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The “Date Rape” Issue: Feminist Hysteria, Anti-Sex Witchhunt

(From Women and Revolution No. 43, Winter 1993-Spring 1994)

Workers Vanguard No. 1056	14 November 2014

The “Date Rape” Issue: Feminist Hysteria, Anti-Sex Witchhunt

(From Women and Revolution No. 43, Winter 1993-Spring 1994)

 

Written amid a general anti-sex frenzy in the U.S. two decades ago, the article excerpted below, about a supposed epidemic of “date rape” on college campuses, also cuts against today’s campaign for anti-sex “affirmative consent” regulations. Women and Revolution, in which the article originally appeared, was the journal of the Women’s Commission of the Spartacist League/U.S. until its publication was suspended in 1998. Today, articles under its masthead also appear in Spartacist, the International Communist League’s theoretical organ.

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The anti-sex frenzy springs from the agenda of the religious right. Espousing an ideology supposed to have something to do with women’s rights, the feminists might be expected to oppose this witchhunt. Instead, there is a convergence between feminism and religious reaction in support of moralist repression. This is particularly evident in the “date rape” frenzy on the campuses which has recently grabbed headlines across the nation and the world. Egged on by feminist witchhunters, “politically correct” sex on campus serves the war on privacy by whitewashing the intrusion of the campus administration and the cops into students’ personal business as “protecting women” and “stopping rape.” One goal of the student struggles of the 1960s and ’70s at colleges across the country was to put a stop to the in loco parentis prerogatives of campus administrations and to end rules that set curfews for young women, limited the hours that men could enter the sex-segregated dorms and encouraged “housemothers” to make periodic checks of the rooms to see that “all four feet” were firmly planted on the floor when a guy visited one of the “coeds.” The “date rape” hysteria has opened the door to the return of the college snoops.

In The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, Princeton grad student Katie Roiphe exposes the climate of fear and the self-imposed status of “victims” engendered by the “date rape” feminists. Speaking for a layer of young women repulsed by this anti-sex hysteria, Roiphe contrasts what she found when she entered Harvard with what she was taught by her mother, who grew up in the wake of the anti-Communist witchhunt of the 1950s:

“This image of a delicate woman bears a striking resemblance to that fifties ideal my mother and the other women of her generation fought so hard to get away from. They didn’t like her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence. They didn’t like the fact that she was perpetually offended by sexual innuendo. They didn’t like her excessive need for protection. She represented personal, social, and psychological possibilities collapsed, and they worked and marched, shouted and wrote, to make her irrelevant for their daughters. But here she is again, with her pure intentions and her wide eyes. Only this time it is the feminists themselves who are breathing new life into her.”

Roiphe’s scathing attack on the “date-rape crisis” has earned her the enmity of rabid feminists everywhere, and congratulations from more rational layers. In “Not Just Bad Sex” (New Yorker, 4 October 1993) Katha Pollitt accuses Roiphe of everything from poor journalism to a “privileged” lifestyle. While Roiphe’s polemic does not reach beyond the middle-class, heterosexual and largely white college milieu in which the “date rape” frenzy is centered, she has done a real service in challenging the campaign of “politically correct” sex—what the Nation (8 November 1993) labels “the new sexual McCarthyism.”

On a certain level, “date rape” hysteria is an absurdity: Even literary classics like Andrew Marvell’s love poem “To His Coy Mistress” have been tagged as apologies for male sexual “coercion”! “Date rape” is indeed a fitting butt for the spate of cartoons and magazine articles that followed the publication of Roiphe’s book.

But ludicrous as it is, “date rape” feminism has a destructive logic, and it’s nowhere more obvious than on the question of abortion rights. The government has usurped the authority to determine when and if a woman wants to have a child by whittling away at the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion nationally. A big part of this is its assertion of the in loco parentis privilege of “protecting” young women through “squeal laws” that demand parental consent for abortions for women under the age of 18. Last November the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi’s reactionary law requiring permission from both parents or a judge.

“Date rape” hysteria serves as a diversion from the real oppression and exploitation suffered by the vast majority of women in this country. Most working-class and minority women can’t afford to go to college, but rather endure the constant menace of violence and rape as they go to and from backbreaking, low-paying jobs or to pick up their continually threatened welfare pittances. The most forceful and consistent assertion of government intrusion into private life has been the anti-drug witchhunt, which for poor blacks (including, obviously, women) in the devastated inner-city ghettos has meant massive police raids, while workers across the country are subjected to urine testing serving to enforce discipline in the workplace.

Willfully lumping together everything from morning-after regrets to savage brutality, “date rape” hysteria trivializes the crime of rape and belittles the real humiliation, terror and agony that rape victims undergo.

Anti-Sex Codes and Campus Hysteria

The “date rape” campaign was launched on campuses in the 1980s with annual “Take Back the Night” candlelight parades to “end sexual violence against women.” Culminating in outdoor speakouts where “survivors” give testimonials of their personal experiences, the marches have taken on the aura of religious ceremony.

Far from focusing on real acts of violence against women, the “date rape” frenzy redefines as rape experiences which are instead ambiguous or unpleasant—thus trivializing the sometimes painful tribulations of young people grappling with their first sexual encounters. But the “date rape” frenzy is more than these celebrations of trauma and helplessness. Freshmen undergo required “sexual harassment counseling”; films are shown and peer-group sessions held, all with the message that sex is dangerous and dating should be done only when sober, preferably with a chaperon. College pamphlets ask, “Is Dating Dangerous?” and “Friends Raping Friends: Could It Happen to You?”

As if this weren’t sufficiently daunting, campus administrations are now enforcing in loco parentis anti-sex codes. At Ohio’s “liberal” Antioch College, a “sexual consent policy” proscribes “Insistent and/or persistent sexual harassment…emotional, verbal or mental intimidation or abuse found to be sexually threatening or offensive… unwelcome and irrelevant comments, references, gestures or other forms of personal attention which are inappropriate and which may be perceived as persistent sexual overtones or denigration.” To avoid any misunderstandings, students must get “willing and verbal consent” at each stage of the sexual encounter: “If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask. If you want to touch her breast, you have to ask. If you want to move your hand down to her genitals, you have to ask. If you want to put your finger inside her, you have to ask.” While many of us would be begging this motormouth to shut up and get on with it, this seemingly absurd scenario is serious: A woman can now cry “rape” if she thinks a guy might want to screw her, and the administration can suspend or expel the accused, who then faces the hideous legal ramifications of a bogus rape charge. Novelist Martin Amis, speaking at Princeton in 1992, quipped, “As far as I’m concerned you can change your mind before, even during, but just not after sex.”

Lots of people think it’s fun to get drunk and screw, but if you go to Antioch it’s against the rules: If you’re drunk, your “consent is not meaningful”! At Ann Arbor sororities, one woman is picked to remain sober during frat parties; it’s her job to stop her sisters from going off with a guy to his room. The logic of the “date rape” frenzy is carried to its chilling extreme in a poster put up around Berkeley, “Dead Men Don’t Rape” and signed by the Women’s Action Coalition “We Will Take Action.”...

“Date Rape”: Brutal Reality or a Political Program?

Statistics are notoriously susceptible to manipulation for political ends, and the statistics cited for the feminists’ “epidemic” of campus rape couldn’t be a better example. The evidence for “date rape” rests on a 1985 survey by Ms. magazine, financed by the National Institute of Mental Health, which found that “one quarter of women in college today have been victims of rape or attempted rape.” But, as debunkers have pointed out, 73 percent of the women categorized as rape victims did not define their experience as rape—that was done by Dr. Mary Koss, the psychologist who analyzed the survey and who coined the term “date rape.” Some 42 percent of these women later had sex with the man who allegedly “raped” them!

Roiphe astutely points out that the “date rape epidemic” is not a reflection of sexual behavior but a “mood.” Just listen to its propagandists: “Without mutual desire” it’s a “form of rape,” according to Andrea Parrot, Cornell professor and “date rape expert.” The code words are “manipulation” and “verbal coercion”—defined as “a woman’s consenting to unwanted sexual activity because of a man’s verbal arguments not including verbal threats of force.” The etiquette guides of the 19th century told young women that attractive men “can with a subtlety almost beyond the power of her detection, change her ordinary views of things, confuse her judgements, and destroy her rational confidence in discriminating the powers of her own mind” (Advice to Young Ladies, 1848). The titles may be different, but today’s “sexual consent policies” peddle the same retrograde assumptions about the stereotype of the aggressive, violent man, who “wants only one thing,” and the weak, indecisive woman, uninterested in sex and requiring protection.

The definitions used in the “date rape” culture reflect the feminist view that heterosexual sex and rape are a natural progression. Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth (1991) writes: “Cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events.” This is a rehash of Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, in which she argued that rape was “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” According to Brownmiller’s contemporaries:

“Rape is not a special isolated act. It is not an aberration or deviation from the norms of sexual and social behavior in this country. Rape is simply at the end of the continuum of male-aggressive, female-passive patterns, and an arbitrary line has been drawn to mark it off from the rest of such relationships…most men in our country are potential rapists.”

