Australasian Spartacist No. 218	Summer 2012/13

Anti-Woman Bigotry and Gillard's "Misogyny" Speech

ALP Government: Enemy of Workers and Oppressed

For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

On 9 October, when federal Labor leader Julia Gillard delivered her parliamentary broadside against Liberal Opposition leader Tony Abbott, lambasting his misogyny, the speech rapidly went global, making international headlines and becoming an overnight YouTube hit. At home, Gillard’s sagging approval rating bounced in the polls, her speech striking a chord with women of all ages across the country. Ever since replacing Kevin Rudd as prime minister in 2010, Gillard has faced a relentless anti-woman barrage from a reactionary cabal extending from redneck yahoos to the inner sanctums of the Tory Liberal/National Party coalition, and fuelled by elements in the bourgeois media. From shock-jock celebrity Alan Jones ranting that Gillard should be “put in a chaff bag and thrown into the sea,” to Abbott sneering at the PM “to, politically speaking, make an honest woman of herself,” the sleazy campaign of denigration directed against Gillard, the country’s first female prime minister (and moreover childless, an atheist and living in a de facto relationship), is par for the course in this deeply sexist society.

While Gillard’s speech was one of those rare occasions when some fragments of truth are heard from the pigsty of bourgeois parliament, her concern for “the role of women in public life and in Australian society” most certainly does not extend to poor and working women. On the same day Gillard delivered her speech, both major parties voted up legislation to throw single parents off support payments when the youngest child turns eight. Over 100,000 sole parents, overwhelmingly women, will be forced onto pitiful “Newstart” dole payments, driving their families further into poverty. Promoted as an “incentive” to work, it cuts the incomes of thousands already working casual and low-paid jobs.

Almost three weeks earlier, Gillard voted against a bill that would have overturned the discriminatory ban on gay marriage. And while she promises the ALP “will always support and protect access to publicly funded abortions” (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August), Gillard heads a party that invariably allows its MPs a “conscience vote” on abortion (just as it did on gay marriage), pandering to the powerful Catholic right within the party machine. Abortion, a medical procedure, is the subject of criminal law in most states and territories. Where it is legal, restrictions apply particularly to late-term abortions. Access is further impacted, to a greater or lesser degree, by ethnic and class advantages.

ALP Enforces Capitalist Class Rule

The minority Labor Party government that Gillard leads, while fragile (dependant on Greens and “independents”), does not lack zeal in proving its fitness to legislate for the profit-driven Australian ruling class. Alongside union-busting attacks by its Fair Work Australia industrial courts, this government has presided over the increasing casualisation of the workforce, the increasing cost of scarce childcare services, and a crumbling public health-care system. The gap between women’s and men’s wages has widened as has the gap between rich and poor, with homelessness on the rise. Today, more than two million Australians (almost ten percent of the population) live below the poverty line, including one in six children.

Gillard’s speech has been described as a watershed moment for Australian women. In fact, it is about as hollow as Rudd’s duplicitous “apology” to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations. The ALP has extended the former Howard Liberal/National Coalition government’s Northern Territory “Intervention,” a repressive police occupation of Aboriginal communities carried out under the pretence of “child protection.” It includes paternalistic welfare “quarantining,” an insult not least to Aboriginal women. Alongside facing state terror, Aboriginal communities are starved of adequate housing, medical and school facilities, with the resulting heightened social disorders then used as “proof” that they can’t continue residing on lands that are potential future mining bonanzas.

Hand-in-hand with brutality against Aborigines is the government’s barbaric treatment of refugees, outbidding the Coalition to win the racist, xenophobic vote. Alongside this have been military ventures from East Timor to the Solomons, and participation in blood-stained U.S.-led imperialist occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan in which hundreds of thousands have died including women and children. Just a few days after her speech, Gillard visited the Australian troops in Afghanistan to cheer them on. Having overturned the ban on women in combat roles, Gillard now offers both men and women a “future” as cannon fodder for the imperialist military. We say: Not one person, not one cent for the bloody Australian military! Australian troops/cops get out of Afghanistan, North Africa, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia!

The ALP is what Marxists call a bourgeois workers party: while based on the trade-unions, it has a thoroughly pro-capitalist program and leadership. In government, the Labor Party always serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, maintaining capitalist order to ensure the continued exploitation of the working class. In this they work closely with the bureaucratic misleaders of the trade unions, who promote class-collaborationist nationalism, protectionist poison and arbitration in the service of strangling impulses for struggle among workers. While thousands of men and women are being thrown out of jobs, for example in the manufacturing and retail industries, these sell-outs bow to the bosses’ laws and courts, which serve to keep workers’ struggles within the bounds acceptable to the capitalist ruling class.

Working men and women need a revolutionary workers party that fights in their class interests against the bosses and stands as a tribune of the people. Building such a party will take a political fight in the unions to replace the Laborite social-democratic union misleaders with a new, class-struggle leadership. What’s needed is determined class struggle completely independent of the bosses’ state, and combining a fight against union busting and job casualisation with opposition to the all-sided attacks on women and ethnic minorities at home and the ravages of imperialism abroad.

A class-struggle leadership in the unions would mobilise workers behind the fight for women’s rights; for free abortion on demand, for freely available, safe contraception, linked to the call for free, quality health care for all; for fully paid maternity and paternity leave and free 24-hour childcare to address the deep class and race oppression of poor and minority women. It would take up the fight for decent hours at union pay and conditions and for equal pay for equal work, including for immigrants, minorities, women and youth. It would fight unemployment through a struggle to reduce the workweek with no loss in pay—make the bosses pay! An all-out struggle to organise the thousands of non-unionised women, immigrants, minorities and young workers would do much to revitalise the declining union movement. However, ultimately, providing all with even the basic necessities of life—decent jobs, free quality, secular education and health care, decent affordable housing and public transport—requires a workers state with a planned collectivised economy where production is organised for the needs of society not for capitalist profit.

Marxism Vs. Feminism

Gillard’s “misogyny” speech has helped put the wind in the sails of feminists, already buoyed by recent activity around women’s rights. For those like Labor-loyal arch-feminist Ann Summers, opposition to the anti-woman chauvinism aimed at Gillard is closely entwined with wanting to “restore some dignity and respect to the holder of our highest office” (“Her Rights at Work [R-rated version],” 31 August). When writer and feminist Sophie Cunningham lamented in a 2011 speech on women’s inequality that women “own one percent of the means of production,” she captured the feminist establishment’s chief quarrel with capitalist society: being denied full access to the boy’s club of ruling-class power.

Feminism holds that the main division in society is between men and women rather than classes, that is, the capitalist class versus the working class. Denying the primacy of class divisions in society, feminism is a bourgeois ideology that views women’s oppression as a set of bad ideas and policies stemming from the existing patriarchy. Rejecting the fight to overthrow the capitalist system, many feminists have secured careers in the Labor Party and the trade-union bureaucracy where they have helped to oversee cutbacks and union-busting by the ALP federally and in the states which have particularly hit their working-class “sisters.”

A case in point is the previous Queensland state Labor premier Anna Bligh, a “pro-choice” feminist. A former student campaigner for abortion rights, Bligh administered the capitalist state, upholding archaic anti-abortion clauses in its Criminal Code. Doubtless many feminists look to women in Gillard’s cabinet such as Jenny Macklin, Tanya Plibersek, Penny Wong and Nicola Roxon, who all play pernicious and very specific roles administering the system for the bosses, driving down the conditions of the proletariat and oppressed.

Functioning entirely within the framework of bourgeois society, feminism is incapable of resolving women’s oppression, which is rooted in the institution of the family, a fundamental prop of capitalist class rule along with religion. In Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels traced the origin of the institution of the family and the state to the division of society into classes, leading to the special oppression of women. Engels explained that with the rise of a social surplus beyond basic subsistence, a leisured ruling class developed based on private appropriation of that surplus. The centrality of the family, the main source of women’s oppression, flowed from its role in the raising of the next generation and in the inheritance of property, which required women’s sexual monogamy and social subordination. Engels termed this “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.”

While women’s oppression affects women of all classes in this society, it is a feminist myth that women can advance their interests together in “sisterhood.” Women workers have more in common with their male co-workers than with a female boss. The role of women in production as workers gives them the social power, along with their male co-workers, to destroy private property in the means of production and lay the material basis for women’s emancipation. Thus the liberation of women is the task of the working class as a whole. Alongside giving full legal equality, a workers state will replace the social functions of the family with communal methods. Women will no longer be tied to household drudgery, but free to participate fully in economic, political and social life.

Our proletarian revolutionary perspective is counterposed to the outlook peddled by reformist left groups such as the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP)/Radical Women (RW). Paying lip service to Marxism while reinforcing feminist illusions among women, these “revolutionary feminists” declare “women will liberate ourselves only by uprooting the profit system and replacing it with a socialist communal society” and “women’s liberation can only be won by a movement of radical women” (Freedom Socialist Bulletin, Summer/Autumn 2005).

