vangaurd-Elections 2012:Wall Street Democrat vs. Wall Street Republican

Workers Vanguard No. 1011	26 October 2012

Elections 2012:Wall Street Democrat vs. Wall Street Republican

For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!

Part One

The following is a presentation, edited for publication, by Spartacist League spokesman Paul Cone at an October 13 forum in Los Angeles.

As revolutionary Marxists, our approach to the elections is the same as our approach to all our work and especially our interventions into class and social struggle. We seek to break the workers from illusions that the Democrats, Republicans or any capitalist party can be relied on to promote their interests, or that any lasting improvement of their lot can be achieved under capitalism. At bottom, the belief that any fundamental change for workers and the oppressed can be achieved through the ballot represents a utopian belief in the reformability of the bourgeois state.

We seek to instill in the working class, as well as radicalized youth, the recognition of the unique social power the proletariat possesses as the collective producers of most of the wealth of this society. Such social power needs to be realized through a party of their own, a workers party. What we mean by that is not an electoral vehicle but a party that leads the working class and oppressed in a fight for workers rule: the expropriation of the capitalist class through workers revolution and the formation of a workers government. In a society under workers rule, the productive capacity and resources are owned in common and production is based on human need—not the mad chase after profits.

I want to also point out that we communists would run for elective office and serve in the Congress and other legislative bodies as revolutionary tribunes of the working class—i.e., as oppositionists to the capitalist order. But we would not run for executive offices such as president, governor, mayor. Holding executive office means taking responsibility for the administration of the machinery of the capitalist state. Running for such offices can only reinforce illusions that the capitalist state, under the right leadership, can be made to serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed.

Although the working class here has historically waged some of the fiercest battles against the bosses and their state, the U.S. stands out as the only advanced capitalist country where the working class has not attained even a minimal level of political class consciousness. In its mass, the American working class has never supported a party whose declared ultimate goal is the replacement of the capitalist system with a socialist society, or which even claims to stand simply for workers’ interests in their day-to-day struggles against the employers. The two primary, and interrelated, obstacles have been illusions in the Democrats and the racial and ethnic divisions promoted by the capitalists, both of which are purveyed by the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy.

Capitalist Crisis: Workers Pay

This year’s elections come in the context of four years of the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We’ve seen the continued hemorrhaging of jobs, home foreclosures and massive indebtedness along with a massive bolstering of the forces of state repression under the pretext of the wars against terrorism and drugs.

To the tune of trillions of dollars, first Bush and then, even more so, Obama bailed out the con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were central to this collapse. The working class, black people, Latinos, the poor, the sick and the aged have been made to foot the bill. Alongside large-scale and long-term unemployment, corporate profits have, on the average, risen at an annual rate of 4.8 percent over the past three years. Over the past year, the net worth of the 400 richest Americans grew by $200 billion—an average of $50 million each. In that same period, median household income fell by 4 percent. In New York City, the center of American finance capital, nearly 1.7 million people are officially classified as poor, the highest figure in more than a decade. Officially, the homeless population of the city is 46,000.

The national jobs report issued on September 7 disclosed that only 69.8 percent of men over the age of 16 were either working or looking for work—an all-time low. With one-quarter of jobs paying below the poverty line for a family of four, 58 percent of all job growth since what they like to call the “recovery” is in low-wage occupations, earning less than $14 an hour. Six million people have no income other than food stamps. Some 2.8 million children live in households with incomes of less than $2 per person a day—a benchmark generally associated with the impoverished Third World.

In racist America, it’s all the worse for black people and Latinos, who were among the main victims of the banks’ subprime mortgage scams. One-third of black and Latino households have no net worth, with many underwater in debt. Over 25 percent of blacks and Latinos are officially recorded as living in poverty.

Periodic economic crises, such as the one we are in now, are inherent in the capitalist system of production for profit. In the 1930s, the one country that not only wasn’t ravaged by the Great Depression but experienced great economic development was the Soviet Union, where the working class in 1917 had taken state power, which was maintained despite the subsequent bureaucratic degeneration under Stalin. Today in the Chinese deformed workers state, where capitalism was overthrown by the peasant army led by Mao in 1949, state control of the economy has greatly offset the effects of the worldwide economic crisis.

Short of the working class taking power, there is no crisis that cannot be surmounted by the bourgeoisie. In “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” better known as the Transitional Program, which was written in 1938 during the Great Depression, revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky put forward a series of demands that are applicable today. These demands address the economic catastrophe facing the working class, “unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

In the face of mass unemployment, Trotsky called for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work, for a massive program of public works and for wages to rise with prices to guard against the ravages of inflation. To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the capitalist owners and the swindles of the banks, he argued that the workers should demand that the capitalists open their books. He also raised the call for the expropriation of branches of industry vital for national existence and of the most parasitic of the capitalist owners. He underlined that such a demand must be linked to the fight for the seizure of power by the working class, as against the Stalinist and social-democratic misleaders for whom the call for nationalization was merely a prescription for bailing out capitalist enterprises.

Trotsky bluntly put it: “If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish.” In opposition to the capitalists and their reformist agents, Trotsky argued that “‘realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’” would be “decided only by the struggle,” by means of which, “no matter what its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.”