— A. Medea and K. Thompson, Against Rape

At its extreme, rape is equated with sex, for example by anti-porn queen Catharine MacKinnon: “Compare victims’ reports of rape with women’s reports of sex,” she says. “They look a lot alike.” But contrary to feminist mythology, rape is not a “normative” expression of sexuality in this society. As we wrote in 1975 in “Rape and Bourgeois Justice” (Young Spartacus No. 29, February 1975):

“Rape transforms what is normally a pleasurable intimacy and consensual activity for sexual gratification into an experience of fear, degrading submission, brutality and often injury for the victim and into an overt expression of hostility and aggression for the rapist. Between the actuality of rape and the sex act per se there are differences. These differences may be considered as discontinuities in the continuum of sexual relations. It is precisely the feminists who make the value judgement that there are no discontinuities, no differences in kind, between mutually pleasurable, consensual sexual intercourse and a victimization and violation filled with terror and degradation.”

Rape at the final discontinuity ceases to be a sexual act.

Susan Estrich, feminist author of Real Rape, believes many women “would say no if they could” to any sex with men. Nonetheless she is quite correct that “The legal definition of rape turns on force and nonconsent, not on the relationship between accuser and accused.” We believe that effective consent should determine sexual relations—not the age, sex, number or degree of intimacy of the people involved. Because it’s the circumstances of a sexual encounter that determine whether it is a crime or an act of voluntary sexual intercourse, ambiguities about consensuality do and must occur, particularly when the people know each other. Consent is always colored by the society we live in. Consensuality is rendered something less than complete when sexist attitudes and economic constraints (however expressed through a complex set of social factors that make them more or less “acceptable”) keep estranged couples together. And given the tangle of race, sex and class in this bigoted society, relationships can often be emotionally exploitative and unequal—but to call them “crimes” is to bring in the government, which is the very enforcer of that bigotry and exploitation.

If among adults the psychology and sociology of sexual relations are murky and complex, they are all the more so when young people come into sexual contact with each other at the height of their socialized sexual differentiation, without any preparation or experience and without much access or opportunity. Sexual experimentation is one of the things youth is all about. Sex hormones are boiling for both young men and women, but the expressions of this sexuality differ. While the current crop of college women has been spared some of the guilt, shame and fear of pregnancy imposed on earlier generations, experiences vary from doing nothing to doing a lot. Social control over teenage boys is much less: they can be described as alienated young males charging an indifferent and hostile society with an erection, and generally bouncing off. Young men will do almost anything to get off; mainly this takes the form of masturbation, but guys will get a girl in bed if they can. And contrary to feminist myth, they are often successful: many young women do like to screw.

Of course early sexual experiences are not always the most auspicious, particularly now that AIDS is a real fear. Condoms do not make for a spontaneous expression of passion. Teenagers often have to get drunk to get up the nerve to have sex, and they aren’t experienced at handling alcohol. Under these circumstances, premature ejaculation, fumbling, miscommunication are unfortunately probably the norm rather than the exception. But awkward, unpleasant, even manipulative experiences are not rape. In an interview with the London Independent on Sunday (31 October 1993), Mary Koss revealed an underlying assumption behind the “date rape epidemic”: “It isn’t drunkenness itself that determines whether or not you get raped, it’s whether you have the misfortune to be drunk around a sexual jerk.” If finesse defines consensuality, one gets an idea of the genesis of her “one in four women raped” statistic.

The difficulties of teenage sex result in part from religious moralism which reinforces the myth of asexuality of youth in this society and in part from sexual stereotyping which tries to make bullies out of little boys and compliant dolls out of little girls. Moreover, deforming puritanism and bigotry in North American society all but seals off, especially for boys, anything but heterosexual activity.

It would surely help to have sex education that prepared young people for screwing. An understanding of the reproductive system is important, but somewhat more pertinent for youth than the placement of a girl’s Fallopian tubes is the existence of her clitoris. Instead, the federal government has spent over $31 million to develop an “abstinence only” curriculum which teaches “the only safe sex is no sex,” doesn’t mention condoms or homosexuality, and counsels girls that have had sex already to practice “second virginity.” This does not differ much from the message of pamphlets distributed at some college orientations to teach of the danger of AIDS: “To eliminate risk, abstain from sex or avoid sexual intimacy beyond fantasy, massage and mutual masturbation.” In this sexually charged society, the message that teenagers get from these moral strictures is that when adults tell you “what’s good for you” it’s all hypocrisy and lies.

Rape Laws and “Family Values”

...Rape is a hideous crime, one which embodies all the sexual myths and stereotypes of this deeply racist society. But the juridical basis of the current rape laws has little to do with protecting women against violence. The laws exist for the protection of women as property, based on the moral code embodied in the institution of the family. Thus the real crime of rape in patriarchal societies of all kinds is that the woman is “defiled”; her value as a “pure” transmission belt for the inheritance of private property is damaged. In the U.S. this is expressed in the notorious harassment of the victim by the police. Victims are sometimes denied immediate medical attention and frequently find themselves on trial as courts subject them to rigorous moral scrutiny. For the cops and judges in America, a rape victim with a sexual past has no value to protect.

In strict Islamic societies, rape victims are often killed by their families; at best they cannot marry. Shrouding women in the veil in countries like Iran and Afghanistan is the ultimate in “protection of women,” meant to keep them in a condition of chattel slavery to husbands or fathers. This was not the least of our reasons for hailing the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, which alone held forth the prospect of freeing women from this bondage. Indifferent to the plight of their Afghan “sisters,” American feminists backed the CIA’s cutthroat mujahedin allies in their fight against the Red Army.

Despite the inherent contradictions of “justice” in the bourgeois court system, we do not oppose the rape laws per se and could well support prosecution of an accused rapist in a given situation. We take a very different attitude, however, to the statutory rape laws, which prohibit any sexual intercourse with any girl under the age of consent (which varies from state to state). Such laws exist only to oppress young people and are almost always prosecuted in a vindictive manner by the state. In New York, for example, a 19-year-old boy can go to jail for spending the night with his 17-year-old girlfriend.

The Social Tinder of Race and Sex

The reform of the rape laws in the 1970s made it easier for a woman to prosecute, but it also made it easier to railroad the accused on purely vindictive charges. In this racist society the new laws have been used to further victimize black people. In a country where the ultimate taboo is interracial sex, the ruling class never hesitates to pull out all the stops in their manipulation of sexual fear in the service of racial oppression. Nor are the feminists wanting in this regard.

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, was hideously mutilated and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for “reckless eyeballing” a white man’s wife. This monstrous racist lynching was a touchstone on the race question. But 20 years later Susan Brownmiller disgustingly insisted that Till had something in common with one of the murderers: “They both understood that…it was a deliberate insult just short of physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant that this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her.” In her book Katie Roiphe recalls Emmett Till’s case, and describes how at George Washington University a female student fabricated a story about “two muscular young-looking black males” in “torn dirty clothing” raping a white student; she later recanted.

Roiphe rightly points out that the feminist insistence that male catcalls and leers are tantamount to rape is no different from the accusations of “reckless eyeballing” that formed the basis for white lynch mob attacks on blacks in the South. But Roiphe relegates it to a lesson of history, asserting that “lynchings and Jim Crow are not the current danger.” In fact, the protection of “Southern white womanhood” remains the bloody battle cry of the Ku Klux Klan. Legal lynching is a current reality: In 1990, a 21-year-old black man, David Scott Campbell, was found hanged in a Mississippi jail, one of 24 blacks who were declared “suicides” in the state’s prison system in the past five years. Campbell was arrested on a year-old warrant, but in the eyes of the cops his “crime” was dating a white woman.

The institution of the family inculcates powerful anxieties and superstitious fears which are especially prone to social control by reactionary forces. “Take Back the Night” marches are reactionary, not-so-thinly veiled calls to strengthen the state and its repressive apparatus, the racist cops; along with slogans like “Dead Men Can’t Rape” and “Castrate Rapists,” they’re a lynch mob waiting to happen. (The demand for castration is especially horrifying: this brutality was performed on black men by the slavocracy until as late as the 19th century, when even they abandoned it as too barbaric; and for decades the Klan performed it in lynchings.)

[....]

The “date rape” hoax is a cynical and dangerous business because it invokes government authority to intervene as moral arbiter in our most intimate affairs and fuels a state-sponsored campaign of sexual regimentation in the service of bolstering the reactionary institution of the family. While Marxists cannot decree either a just or a pleasurable solution to the ambiguities that arise out of the intersection of sex, race and class in this capitalist society, we can and do oppose all attempts to fit human sexuality into legislated and decreed “norms.” Back-alley abortions, prostitution, unwanted pregnancies, physical and sexual violence and racial oppression are the sordid reality behind “public morality.”