Leading FSP/RW cadres, Alison Thorne and Debbie Brennan, are among those supporting the recently formed Melbourne Feminist Action (MFA). Fellow MFA supporters include veteran anti-communist feminist writer Eva Cox. MFA’s first public action was a 300-strong defence rally at the East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic, which is picketed daily by anti-abortion bigots. Called around the slogan “Our Clinic, Our Bodies, Our Choice,” the rally included among its demands that nearby St Patrick’s Cathedral condemn and refuse support to the “anti-choice” harassment. The futility of appealing to the woman-hating established churches is shown by the horrific death in Ireland of Savita Halappanavar after being refused an abortion under the laws of that Catholic-dominated state.

The FSP/RW’s “feminist unity” mongering invariably leads them to embrace cross-class community campaigns, in which the need for an independent proletarian-centred class-struggle fight is buried. While it is a good thing that so many turned out to defend the clinic, we recognise the need for such defence to be allied to the working class, the social force with the power to lead all the oppressed in struggle and ultimately to sweep away the entire barbaric capitalist system. We call for a fight to defend and extend women’s rights, including the right to abortion, through the independent mass mobilisation of the oppressed backed by the social power of labour. This is the road to decisively routing the religious cranks and their potentially murderous and fascistic hangers-on.

Like the FSP, Socialist Alliance (SA) also identifies itself with feminism. At this year’s annual feminist “Reclaim the Night” rally on 20 October in Melbourne, SA cadre Margarita Windisch shared the platform with writer and feminist Clementine Ford, and Durkhanai Ayubi, a senior policy analyst with the Gillard government. Unsurprisingly, Windisch’s speech was bereft of any mention of socialism or even capitalism for that matter. As reported in Green Left Weekly (31 October), she offered “congratulations” to Gillard for acknowledging sexism while simply looking to “shame” her over cuts to welfare. Reporting on a new study on violence against women, Windisch enthused, “the mobilisation of feminist movements is more important for change than the wealth of nations, left-wing political parties or the number of women politicians. Clearly, the onus is on us to make change.”

In an open reformist appeal to the state, Windisch called for women to play “our gender card” including “until sexual assault and domestic violence is taken seriously by the courts and the police” and “until our[!] troops are not used to invade other countries and kill our sisters.” Dare we ask, are Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton also playing their “gender cards” as they help oversee the bloody imperialist occupation of Afghanistan? Contrary to Windisch’s anti-Marxist feminist mush, the capitalist state—at its core, the military, courts, prisons and police—exists to uphold the interests of the capitalist class. As Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin spelt out, it can’t be reformed or pressured to act on behalf of the oppressed; it must be smashed through workers revolution and replaced by a workers state.

While, around the country, the “Reclaim the Night” (RTN) marches protesting violence against women were mostly small events, the rally in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick attracted some 5-7,000 people, reportedly the largest gathering in over ten years. It tapped into the widespread and justified horror at the brutal abduction, rape and murder of a 29-year-old local woman and ABC worker, Jill Meagher, in late September. On 30 September, amidst a media campaign promoting unifying as one community, up to 30,000 Melburnians took part in a “peace” march in Meagher’s memory and opposing violence against women. The bourgeoisie seizes on the fear and uncertainty created by vicious crimes such as the murder of Jill Meagher to promote “law and order.” Thus, the Victorian Liberal state premier, Ted Baillieu, pledged $3 million to councils to improve “security” by expanding the number of invasive CCTV cameras.

“Reclaim the night” marches have a history of making not-so-thinly veiled calls to strengthen the state and its repressive apparatus, particularly the cops. While Melbourne’s RTN organisers trumpeted that they “refused to engage with any policies that would give further powers to police,” nevertheless speakers such as Windisch promoted a touching faith in the capitalist state and the organisers also thanked the Brunswick police who “supported the march from the very beginning and worked with us to make it safe” (www.facebook.com/ReclaimTheNightSydneyRd2012, 21 October).

Anti-Communist Opportunists in a Tangle

For their part, the anti-communist Socialist Alternative have caused a stir amongst the reformist left, including their own membership, with a 22 November article penned by Louise O’Shea entitled “Jill Meagher, Reclaim the Night and the political right.” Seeking to distance SAlt from bourgeois feminism, but lacking the necessary Marxist program to do so, O’Shea’s article is peppered with rhetoric against class collaboration. This takes some chutzpah given that SAlt is immersed in class-collaborationist politics, from entrenching itself in cross-class anti-war coalitions to calling for a vote to the capitalist Greens in numerous parliamentary elections.

According to O’Shea, “Socialist Alternative’s central criticism of the Jill Meagher phenomenon and mobilisations around it was that they were a vehicle through which the rich and powerful could push an agenda, and which it was impossible given the level of class struggle and class consciousness in Australia today for the tiny forces of the left to intervene to change, so inherent is the right wing logic of the issue.” While O’Shea/SAlt’s article makes some valid points, their argument that, because Meagher was a pretty, white petty-bourgeois woman, any mobilisation around her murder would inherently have a right-wing logic effectively dismisses all those who demonstrated as one reactionary mass.

No doubt those who joined the RTN rally protested for varied, and sometimes contradictory, reasons. Many would have protested in genuine anger and repulsion at physical brutality against women in this deeply sexist capitalist society (it is reported that in NSW alone one woman is killed in domestic violence on average each week). Many would have protested the daily grinding oppression faced by women and the misogynist piggery saturating official political debate. At the same time, lacking a class understanding of society, many would carry illusions in the capitalist state as an instrument to protect women. We Marxists look to intervene into protests such as RTN to change consciousness, winning those who are open to communist politics to the need to build a Leninist party, a tribune of the people, committed to overthrowing the capitalist state. Socialist Alternative is motivated by a different purpose. With any given movement, these Labor-loyal opponents of Marxism see only two choices: either stay away or, more commonly, capitulate to the current consciousness under cover of some militant-sounding rhetoric.

Concern about an issue’s “right wing logic” has seldom given SAlt pause in the past. For example, in 1999 they enthusiastically joined the reactionary marches for Australian troops to occupy East Timor and trumpeted chauvinist union bans that were designed to hasten this outcome (see “Social Chauvinists and Shameless Opportunists,” ASp No. 195, Winter 2006). The contradiction between O’Shea’s argument and SAlt’s modus operandi was not lost on its own members. SAlt cadre John Passant rebuked, “The same is true of some other campaigns we have been involved in.... Should the Revolutionary Socialists [RS] of Egypt have abstained from the struggle against Mubarak for the same reason Louise offers in this article?” (enpassant.com.au, 23 November). Passant is referring to SAlt’s support to their Cliffite co-thinkers in Egypt, who have treacherously fostered suicidal illusions in the reactionary, woman-hating Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Earlier this year, RS caused some anguish amongst its own members when it formally endorsed Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in the second round of the presidential elections calling for “a national front that stands against the candidate of the counterrevolution.” In contrast to SAlt, we Trotskyists, fighting for a revolutionary perspective, stood for the independent mobilisation of the working class and warned against illusions in the blood-drenched military or reactionary Muslim Brotherhood. (See “Military Rulers Give Presidency to Muslim Brotherhood,” Workers Vanguard No. 1005, 6 July 2012.)

SAlt’s embrace of reactionary anti-woman forces is nothing new. During the 1980s SAlt cadre, then in the International Socialist Organisation, cheered on the bloody CIA-backed, woman-hating Afghan mujahedin cutthroats against the liberating forces of the Soviet Red Army. They rallied for the reactionary, priest-ridden, anti-woman, anti-Semitic Polish Solidarność. Not least, in 1991 they hailed Boris Yeltsin’s counterrevolutionary forces in the former USSR, which trampled on the rights of women. They crowed “‘Communism’ is dead.... It’s a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (The Socialist, September 1991).

For New October Revolutions!

We look to the model of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party. Mobilising millions of working women in its cause, it gave flesh and blood to the Marxist program of workers rule. It freed women from the brutal peasant patriarchy and religious backwardness of the old Tsarist/capitalist regime. It gave women full legal equality; new marriage laws were based on individual rights and equality of the sexes; divorce was made easily available; the distinction between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” children was removed. The Bolsheviks also removed all laws against homosexuality and other consensual sexual activity. Abortion was legalised in 1920. Inheriting economic backwardness, the isolated and war-ravaged workers state did all it could to build the communal dining halls, laundries, childcare and other programs necessary to free women from the family confines. For a fuller discussion, see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist No. 59, Spring 2006.

The official glorification of family life and the retreat from Bolshevik policies on divorce and abortion were integral to the subsequent degeneration of the Russian Revolution, in which a bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin usurped political power from the Soviet working class beginning with a political counterrevolution in 1924. However despite this degeneration, the central gains of the Russian Revolution—embodied in the overthrow of capitalist property relations and the establishment of a planned economy—remained. These gains were apparent, for example, in the material position of women. Just over twenty years ago, prior to capitalist counterrevolution, Soviet women had access to state-supported childcare institutions, full abortion rights, access to a wide range of trades and professions, and a large degree of economic equality with their male co-workers.