Obama at Helm of U.S. Imperialism

Our opposition to Obama and the Democrats, no less than our opposition to the Republicans, is a class opposition. It’s not a protest against the Democrats’ failure to live up to expectations—they did exactly what we expected. It is not a search for some alternative within the capitalist electoral framework—a formation like the Greens or the Peace and Freedom Party that would supposedly break the two-party monopoly with a bourgeois third party. Nor is it an exercise of political coquetry: “Oh, if you know we always vote for you Democrats, what would compel you to carry out our political wishes?” All of these are how the radical liberals and reformist socialists approach the question of the Democratic Party. No less than open support to the Democrats, these do nothing to advance class consciousness but rather keep the working class enthralled to the capitalist order. They are all obstacles to building the revolutionary workers party necessary to end this nightmare of capitalism once and for all.

As we wrote four years ago (“Obama: Commander-in-Chief of Racist U.S. Imperialism,” WV No. 925, 21 November 2008):

“The election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States has aroused great expectations among working people and the oppressed around the world. Black people and others celebrated on streets throughout the country the election of the next Commander-in-Chief of bloody U.S. imperialism.... Amid fears of a new Great Depression...hopes for ‘change’ center on the incoming Democratic Obama administration. These hopes will be brutally dashed.”

We also pointed out: “As America’s next top cop, Obama will preside over the racist capitalist system, which is based on the exploitation of working people at home and abroad.”

That prognosis was verified—and then some. But we didn’t need a crystal ball. V.I. Lenin, who founded the Bolshevik Party and together with Trotsky led the October 1917 Russian Revolution—the only successful workers revolution in history—aptly described the choice in elections under capitalism as a process “to decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people.”

This time around, the reality show to become America’s next top war criminal pits the two rich white guys, Romney and Ryan—who look like a walking ad for khakis, hair gel and Pearl Drops tooth polish and who promise to eliminate just about all of the remaining government social services that are a lifeline to a large bulk of the population, while promising greater riches to the capitalists—against the hoops-playing, change-promising Obama, who stuffed his administration with a Wall Street all-star team, such as Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers and Jacob Lew. The Obama administration has handed out lucre to just about every industrialist and banker that came, hat in hand, knocking on the White House door—and not even spare change for the rest.

A lot has happened in the last four years. Mass unemployment has provided a more fertile climate for the decades-long attacks on the basic organizations of defense of the working class—unions. The current attacks were kicked off by the 2009 auto contracts forced upon workers at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler by the United Auto Workers’ Ron Gettelfinger and the newly elected Obama—part of the bailout of the auto bosses. This opened the floodgates for extending two-tier agreements to other union contracts throughout the country, and threw thousands of auto workers on the scrap heap.

We’ve seen the emergence of the Tea Party crazies, launched and funded by some of the fattest of fat cats in the conservative Republican establishment. They seem to have consolidated a great deal of control of the Republican Party, peddling religious obscurantism, anti-women bigotry, nativist hatred of anyone who wasn’t born in the U.S.—that is, born with white skin and speaking English. Their not so thinly veiled racism is expressed, among other ways, in the hallucinogenic belief that Obama is forcing socialism on the U.S., the only basis for which is his black skin. To defend the purity of elections, they have been on a drive to purge blacks and Latinos from voting, imbibing so much of the “voter fraud” Kool-Aid they have begun to visualize magic buses full of “illegal” voters pouring into polling places across the country.

After decades of massive redistribution of wealth to the richest sliver of the population under both Democratic and Republican administrations, even the bourgeois press has noted the gaping inequality between the haves and have-nots. The populist Occupy phenomenon burst across the scene with an impact reminiscent of the 1973 comet Kouhoutek.

Earlier this year Charles Murray, author of the racist screed The Bell Curve (1994), turned his attention to poor white people in a new book, Coming Apart. According to Murray, poor people are poor because they make poor choices—usually citing what he considers “moral” ones, like smoking, drinking, a little pot, having sex at a young age. As if the well-heeled don’t do exactly the same—and probably to a greater extent since they have the money to burn. (This is the same drivel that Bill Cosby, Obama and others have been handing down to poor black people to blame them for their oppression.) Obviously the poor “choices” begin with choosing to be born into a poor family. Although the book overwhelmingly represents the view of the capitalist class, it didn’t get that much play thanks to its inopportune timing—both political parties are fighting over precisely that demographic in the key swing states.

The right to abortion has been further eroded. Obama promised to ease the Republicans’ war on immigrants only to have his administration shatter prior records for deportations by such a wide margin it is a wonder they weren’t called before a Congressional committee investigating steroid use. Obama also promised to reverse much of the decimation of civil liberties under the “war on terror” only to expand government spying to a level that would make George Orwell’s Big Brother envious. Meanwhile we have seen authorized assassinations of U.S. citizens, indefinite detention and persecution of leftist opponents of government policies.