The “date rape” fraud deflects attention from the real violence perpetuated every day against women and children under this class system. Social degradation and dehumanization (which permeate sexual relations as all else) is rooted in the nature of this society and the exploitation of labor. The social alienation of a system in which the vast mass of people are tools for the enrichment of the very few is compounded by the institutionalized inequalities of race, nationality and sex. Violence against women springs in part from the deep sexual insecurities fostered by repressiveness and social irrationality.

This system is also imperialist, reaping billions off the Third World masses who are deliberately pushed down into starvation, illiteracy and endemic disease, and held down by brutal dictatorships. Subjected to oppressive practices like female genital mutilation or enforced segregation under the veil and in the home, most women get to watch their children die and to die young themselves, often in childbirth or after some botched abortion.

To create genuinely free and equal relations between people in all spheres, including sex, requires nothing less than the destruction of this class system and the creation of a communist world. In a classless society social and economic constraints over sexual relations will be nonexistent, and in the words of Frederick Engels, “there is no other motive left except mutual inclination.”

Sex and Consent on Campus Workers Vanguard No. 1056	14 November 2014

“Yes Means Yes” Law: Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex

Sex and Consent on Campus

 

Amid an ongoing debate over sex and consent on college campuses, in September California passed “affirmative consent” legislation, which was followed by a slew of similar initiatives nationwide. The pretext is to curb a purported epidemic of sexual violence and have college administrations come clean on reporting sexual assault complaints. But legislating one form of consent as the only acceptable variant and branding all else as assault—as these new policies do—means that these administrations now have even greater power to enforce what is acceptable sexual activity among students.

The new California code, known as “yes means yes,” dictates that “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” must be ongoing throughout an entire coupling. Acts without explicit agreement or while under the influence of drugs or alcohol are not considered consensual. As many young students are unskilled at both sex and drinking, this combination often results in morning-after misgivings and bad hangovers. In an American Spectator article online titled “In California, Every Love Scene Ever Filmed Is Rape” (2 October), one commentator aptly captured that state lawmakers have made “every drunken collegiate hookup a potential sexual assault.”

Like the “date rape” frenzy in the 1990s (see article, page 7), the current campaign invites campus bureaucrats into the bedroom to poke, pry and criminalize a range of customary sexual activity—from intoxicated make-out sessions to miscommunicated caresses or overly zealous groping. Regimenting sex is a morality drive, and laws dictating affirmative consent give the campus sex police an even freer hand to say what is immoral, much like former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s standard for pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Campus administrations, government out of the bedroom!

What might be in store for students is shown by a case from Occidental College in Los Angeles. In September 2013, after a day of binge drinking, two heavily intoxicated freshmen planned to have sex, exchanging text messages about having a condom. The next day, neither could recall what happened. The young woman was told by a sociology professor that she had been raped, evidenced by her difficulty sleeping and because the man “fit the profile of other rapists.” In police interviews, witnesses said both students were willing participants exercising bad judgment. But Occidental’s investigation determined that he violated school policy because she was drunk, i.e., he failed to recognize that her drunken consent was meaningless. Occidental found him guilty of sexual assault, rejected his appeal and expelled him. As a result of this botched one-night stand—details of which are in an 82-page report online—both lives are ruined. She dropped out of school and he has been rejected by other colleges and stigmatized as a rapist.

The suggestion that a misunderstanding—or for that matter, bad or unpleasant sex—is equivalent to rape is not only ludicrous but dangerously trivializing of actual sexual violence. Human sexual behavior is certainly complex, but it is not one broad continuum from the innocuous hookup to violent rape. Rape is a heinous crime of degradation and terror whose victims have every right to legal recourse. One much-discussed article in New York magazine (21 September) on student activists “starting a revolution against campus sexual assault” captures the effort to make all sexual acts suspect: “Frustration with hook-up culture is undeniably a part of the anti-rape movement. In some activists’ ideal world, there might be no trial, on campus or elsewhere, but instead a simple presumption of guilt.”

For us Marxists, the guiding principle in all sexual relations is that of effective consent, meaning nothing more and nothing less than mutual agreement and understanding, as opposed to coercion. The social norms surrounding sexuality—colored by shame, fear and religious mores, not to mention gender, class and racial inequalities—can complicate matters. But as long as those who take part agree at the time, nobody else, least of all the state, has the right to tell them how or if they can do it.

Sexual violence is an extreme reflection of the degraded status of women in this decaying capitalist social order. More often than not, going to the authorities who enforce that order, whether it be the police or the campus administration, adds more trauma on top of the sexual assault itself. It is a reflection of entrenched anti-woman bigotry that those looking for redress are subjected to indifference or “blame the victim” humiliation, or pressured into recanting.

The “yes means yes” campaign will do nothing to curtail actual rape, let alone address the social degradation and abuse perpetrated daily against women and children under this class system. Instead, the capitalist rulers have seized on the campaign to drum up fears among the population while reinforcing obedience to god and country and bolstering the bourgeois order. Whipping up social anxiety diverts attention from the madness of society, with deteriorating schools, massive unemployment, a failing health care system and perpetual war.

From an early age, youth are instilled with fear and loathing about sex—through everything from “abstinence only” moralism to “marriage is forever” straitjacket monogamy. As if getting past high school weren’t already difficult enough, the university administration and bourgeois state intervene as the guardians of moral order, infantilizing young adults who might just want to have fun. Crackdowns on harmless things like sexting or intergenerational relationships are a component of broader social regimentation, as are increasing restrictions on access to contraception and the rollback of abortion rights.

Sex, Race and Regimentation

To prove there is an epidemic of rape on campus, media outlets and activists recycle the deceptive statistic that one in five female college students is a victim of sexual assault. That statistic, which was obtained through dubious calculations and unclear questionnaires, counts regrettable or confusing sexual encounters, that is, the “gray area,” as assault. Over half of MIT students in a recent survey thought it possible for rape to “happen unintentionally,” i.e., by accident! The one-in-five figure is the same that was retailed two decades ago when campus “Take Back the Night” rallies were all the rage. College campuses are not the epicenter of rape in the U.S.; one need only look at the military or cops, institutions of the state, to find rampant sexual abuse.

A current hotbed of the campus “anti-rape movement” is Columbia University, where senior Emma Sulkowicz has gotten media attention for her Carry That Weight mattress project. Sulkowicz carries a mattress with her around campus to dramatize that the male student she alleges raped her has not been expelled. We do not know what happened in the incident in question. But after the fact, her experience reporting to cops and campus investigators appears to have been harrowing and patronizing, as is typical.

Sulkowicz’s case is the central focus of the group No Red Tape, which cosponsored an October 29 “Carrying the Weight Together” national day of action. Among the chants that day at Columbia was “rape culture is contagious,” conflating general sexist behavior or ideas with rape. Protesters also called for university president Lee Bollinger to “be the leader on our side.” Top campus officials are the people who oversee the exclusion of black and Latino students, persecute leftists and pro-Palestinian activists and put the squeeze on campus workers.

The pseudo-socialists of the International Socialist Organization, who tail anything that moves, are heavily active in No Red Tape. These reformists tout the need to “hold administrations directly responsible” while celebrating the fact that the demonstrations have brought “welcome attention” from the White House (socialistworker.org, 2 October).

In fact, from the outset the “offensive against campus sexual assault” has been pushed from the top. Obama recently set up a White House task force on the matter and enlisted Hollywood stars to take an “It’s On Us” pledge. In 2011, the federal government released a “Dear Colleague” letter to university administrations setting a lower standard for the burden of proof, so that a student can be disciplined for something that was only more likely than not to have occurred. The Department of Education has more than 70 colleges under federal investigation for mishandling cases alleging abuse. Colleges that do not put forward the proper sexual consent rules under Title IX are threatened with losing funding.

Title IX, which outlaws gender discrimination in federally financed institutions, was enacted over 40 years ago, like many other reforms ushered in by the social struggles of the civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements. Title IX not only benefited women’s participation in sports, but also opened doors to other educational programs and facilities. However, all reforms under capitalism can be reversed or perverted to serve a different purpose than intended.

The cast of characters backing this campaign is evidence in itself of the campaign’s repressive agenda. Take Janet Napolitano, former secretary of homeland security, top sheriff of the “war on terror,” now serving as University of California president. Napolitano demonstrates her touching concern for students by pushing a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual assault while jacking up tuition at the ten UC campuses.

Before his recent re-election as New York governor, Andrew Cuomo pushed for State University of New York campuses to adopt a uniform consent policy similar to “yes means yes,” and he now intends to codify that standard as state law. Democratic Party politicians package these new policies as advancing women’s rights (while, of course, barely lifting a finger to defend access to abortion or birth control). Posturing as “friends of women” is made all the easier by right-wing misogynist pundits, who consider women vessels to produce babies.

Some conservatives have noted the usefulness of the campus anti-sex campaign in promoting neo-Victorian modesty and chivalry, which fell out of favor with “sexual liberation.” Meanwhile, many people rightly oppose the ominous overreach of affirmative consent. Harvard’s latest sexual harassment policy came under fire from 28 of the university’s current and retired law school professors because it lacked “basic elements of fairness and due process” and was “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.”