Unlike the reformists, the Spartacist League/International Communist League stood for the unconditional military defence of the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state and East European deformed workers states against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time we called for proletarian political revolutions to oust the bureaucracies and establish soviet workers democracy and an internationalist proletarian perspective. The capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92 was a bitter defeat for the world’s working class, not least women, and conditions the current period of capitalist reaction. To the extent that left groups like SAlt and SA, who cheered on counterrevolution, had any influence, they share responsibility for the current regression in class struggle and class consciousness.

Opponents of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the reformists’ fundamental loyalty has always been to the racist, social-democratic, pro-imperialist ALP. In the 2010 federal elections SAlt called for a vote to the bourgeois Greens, Labor “or others who are genuinely left-wing”! For their part, Socialist Alliance called to “Vote Socialist and Greens” while directing preferences to the ALP. Their unprincipled call for a vote to the Greens was in the service of pressuring Labor, who they hoped above all to have in government as a “lesser evil.” Thus these reformist opponents of Marxism, who falsely claim to champion women’s rights, share responsibility for the continued exploitation and oppression of Aborigines, women, refugees and workers suffering under the Gillard Labor government. Noting that there was no party standing in the class interests of the proletariat, even in a minimal way, we of the Spartacist League called for no vote to the bourgeois Greens or to anti-working-class Labor. We said: Break with Laborism! Build a revolutionary workers party!

We note in our statement of program, “‘Little Australia’ social-democratic nationalism glories in the anti-intellectual oafishness of the Australian ‘ocker,’ and the anti-woman cult of ‘mateship.’ It is white racist, and proud of its brutally male chauvinist and self-indulgent parochial, ‘national character’ best described as a culture of white pigs” (For a Workers Republic of Australia, Part of a Socialist Asia!, October 1998). Utopian socialist Charles Fourier observed that the position of women in society is an index of its general advancement. In this remote, white imperialist enclave, anti-woman bigotry is historically entrenched. It goes back to when the British colonialists first arrived bringing with them private property relations and establishing a backward, viciously male-chauvinist penal colony built on the dispossession and slaughter of the local Aboriginal population.

The eradication of racism, women’s oppression and all forms of discrimination requires a revolutionary struggle, mobilising the power of the multiracial working class to uproot capitalism and liberate humanity from poverty and want. We strive to build the necessary instrument to achieve this: a multiracial vanguard party of the type built by the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky, which led the victorious socialist revolution in October 1917. A proletarian, internationalist, revolutionary party would seek to lead the working class, men, women, of all ethnicities, on the streets and in the factories, to champion the rights of all the oppressed as part of the struggle to overthrow this racist, sexist and exploitative system through workers revolution.

Workers Vanguard No. 1016	25 January 2013

Neocolonial Slavery and World Socialist Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

In May 1940, as Germany was invading France during the second interimperialist world war, the Trotskyist Fourth International convened an Emergency Conference in New York City, drawing delegates from sections in North and South America, Europe, China and Australia. Among its resolutions was one, excerpted below, linking the struggle for liberation in the colonial and semicolonial world with the fight for proletarian revolution in the advanced imperialist countries.

Under the banner of bourgeois “democracy” and bourgeois “equality,” the great capitalist empires were built upon the exploitation of the proletariat at home and the enslavement of weaker peoples overseas. In the three centuries of their growth, the capitalist nations warred constantly to acquire and expand their colonial domains, to defend them against the raids of rivals, or to suppress revolts of the colonial peoples. In 1914-18, the great imperialist powers fought to redivide an already divided world. They succeeded only in hastening the catastrophic decline of the capitalist system. The revolutions the war engendered, however, failed to establish in the advanced West and the backward East the proletarian power which could and can alone reorganize the world on a socialist basis. The workers won and held power only in backward Russia. Capitalism survived, but only to subject the world to the further agonies of its passing. Twenty-two years after the armistice of 1918, contorted by a crisis they were powerless to surmount, the imperialists plunged the world once more into bloody conflict—Germany, Italy, and Japan to “expand or die”—England, France, and the United States to defend and extend their world hegemony....

In the colonies, in the past, imperialist rule has meant the stifling of economic development and the perpetuation of backward economic and social relations in their most oppressive forms. If an imperialist “solution” of the present world conflict is imposed, a still greater rate of exploitation will be forced upon the colonies and the thralldom of the past deepened multifold. The Western Allies once more offer promises of “freedom” and “cooperation” after they win the present war. But acceptance of such promises only paves the way for the crueler deceptions of the Versailles [treaty at end of WWI] of tomorrow. Germany, for its part, does not bother with deceptive illusions but fights openly to rule the peoples it can conquer by blood and iron alone.

The hopes of liberation of the colonial peoples are therefore bound up even more decisively than ever before with the emancipation of the workers of the whole world. The colonies shall be freed, politically, economically, and culturally, only when the workers of the advanced countries put an end to capitalist rule and set out together with the backward peoples to reorganize world economy on a new level, gearing it to social needs and not to monopolist profits. Only in this way will the colonial and semicolonial countries be enabled to emerge from their varying stages of backwardness and take their places as integral sections of an advancing world socialist commonwealth.

—“The Colonial World and the Second Imperialist War” (May 1940), reprinted in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years (1933-40) (Pathfinder Press, 1973)

Workers Vanguard No. 1016	25 January 2013

Victory to NYC School Bus Workers Strike!

JANUARY 22—The 8,800 school bus drivers and matrons of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1181 hit the picket lines at depots around New York City last Wednesday in their first strike since 1979. The pickets are braving freezing weather to defend the Employee Protection Provisions (EPP) won in that hard-bitten 12-week battle. Over the last two years, billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg has sought to shred the EPP, which provides a measure of job security for the workforce by requiring the private bus companies chartered by the city to hire according to seniority. Even as Bloomberg rails against supposedly illegal “job guarantees that the union just can’t have,” he has solicited new bids for bus service without the EPP in an unvarnished attempt to bust the union. With the city rulers putting the squeeze on working people throughout NYC, every public worker, every trade unionist and everyone who struggles to make ends meet has a stake in the outcome of the strike.

The mayor’s union-busting scheme is said to aim to cut the city’s “irrational” busing costs and comes wrapped in “concern” for special-needs and other students. The real extent of this concern was on display when Bloomberg was shutting down public schools and slashing millions from education programs. For all the howling against the strike in the bourgeois media, it is popular among many parents, who entrust their children to the care of these dedicated workers every weekday and blame the effects of the walkout on the city. The wages of the ATU membership, which represents a cross-section of the city—black, white, Latino, Caribbean and East European—average only $35,000 a year, a figure that City Hall wants to slash. In the process, the mayor is hoping to set a precedent for ripping up union contracts and getting away with it in NYC, a historic labor stronghold.

The city’s assault on the education workforce extends to some 75,000 members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Together with Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo, Bloomberg is hell-bent on gutting seniority rights by imposing an evaluation system that would allow it to dismiss “ineffective” teachers. The Obama administration has intervened in this dispute—by threatening to withhold $700 million from the state if some such scheme is not soon in place. Indeed, the White House has led a nationwide war against teachers unions, marked by an expansion of non-union charter schools, longer workdays and raises keyed to student test scores. Obama himself endorsed the mass firing of all 93 teachers in a Rhode Island town because they resisted such “reforms.” Seeing no profit in educating black and Latino urban youth or others they deem superfluous, the racist capitalist rulers have driven U.S. public schools into ruin and then held the teachers unions responsible.

Bloomberg appears to be taking his cue from the 1979 strike, and the union would do well to borrow a page from its own history, too. Back then, the vicious, labor-hating Democratic mayor Ed Koch provoked a strike by seeking to eliminate job protections for the bus drivers and matrons. When Koch’s school chancellor put the service contract out to bid for the first time in eight years, many bids came in from low-wage, non-union companies. Abetted by the editors of the city’s tabloid press, hizzoner used children dependent on bus transport as pawns in his union-busting game. A large fraction of them also had special needs, which Koch tried to wield as a cudgel against the strikers. As we noted at the time:

“Many unions, faced with tear-jerking stories of home-bound wheelchair-confined children, would have buckled under. But the Amalgamated Transit Union Locals 1181 and 1061 refused to budge....

“When a number of the offending cabs [used to transport students] were subsequently found with their windshields broken and tires slashed, New York’s war of the crippled children was on.”