Two-Party Electoral Circus

In his September 25 lecture to the United Nations, Obama told this gathering of imperialist thieves and their victims that Americans “have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their view.” No. Since its emergence as an imperialist power with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S., like its imperialist rivals, has sent its young men, and now some women, to fight and kill in its quest for world domination, to secure markets and resources and geopolitical military advantage. For over a century, Washington has placed in power and/or propped up just about every military dictatorship around the world.

This Nobel Peace Prize recipient initiated a surge of troops for the occupation of Afghanistan and supplied the firepower for NATO’s devastation of Libya. He has bolstered U.S. military forces in Asia directed against the Chinese deformed workers state, declaring the Pacific to be the Pentagon’s number one priority, and the U.S. also maintains the embargo against the Cuban deformed workers state. Obama has also implemented starvation sanctions against Iran as punishment for their purported program of developing nuclear arms. U.S. drones regularly rain death and destruction from Pakistan to Somalia. DEA narcs help terrorize Latin American farmers and workers in the name of the “war on drugs,” and when the U.S.’s puppet rulers meekly suggest decriminalizing some controlled substances they get slapped down from Washington. U.S. imperialism, hands off the world!

Obama promised nothing to black people. He kept that promise. In the supposedly “post-racial” utopia ushered in by his election, we have the continued mass incarceration of black people and the escalating terrorization by cops of black and Latino youth in ghettos and barrios, which in turn fuels vigilante terror like the racist killing of Trayvon Martin.

Yes, Obama has done just about everything the capitalist masters asked and so much more. Yet from the day he took office, a core component of the Republican Party took to the streets demanding “Take our country back!” Back from whom? No secret there. Even as the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism, Obama is marked by his black skin and African heritage. Newt Gingrich called him the “Food Stamp President.” Romney, not unexpectedly, has even charged, falsely, that Obama is undoing Clinton’s signature law eviscerating welfare by removing the work requirements, resurrecting Reagan’s “welfare queen” chimera that impoverished black women are sucking up the government dollars of hard-working, tax-paying white people.

Add to these the likes of abortion opponent Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for Senator from Missouri, who said that a woman who gets pregnant following a rape wasn’t really raped; the spectacle at the Republican Convention, where a black woman working for CNN was pelted with peanuts while one of the Republican faithful screamed at her, “This is how we feed the animals”; the efforts across the country to destroy unions; draconian immigration laws enacted in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama and elsewhere. You get a sense of why workers, blacks, immigrants, women, gays, who have nothing to show for their past support, are going to again vote Democrat as a lesser evil.

How to account for a significant portion of the American bourgeoisie being so mentally unhinged? Did a Klingon warship pass over the U.S. 30 years ago firing some form of brain-destroying phaser? Maybe the answer is buried in the UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico. But I don’t think so. After the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, it appeared that the U.S. imperialists had finally become masters of the world. But even as the U.S. achieved unrivalled military supremacy, its industrial base continued to decline. To some in the ruling class, this decline of the country’s economic might defies explanation—besides being contrary to “God’s will.” In consequence, a wing of the bourgeoisie has seemingly gone totally insane.

The massive redistribution of wealth to the top, the increasing segregation of black people, shredding of the social “safety net,” embrace of “Christian family values,” rollback of democratic rights, imperialist wars and occupations: all have been bipartisan policies. The Republicans may explicitly announce that it is open season on workers and oppressed minorities; the Democrats instead offer a pat on the back, maybe a little consolation that we “share your pain,” while enforcing capitalist misery and social reaction, often more effectively.

Yet at the same time that the differences between these two capitalist parties have increasingly narrowed, the vitriol between them has grown. This is not a unique development. Writing about the 1912 presidential election won by the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, in an article titled “The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections,” Lenin observed:

“Since the Civil War over slavery in 1860-65—two bourgeois parties have been distinguished there by remarkable solidity and strength. The party of the former slave-owners is the so-called Democratic Party. The capitalist party, which favoured the emancipation of the Negroes, has developed into the Republican Party.

“Since the emancipation of the Negroes, the distinction between the two parties has been diminishing. The fight between these two parties has been mainly over the height of customs duties. Their fight has not had any serious importance for the mass of the people. The people have been deceived and diverted from their vital interests by means of spectacular and meaningless duels between the two bourgeois parties.”

Centrality of Black Oppression

Shortly after the Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election victory, Richard Viguerie, a key conservative fund-raiser and organizer, said, “It was the social issues that got us this far, and that’s what will take us into the future. We never really won until we began stressing issues like busing, abortion, school prayer and gun control.” Reagan aide Lee Atwater made clear what that meant. For obvious reasons I’m going to paraphrase here: “You start out in 1954 by saying the ‘N’ word. By 1968 you can’t say the ‘N’ word—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

In fanning the flames of racist reaction, the Republicans are implementing the “Southern Strategy” that has served them well for the past 40 years. The shape of bourgeois politics in America was fundamentally altered by the civil rights movement. The New Deal alliance between labor, Northern liberals and Southern segregationists cemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s was blown apart. The 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act, was the one who authored the “Southern Strategy,” persuading racist Southern Democrats—the Dixiecrats—to defect.