Hailing the California law is old-school feminist Gloria Steinem. Preaching that “silence is not consent; it is the absence of consent,” Steinem welcomes a rule that “redefines that gray area” between yes and no (New York Times, 4 September). Offering perhaps the most blunt—but demented—rationale for affirmative consent laws is Ezra Klein of the online news site Vox, who remarked that “yes means yes” legislation is “terrible” but “necessary”! Presenting males as predators with an unrestrained libido, Klein wants all men to “feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.” Klein’s preferred sexual “culture” more closely resembles a scene from the Inquisition.

For Klein, a conscious policy of false accusations and convictions is a good thing. He accepts that innocent men are collateral damage, and in this racist capitalist society black men in particular will be on the receiving end. Accusations of rape have long been used to justify lynch mob “justice” and railroad black men to prison. In 1931, the Scottsboro Boys were framed up and imprisoned for rapes that never happened; in 1989, the Central Park Five were falsely convicted and thrown behind bars for the rape of a jogger in New York City.

Frenzy about black male sexuality is a common thread in American culture. The recent viral Hollaback YouTube video documenting “catcalling” in NYC was edited so that it showed no white males, only dark-skinned men. The clipped segments of a white actress being leered and jeered at while walking down the sidewalk treats non-threatening and threatening behavior equally, from being greeted with “How you doing today?” to being followed. Rightly chastising Hollaback’s portrayal of black and brown men “as congenital predators,” Liliana Segura noted in an Intercept article (3 November): “That this viral video had, in the span of five days, sparked such a sense of crisis that people would push for a legal ban on street harassment was, to me, the most damning indictment of its race politics.” In a city infamous for “stop and frisk,” any such law will only lead to more criminalization of minority youth at the hands of police thugs.

It is wrong in any case to place the burden of women’s oppression—of which daily discrimination such as sexual harassment is but a reflection—on the behavior of individual men. Sexist stereotyping and attitudes flow from women’s subjugation in the patriarchal family, the main social source of women’s oppression. Together with religion, the family serves as a key prop of the capitalist system: it instills subservience to authority and promotes a puritanical morality against anything that deviates from the family ideal—from premarital sex to gay sex. Working-class women shoulder a double burden, exploited at work and responsible for household drudgery and child rearing. The low status of women in this patriarchal society can only be ended through socialist revolution.

Feminist Puritanism and the State

It’s bad news when the ruling class is worried about what people do in their bedrooms. Anti-sex panics serve to bolster social conservatism and reinforce the family. In the 1980s and ’90s, people were force-fed the lie that there was an epidemic of child molestations and ritual abuse of children, with sexual predators supposedly lurking behind every teacher’s desk. Today, thousands of those engaging in private activities that do not harm anyone—such as possession of child porn—are criminalized as “sex offenders.” False allegations of sexual abuse have destroyed lives, torn up families and led to suicides.

In moral crusades against pornography, prostitution and youth sexuality, feminists have consistently found themselves in bed with the enemy of women: the state. Feminism works inside class society, seeking to give bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women a chance to compete in the male club of power and privilege. Feminist ideology presents women in a state of perpetual victimhood, needing government “protection.” Far from “empowering” them, feminism keeps young women activists wedded to the very puritanical and repressive order that oppresses them.

As Marxists, we have always been outspoken opponents of anti-sex hysteria and state intrusion into private life. However, we do not offer a program on how to untangle the complexities of sex under capitalism. As we stated in our article titled “Rape and Bourgeois Justice,” (Young Spartacus No. 29, February 1975): “Only in a workers state will men and women stand in full equality before the law, the administration of which will be a part of the creation and maintenance of the social fabric of well-being for the population as a whole.” And while we cannot spell out what sexual relations will look like in a society liberated from religious anxieties and racial and class inequities, we know they will be far better.

On The West Coast The Class Struggle Continues....

Shipping Bosses Accuse ILWU of Tying Up Docks

Showdown Brewing at West Coast Ports

Workers Vanguard No. 1056	14 November 2014

Shipping Bosses Accuse ILWU of Tying Up Docks

Showdown Brewing at West Coast Ports

 

10 NOVEMBER—For over four months, some 14,000 members of the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) have been working without a contract. Now, the shipping and terminal bosses organized in the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) are screaming that the ILWU has “orchestrated work slowdowns” that are “crippling” ports from Seattle and Tacoma to Los Angeles/Long Beach. Charging that the union reneged on its agreement that “normal operations at West Coast ports would continue until an agreement could be reached,” the PMA is demanding an extension of the previous contract. The ILWU slammed the PMA’s claim as “a bold-faced lie,” pointing out that the union has never agreed to a definition of “normal operations.” What the union is up against is the “normal,” relentless drive of the companies to maximize profits by increasing productivity through attacks on hard-won union work rules and job conditions.

An ILWU press release issued today puts the blame on the bosses for creating the bottleneck at L.A./Long Beach through mismanaging port operations and undermanning the work at a time of increased volume. The squeeze on longshore labor is a matter of life and death. As the press release stated: “West Coast longshore work is extremely hazardous, with higher fatality rates than the work of firefighters or police officers, according to U.S. Department of Labor figures. The biggest factor causing accidents on the docks is the employers’ constant demand for increased production.”

With ships stacking up at ports that handle nearly 80 percent of container shipping on the West Coast, a group of more than 100 retail and transportation companies fired off a letter to President Barack Obama demanding that the government “use all of its available options” to head off the growing confrontation. They called for everything from sending in a federal mediator to invoking the union-busting Taft-Hartley law in the event of a strike or lockout. During the 2002 contract negotiations, the PMA locked out longshoremen for 11 days after accusing the ILWU of engaging in a “slowdown.” The Republican Bush administration—which had earlier warned that a strike would “threaten national security” and drawn up plans to militarize the docks—brought down Taft-Hartley, forcing longshoremen back to work under conditions dictated by the PMA.

There should be no illusion that things are different with a Democrat in the White House. Contrary to the trade-union bureaucracy’s promotion of the Democrats as the allies of labor, they represent the interests of American capitalism no less than the Republicans. That Obama will stand with the PMA is as obvious as the flotilla of armed Coast Guard ships his administration had readied to use in the ILWU’s 2011-12 battle against the union-busting EGT grain consortium in Longview, Washington. Federal mediators and other agencies like the National Labor Relations Board are merely the government’s advance men whose purpose is to bring the unions to heel.

The showdown between the PMA and the ILWU could become a critical class battle in which all labor has a stake. The ILWU has enormous potential social power. With the offshoring of much manufacturing and the just-in-time delivery system, a strike would quickly paralyze whole sectors of the U.S. economy. But the union has been weakened and is increasingly isolated as it faces a confrontation with the powerful conglomerate of shipping and terminal operators—and behind them the forces of the capitalist state.

Union Hiring Hall Under Attack

For months, the contract negotiations were portrayed as the smoothest in years. In late August, an agreement was announced on health benefits, which had been seen as a major hurdle. Details were left unsaid, and looming on the horizon in 2018 is a whopping $150 million annual Obamacare tax on the ILWU’s so-called “Cadillac” health plan. Even now, the union’s membership is left in the dark as to what’s on the table. Nevertheless, there are warning signs. A backdrop to the present confrontation is the ILWU’s recent contract agreement with major grain terminals in the Pacific Northwest, which are not part of the PMA. After a lengthy battle in which ILWU members working at United Grain in Vancouver, Washington, and Columbia Grain in Portland, Oregon, were locked out for well over a year while scabs did their jobs, the settlement essentially guts the union hiring hall.

The hiring hall was a key gain of the momentous 1934 West Coast longshore strike. Under the previous hated “shape-up” system, corrupt and brutal gang bosses in the service of the companies had total power to select who among the men desperately gathered at the ports each morning would be allowed to work. To win union control over hiring, the longshoremen fought an all-out battle against the companies, the cops and National Guard troops. The implementation of the rotary dispatch system was designed to equalize work opportunity among longshoremen, with the union having the decisive say in the system.

Ever since, this system has been a thorn in the side of West Coast shipping, terminal and export trade bosses, who bristle at the fact that they don’t have the same hiring prerogatives as employers in almost every other industry or workplace in capitalist America. In the 1960s, following the introduction of container shipping, the PMA got a foot in the door with a contract provision allowing for “steady men.” These skilled workers bypass the hiring hall, reporting directly to stevedoring companies. They are paid a premium and are also guaranteed a minimum of work each month. This subversion of the hiring hall has long been a dagger pointed at the heart of the union.

In longshore operations, “steady men” are restricted to crane operators, mechanics and certain heavy equipment operators. But the recent grain contracts give those companies the right to hire unlimited steady workers for all job categories at their terminals. Management has sole discretion over whether additional workers will be ordered on a day-to-day basis for terminal work. The hall crews formerly required for work on river barges have been eliminated, although gangs from the hall will still be dispatched to load the ships. However, if the hall cannot supply adequate “qualified” labor, management has the right to hire non-ILWU labor or use supervisors to do the work. The key terminal job of operating the console that controls the flow of grain was ceded to management, as was the job overseeing the loading of ships.