— “Is There Anything Koch Won’t Do?” (WV No. 226, 2 March 1979)

The Koch administration went on to commandeer chauffeured city vehicles and prison vans from Rikers Island to replace the garaged buses. But the union answered every move by the city with hard-nosed class struggle. Picket lines remained solid, and other scab vehicles ended up just like the taxis. Strikes were breaking out across the city, giving the bosses and their mayor plenty to worry about—sanitation workers refused to cross picket lines of apartment house workers, striking tugboat crews kept boats at bay, and picketing Teamsters milk drivers left the milk to be dumped down the drain. Having wasted $10 million trying to break the strike, the city finally buckled, and the ATU won the EPP.

The same kind of boots-on-the-ground labor solidarity would go a long way toward beating back the union-busters today. A good step would be for other unions, beginning with Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, the UFT and Teamsters, to swell the ATU picket lines and help extend them to every depot gate. The school bus drivers and matrons have some 300,000 potential allies in city unions who are working without a contract or under a contract extension. The president of Teamsters Local 854, which also organizes bus workers, has pledged to honor picket lines. At the same time, buses driven by Teamsters, as well as non-union drivers, have kept on rolling, pointing to the need for mass pickets to keep all buses locked up tight. If the ATU is defeated, it is only a matter of time before the city takes it to the Teamsters. The two unions should have a common contract expiration date to facilitate joint class struggle.

The lineup against Local 1181, the largest ATU local in the nation, includes not only City Hall and the bus companies but also Democratic Party politicians and the courts, cops and labor boards of the class enemy. Union officials representing NYC public workers, from the subways to the classroom, would like nothing better than to elect a “friend of labor” Democrat to replace Bloomberg later this year. But the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are a party of capital. Among the favored Democratic mayoral candidates is NYC Comptroller John Liu, who last week issued an official statement defending the EPP. But last year Liu approved new school bus contracts covering pre-kindergarten children without the EPP after Cuomo had vetoed a bill, at Bloomberg’s urging, that would have mandated its inclusion.

A 2011 New York State court ruling opened the door to this rollback of the EPP and gave the mayor a club to wield against the union. The bosses’ state—including the courts and cops—is an instrument of coercion that safeguards their interests. To date, the NYPD has arrested at least two ATU supporters, including a striker who tried to block a departing scab bus in the Bronx, underscoring that the cops are strikebreakers, not “workers in uniform.” It is crucial for labor to rally to the defense of any arrested striker.

Meanwhile, the bus companies have turned to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to put an end to the strike. Time and again, whether composed mainly of Democratic or Republican appointees, the NLRB has stepped in to demobilize labor struggle. When longshoremen fought an attempt by the EGT grain exporter to introduce scab labor at a new terminal in Longview, Washington, in 2011, the NLRB filed an injunction to stop “aggressive picketing” and later sought massive fines against the union. Last year, Local 1181 fended off an earlier unfair labor practices case brought by the city. Yet the labor tops would have trade unionists believe that Obama’s NLRB can be made to work for them.

By the same token, the union bureaucrats bow before the supposed good will and omnipotence of the capitalist state and the labor law it enforces. A case in point is the Taylor Law, which forbids New York State public employees from using their strike weapon. Out of labor’s struggles, a new leadership must emerge that is independent of all capitalist parties and committed to the policy of class struggle. Victory to the school bus workers strike!

Workers Vanguard No. 1016	25 January 2013

Forty Years Since Roe v. Wade

Defeat the War on Abortion Rights!

For Free Abortion on Demand!

On 22 January 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in its historic Roe v. Wade decision. The Bible thumpers immediately launched a counteroffensive, and not long after, the federal and state governments began to chip away at abortion rights. Over the last two years, Republican-controlled state legislatures, with the support of some Democrats, have passed an unprecedented barrage of anti-abortion measures across the country. Although he lauded Roe on its last anniversary, President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2010 to “ensure” that federal funds from his signature health care plan “are not used for abortion services.”

The existing arsenal of state and federal restrictions has all but eliminated abortion as an option for many women. As a Time magazine cover article titled “What Choice?” (14 January) notes: “The number of abortion providers nationwide shrank from 2,908 in 1982 to 1,793 in 2008, the latest year for which data is available. Getting an abortion in America is, in some places, harder today than at any point since it became a constitutionally protected right 40 years ago this month.”

The wave of state anti-abortion measures, which include 92 enacted in 2011 and 43 in 2012, aims to whittle away abortion rights piecemeal by piling up delays and expenses that make the process as difficult as possible for both women and doctors. These “salami tactics” include waiting periods, parental consent requirements for minors, ultrasound tests, mandatory disinformation under the guise of “counseling,” bans on doctor-patient consults by telephone, the elimination of state funding and restrictions on private insurance coverage. Abortion clinics also are increasingly being made to expand procedure rooms and widen hallways to match ambulatory surgical centers—medically useless but hugely expensive requirements that will force many facilities to shut down. “It’s never been this frightening before,” the longtime director of a Pittsburgh abortion clinic recently commented on such requirements. “I don’t know if we’re going to make it” (Washington Post, 14 January).

A longstanding goal of the anti-abortion forces is to set up a test case to overturn Roe v. Wade. To advance this agenda, the God squad has pushed for “fetal pain” and “fetal homicide” laws that are on the books in many states. On January 11, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors can treat a fetus as an “unborn child,” upholding the convictions of two mothers on felony charges of “chemical endangerment of a child” because they had allegedly taken drugs during pregnancy. An anti-abortion bill enacted last month in Michigan originally included a ghoulish provision, ultimately removed, that would have required fetal remains to be disposed of “by means lawful for other dead bodies, including burial, cremation or interment.”

The same day as the Alabama ruling, the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi missed the state-mandated deadline for its doctors to obtain privileges to admit patients at a local hospital. This requirement was signed into law last year by the governor vowing that it would “end abortion in Mississippi,” the state with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. No local hospital was willing to affiliate with the clinic, and the state medical journal even refused to run the clinic’s ad seeking a doctor with the required privileges.

The legislative assault on abortion rights is backed by harassment of patients and staff at clinics and at times raw terror in the form of bombings and murders. We honor the many courageous doctors and staff whose lives have been taken by the anti-abortion zealots. Most recently, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in 2009 in Wichita, Kansas, because of the medical services he had provided women, including late-term abortions. The new wave of laws will only embolden the anti-abortion terrorists. Speaking to the fears of many abortion providers, the director of Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, North Dakota, told Time: “Even if I’m at Target looking at clothes, I never let my guard down.”

The anti-woman bigots view abortion as a threat to the patriarchal family—the main source of women’s oppression—that along with religion is a key prop of capitalist class rule, helping to regiment the population and instill social conservatism. As Marxists, we fight for full democratic rights and social services for women, including free abortion on demand. Unrestricted access to abortion and contraception is essential for all women, including teenagers, to exercise control over whether and when they will have children. There is an urgent need for mass struggle to defend abortion rights.

Faced with attacks on their livelihoods, benefits and bodies, over two- thirds of single women who cast ballots in the 2012 election voted for Obama. It was not hard for Democrats to pose as allies of women, with Mitt Romney vowing to take steps to overturn Roe v. Wade and Tea Party troglodytes spewing on about “legitimate” rape. But although the Republicans may forthrightly prefer to keep women “barefoot and pregnant,” the Democratic Party—the other party of racist U.S. capitalism—is no alternative. Obama has pandered to religious reaction, including by reversing the FDA’s approval of over-the-counter access to the morning-after birth control pill for teens. In advancing the interests of the capitalist exploiters, both bourgeois parties espouse “family values” that serve to keep women “in their place.”

Despite their pro-choice rhetoric catering to higher income and bourgeois women who already have the means to get an abortion if needed, the Democrats have repeatedly slashed access to abortion for working women and the poor. The first major post-Roe attack on abortion rights took place under “born again” Democrat Jimmy Carter, who in 1977 sneered, “There are many things in life that are not fair,” as he signed into law the Hyde Amendment that eliminated abortion coverage from the Medicaid health plans of 23 million poor women. The Hyde Amendment has been renewed every year since, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans were in the White House.

The Democratic administration of Bill Clinton carried out a relentless campaign against poor and black women that went virtually unopposed by feminists as long as abortion remained formally legal. In 1996, as part of his campaign to “end welfare as we know it,” Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” which slashed benefits for women and children, leaving the most vulnerable members of society to starve and die. Already ground down by the entrenched racial and ethnic oppression and anti-woman bigotry of American capitalism, minority and poor women have been hit especially hard by the attacks on abortion rights. Over two-thirds of U.S. women who have abortions are economically disadvantaged, and black and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely as white women to experience unwanted pregnancies and to have abortions.

For decades, bourgeois feminist groups like the National Organization for Women and NARAL Pro-Choice America have campaigned to elect Democrats to “fight the right” and “save Roe v. Wade.” Last November, feminists and liberal activists celebrated the defeat of Indiana’s Republican U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who had outrageously remarked that pregnancies conceived in rape are what “God intended to happen.” But the Democrat who beat Mourdock, Joe Donnelly, has bragged that he has “consistently opposed abortion and will continue to do so in Congress.”