The bourgeoisie, which was willing to permit the gradual abolition of legal segregation and provide avenues for the upward social mobility of a small layer of black people, at the same time unleashed a campaign of white backlash which eventually took the form of opposition to “big government”—identified as forcing white children to go to school with blacks, giving tax money to black welfare mothers and poverty bureaucrats, and giving jobs to blacks and women under affirmative action. While most black people were no better off, the government created a layer of black middle-class professionals. Racist politicians began deliberately stoking white resentment.

All this underscores that the oppression of black people, a race-color caste overwhelmingly segregated at the bottom of society, remains at the core of American capitalism. The forcible segregation, stigmatization and vilification of those whose ancestors were dragged here in chains as slaves serves to maximize profits, regulate labor and divide the working class. As historic American Trotskyist Richard Fraser noted of segregation some 60 years ago:

“Prejudice is the product of this complex social relation. But although it is directed immediately against the Negro, its object is the working class as a whole. Through discrimination and segregation, Negro labor is degraded and its wage falls to the bare subsistence level. But this sets the pattern and controls the conditions of labor as a whole.”

— “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953), reprinted in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of His Work,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990

Fraser added: “Without racial separation in the United States, there would be no possibility of maintaining the discriminatory social and economic practices which are fundamental to the economic and social well-being of American capitalism, and its role in the world today.”

The fight for black equality remains the strategic question of the American revolution. We fight for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integrationism. In fighting for the working class to oppose all instances of racist discrimination, we have supported scatter-site public housing in opposition to residential segregation; defended school busing as part of our fight for free, quality integrated education; initiated mobilizations centered on the multiracial labor movement against KKK and Nazi terror. At the same time, we stress that genuine equality for black people in the U.S. will only come about through the smashing of capitalism, preparing the road to an egalitarian socialist order. This perspective is counterposed to liberal integration, which is premised on the utopian notion that equality for black people can be attained within this capitalist society founded on black oppression. Our perspective is counterposed as well to go-it-alone black nationalism—a petty-bourgeois ideology of despair which at bottom accepts the racist status quo.

There will be no effective resistance to the immiseration of American working people without the unity in struggle between the trade unions and the black and Latino poor. Despite the destruction of industrial jobs and erosion of union strength, black workers, who have a significantly higher rate of trade-union membership than white workers, continue to be integrated into strategic sectors of the proletariat, which alone has the power to shatter this racist capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program, black workers will be the living link fusing the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses with the social power of the multiracial proletariat under the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Únete a Smedley Butler Brigada de Veteranos por la Paz, a sus amigos y aliados de los Veteranos / Día del Armisticio domingo 11 de noviembre en Boston para una marcha contra la guerra y el Programa

Todos son bienvenidos. Ven y únete a nosotros para celebrar los Veteranos / Día del Armisticio, realmente un día Internacional de la Paz el domingo 11 de noviembre a una marcha y otras actividades.

Formar para el desfile al mediodía en la esquina de la calle Beacon Street y Charles (justo arriba de Cheers en la entrada para el Boston Common).

VFP Pavilion at Faneuil Market (Samuel Adams Park) desde las 11 AM PM -4. Se necesitan voluntarios para configurar el pabellón y el personal durante el desfile.

Programa de VFP en el Mercado Faneuil se inicia después de acabado desfile (aproximadamente a las 2:00 pm, pero está supeditada a la llegada del desfile oficial) con oradores, cantantes y bandas (entre 30 y 45 minutos, el más corto es el mejor)-Este-temas destacados del año No a la guerra contra Irán, Freedom For Private Bradley Manning.

Estaremos repartiendo panfletos durante el día en varios lugares del centro de la ciudad de Boston (incluyendo la oficina de reclutamiento de las Fuerzas Armadas en la calle Tremont y otros sitios TBA) repartiendo volantes que destacan nuestro dos principales cuestiones e Irán y Manning Bradley.

Venga a ayudar a establecer y dotar de personal del pabellón en el Mercado Faneuil. Ayuda folleto. Ayude a engrosar los números. Traiga VFPers compañeros y otros partidarios. Señalar este evento a los periódicos locales y decirles que usted estará allí para ayudar a nuestra campaña de publicidad.

From The International Communist League Press

Le Bolchévik nº 201	Septembre 2012

Débat à la fête de LO

Guerre d’Algérie : Voix ouvrière et la lutte pour l’indépendance

Lutte ouvrière (LO) avait décidé cette année, à l’occasion du 50^e anniversaire de l’indépendance de l’Algérie, de mettre l’accent lors de sa fête sur cet anniversaire. Elle avait invité plusieurs auteurs de livres et elle a organisé la projection de films importants sur la guerre d’Algérie, y compris le précieux film de Jacques Panijel sur le massacre des Algériens à Paris le 17 octobre 1961. De plus, LO a publié une nouvelle brochure spéciale de plus de 100 pages, un recueil de textes qu’elle avait publiés à l’époque.