One of the gains of the mass struggles that built the ILWU was the six-hour day. Now, even the eight-hour day (long the norm) is a thing of the past in grain, as the companies are allowed to extend shifts up to 12 hours, an ominous threat to health and safety. At the same time, provisions allowing longshoremen to “stand by” (stop work) if they feel their safety is threatened have been vitiated. Not only is management allowed to work their jobs if the matter is not immediately resolved, but the workers can be subject to discipline up to and including firing if an arbitrator rules the safety claim was not made “in good faith.”

The trendsetter for these agreements was the 2012 contract at the new, multimillion-dollar EGT terminal in Longview. Early in the battle against EGT’s union-busting offensive, ILWU members and their allies fought back in class-struggle actions, the likes of which had not been seen in this country in years. But in the face of massive fines, the ILWU International backed off. With military forces mobilized by the Obama administration to escort the first shipment of scab grain out of the terminal, an agreement was signed. Subverting the hiring hall, it gave EGT complete control over which ILWU members would be approved to work at its terminal. In the new grain agreements, workers dispatched from the hall are not subject to company pre-approval, nor are there fines and other penalties for unauthorized work stoppages as at EGT. But this is small consolation.

No doubt the PMA sees the grain agreements as an opening to press its own advantage against the ILWU. Pointing to the tie-up at the container ports, an article in the shipping industry’s publication of record, the Journal of Commerce (5 November), argues that the grain companies “found a solution to the problems generated by such tactics” with contracts that “in effect give control of the hiring hall to the employers.”

What made the difference in the 1934 longshore strike that won the hiring hall—as well as the victory of other strikes that year by Minneapolis Teamsters and Toledo auto parts workers—was a leadership committed to a class-struggle policy. As we wrote in Part One of our article “Then and Now” (WV Nos. 1050 and 1051, 8 August and 5 September) contrasting these strikes with today’s devastation of organized labor:

“Unlike other strikes at the time, the militancy of the workers was not restrained by leaders who promoted the lie of a ‘partnership’ between labor and capital. Instead, the mass strength and solidarity of the workers was organized and politically directed by leaders who rejected any notion that the bosses are ‘reasonable’ or their state ‘neutral.’ Understanding the forces of the class enemy that would be arrayed against any union struggle, the leaders of these strikes were prepared for class war. And it was no easy fight.”

Not the Time to Be Making New Enemies

In August 2013, on the eve of the AFL-CIO’s convention, the ILWU split from the federation. At the time, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath pointed to escalating attacks on the West Coast longshore union by AFL-CIO affiliates. These charges were all too true. One of the more notorious examples was the strikebreaking role played by the Operating Engineers Local 701, which supplied scab labor during the ILWU’s fight against EGT.

Other attacks have come as part of the dirty game of jurisdictional warfare pitting union against union in a scramble to defend their own shrinking turf. Here the ILWU bureaucracy’s hands are no cleaner than those of the AFL-CIO tops. Faced with the PMA’s drive to increasingly mechanize operations on the docks, the ILWU leadership’s answer is to claim jurisdiction over maintenance and other mechanical service jobs, a number of which are currently done by the IAM machinists and other unions.

Turning its back on any fight to mobilize unity in action of all unions at the ports, including the East and Gulf Coast ILA longshoremen, the ILWU has only greased the skids for more backstabbing by the trade-union bureaucrats by splitting from the AFL-CIO. In a recent strike by some 130 recycling workers, organized by ILWU Local 6, at Oakland’s Waste Management plant, Teamsters truck drivers at the facility scabbed, herded across the picket lines by their union bureaucrats! ILWU Local 6 members chanted “Remember 2007,” referring to when they honored locked-out Teamsters pickets at the same facility. The bureaucrats’ alibi was that the Local 6 strike was not officially sanctioned by the Teamsters Joint Council or the Alameda Labor Council, the latter reportedly arguing that “sanction” could not be given to a union not affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

The strikebreaking actions of the Teamsters against mainly Latino immigrant workers, many of them women, fighting for a meager increase in their poverty-level wages were a crime against all labor. But the ILWU tops have done likewise, ordering their members to cross the picket lines of overwhelmingly immigrant, unorganized and viciously exploited port truckers in Oakland and more recently at the L.A./Long Beach port. Now locked in a showdown with the PMA, the ILWU finds itself with few friends and many real and potential enemies. Faced with the backstabbing moves of the trade-union misleaders, all workers had better understand that if a union with the strength of the ILWU goes down, it will be a savage body blow to labor as a whole.

For a Class-Struggle Leadership!

In his letter of disaffiliation from the AFL-CIO, McEllrath pointed to the ILWU’s “long and proud history of militant independence inside and outside the House of Labor.” The notion of the ILWU as the last remaining bastion of labor militancy is one readily belied by the actual history and practice of its leadership. In fact, the last coastwide ILWU strike was in 1971, more than 40 years ago. That strike was largely foisted on the union leadership, then under ILWU founder Harry Bridges, by a membership seething over the massive loss of jobs under the 1960 Mechanization and Modernization Agreement that he had negotiated and rammed down their throats.

Key to reversing the erosion of the ILWU as an industrial power on the West Coast docks is defense of the union hiring hall. That means a fight to bring all the steady men back to the hall, with equal pay for equal work at the highest rate of pay. The answer to the job loss threatened by the increasing automation of the ports is to return to one of the union’s first achievements, the six-hour day, at no loss in pay to spread the available work among all longshoremen. There must be a fight to organize the port truckers, who are crucial to the movement of cargo. As a key link in the vast global cargo chain, the largely immigrant port truckers, many of whom have experiences in class battles and other struggles in their home countries, have tremendous potential social power to take on the trucking companies and, behind them, the international shipping and terminal bosses. Such an organizing effort, combined with the fight for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay, would also forge bonds with the black and Latino poor by opening up good-paying union jobs.

The road forward lies in the struggle to build a class-struggle labor leadership that will fight in opposition to the aims and interests of American capitalism, its government and political parties. For the workers to prevail over their exploiters, it is essential that labor’s fight be linked to the building of a multiracial revolutionary workers party capable of leading the struggle to do away with this entire system of wage slavery through socialist revolution. When those who labor rule, the means of production will be taken out of the hands of the rapacious capitalist owners and made the collective property of society, ultimately on an international scale. Then, advances in automation and other technology, which are now wielded as a club against the workers’ jobs and livelihoods, will be used to reduce their workload and vastly improve the conditions of life for the population as a whole.

U.S. Out Of The Middle East!  As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing”    Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Escalations-No New U.S. War In Iraq- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries!  Stop The U.S. And Allied Bombings! –Stop The U. S. Arms Shipments … Frank Jackman comment: As the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally, orders more air bombing strikes in the north and in Syria,  sends more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred recently, to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds, supplies arms to the moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. And all the time saying the familiar (Vietnam era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, cannot rely on the Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to get whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq –Stop The Bombings- No Intervention In Syria!  *** Here is something to think about:   Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden. Workers Vanguard No. 1056

Down With U.S. War Against ISIS!

 

Syria/Iraq: Kurdish Nationalists Serve U.S. Imperialism

 

In his press conference the day after the midterm elections, President Barack Obama stated that he would seek Congressional authorization for his war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, three months after the U.S. imperialists started their bombing campaign against those reactionary Islamists. Two days later came the announcement that 1,500 American troops would soon be sent to Iraq, doubling the number of military “advisers” there. The insistence by the White House that there will be no U.S. “boots on the ground” to carry out the war against ISIS is sounding thinner by the day.

For the moment, the Obama administration continues to rely on bombing attacks and local proxies on the ground. In the battle for the predominantly Kurdish city of Kobani in northern Syria, the U.S. has carried out airstrikes against ISIS and dropped arms and other supplies to fighters, mainly from the People’s Protection Committees (YPG). The YPG—the military wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is allied to the nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) based in Turkey—is acting as both ground troops and spotters for the U.S. imperialists. YPG spokesman Polat Can described how a member of his organization in the joint operation command center transmits the coordinates for bomb attacks provided by YPG forces on site (civiroglu.net, 14 October).

The acceleration of U.S. “mission creep” in Iraq and Syria underscores the need for class-conscious workers everywhere, particularly in the U.S., to oppose the war against ISIS and all other imperialist depredations. Cynically carried out in the name of humanitarian assistance to the Yazidis, the Syrian Kurds and other victims of the ISIS cutthroats, the imperialist onslaught is aimed at reinforcing the U.S. hold over the Near East. The U.S.-led “coalition” hodgepodge includes Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have been among the main financial backers of ISIS, as well as other Persian Gulf monarchies. The public beheadings by ISIS shocked Americans, feeding into support for the bombing campaign. Not as publicized in the U.S. capitalist media are the numerous beheadings carried out by Washington’s Saudi allies, who execute people convicted of homosexuality, adultery, blasphemy, apostasy and sorcery.