The war on abortion rights, a battering ram for social and political reaction, is part of the generalized and bipartisan assault on the rights and living conditions of working people—from union-busting and mass layoffs to skyrocketing medical costs and the shredding of what is left of the social safety net. It is no coincidence that last month’s Michigan anti-abortion package came out of the same “lame duck” legislative session that enacted a union-busting “right to work” law (see article in WV No. 1015, 11 January).

It is in the interest of the working class, with its hands on the wheels of production, to use its social power to fight to defend itself as well as the rights of women and all the oppressed. Such struggles must be waged independently of all the capitalist parties as part of the fight for free, quality health care for all, along with 24-hour childcare facilities at work and in the community. With untold millions of American families staggering from wage cuts, pink slips and home evictions amid the seemingly intractable economic downturn, it is clearer than ever that the capitalist rulers do not accord living children the same solicitous concern as the fetus.

The legalization of abortion 40 years ago was the product of the tumultuous struggles of the 1960s, especially the fight for black equality and the Vietnam antiwar movement, which were catalysts for the women’s rights movement of that era. In the face of class and social struggle, the capitalist class may cede some reforms. But the only way to ensure those gains are not undone is for the working class to wrest power and the wealth of society from the capitalist rulers. Women’s emancipation can be realized only with the victory of proletarian revolution, which will smash all forms of social oppression, lay the material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interests of all. The Spartacist League/U.S. is committed to fighting to build a revolutionary workers party to lead that struggle. 

Workers Vanguard No. 1016	25 January 2013

Imperialist Troops Out of Mali Now!

JANUARY 21—In a stark assertion of French imperialism’s domination over its former colonies in West Africa, Socialist Party president François Hollande has launched a bombing campaign and intervention by some 2,000 ground troops in Mali. Billed as part of the global “war on terror,” the military assault was intended to force a retreat by Islamic fundamentalist forces that, having seized the northern half of the country, were threatening to march on the capital, Bamako. Hollande bluntly ordered: “Destroy them. Take them captive, if possible” (London Guardian, 15 January). His defense minister candidly declared that the aim of the Mali mission is “total reconquest.”

However, as battles continue to rage in and around key towns that had been seized by the fundamentalists, Hollande’s critics within the French ruling class are beginning to fret about sinking in a quagmire if left to go it alone. Meanwhile, the seizure of scores of hostages at a natural gas field in Algeria by Islamists declaring their solidarity with the Malian rebels—and the considerable loss of life when Algerian security retook the installation—may offer a sampling of future fallout from the imperialist occupation of Mali. After initially expressing concern over the intervention in Mali, the Algerian regime saluted the effort, crucially allowing the French military overflight rights.

While rulers of the major capitalist powers rushed to express their solidarity with the French operation in Mali, they are also reticent about contributing forces and money. The UN Security Council voted unanimously last month to approve an African “peacekeeping” mission of some 3,300 troops, and some countries of the Economic Community of West African States already have hundreds of troops on site. But the imperialists have little expectation that these forces will be an effective gendarmerie. Meanwhile Washington, after initially distancing itself from the French operation, has dispatched about 100 “trainers” to African countries that are providing troops. Last week, European Union foreign ministers agreed to send 450 “non-combat” troops to Mali, supposedly to train its armed forces.

The Obama administration, still smarting from having its Libyan ambassador killed by Islamist forces that had been armed and financed by the U.S. and its allies in the drive to topple Muammar el-Qaddafi, has ruled out sending its warplanes to Mali. The White House has also turned a deaf ear to requests that it provide air tankers to help refuel French jets, which France views as vital to its imperialist marauding given the vast distances it has to cover in crossing over North Africa. However, Washington has offered to provide limited logistical support to the French operation, as have Britain, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Canada and Russia.

Immediately following the announcement of the French imperialist expedition, our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France issued a leaflet demanding French troops out of Mali and all of Africa and calling for defense of the insurgents against the imperialist intervention. The leaflet notes that among France’s multiple security interests in the region are the uranium mines in northern Niger, which have been operated for decades by the French Areva nuclear power conglomerate and its predecessors.

The American bourgeoisie has its own imperialist interests in Africa. A Congressional report last summer titled Africa Command: U.S. Strategic Interests and the Role of the U.S. Military in Africa emphasized “the increasing importance of Africa’s natural resources, particularly energy resources” and expressed “mounting concern over violent extremist activities.” The report cited, in particular, oil production in Nigeria—Africa’s largest oil exporter and the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the U.S.—and the potential for deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Guinea.

Washington has paid out tens of millions of dollars to beef up the military in Mali and neighboring countries in order to prevent jihadists from getting a foothold in the region. Under Barack Obama, the Horn of Africa port of Djibouti, where more than 2,000 U.S. troops are stationed at Camp Lemonnier, has become the busiest Predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone. Since 2007, the U.S. military has also set up a dozen small air bases in Africa, from which Special Ops forces launch surveillance flights. The U.S. military presence in Africa has grown steadily under Obama, with an average of 5,000 troops spread across the continent at any one time and 30 ships patrolling the Indian Ocean. All U.S. bases and troops out of Africa!

As the LTF leaflet stresses, our military defense of the insurgents in Mali implies not the least political support to the reactionary Islamists, whose atrocities include floggings, amputations and the stoning to death last summer of a couple accused of having an extramarital affair. In an act reminiscent of the destruction by the Afghan Taliban of two ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan, the fundamentalists in Mali took pick-axes to Timbuktu’s historic mausoleums and Sufi shrines, threatening as well its collection of rare archives. Much less prominently reported by the Western bourgeois press are the wholesale killings, disappearances and torture inflicted by the military regime in Bamako on its perceived opponents.

The armed rebellion in northern Mali was initially led by the secular National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), which has variously called for independence or autonomy for the Tuareg region of Mali. Distressed that the rebellion was gaining momentum, a group of officers seized power in a coup in Bamako last March, suspended the constitution and launched a campaign of terror against their political opponents. Within days, taking advantage of the chaos, the MNLA seized the whole of northern Mali in alliance with Islamic fundamentalist forces. The Islamists promptly turned on their MNLA allies and drove them from the population centers. Today, the marginalized MNLA warns of genocide if French air strikes allow the Malian army to “cross the demarcation line” separating northern Mali from the south. Nevertheless, the MNLA declares that it is “ready to help” the French intervention.

A particular target of the blood-soaked regime in Bamako has been the civilian Tuareg population. The Tuaregs, the dominant ethnic group in northern Mali, are a semi-nomadic people stretching across the Sahara who are ethnically distinct both from Arabs, who constitute the majority in the countries to the north of Mali, and the black Africans who inhabit southern Mali and control the national government and military. When the northern rebellion heated up a year ago, the military went on a killing spree, bombing the civilian population and arresting, torturing and killing Tuaregs for the “crime” of their ethnic origin. Not surprisingly, such atrocities spurred Tuaregs serving in the Malian army, including a number trained by U.S. Special Forces, to go over to the rebels.

Last February, mobs in Bamako attacked homes and businesses owned by Tuaregs and other ethnic groups there—including Arabs, many of whom also inhabit the north of the country—while security forces looked on. Last week, as the French military pushed north to confront Islamist forces in the town of Diabaly, Human Rights Watch reported that Malian soldiers in Niono, a town on the road to Diabaly, were again massacring Tuareg and Arab civilians.

The rebel offensive that broke out in northern Mali was an indirect consequence of the imperialists’ successful drive in 2011 to oust Qaddafi. Many Malian Tuaregs worked in Libya’s oil fields, as well as in Qaddafi’s armed forces, as a way to escape from conditions in northern Mali, which successive regimes have left bereft of schools, hospitals and paved roads—to say nothing of job opportunities. In the Sahel region south of the Sahara, almost a quarter of a million children die of malnutrition-related causes each year, according to Oxfam.

With the fall of Qaddafi—and the racist pogroms carried out by imperialist-supported rebels in Libya—those Malian Tuaregs returned home, bringing with them their military know-how and, in some cases, heavy weapons. Many of the arms for the northern Malian rebels have been funneled in by reactionary Islamists who were part of the imperialist-supported anti-Qaddafi forces.

The imperialist onslaught will no doubt deepen the already intense interethnic tensions in the region. These were highlighted in an article in the London Guardian (6 July 2012) by its West Africa correspondent, Afua Hirsch. Reporting from a Tuareg refugee camp in Burkina Faso, she wrote that the black NGO staff were refusing to work with the lighter-skinned Tuaregs because they “felt aggrieved by the reputation of the Tuaregs for enslaving black Africans.” She noted that this history “still plays itself out in the Tuareg caste system—where ‘Bella,’ dark-skinned members of the tribe who were once slaves, still occupy the lowest positions.” In return, many Malian Tuaregs claim that they have fled their country not only because of atrocities carried out by the army but because Bella militias “are also targeting anyone with light skin.”