L’un des principaux meetings de la fête, avec quelques centaines de personnes, était également consacré à la guerre d’Algérie. L’une des porte-parole de LO, Farida Megdoud, a introduit le débat en présentant longuement la position de l’Internationale communiste (IC), du temps de Lénine et de Trotsky, sur la question coloniale. Elle a particulièrement insisté sur le devoir pour le prolétariat des pays colonisateurs de soutenir inconditionnellement, un mot qu’elle a abondamment souligné avec une certaine solennité, la lutte des peuples coloniaux pour leur émancipation contre le joug colonial. Elle a bien sûr aussi mentionné, à juste titre également, la nécessité pour les communistes de préserver leur indépendance politique par rapport à la bourgeoisie ou à la petite bourgeoisie des pays coloniaux. Elle est revenue sur la lutte de l’Internationale communiste de Lénine et Trotsky pour forger la jeune section française de l’Internationale communiste (« la SFIC, pas le “PCF” », a-t-elle précisé) contre le chauvinisme colonial de la vieille SFIO, la social-démocratie de Jean Jaurès.

Megdoud a parlé de la lutte contre la guerre du Rif au Maroc au milieu des années 1920 et elle a mis en relief le soutien apporté par le PCF/SFIC à Abd el-Krim, le dirigeant de la lutte anticoloniale. Elle a dressé le contraste frappant entre cette politique et celle du PCF pendant la guerre d’Algérie : alors que certains de ses militants s’étaient mobilisés en soutien à la lutte pour l’indépendance, le PCF a trahi cette lutte, votant y compris les pouvoirs spéciaux pour la répression coloniale sous l’égide du gouvernement SFIO.

Megdoud tenait là des propos remarquables et dans l’ensemble très justes – mais qui n’ont rien à voir avec les positions réelles de Voix ouvrière (predécesseur de LO) à l’époque ni de Lutte ouvrière aujourd’hui. Il suffit de relever l’absence complète de LO l’année dernière de toute les manifestations parisiennes contre l’agression coloniale de l’impérialisme français pour déposer le président ivoirien Laurent Gbagbo et le remplacer par un laquais plus docile. LO craignait de se retrouver côte à côte dans la rue avec des militants nationalistes bourgeois pro-Gbagbo, ce qui montre que son « soutien inconditionnel » à la lutte des peuples coloniaux n’est qu’un sermon pour le dimanche de Pentecôte, pendant que le reste de l’année LO fait exactement le contraire.

A peine quelques minutes avant le discours de Farida Megdoud s’était en fait tenu un meeting de Lutte ouvrière sur les interventions françaises en Côte d’Ivoire, en Libye et en Afghanistan. Nous étions intervenus pour expliquer la position marxiste notamment en Libye : nous avions dans un premier temps dénoncé tant le gouvernement capitaliste sanglant de Kadhafi que les rebelles pro-impérialistes et tout aussi réactionnaires du « Conseil national de transition » (CNT), alors que ces derniers étaient promus par le NPA de Besancenot et ses multiples factions « oppositionnelles » ainsi que par Bernard-Henri Lévy, le « philosophe » impérialiste ami de Sarkozy. Mais lorsque la France et l’OTAN avaient commencé à bombarder la Libye, nous avions évidemment pris la défense de la Libye néocoloniale contre l’agression impérialiste, sans donner le moindre soutien politique à Kadhafi.

LO a eu une position inverse : d’abord la sympathie pour les rebelles islamistes contre le méchant dictateur Kadhafi, puis une neutralité à peine déguisée par des discours platoniques contre les bombardements impérialistes : LO a refusé de soutenir la Libye, « inconditionnellement » ou pas, contre les bombardements de Sarkozy. Roland Szpirko, l’un des principaux cadres de LO, a rappelé cette position de LO en réponse à notre intervention dans ce meeting. Szpirko faisait ainsi fi du rectificatif adopté subrepticement par LO lors de son congrès de décembre 2011 : LO, sans doute embarrassée d’avoir été prise la main dans le sac à exhiber de la sympathie pour le CNT, ce ramassis de réactionnaires islamistes anti-femmes, de racistes anti-Noirs, de monarchistes et d’agents impérialistes, avait adopté une résolution soulignant que « les aspects tribaux » dominaient dès le début les affrontements en Libye (Lutte de classe n° 140).

Pour en revenir au meeting sur la guerre d’Algérie, un camarade de la Ligue trotskyste est intervenu en ouvrant le débat :