In Kobani, the PKK-allied forces have tied the fortunes of the oppressed Kurdish population to U.S. imperialism’s war against ISIS. They are joined in this effort by Iraqi government forces and the Kurdish pesh merga of northern Iraq, who are conducting joint military operations with the U.S., just as they did during the American occupation of Iraq. As we stated last issue, “The fact that all these forces are ‘boots on the ground’ for imperialist intervention means that revolutionary Marxists have a military side with ISIS when it targets the imperialists and their proxies” (WV No. 1055, 31 October).

We are implacable opponents of the ultra-reactionary political and social program of ISIS, and we condemn communal atrocities on all sides. Prior to the U.S. military intervention, we insisted that the international proletariat must take no side in the raft of interethnic and inter-communal conflicts in the region, which are in no small part the legacy of imperialist subjugation. Where the working class must take a side is in opposition to the imperialists and their lackeys in Iraq and Syria.

Our military side with ISIS against the U.S.-led coalition and its local adjuncts today flows from our understanding that it is the imperialists who are the main enemy of the working people in the U.S. and the Near East. In its quest for profit and domination, the U.S. ruling class has slaughtered millions upon millions and constantly wreaked havoc around the world. In other circumstances, ISIS might well act as an agency of the imperialists, as its forebears did in the CIA-backed mujahedin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. More recently, U.S. backing for the opposition to Syria’s Assad regime in the early part of that country’s civil war gave much encouragement to Islamic fundamentalist forces, including what would become ISIS.

Laying the cards on the table, a New York Times (23 October) editorial titled “Why Kobani Must Be Saved” noted that the Kurdish town, “once dismissed as inconsequential by American commanders,” had become a test of the Obama administration’s strategy of airstrikes combined with reliance on local ground forces. “A setback in Kobani,” the Times declared, “would show the fragility of the American plan and hand the Islamic State an important victory.”

From the point of view of the international proletariat, a defeat of U.S.-backed forces in Kobani could throw a monkey wrench into imperialist designs for the region. It could also promote opposition domestically, where despite the uptick in support for the anti-ISIS campaign working people remain war-weary. Ground down by years of economic crisis, with a “recovery” that has overwhelmingly benefited the rich, much of the American population is distrustful of and disaffected from the government, including over its shredding of the right to privacy and other democratic rights under the rubric of the “war on terror.” We Marxists aim to turn such disillusionment and anger into class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home. It is through such struggle that the proletariat must be won to the program of socialist revolution to destroy the imperialist beast from within.

Kurdish Nationalists’ Ties to Imperialism

The PKK leadership’s current alliance with the U.S. is only the latest in a long history of maneuvers by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Kurdish nationalists to ingratiate themselves with the imperialists and/or regional capitalist regimes. At all times, this program has meant betraying the just struggles of the Kurdish people.

The Kurdish nation is divided among Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey—a legacy of the carving up of the Near East by British and French imperialism out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The national liberation of the Kurdish people requires the proletarian overthrow of those states and the forging of a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan. Kurdish national aspirations must be linked to the struggles of the working class in Turkey and throughout the Near East and beyond. Centrally important to this perspective is the presence of as many as one million Kurds in Germany, where they are heavily integrated into the working class. These workers are a living bridge between the struggles of Near Eastern Kurds and those of the powerful German working class against its exploiters.

The Kurdish nationalist and tribal leaders have compiled a century-long record of betrayal, leading to one disaster after another for the Kurdish masses. When the Turkish Ottoman empire launched the genocidal campaign against the Armenians during World War I, in which as many as one million or more were massacred, it was assisted by Kurds mobilized by their tribal leaders. The Kurds were subsequently rewarded with merciless repression. In consolidating the modern Turkish state, Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) sought to destroy the Kurds’ national identity, banning the use of their language. Repeated Kurdish revolts were brutally suppressed, with hundreds of thousands deported to central and western Turkey.

It was the Soviet Union, created by the proletarian 1917 Russian Revolution, that showed the way out of this cycle of ethnic and communal slaughter and created the conditions for the Kurds to achieve their greatest degree of freedom. Under V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik regime, the 200,000 Kurds in the fledgling workers state were granted full political and language rights. Autonomous administration was granted to Kurdish districts in the Caucasus, with education and government business conducted in their language. It was in Soviet Armenia that a written Kurdish language first flourished (initially in the Armenian alphabet, followed by Latin and Cyrillic). The Armenian capital, Yerevan, became the first center of Kurdish publishing and literary development. The bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state under J.V. Stalin did not erase these gains, even after Stalin dissolved “Red Kurdistan” in 1929. By the 1930s, all Soviet Kurds were literate, compared to a mere 1 percent before the Revolution.

The actions of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), today led by Massoud Barzani, and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Iraq provide a textbook example of how looking for allies among local capitalist rulers and their imperialist godfathers spells defeat. After the Arab nationalist Ba’ath regime that was installed in Iraq in 1963 launched an attack on the Kurds, the KDP got support from an unholy alliance of the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and the Shah of Iran. In return, the KDP turned on the Iranian Kurds, hunting them down and turning them over to the Shah. After a cease-fire with the Ba’ath regime in 1970, the Kurds secured a large autonomous region in northern Iraq.

As always, the Kurds’ supposed benefactors turned on them. In 1975, the Shah made a separate peace with Hussein and cut off support to the Kurds, with the CIA quickly following suit. This allowed the Iraqi army to surge back into the Kurdish area. The subsequent wave of repression forced more than 100,000 Kurds to flee the region. Shortly afterward, during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the KDP got support from Iran while the PUK made a cease-fire deal with Hussein. In 1983, the U.S. began a tilt toward Iraq in the conflict. With arms and other aid flowing in from the U.S. and Europe—including the technology to develop poison gas and biological weapons—the Iraqi regime was emboldened to move against the Kurdish population. The PUK then joined with the KDP and Iranian armed forces, which moved deep into Iraqi Kurdistan. Hussein responded by launching air bombardment and poison gas attacks, killing Kurds by the thousands.

During Operation Desert Storm, America’s first war on Iraq in 1991, the KDP and PUK sided with the imperialists. Following the war, the Kurds rose up in the vain expectation that the U.S. would back them. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the Iraqi government, and this time the number of refugees exceeded one million. Nevertheless, the Iraqi Kurds were able to set up their autonomous region as a result of a U.S.-enforced “no fly zone” in the north of the country. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, both the KDP and PUK operated under American command and then served as military auxiliaries to the occupation forces. For nearly a decade, Barzani has held office in the oil-rich north, and Talabani served as president of the Baghdad government from 2005 to July 2014.

While the Kurdish leaders have benefited handsomely from their services to the imperialists, the masses have paid with their blood. Throughout the Iraq occupation, the U.S. manipulated and reinforced sectarian divisions, including by mobilizing the Kurdish pesh merga along with Shi’ite militias to crush Sunni insurgents in Falluja in 2004 as American troops leveled that city. From encouraging Shi’ite death squads to rounding up Sunnis associated with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, the Shi’ite-dominated Baghdad government poured gas on the exploding sectarian powder keg. It was out of the ruins of such communal warfare that Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into ISIS, emerged and gained support from many aggrieved Sunnis.

The PKK, Syria and Turkey

The PKK, which used to pass off its nationalist program as a variant of “Marxism-Leninism,” got a foothold in Syrian Kurdistan in the late 1970s as a result of tensions between Turkey and Syria. At the time, Syria became a close ally of Iran, as it is today, and was also aligned with the Soviet Union. Seeking to use the Kurds against his Turkish rivals, then-president of Syria Hafez al-Assad (father of the current president) allowed the PKK to open offices in Damascus and establish training centers in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, which was under Syrian control. A high proportion of PKK fighters in Turkey—as many as a third by some estimates—were and are today Syrian Kurds.

At the same time, Hafez al-Assad’s Arab nationalist regime moved to deepen the oppression of the Kurdish people in Syria. He actively sought to settle Arab tribes on Kurdish land and continued to deny citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Kurds. Today, some 300,000 of them are stateless.

The destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991 increased Syria’s vulnerability to Turkey’s much greater military power. By 1998, facing the threat of military intervention by Turkey, Assad banned the PKK, imprisoned a number of its leaders and kicked out PKK founding leader Abdullah Öcalan. The following year, Öcalan was captured with the assistance of the CIA and imprisoned in Turkey. In subsequent years, PKK fighters in Syria and Lebanon were forced to relocate to northern Iraq.

The 2011 outbreak of the Syrian civil war provided the PKK/PYD with a new lease on life. The regime of Bashar alAssad and the Kurdish PYD shared an antipathy toward the Sunni Arab rebels. Even those Syrian Kurdish parties that were initially willing to play ball with the U.S., Turkey and others in setting up a united opposition in exile eventually withdrew from the main anti-Assad coalition because the non-Kurdish rebel groups rejected any form of autonomy for the Kurds. The PYD told Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces to stay away from Kurdish territory. The warning was generally heeded, although there have been intermittent clashes between the FSA and the YPG. Assad sought to encourage the tension by conciliating the Kurds, allowing some to have their citizenship restored and assenting to the transfer of around 1,000 PKK fighters from Iraq to Syria.