That interethnic tensions and racial discrimination in the region remain so poisonous today is a legacy of French colonialism, which reinforced these and other reactionary aspects of the societies they conquered. After subduing the Tuareg region of what was then called French Sudan in the late 19th century, the colonialists set up a racially discriminatory system that pitted Tuaregs and black Africans against each other. Implementing a policy of divide and rule, the French government encouraged the Tuaregs’ traditional supremacy over black Africans. Though the French colonialists largely ended the slave trade in the first decades of colonial occupation, they helped to ensure that black slaves remained subject to their Tuareg masters long afterward. Their system of forced labor and compulsory military service was based on racial criteria, with an exemption for the Tuareg elite.

The French also played the Tuaregs off against black Africans—and Algerian nationalists—through their drawing of territorial boundaries. In the 1950s, after it was discovered that the Saharan region was rich in mineral resources, they floated the idea of creating a new French-controlled colony, dominated by Tuaregs and Arabs, and limiting the soon-to-be independent Mali to the overwhelmingly black south. France dropped that proposal, and independent Mali was formed as a powder keg of ethnic tensions between Tuaregs and black Africans, who led the first post-colonial government. Those tensions led directly to the first Tuareg rebellion in 1963 and its brutal repression by the Malian army.

There will be no end to the interethnic bloodshed and abject poverty of the region within the framework of capitalism. Just as the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 opened up the perspective of revolutionary change in the backward regions of Central Asia, the emancipation of the masses in the Sahel and other parts of Africa whose development has been so dreadfully retarded must be linked to the international struggle of the working class for socialist revolution. Proletarian revolution in South Africa, Egypt or other countries in Africa that have experienced significant industrial development would propel social transformation reaching into the most backward areas of the continent. Such a perspective must include the fight for socialist revolution in France and other imperialist centers, where Malian and other immigrant workers can provide a living link to the struggles of the dispossessed in Africa. What is necessary is the forging of Trotskyist vanguard parties committed to the fight for new October Revolutions.

The following is a translation of the LTF leaflet, which was issued on January 11.

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The head of French imperialism, François Hollande, announced tonight a military intervention of the French air force and special forces in Mali as part of a so-called “anti-terrorist” operation. For months now, French imperialism has been looking for a pretext to launch its killers into action in its neocolonial backyard. Today we are told that the reactionary Islamists who now control the north of Mali have supposedly launched an offensive against the rest of the country, and that the Malian army supposedly collapsed when faced with a hundred pickup trucks filled with Islamist forces, thus opening up the road to the south all the way to Bamako. We have no idea what is true or not about this story. Regardless, we denounce the French intervention. French military out of Mali and out of Africa!

For the past year, Mali had been torn by a reactionary civil war in which the international workers movement had no interest in supporting either the military regime in Bamako or the anti-woman Islamists of the north. Now, however, it is necessary to unequivocally defend the people who are being bombed in the north against the neocolonial French military, without giving the least political support to the benighted reactionaries. Defend the northern insurgents against the French intervention!

Today’s New York Times reports rumors that a French military helicopter was shot down by the northern troops. Any military setback for French imperialism in this operation would weaken it and would thus be a boost to class struggle in France against this capitalist-imperialist government, now led by the Socialist Party and the bourgeois Greens, with the support of the Communist Party (PCF). That is why the working class in France, with its strong component of Malian workers—thousands of whom live in the Paris region—has a vested interest in opposing French imperialism’s latest neocolonial military adventure. We can say this even more forcefully because we called on workers not to vote for Hollande as Commander-in-Chief, unlike the PCF and the New Anti-Capitalist Party. As for the [fake-Trotskyist] Lutte Ouvrière, they did not want to choose between abstaining and voting for Hollande.

The current disaster in Mali is the product of a long history of French colonial and neocolonial oppression. French imperialists plundered the country during decades of colonial occupation, marked by the systematic practice of forced labor (only officially abolished in 1946). They then arbitrarily drew the borders of an “independent” Malian state, which only had the bare trappings of sovereignty. The currency, the CFA franc, is directly managed by the Banque de France, which controls its exchange rate as well as deposits. The French imperialist military intervention takes place in what France considers its exclusive preserve. Its purpose is to maintain French imperialist domination in the entire region—and especially to protect the profits of the Areva company, which exploits enormous uranium deposits in neighboring Niger.

The situation in northern Mali today is a direct result of both the oppression of the Tuareg population by the central Malian state and the imperialist intervention in Libya in 2011, which François Hollande and [social democrat] Jean-Luc Mélenchon supported. Not only did this military intervention bring various rival Islamist militias to power in Libya, institutionalizing sharia against women, but it also enabled reactionary Islamist groups throughout the region to get arms. When it suits French interests, as in Libya and Syria, Paris promotes the Islamists. But elsewhere, as in Afghanistan and now Mali, they are massacred. This in itself shows the boundless cynicism of the Hollande government and its interior minister Valls when they brandish “Islamic terrorism”—a code word for launching racist police operations in France against a population considered suspect because they are Muslims, in particular workers of North African or West African origin and their families.

Algeria now rightly sees the French intervention directly on its borders as a threat, a first since it gained independence in 1962 after seven years of war. This casts a harsh light on Hollande’s “confession” speech [admitting that the French had committed atrocities during the Algerian War] when he traveled to Algeria just a few weeks ago. Meanwhile the war minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian of the Socialist Party, had just honored the memory of General Bigeard, the French general who came to symbolize torture during the Algerian War.

For the last 30 years, Mali has been used mainly as a pool providing ruthlessly exploited labor in France. Thousands of Malian workers in France today are undocumented, even after years of living and working here. Many youth of Malian origin participated in the 2005 revolt of the ghetto neighborhoods and in protests against murderous racist police terror in the town of Villiers-le-Bel. The labor movement must defend the ghetto youth, just as it must oppose the neocolonial adventures of French imperialism. The working class of this country must unite against the abuses carried out daily by the capitalists and their government, which are intent on rolling back workers’ gains. Ultimately, there is only one way to put an end to the bloody crimes of the brutal French military in the world: overthrowing the dictatorship of capital in this country through a workers revolution led by a Bolshevik party. French troops out of Mali and out of Africa! Down with French imperialism! Down with the Hollande-Duflot capitalist government! 

***When The Wild West Really Was The Wild West- “Wild Bill”- A Jeff Bridges Retrospective

DVD Review

Wild Bill, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Barkin, John Hurt, directed by Walter Hill, 1995


Those of us who grew up in the 1950s, those of now AARP-worthy , in the early days of television, black and white television, got our heroes, our Western cowboy heroes strictly in white hat, and our bad guys, mal hombres, strictly in black. And the Indians (a.k.a. Native Americans these days) well, the less said about the treatment of those benighted and betrayed people the better. Of course this view was all hokum, or worst. It took the likes of Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCormack and others in literature to give us a more realistic view of the rawness, untamed rawness of the Old West. And the likes of Walter Hill to give us a more truthful cinematic view, a view with muddy streets, whiskey breathe, fistfights at the drop of a hat, white or black , treachery among enemies, treachery among friends, many social diseases and all. And that was on the good days. The good director here has taken on the legend of Wild Bill Hickok, generally given the better of it in Western lore as an associate of Buffalo Bill, a civilizing influence, and a king hell gunfighter.

Of course, the subtext for this review is that the actor playing Will Bill is none other than Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges for his “modern” cowboy role (singer-songwriter, okay) in Crazy Hearts. My argument underlying the choice of subtext is that Bridges was born to play theses good old boy Western parts and has done mainly stellar work in the genre ever since he cut his teeth on the modern Texas good-old-boy-in-the-making Duane Jackson in the film adaptation of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. And at the acting level that is true here, although the existential characterization and the Bridges cool wit is perhaps a little over the top for the nitty-gritty West of the late 19th century.

One comes away from this film feeling, and maybe not incorrectly, that the distance between hero and villain (here in this contrived concoction about the manner of Bill’s untimely end, and as avenger -villain, the son, the driven son of “spurned” mother whom was once Wild Bill’s lover) is who is left standing at the end. And for most of his life from his service in the Union Armies during the American Civil War until that fateful day that Bill was just one step too cool Will Bill was the last one left standing. But, see there was that little matter of the spurned woman, and that driven son to lay old Bill low.

In any case if you have not seen a Western since the 1950s (although I guess I would want to know where you have been) you will be hard-pressed to sort out the heroes from the villains in this film. The Indians (a.k.a. Native Americans) as usual, in real life or fiction, get short shrift.