« Le prolétariat a toutes raisons de saluer la défaite qu’a subie l’impérialisme français en Algérie il y a 50 ans. Il fallait soutenir la lutte pour l’indépendance sans donner le moindre soutien politique au FLN petit-bourgeois.
« La théorie de la révolution permanente, c’est la perspective d’une révolution ouvrière : seul un gouvernement ouvrier et paysan en Algérie peut véritablement lutter pour éradiquer l’oppression coloniale du pays et lutter pour l’extension de la révolution socialiste à la métropole impérialiste.
« Lutte ouvrière distribue donc une nouvelle brochure avec des dizaines de textes sur la guerre d’Algérie et les positions qu’avait Voix ouvrière. Je conseille vivement à tout le monde de la lire, car cela donne un tableau très révélateur de la politique de LO, à l’époque et aujourd’hui, à la fois pour ce qu’il y a dans la brochure et pour ce qui n’y figure pas.
« VO se contentait de revendiquer la fin de la guerre en disant qu’elle coûtait cher aux ouvriers français ; ils parlaient du rationnement de l’essence pour les ouvriers français, etc. VO n’a commencé à revendiquer explicitement l’indépendance qu’en septembre 1958, le mois où de Gaulle s’était prononcé pour l’autodétermination ! La première fois que VO mentionnait la torture c’était en mai 1959, plus de quatre ans après le début de la guerre.
« C’est toute la méthodologie économiste de LO qui s’exprimait pendant la guerre. VO refusait de soutenir activement la grève de huit jours des travailleurs algériens en 1957 pour l’indépendance (c’est là-dessus que commence la brochure), mais par contre elle pensait que la lutte économique des travailleurs contre le coût de la guerre allait transformer par elle-même la conscience des ouvriers. Il n’était donc nul besoin d’avancer un programme trotskyste révolutionnaire. Tout au plus VO pouvait-elle ainsi jeter les travailleurs dans les bras du défaitisme bourgeois représenté en fin de compte par de Gaulle qui a été finalement obligé d’organiser le retrait français d’Algérie.
« Lénine expliquait déjà en 1902 dans Que faire ? que l’économisme, c’est la politique bourgeoise de la classe ouvrière, c’était un pendant russe du réformisme graduel de Bernstein en Allemagne. Nous nous plaçons au contraire dans la tradition de Lénine et cherchons à construire un parti révolutionnaire d’avant-garde, un parti léniniste. Dès ses origines VO était au contraire sur une voie de garage opposée à la lutte pour la Quatrième Internationale. Celle-ci sera reforgée contre le réformisme syndical et municipaliste à la LO. C’est la perspective de la Ligue communiste internationale, qui en France publie le Bolchévik. »

La réponse de Megdoud à cette intervention, évitant soigneusement de répondre à nos critiques sur l’appel à l’indépendance et sur la question de la torture, n’a fait que confirmer la justesse de nos critiques. Elle a d’abord expliqué que leur brochure était un recueil de positions prises à chaud sur le vif en cherchant à s’adresser aux travailleurs alors que VO était encore une petite organisation avec moins de 30 camarades – comme si la faible taille de l’organisation avait été une excuse pour le fait que Voix ouvrière avait refusé de se prononcer pour l’indépendance. Ensuite elle a dit que dès 1945 VO se prononçait contre la répression (il faut remarquer à ce sujet que le groupe de Barta qui existait à l’époque, antécédent de Lutte ouvrière et autodissous en 1947, s’était prononcé pour l’indépendance de l’Algérie, une position que précisément n’avait pas reprise le groupe VO refondé par Robert Barcia au milieu des années 1950).

Farida Megdoud a aussi insisté qu’à l’époque il n’était pas si évident d’être pour l’indépendance dans la mesure où la cause algérienne était loin d’être populaire dans la classe ouvrière – encore une excuse pour la capitulation de LO face au chauvinisme présent parmi de nombreux travailleurs. Elle a insisté également sur l’atmosphère répressive de l’époque, l’hostilité du PCF – comme si cela justifiait de ne pas s’être opposé frontalement au sabotage par le PCF de la lutte pour l’indépendance. Elle est revenue une nouvelle fois sur l’insistance de l’IC à défendre le droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes.

La réponse de Megdoud était en train de se transformer involontairement en véritable réquisitoire contre les positions de VO pendant la guerre d’Algérie. Elle a essayé de se reprendre avec sa dernière planche de salut : l’ouvriérisme. Elle a déclaré que leurs positions étaient précieuses car ils étaient les seuls à s’adresser à la classe ouvrière. Quelle pirouette ridicule ! Toutes les organisations de la classe ouvrière se sont adressées sous de multiples aspects à la classe ouvrière à propos de la guerre d’Algérie à cette époque : la SFIO pour justifier la répression coloniale, le PCF pour excuser son propre rôle traître dans cette trahison (y compris le cassage des grèves contre la guerre en 1956 – voir notre article paru dans le Bolchévik n° 152, printemps 2000), les ancêtres du NPA de Besancenot pour soutenir politiquement les nationalistes petits-bourgeois du FLN, et ceux du POI de Gérard Schivardi et Daniel Gluckstein pour soutenir politiquement les nationalistes petits-bourgeois du MNA, rival du FLN.

La question n’est donc pas de se tourner vers la classe ouvrière, mais de le faire avec quel programme ? La conception qu’avait Lénine du parti révolutionnaire, et grâce à laquelle le parti bolchévique a pu mener les ouvriers russes à la victoire en Octobre 1917, c’est un parti ouvrier d’avant-garde présentant à la classe ouvrière un programme pour la mobiliser vers la lutte pour le pouvoir, et, s’adressant au-delà de la classe ouvrière aussi, présentant un programme pour l’émancipation de tous les opprimés sous le capitalisme. LO prétend au contraire qu’ils étaient trop petits à l’époque pour pouvoir dire la vérité aux travailleurs (et ils reprennent encore cet argument aujourd’hui à l’occasion quand ils disent que de toutes façons leur influence est marginale dans la classe ouvrière, comme si du coup ce qu’ils y font n’avait pas d’importance). En l’occurrence, il fallait mobiliser la classe ouvrière pour soutenir activement la lutte pour l’indépendance de l’Algérie, dans le cadre d’un programme pour la révolution socialiste des deux côtés de la Méditerranée. C’est un tel parti que nous cherchons à construire.