July 2012 marked an important pivot in the Syrian civil war, as rebel forces launched an offensive in Damascus (killing three members of Assad’s inner circle in a bomb attack). With rebels advancing on the outskirts of the capital, Assad reached a tacit agreement with the PYD. Syrian troops were withdrawn from Kurdish areas and PYD forces quickly moved in virtually without military confrontation. This freed up regime forces to fight the rebellion in Damascus and elsewhere.

The main foes of the PYD were now the Nusra Front and ISIS. A detailed on-site study earlier this year by the International Crisis Group (ICG), an advisory body to the imperialists, documented cases in which the YPG, while engaged in key battles with Islamists, received weapons as well as air support from the Assad regime. The ICG also reported that Damascus was supplying the PYD with financing and diesel fuel.

The creation of a semi-autonomous Kurdish region right on the border with Turkey was anathema to the regime in Ankara. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Turkey had sought to head off the consolidation of a PYD/PKK-dominated area on its border. A glance at a map shows why this is considered so critical. The parts of Turkish Kurdistan where the PKK has centered its guerrilla war are located in eastern and southeastern Anatolia, while the Kurdish regions of Syria are more to the west. The threat to the Turkish government is that PKK fighters operating from bases in Syria could open a new front against Turkey in central Anatolia.

During the long, brutal war waged by capitalist Turkey against the PKK, in which 37,000 Kurds were slaughtered between 1984 and 1999, PKK fighters in Iraq were hunted down and killed by the KDP and PUK on behalf of Ankara. Today, to undercut PYD gains in Syria, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has again turned to his ally Barzani. The KDP first sought to consolidate a foothold in northern Syria by conciliating the PYD, but attempts to set up a joint administration of Syrian Kurdish areas have failed. To counter the growing influence of the PYD, Barzani then announced that hundreds of Kurdish defectors from the Syrian army, who had received training from the KDP in Iraqi Kurdistan, would be dispatched back into Syria. The PYD blocked their entry at the border. More recently, Ankara agreed to allow KDP forces to transit through Turkey to Syria, which Erdogan sees mainly as a police action against the PKK/PYD.

Behind such maneuvers are the strong economic ties between Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey. Tens of billions of dollars in Turkish investment have poured into Erbil, the regional Kurdish capital, in recent years, transforming the city’s skyline while lining the pockets of the Barzani clan and other nationalist leaders. Turkey also has its eyes on the area’s oil resources, although Washington has so far opposed Barzani’s attempts to export oil directly to Turkey without giving the central government in Baghdad its cut.

The Turkish rulers consider Iraqi Kurdistan a gateway for projecting power in the Near East. This aim is also served by Turkey’s support to the anti-Assad opposition in Syria. Erdogan has pushed for tying assistance to the Kurds in Kobani to setting up a Turkish-dominated buffer zone inside Syria. This would include a no-fly zone that would clearly be aimed at the Assad regime, since ISIS lacks an air force.

Reformists Salute Imperialists’ Foot Soldiers

A victory for the U.S. and its underlings would further embolden the imperialists in their drive for domination and throw back the struggles of the Kurds and other oppressed peoples and communities. This understanding, which is elementary for Marxist opponents of the capitalist-imperialist order, is trampled on by reformist leftists internationally who are backing the Kurds in Kobani.

In the front ranks of the pro-imperialist chorus in France is the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA—affiliated with the United Secretariat), which calls on the French government to arm the Kurds in Kobani. In an October 9 statement, the NPA stated that it was “opposed to the catastrophic interventions of the armies of the great powers” against ISIS and called instead to “support the resistance of the local progressive forces.” In other words, the Mafia don should assign the hit to a junior foot soldier, the difference being that in the Mob that act might win initiation into the Family. The NPA’s line on Kobani is basically the same as its position on French imperialist intervention in Mali and other African neocolonies, where the NPA prefers arming local forces to sending in French soldiers.

In the U.S., the same reformist groups that a decade ago built an antiwar movement directed against the Republican Bush administration are keeping any opposition to the current U.S. intervention, directed by the Democratic Commander-in-Chief, sotto voce at best. Among the opportunists are those who claim to oppose U.S. intervention in Syria/Iraq while simultaneously backing the Kurdish forces that are acting as imperialist proxies. For example, a statement by Socialist Alternative (27 October) gushes over the possibility that “Kurdish militias in Kobane, currently supported by U.S. strikes and weapon supplies, will turn back the IS [Islamic State] offensive,” declaring that such an outcome would “underline the need for a united and mobilized movement from below to permanently defeat IS” (socialistalternative.net).

At least these reformists are straightforward in hailing the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. The centrists of the Internationalist Group try to have it both ways, calling in the Internationalist (October 2014): “Defend the Kurds, Defeat U.S./NATO Imperialism!” The simple fact, as we wrote last issue, is that “championing the Kurds in the current conflict can only mean lending support to imperialist plunder.”

In their publicity for the Kurdish nationalists, many reformist groups are pointing to the Kurdish regions of northern Syria as the site of a social revolution being carried out under the PKK and PYD. These are the same left groups that not too long ago were hailing the Syrian rebels, who were all—from a few more-secular types to the Islamists—as hostile to the idea of Kurdish national rights as they were to the Assad regime and who explicitly appealed to the imperialists for military intervention on their behalf.

The reality in what the PYD calls Rojava (western Kurdistan) is not quite so rosy. Far from putting forward the overturn of capitalist property relations, the PYD’s charter for self-rule in Rojava enshrines the right to private property. The PYD has set up its own apparatus of repression through its military, police and prisons—i.e., a fledgling bourgeois state apparatus. The members of the People’s Councils that have been established, to the cheers of the reformist left, are appointed by the PYD. While the councils include representatives of other parties and, in areas containing sizable non-Kurdish populations, members of other communities, these bodies have little real function beyond distributing humanitarian aid and other necessities. The ICG report said of the PYD: “Most often, it took over the [Assad regime’s] governance structures and simply relabeled them, rather than generating its own unique model as it claims.”

Belying the claims of autonomy, the Assad regime has not fully withdrawn its forces from the area, expecting to return en masse at the first opportunity. While Damascus has pulled back most of its security personnel, it continues to run administrative offices and to pay the salaries of state employees, including teachers (who continue to follow the Ba’ath Party-approved syllabus). In the largest Kurdish city, Qamishli, Syrian government forces remain at the border crossing with Turkey, at the airport and in the center of town, where the offices of the security services are located. Recent on-site reports by Human Rights Watch and the Washington Institute noted that Syrian soldiers and other security personnel move freely in Qamishli and surrounding villages. The bottom line is that whatever autonomy might have been achieved has been subordinated by the Kurdish nationalists to their service in the imperialist military campaign.

Marxists seek to break Kurdish militants from the nationalist politics that have time and again led to disaster and win them to a revolutionary proletarian internationalist program, which centrally includes unconditional opposition to imperialism. Forming a strategic part of the proletariat of Turkey, Iran and other Near Eastern societies as well as Germany, Kurdish workers possess the key to social and national liberation. As a Spartacist representative stated in greetings to a conference of Kurdish militants in Europe three decades ago:

“We understand that the struggle for a United Socialist Republic of Kurdistan will be shaped by and in turn shape the future of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole region toward a socialist federation of the Near East. Our model is Lenin’s Russia of 1917-1924 where the Bolsheviks offered the national minorities the option and the advantages of association with the Soviet Federation. For our part, we are dedicated to the forging of the internationalist party of worldwide proletarian revolution and speak to you in the understanding that the future of humanity depends on its construction.”

— WV No. 362, 14 September 1984

In Boston The Class Struggle Continues...

Defend Boston School Bus Union Leaders!

Workers Vanguard No. 1056	14 November 2014

Defend Boston School Bus Union Leaders!

 

On November 24, Boston school bus union leader Stevan Kirschbaum will face trial on bogus felony charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, as well as trespassing. This blatant attempt at a frame-up by state authorities acting at the behest of the employer, Veolia Transportation, recently renamed Transdev, is part of a concerted effort to break the back of the drivers’ union, United Steel Workers (USW) Local 8751. Ever since the school district tapped it to start operating the bus system in July 2013, Transdev has lived up to its reputation and embarked on a union-busting campaign, from imposing new work rules and harsh discipline to cheating drivers out of pay. Now the company wants to write these new terms of exploitation into the union contract. We demand: Drop the charges against Kirschbaum!

Transdev’s assault on the union came to a head on October 8 last year when management refused to meet with Local 8751 reps and locked out the workers, who responded with pickets at all four bus yards. After bringing in police to help clear the yards, management agreed to sit down with the union. The next day, with drivers back on their routes, Transdev refused to budge in those talks. In retaliation for the brief job action, it then moved to weaken the union by firing Local 8751 grievance committee chairman Kirschbaum, vice president Steve Gillis, recording secretary Andre Francois and shop steward Garry Murchison. A fifth worker, steward Richard Lynch, was suspended but not fired. Reinstate the school bus drivers!