Pardon Private Bradley Manning Stand-Out-Central Square, Cambridge, Wednesdays, 5:00 PM – Support The Bradley Manning International Day OfSolidarity February 23, 2013 –The 1000^th Day Of Pre-Trial Confinement-Update

Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Free Private Bradley Manning-President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning -Make Every Town Square In America (And The World) A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley to Berlin-Join Us In Central Square, Cambridge, Ma. For A Stand-Out For Bradley- Wednesdays From 5:00-6:00 PM

Support And Build The Bradley Manning International Day Of Solidarity February 23, 2013 –The 1000^thDay Of Pre-Trial Confinement- Park Street Redline MBTA Station-Boston Common-1:00-2:00 PM

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Beginning in September 2011, in order to publicize Private Manning’s case locally, there have been weekly stand-outs (as well as other more ad hocand sporadic events) in various locations in the Greater Boston area starting in Somerville across from the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop on Friday afternoons and later on Wednesdays. Lately this stand-out has been held each week on Wednesdays from 5:00 to 6:00 PM at Central Square, Cambridge, Ma. (small park at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Prospect Street just outside the Redline MBTA stop, renamed Manning Square for the duration of the stand-out) in order to continue to broaden our outreach. Join us there in calling for Private Manning’s freedom. President Obama Pardon Private Manning Now!
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The Private Bradley Manning case is headed toward an early summer trial now scheduled for June 2013. The news on his case over the past several months (since about April 2012) has centered on the many pre-trial motion hearings including recent defense motions to dismiss for lack of speedy trial. Private Manning’s pre-trial confinement is now at 900 plus days and will be over 1000 days by the time of trial. That motion, still not ruled on as of this writing, is expected to be decided by the next round of pre-trial hearings in late February.

The defense contends that the charges should be dismissed because the military by its own statutes (to speak nothing of that funny old constitutional right to a speedy trial guarantee that our plebeian forbears fought tooth and nail for against the bloody British and later made damn sure was included in the Amendments when the founding fathers“forgot” to include it in the main document) should have arraigned Private Manning within 120 days after his arrest. They hemmed and hawed for almost 600 days before deciding on the charges and a court martial. Nobody in the convening authority, as required by those same statutes, pushed the prosecution forward in a timely manner. There were no serious efforts to push the work of the classifying agencies (the agencies that would determine what level of security classification had been allegedly violated) throughout most of that time although the government knew what documents it was going to proffer at the Article 32 hearing well before that work was finished. In fact the court-martial convening authority, in the person of one Colonel Coffman, seems to have seen its role as mere “yes man, ” a “rubber stamp” in the defense’s words, to each of the government’s eight requests for delays without explanation (and without informing the defense in order to take their objection). Apparently the Colonel saw his role as a mere clearing agent for whatever excuse the government gave, mainly endless addition time for clearing various classified documents a process that need not have held up the proceedings. The defense made timely objection to each governmental request after the fact to no avail.

Testimony from military authorities at pre-trial hearings in November 2012 about the reasons for the lack of action ranged from the lame to the absurd (mainly negative responses to knowledge about why some additional delays were necessary. One “reason” sticks out as a reason for excusable delay -some officer needed to get his son to a swimming meet and was thus “unavailable” for a couple of days. I didn’t make this up. I don’t have that sense of the absurd. Jesus, a man, a presumably innocent man, was rotting in Obama’s jails and they let him rot a little longer because of some damn swim meet.). The prosecution, obviously, has argued that the government has moved might and main to move the case along and had merely waited until all leaked materials had been determined before proceeding.

We shall see but here is a good statement of the situation right now and the options for the Bradley Manning Support Network:

“Three years is not a speedy trial

On Bradley Manning’s 964^th day in prison without trial, both parties argued over the defense’s motion to dismiss charges for lack of a speedy trial. Under Rule for Court Martial 707, the military was supposed to arraign Bradley in 120 days, but it took over 600. Under Uniform Code for Military Justice Article 10, prosecutors are obligated to maintain diligence in trying the accused. Defense lawyer David Coombs explained to the court that rather than being proactive, the military was reactive, waiting for months and months for other agencies to complete classification reviews, when it should have been hurrying those processes along to get to court-martial as quickly as possible. If Judge Lind finds Article 10 was violated, she must dismiss charges. If she dismisses charges “with prejudice,” meaning she finds that the military was prejudicial in denying Bradley a speedy trial, then Bradley will walk free. However, if she dismisses “without prejudice,” finding the delays were negligent but not malicious, the military could simply re-charge Bradley with all of the same offenses. She’ll rule at the next hearing, February 26 through March 1.”

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The defense has also recently pursued a motion for a dismissal of the major charges (espionage/ indirect material aid to terrorists) on the basis of the minimal effect of any leaks on national security issues as against Private Manning’s claim that such knowledge was important to the public square (freedom of information issues important for us as well in order to know about what the hell the government is doing either in front of us, or behind our backs). Last summer witnesses from an alphabet soup list of government agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence, etc., etc.) testified that while the information leaked shouldn’t have been leaked that the effect on national security was de minimus. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Leon Panetta, also made a public statement to that effect. The prosecution argued, successfully at the time, that the mere fact of the leak of classified information caused irreparable harm to national security issues and Private Manning’s intent, even if noble, was not at issue.

The recent thrust of the motion to dismiss has centered on the defense’s contention been that Private Manning consciously and carefully screened any material in his possession to avoid any conflict with national security and that most of the released material had been over-classified (received a higher security level than necessary).(Much of the materials leaked, as per those parts published widely in the aftermath of the disclosures by the New York Times and other major outlets, concerned reports of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic interchanges that reflected poorly, poorly to say the least, on that profession.) The Obama government has argued again that the mere fact of leaking was all that mattered.That motion has also not been fully ruled on and is now the subject of prosecution counter-motions and a cause for further trial delay.

Here is the latest from the Bradley Manning Support Network on this issue while will the subject of May pre-trial hearings:

“Turning whistle-blowing into treason

Meanwhile, in an attempt to curtail the defense’s ability to show Bradley Manning is a whistle-blower, the government moved to preclude discussion of his motive in determining his guilt or innocence. Judge Lind granted this motion in part: the defense will not be allowed to show Bradley’s motive, such as chatlog quotes showing that he wanted information to be free, in debating whether he knew Al Qaeda would have access to the cables he released (but it will be allowed to discuss motive during a potential sentencing portion). The military will have to prove that Bradley knew he was “dealing with the enemy” in passing information to WikiLeaks. The defense will be allowed to show that Bradley selected certain cables or types of cables to prove he knew which information would not cause harm to U.S. national security if made public. The government also moved to preclude discussion of over classification, trying to prevent the defense from arguing that documents released needn’t have been classified in the first place. Judge Lind decided to defer that ruling, and will make it at a later hearing. In this hearing, the military also said that it would still charge Bradley Manning with “aiding the enemy” if he’d released information to the New York Times instead of WikiLeaks, an argument that would effectively turn whistle-blowing into treason and one which troubled many journalists following the proceedings.”

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A defense motion for dismissal based on serious allegations of torturous behavior by the military authorities extending far up the chain of command (a three-star Army general, not the normal concern of someone so far up the chain in the matter of discipline for enlisted personal) while Private Manning was first detained in Kuwait and later at the Quantico Marine brig for about a year ending in April 2011 has now been ruled on. In late November and early December Private Manning himself, as well as others including senior military mental health workers, took the stand to detail those abuses over several days. Most important to the defense was the testimony by qualified military mental health professionals citing the constant willful failure of those who held Private Manning in close confinement to listen to, or act, on their recommendations during those periods

Judge Lind, the military judge who has heard all the pre-trial arguments in the case thus far, has essentially ruled unfavorably on that motion to dismiss given the potential life sentence Private Manning faces. As she announced at an early January pre-trial hearing the military acted illegally in some of its actions. While every Bradley Manning supporter should be heartened by the fact that the military judge ruled that he was subject to illegal behavior by the military during his pre-trial confinement her remedy, a 112 days reduction in any future sentence, is a mere slap on the wrist to the military authorities. No dismissal or, alternatively, no appropriate reduction (the asked for ten to one ratio for all his first year or so of illegal close confinement which would take years off any potential sentence) given the seriousness of the illegal behavior as the defense tirelessly argued for. And the result is a heavy-handed deterrent to any future military whistleblowers, who already are under enormous pressures to remain silent as a matter of course while in uniform, and others who seek to put the hard facts of future American military atrocities before the public.

Here is the Bradley Manning Support Network’s take on Judge Lind’s decision:

“Judge ruled abusive treatment at Quantico was unlawful, awards sentencing credit

Following over two weeks of testimony from Quantico guards and higher officers about keeping Bradley in a 6×8 cell for 23 hours a day and denying him exercise time and easy access to basic hygiene items Judge Denise Lind ruled that Bradley was treated harshly and awarded him 112 days off of a potential sentence. This is a meager rebuke and a scant reduction when compared to the life sentence Bradley could face, but it is an important symbolic vindication for those who fought so hard to raise awareness of the disturbing treatment and to move Bradley from Quantico.”