VO, au contraire, s’adaptait à la conscience du moment des travailleurs, alors influencés par le stalinisme. Au lieu de chercher à mobiliser politiquement les travailleurs en solidarité avec le peuple algérien en lutte pour son indépendance, elle cherchait à ramener les travailleurs vers la lutte économique. Elle disait par exemple dans un éditorial du 24 avril 1957, typique de ses écrits d’alors : « Nous pouvons nous battre pour défendre notre niveau de vie. C’est seulement si nous nous laissons appauvrir que Mollet [le chef du gouvernement, SFIO] pourra continuer la guerre. C’est notre seul moyen de pression, mais c’est aussi le plus efficace : refuser de faire les frais de la guerre, refuser de payer. »

VO faisait croire que la lutte économique contre le coût de la guerre, contre son impact sur le panier de la ménagère, etc., ferait par elle-même progresser la compréhension politique des travailleurs. En escamotant la lutte dans la classe ouvrière française pour l’indépendance de l’Algérie, elle s’est retrouvée à la remorque du PCF à un moment où celui-ci trahissait cette lutte. LO est bien plus à droite aujourd’hui qu’à l’époque, elle participe même à des coalitions avec la bourgeoisie et le PCF pour gérer des municipalités capitalistes, mais elle n’a pas changé fondamentalement de méthode. Comme nous le disions dans le dernier numéro du Bolchévik, leur conception, c’est celle d’un parti anti-léniniste d’arrière-garde. C’est en détruisant l’influence politique de ces économistes, comme l’avait fait Lénine au début des années 1900, que l’on construira le parti ouvrier révolutionnaire dont ont besoin les travailleurs pour en finir une bonne fois pour toutes avec ce système capitaliste d’exploitation et d’oppression.

On Howard Zinn

For Immediate Release

Contact

Jim Plank

mailto:sarah@haymarketbooks.org

773-583-7884

“To hear him speak was like listening to music that you loved: lyrical, uplifting, honest.” --Michael Moore

"Wise, humorous, serious, without one moment of hesitation in tackling who we are as a people, a country, and a world." --Alice Walker

HOWARD ZINN SPEAKS

Collected Speeches 1963-2009 | From the Author of A People's History of the United States | Available for the first time

Edited by Anthony Arnove |

Pub date: Nov. 19 | Haymarket Books, Simultaneous release in

Trade Cloth, $26.95, 320 pp, ISBN 978-1-60846-223-0 | Trade Paper, $18.95, 320 pp, ISBN 978-1-60846-259-9

Enhanced E-book, $12.99, 320 pp, ISBN 978-1-60846-260-5 | E-book, $9.99, 320 pp, ISBN 978-1-60846-228-5

HOWARD ZINN (1922-2010) illuminated our history like no other with his classic, A People's History of the United States. A lifelong activist, WWII veteran, and professor, he was also one of the great orators of the twentieth century.

Howard Zinn Speaks: Collected Speeches 1963-2009 spans five decades of Zinn's thought, covering topics on

war, racism, social movements and more. Praise:

"I hesitate to comment on Howard Zinn Speaks because of my unshakable and overt bias for anything Zinn. But then again having a Zinn bias just means you favor truth and justice over lies and oppression." --Lupe Fiasco

“Always enlightening, often stirring, an amalgam of insight, critical history, and wit, blended with charm and appeal.” --Noam Chomsky

“Howard Zinn’s speeches, beautifully gathered together here by Anthony Arnove, are a joy and an inspiration.” --Marisa Tomei

“These speeches are righteous songs filled with the boldness, vision, humor, depth and urgings of his profoundly human voice.” --Eve Ensler

“Howard Zinn was one of us, the best part of us. Enjoy these speeches. Hear his voice. Then hear your own, closely.” --Josh Brolin

"Great reading for students and teachers—especially when read aloud." --Rethinking Schools

HOWARD ZINN (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People's History of the United States, “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”

The book, which has sold more than two million copies, has been featured on The Sopranos and Simpsons, and in the film Good Will Hunting. In 2009, HISTORY aired The People Speak, an acclaimed documentary co-directed by Zinn, based on A People's History and a companion volume, Voices of a People's History of the United States.

Zinn grew up in Brooklyn in a working-class, immigrant household. At 18 he became a shipyard worker and then flew bomber missions during World War II. These experiences helped shape his opposition to war and passion for history. After attending college under the GI Bill and earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia, he taught at Spelman, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of Political Science at Boston University, were he taught until his retirement in 1988. Zinn was the author of many books, including an autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, the play Marx in Soho, and Passionate Declarations. He received the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Eugene V. Debs award for his writing and political activism.

ANTHONY ARNOVE wrote, directed, and produced The People Speak with Howard Zinn, Chris Moore, Josh Brolin, and Matt Damon; and co-edited with Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History. Arnove’s writing has appeared in The Financial Times, The Nation, Mother Jones, and more. He has appeared on BBC, Democracy Now!, Sky News, and public radio programs across the country.