In an act of solidarity with their victimized brothers, Local 8751 members elected Kirschbaum and the other fired workers to the union committee negotiating a new contract with Transdev. At the conclusion of a union rally at the Freeport bus yard on the day the contract expired, June 30, the workers and their supporters went to the break room for a briefing on the contract battle. When a member of management tried to block the doorway with a table, it was allegedly shoved against her legs. This supposed assault with a “dangerous weapon” is what the Boston prosecutor is now trying to pin on Kirschbaum.

Hundreds of the heavily Haitian and Cape Verdean drivers in Local 8751 and their supporters packed a Dorchester courtroom for Kirschbaum’s pre-trial hearing on October 6, at which two charges (breaking and entering and destruction of property) were dismissed. Importantly, a number of other unions in Boston and beyond have expressed support for the “School Bus 5,” with some of these union members turning out to the court. The attacks on the poorly paid school bus drivers are representative of what the bosses have served up to labor across the country, not least in public education. The government agency overseeing the Philadelphia schools moved to junk the teachers’ contract last month; unionized school bus drivers and matrons in New York City were stripped of job protections, provoking a bitter strike in 2013 that was sold out after one month. Kirschbaum’s supporters, including the Workers World Party (WWP), are calling to pack the courtroom again on November 24. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Standing behind Transdev, the school board and city officials are gunning for Local 8751. Early last year, shortly before giving that employer control over its bus fleet, Boston Public Schools scrapped the last remnants of a busing plan first imposed in 1974 under a federal court desegregation order. The racist contempt that the city rulers have for the membership of Local 8751 is matched only by their animus toward the students in the public schools, a full 75 percent of whom are black or Latino.

In the name of cost savings, the notion of busing kids across town to achieve integration is entirely out the window, and with it the jobs of the bus drivers, whose union was forged in the struggles to integrate Boston public schools four decades ago. School bus service was ended earlier this year for eighth-graders, who were given MBTA transit passes instead, with the school board planning to extend this program to sixth- and seventh-graders. The local NAACP president denounced the cutback in bus service, expressing fears that it “will only serve to further separate our children into racially isolated schools as families opt to keep their students close to home rather than send them on the T” (Boston Globe, 18 June). Here is a graphic example of how labor rights and black rights are bound together.

The 1974 busing plan was effectively killed long ago by the one-two punch of howling racists in the streets and, later, liberals in Congress who made certain that black youth were not bused to the comparatively privileged suburban schools (see article in WV No. 921, 26 September 2008). The Spartacist League actively intervened in the Boston busing crisis, agitating for mass, integrated labor/black defense guards to protect the black children. We also called for low-rent, racially integrated public housing; for quality, integrated education for all and for the implementation of the minimal measure of busing and its extension to the suburbs. The WWP, among other reformist left groups, channeled the fight to defend busing into dead-end appeals to black Democratic Party politicians.

The labor officialdom’s embrace of the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a party of the capitalist class enemy, has paved the way to the wholesale destruction of unionized jobs nationwide. Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh, a former head of the city’s Building and Construction Trades Council elected last year with heavy union support, alibied the firings of the school bus union leaders as a “private matter.” Other Democratic politicians, most prominently black city councilman Charles Yancey, have denounced the firings. But what all these Democrats have in common is an aversion for even the slightest whiff of working-class struggle, expressed in their condemnations of Local 8751’s pickets last October 8. Revitalizing the unions as fighting organizations against the bosses must proceed independently from and in opposition to the Democrats.

The Partisan Defense Committee has written to the Suffolk County D.A. protesting the prosecution of Stevan Kirschbaum and has contributed to his defense fund. We encourage WV readers to do likewise. Donations can be sent to Friends of the School Bus 5, P.O. Box 141, Stoughton, MA 02072 or online at tinyurl.com/schoolbus4.

On November 24, Boston school bus union leader Stevan Kirschbaum will face trial on bogus felony charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, as well as trespassing. This blatant attempt at a frame-up by state authorities acting at the behest of the employer, Veolia Transportation, recently renamed Transdev, is part of a concerted effort to break the back of the drivers’ union, United Steel Workers (USW) Local 8751. Ever since the school district tapped it to start operating the bus system in July 2013, Transdev has lived up to its reputation and embarked on a union-busting campaign, from imposing new work rules and harsh discipline to cheating drivers out of pay. Now the company wants to write these new terms of exploitation into the union contract. We demand: Drop the charges against Kirschbaum!

Transdev’s assault on the union came to a head on October 8 last year when management refused to meet with Local 8751 reps and locked out the workers, who responded with pickets at all four bus yards. After bringing in police to help clear the yards, management agreed to sit down with the union. The next day, with drivers back on their routes, Transdev refused to budge in those talks. In retaliation for the brief job action, it then moved to weaken the union by firing Local 8751 grievance committee chairman Kirschbaum, vice president Steve Gillis, recording secretary Andre Francois and shop steward Garry Murchison. A fifth worker, steward Richard Lynch, was suspended but not fired. Reinstate the school bus drivers!

In an act of solidarity with their victimized brothers, Local 8751 members elected Kirschbaum and the other fired workers to the union committee negotiating a new contract with Transdev. At the conclusion of a union rally at the Freeport bus yard on the day the contract expired, June 30, the workers and their supporters went to the break room for a briefing on the contract battle. When a member of management tried to block the doorway with a table, it was allegedly shoved against her legs. This supposed assault with a “dangerous weapon” is what the Boston prosecutor is now trying to pin on Kirschbaum.

Hundreds of the heavily Haitian and Cape Verdean drivers in Local 8751 and their supporters packed a Dorchester courtroom for Kirschbaum’s pre-trial hearing on October 6, at which two charges (breaking and entering and destruction of property) were dismissed. Importantly, a number of other unions in Boston and beyond have expressed support for the “School Bus 5,” with some of these union members turning out to the court. The attacks on the poorly paid school bus drivers are representative of what the bosses have served up to labor across the country, not least in public education. The government agency overseeing the Philadelphia schools moved to junk the teachers’ contract last month; unionized school bus drivers and matrons in New York City were stripped of job protections, provoking a bitter strike in 2013 that was sold out after one month. Kirschbaum’s supporters, including the Workers World Party (WWP), are calling to pack the courtroom again on November 24. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Standing behind Transdev, the school board and city officials are gunning for Local 8751. Early last year, shortly before giving that employer control over its bus fleet, Boston Public Schools scrapped the last remnants of a busing plan first imposed in 1974 under a federal court desegregation order. The racist contempt that the city rulers have for the membership of Local 8751 is matched only by their animus toward the students in the public schools, a full 75 percent of whom are black or Latino.

In the name of cost savings, the notion of busing kids across town to achieve integration is entirely out the window, and with it the jobs of the bus drivers, whose union was forged in the struggles to integrate Boston public schools four decades ago. School bus service was ended earlier this year for eighth-graders, who were given MBTA transit passes instead, with the school board planning to extend this program to sixth- and seventh-graders. The local NAACP president denounced the cutback in bus service, expressing fears that it “will only serve to further separate our children into racially isolated schools as families opt to keep their students close to home rather than send them on the T” (Boston Globe, 18 June). Here is a graphic example of how labor rights and black rights are bound together.

The 1974 busing plan was effectively killed long ago by the one-two punch of howling racists in the streets and, later, liberals in Congress who made certain that black youth were not bused to the comparatively privileged suburban schools (see article in WV No. 921, 26 September 2008). The Spartacist League actively intervened in the Boston busing crisis, agitating for mass, integrated labor/black defense guards to protect the black children. We also called for low-rent, racially integrated public housing; for quality, integrated education for all and for the implementation of the minimal measure of busing and its extension to the suburbs. The WWP, among other reformist left groups, channeled the fight to defend busing into dead-end appeals to black Democratic Party politicians.

The labor officialdom’s embrace of the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a party of the capitalist class enemy, has paved the way to the wholesale destruction of unionized jobs nationwide. Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh, a former head of the city’s Building and Construction Trades Council elected last year with heavy union support, alibied the firings of the school bus union leaders as a “private matter.” Other Democratic politicians, most prominently black city councilman Charles Yancey, have denounced the firings. But what all these Democrats have in common is an aversion for even the slightest whiff of working-class struggle, expressed in their condemnations of Local 8751’s pickets last October 8. Revitalizing the unions as fighting organizations against the bosses must proceed independently from and in opposition to the Democrats.

The Partisan Defense Committee has written to the Suffolk County D.A. protesting the prosecution of Stevan Kirschbaum and has contributed to his defense fund. We encourage WV readers to do likewise. Donations can be sent to Friends of the School Bus 5, P.O. Box 141, Stoughton, MA 02072 or online at tinyurl.com/schoolbus4.