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Some other important recent news, this from the November 2012 pre-trail sessions, is the offer by the defense to plead guilty to lesser charges (wrongful, unauthorized use of the Internet, etc.) in order to clear the deck and have the major espionage /aiding the enemy issue (with a possibility of a life sentence) solely before the court-martial judge, Judge Lind (the one who has been hearing the pre-trial motions, not some senior officer, senior NCO lifer-stacked panel. A wise move, a very wise move.).

Since this defense ploy, an unusual one, and not commonly used or known about, according to knowledgeable sources, was the subject of some confusion, among supporters and the media so here is the Bradley Manning Support Network’s statement on the issue:

“Why, what it means, doesn’t mean, and what next

By Jeff Paterson, Bradley Manning Support Network. November 19, 2012. Published at Allvoices.com

Army Private Bradley Manning recently informed the military court that he was, in fact, the source of information published by WikiLeaks. While the 24 year old Intelligence Analyst, effectively, took responsibility for transferring classified documents, in violation of military regulations, he maintained that he was not guilty of all 22 charges against him.

“PFC Manning has offered to plead guilty to various offenses through a process known as“pleading by exceptions and substitutions,” explained Manning civilian defense attorney David Coombs on his blog. Manning is “attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated within, or are a subset of, the charged offenses…. PFC Manning is not pleading guilty to the specifications as charged by the government,” added Coombs. Nor is he “submitting a plea as part of an agreement or deal with the government.”…

…What does such a plea actually change?

The plea offered by Manning doesn’t change the charges against him, nor does it alter the possible maximum sentence of life in prison.

The presiding judge, US Army Colonel Denise Lind, may choose to reject Manning’s plea on technical grounds (if so, technically, Manning will have to unaccept responsibility). If the plea is accepted, the prosecution is free to present its case as planned. Manning’s plea offering only addresses three lesser aspects of a couple lesser charges, so the government could easily accept Manning’s plea and still“upcharge” him.

Manning’s plea could make the prosecution’s job easier, if they are relieved of the burden of proving he accessed documents and transferred them to WikiLeaks. Without this new twist, Manning’s court martial was expected to last at least six weeks, with possibly four of those weeks dedicated to testimony covering information technology-related forensic evidence–such as computer and router logs, login passwords, network access records, and hard drive images. The court martial might now become an expedited two or three week affair.

While the government’s burden of proof may have been reduced overall, it is important to understand that Manning is only admitting to violating military regulations that cover the approved usage of secure computers and the appropriate handling of information. During previous pre-trial hearings, Manning’s defense has shown that every member of his intelligence office in Iraq also violated these same regulations. While other soldiers didn’t share documents with WikiLeaks, they did install unauthorized video games and software and they shared a library of bootleg music and movies on secure Army computers. As Manning is the only soldier charged with any of these violations, the issue of selective prosecution is raised….

…The real defense

Manning’s attorney has long contended that the defense will show that the release of these documents brought little to no harm to U.S. national security, and that Manning’s motives were to expose crime, fraud, corporate malfeasance, and abuse. They hope to show that this was, indeed, the outcome. The prosecution’s position will remain that Manning’s motives and the actual outcomes are irrelevant during the guilt phase of trial. …”

Also there has been increased media attention by mainstream outlets around the case (including the previously knowingly oblivious New York Times). Here is a little bit more on the subject from the Bradley Manning Support Network site:

“By Nathan Fuller, Bradley Manning Support Network. January 18, 2013.

Last week in Fort Meade, MD, government prosecutors said that if PFC Bradley Manning had released documents to the New York Times instead of WikiLeaks, they would still charge him with indirectly ‘aiding the enemy,’ which carries a life sentence.

This would be unprecedented: never before has a soldier been sent to jail for ‘aiding the enemy’ as a result of giving information to a news outlet. Government prosecutors argue that Manning needn’t have intended to aid the enemy; merely that he knew Al Qaeda could use the information is enough. This would turn all government whistle-blowing into treason: a grave threat to both potential sources and American journalism.

Following this contention in court, the Los Angeles Times called on the government to drop the‘aiding the enemy’ charge, writing in an editorial, “That charge strikes us as excessive in the absence of evidence that Manning consciously colluded with hostile nations or terrorists.”

Since then, even higher-profile media members have condemned the military’s pernicious claim and the precedent it would set. In an email in which she explained she couldn’t speak on behalf of her newspaper but could comment as a lifelong journalist and a former newspaper editor, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan said,

“The implications for press freedom in the Bradley Manning prosecution trouble me, as does the federal government’s unprecedented targeting, in recent years, of whistleblowers and those who leak to the press. The issues certainly aren’t black and white, but if the public expects the press to do its crucial job in our democracy, people ought to be more worried than they apparently are. And I agree with the Los Angeles Times editorial that the “aiding the enemy” charge, which could result in a life sentence, is excessive.”

New York Times columnist and former executive editor Bill Keller said, “I think the treatment of Manning feels heavy-handed and out of proportion to actual harm done.”

In Michael Calderone’s story for the Huffington Post, “Manning Case Raises Troubling Questions For Journalists,” about the implications of this argument, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest said, “they don’t want other people to get the idea that they should be doing this,” and that it’ll have a “chilling effect on sources.”…”

Glenn Greenwald wrote for the Guardian, “[the government’s argument] can be – and almost certainly will be – just as easily applied to the vast majority of leaks on which investigative journalism has always relied.”

Mainstream news outlets, Greenwald said,

“might want to take a serious interest in this fact and marshal opposition to what is being done to Bradley Manning: if not out of concern for the injustices to which he is being subjected, then out of self-interest, to ensure that their reporters and their past and future whistle-blowing sources cannot be similarly persecuted.”

So why does the government continue to prosecute this way? Keller said, “It’s been clear from the outset that the government decided to make a lesson of Bradley Manning,”and that “the extreme conditions of his early confinement and the aiding-the-enemy charges suggest a deep animus toward Bradley.”

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In November 2012 an important statement of support by three Nobel Peace Laureates(including Bishop Tutu from the South African anti-apartied struggle) calling on their fellow laureate, United States President Barack Obama, to free Private Manning from his jails. Here is some of what they had to say in their open letter as published in a couple of leading journals:

By Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mariead Maguire, Adolfo Perez Esquivelr November 14, 2012. As published in The Nation and The Guardian (UK)-

“…We have dedicated our lives to working for peace because we have seen the many faces of armed conflict and violence, and we understand that no matter the cause of war, civilians always bear the brunt of the cost. With today’s advanced military technology and the continued ability of business and political elites to filter what information is made public, there exists a great barrier to many citizens being fully aware of the realities and consequences of conflicts in which their country is engaged.

Responsible governance requires fully informed citizens who can question their leadership. For those citizens worldwide who do not have direct, intimate knowledge of war, yet are still affected by rising international tensions and failing economies, the WikiLeaks releases attributed to Manning have provided unparalleled access to important facts.

Revealing covert crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, this window into the realities of modern international relations has changed the world for the better. While some of these documents may demonstrate how much work lies ahead in terms of securing international peace and justice, they also highlight the potential of the Internet as a forum for citizens to participate more directly in civic discussion and creative government accountability projects.

Questioning authority, as a soldier, is not easy. But it can at times be honorable. The words attributed to Manning reveal that he went through a profound moral struggle between the time he enlisted and when he became a whistleblower. Through his experience in Iraq, he became disturbed by top-level policy that undervalued human life and caused the suffering of innocent civilians and soldiers. Like other courageous whistleblowers, he was driven foremost by a desire to reveal the truth…”

“…We Nobel Peace Prize laureates condemn the persecution Bradley Manning has suffered, including imprisonment in conditions declared “cruel, inhuman and degrading” by the United Nations, and call upon Americans to stand up in support of this whistleblower who defended their democratic rights. In the conflict in Iraq alone, more than 110,000 people have died since 2003, millions have been displaced and nearly 4,500 American soldiers have been killed. If someone needs to be held accountable for endangering Americans and civilians, let’s first take the time to examine the evidence regarding high-level crimes already committed, and what lessons can be learned. If Bradley Manning released the documents, as the prosecution contends, we should express to him our gratitude for his efforts toward accountability in government, informed democracy and peace.”

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Check the Bradley Manning Support Network -http://www.bradleymanning.org/ for details and future updates.

*Contribute to the Bradley Manning Defense Fund- as the trial date approaches funds are urgently needed! For link go to http://www.bradleymanning.org/for

*Sign the online petition at the Bradley Manning Support Network (for link go to http://www.bradleymanning.org/ )at the Bradley Manning Support Network site to the Secretary of the Army to free Bradley Manning-1000 days is enough!

*Call (Comments: 202-456-1111), write (The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500),, e-mail (http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments)the White House to ask (or demand) President Obama to pardon Bradley Manning- In federal cases, and military cases are federal cases, the President of the United States can pardon the guilty and the innocent, the convicted and those awaiting trial- Free the whistleblower!