PUBLICITY REQUESTS

Please contact Jim Plank, Publicity, Haymarket Books, at jim@haymarketbooks.org or 773-583-7884 for review copy and interview requests. Anthony Arnove is available for select interviews to discuss Howard Zinn Speaks.

ADDITIONAL INFO

Howard Zinn Speaks

Collected Speeches, 1963-2009

Edited by Anthony Arnove

Published by Haymarket Books

Pub date: Oct. 26 | Haymarket Books, Simultaneous release in

Trade Cloth, $26.95, 320 pp, ISBN 978-1-60846-223-0 | Trade Paper, $18.95, 320 pp, ISBN 978-1-60846-259-9

Enhanced E-book, $12.99, 320 pp, ISBN 978-1-60846-260-5 | E-book, $9.99, 320 pp, ISBN 978-1-60846-228-5

Haymarket Books

http://www.haymarketbooks.org/

Workers Struggles

TOMORROW! URGENT ACTION! Immigrant Workers Continue Their Fight for Justice The workers have brought their demand for payment of $183,500 in non-payment of wages and overtime to U.S. District Court in Massachusetts! What: With the legal support of Greater Boston Legal Services a group of Latino immigrant workers and members of Centro Presente have brought their demand for payment of $183,500 in non-payment of wages and overtime to U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. "We have been fighting this case for nearly a year and now finally we've had enough and we're going to court to get what we earned," stated Marcos Che Cucul one of the affected workers. The workers were employed by Mumbai Chopstix located on Newbury Street in Boston, Bukhara in Jamaica Plain, Diva Indian Bistro in Somerville's Davis Square and Cafe of India in Cambridge. These restaurants are part of Amrik S. Pabla's One World Cuisine restaurant group. The workers first came to Centro Presente almost a year ago with their case and have since been managing their public campaign to get their rightfully earned wages through negotiating with the owners. In the process they learned about their labor rights and educated the general public about immigrant labor exploitation. Where: Diva Indian Bistro, 246 Elm Street, Somerville, MA. When: Tomorrow, Friday, November 2nd at 6:00 p.m. For more info please contact: Patricia Montes at 617.959.3108 COME DOWN TO DAVIS SQUARE TOMORROW NIGHT AND SUPPORT IMMIGRANT WORKERS IN STANDING UP FOR THEIR LABOR RIGHTS!! ¡UNION! ¡PODER! ¡JUSTICIA! # # # Centro Presente is a state-wide, membership-based Latino immigrant organization that advocates for immigrant rights and for economic and social justice through the integration of community organizing, leadership development and basic services. Join Our Mailing List! Centro Presente 17 Inner Belt Road Somerville, Massachusetts 02143

COME TO A PLANNING MEETING FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS TO LEARN

MORE AND TO ORGANIZE FURTHER ACTIONS AGAINST THE ILLEGAL SURVEILLANCE

OF THE BPD AND THE BRIC OPERATIONS

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1:30-3:30 PM

HARVARD LAW SCHOOL

WASSERSTEIN-CASPERSEN HALL, RM 1010

6 EVERETT ST., OFF MASS. AVE., NORTH OF HARVARD SQ.

There is a long history of the police and FBI targeting peace and social justice groups, unions, and minority communities for surveillance, disruption and even worse. These assaults on our civil rights and liberties have intensified since 9/11 and the unleashing of the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

in spite of their attempts to cover up their unlawful actions, thanks to the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU of Massachusetts, they got caught:

From ACLU/NLG press release: Boston Police officers make video recordings of peaceful demonstrations and track activists as well as the internal workings of political groups--even when there is no indication of criminal activity or a threat to public safety. The documents reveal that officers assigned to the BPD's regional domestic spying center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), file so-called "intelligence reports" mischaracterizing peaceful groups such as Veterans for Peace, United for Justice with Peace and CodePink as "extremists," and peaceful protests as domestic "homeland security" threats and civil disturbances. These searchable records are retained for years, in violation of federal regulations, and were turned over to the ACLU and NLG only after they sued for access on behalf of local peace groups and activists.

The activist community is justifiably outraged and many wish to take more action. We know that the files that were released are just the tip of the iceberg and involve many more organizations and constituencies than involved in the recent lawsuit.

This is not a public meeting for wide publicity – it is an organizational meeting to discuss our options and to plan additional action.

Lawyers and representatives of the NLG and the ACLU will be there to put the current findings in context and discuss what further legal actions, if any, can be taken. Other suggestions that have been made for actions include: legislative action, petition campaign, demonstrations, letter writing, educational forums. We can decide to do any or all of these and set the goals for what we want to achieve.

For more information and to watch a video: www.aclum.org http://www.nlgmass.org

In the meantime, you are encouraged to send letters to the news media and to Mayor Menino and Police Commissioner Ed Davis.

Mayor Menino

One City Hall Square, Suite 500

Boston, MA 02201-2013

Commissioner Ed Davis

One Schroeder Plaza

Boston, MA 02120