What Is to Be Done?: Building a Communist International Today
Lenin and Trotsky in Red Square, November 1919
"What Is to Be Done?: Building a Communist International Today" includes essays and letters discussing the way forward for building a revolutionary internationalist working class movement. It seeks theoretical and programmatic clarification of the principal controversies and issues in the 21st century communist movement that have emerged from the collapse of Stalinism and the fracturing of the Trotskyist Fourth International. COSMOS LEFT is a supporter of Bolshevism, the Third International under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and Trotsky's Fourth International, including its founding document "The Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution."
The first half of the title of this page, "What Is to Be Done?" refers to Lenin's classic 1902 pamphlet that tries to answer the question of questions facing revolutionaries then and now: how to imbue the working class with a communist consciousness that will lead it to build the kind of revolutionary workers party capable of achieving the socialist revolution. [May 3, 2008]
COSMOS LEFT considers the Cuban Communist Party under Fidel Castro as part of the communist international that working people worldwide should support.
Many of the essays and letters on this page will relate to the major Marxist organizations today that COSMOS LEFT most identifies with: the Socialist Workers Party (Militant newspaper), Workers World (International Answer), the Socialist Equality Party (World Socialist Web Site), and the International Marxist Tendency (www.marxist.com). All of these parties were once part of Trotsky's Fourth International. The SEP and IMT still consider themselves Trotskyist; the SWP formally shed its Trotskyist label in 1983, preferring to call itself Leninist while still viewing Trotsky as one of the great working class leaders of the last century; Workers World abandoned Trotskyism and the SWP in the late 1950s, capitulating to Stalinism. The Russian revolution, its degeneration, and the resulting clashes between Trotskyism and Stalinism are discussed in Chapter 1 of An American Worker in Tiananmen Square and Chapter 11 of An American Worker in Tiananmen Square: Conclusion.
The coming intensification of the class struggle will be characterized by all kinds of fracturing and fusions of various communist tendencies as the American working class, like all international workers, sifts through the existing Marxist parties and cobbles together the revolutionary leadership that will abolish capitalism from the face of the earth. This page of COSMOS LEFT is dedicated to that objective.--March 2003
July 2006:
Since writing the above missive for this page, COSMOS LEFT considers the revolutionary Marxist newspaper based in Canada, Socialist Voice, a fraternal publication that is playing a key role in building a communist international today.
August 2010:
Political relations between COSMOS LEFT and the SWP ended in June 2003, when the latter barred CL from a public meeting on Iraq, no doubt because at a prior meeting we'd asked questions that were too tough for SWP leader Jack Barnes regarding his party's failure to unconditionally support Iraq from the US imperialist attack and its abstentionism from the antiwar coalitions. This rupture had been a long time coming, stemming from the SWP's 1983 renunciation of Leon Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. This break is described in essays further down this page.
A more recent illustration for the break in political relations can be found in the following article by Canada's Socialist Voice, which is a reply to the SWP's bankrupt and reactionary position of refusing to support international labor boycotts of the racist apartheid state of Israel after that regime's May 31, 2010 murderous attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
COSMOS LEFT still supports the leadership and program of the Socialist Workers Party from the days James P. Cannon founded it as the Communist League of America until 1982, when Barnes abandoned the lynchpin of Trotskyism--the theory of Permanent Revolution.
COSMOS LEFT is in strong agreement with the Socialist Equality Party (World Socialist Web Site) on many issues and many aspects of its program, but we profoundly disagreement with them on Cuba (they don't think a socialist revolution occurred there in the early '60s) and on how communists should orient to trade unions (they write off unions as antiworker organizations, failing to distinguish between the class collaborationist bureaucracy and the rank and file. The SEP believes workers should leave the unions and form independent rank and file committees of working people. CL doesn't oppose this idea but we refuse to dogmatically write off the possibility that rank and file struggles could transform the unions into instruments of revolutionary struggle. And of course we support the formation of factory committees and workers councils, or soviets, as the ideal organ of democratic working class political rule.
A REPLY TO THE U.S. SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY
A LeftViews article by Art Young When Israeli commandos attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in
international waters on May 31, murdered nine humanitarian aid workers
and seized the cargo of badly needed supplies for Gaza, they touched
off an international storm of outrage that continues to this day. The
widespread anger has galvanized the international movement in
solidarity with the Palestinian people, drawing in new forces and
producing new initiatives.
Following the attack on the flotilla, Palestinian civil society
issued an appeal to progressive forces around the world to redouble
their solidarity efforts and to strengthen the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions campaign (BDS) against Israel. On June 7 the major
Palestinian trade union federations appealed to dock workers to refuse
to handle Israeli cargo. They said:
Gaza today has become the test of our universal morality
and our common humanity. During the South African anti-apartheid
struggle, the world was inspired by the brave and principled actions of
dockworkers unions who refused to handle South African cargo,
contributing significantly to the ultimate fall of apartheid. Today, we
call on you, dockworkers unions of the world, to do the same against
Israel’s occupation and apartheid. This is the most effective form of
solidarity to end injustice and uphold universal human rights.[1]
Workers in a number of countries responded to this call.
The Swedish Dockers’ Union, which had supported the Freedom
Flotilla, declared a one-week blockade on Israeli goods and ships
beginning on June 23. The union also called for “a general blockade of
Israeli goods until the rights of the Palestinian people are guaranteed
and the blockade of Gaza is lifted.”[2]
On June 3 the Congress of South African Trade Unions called for
“greater support for the international boycott, divestment and sanction
campaign against Israel, which is proving again to be violent and
ruthless in attacking and murdering those who stand in its way. We urge
all South Africans to refuse to buy or handle any goods from Israel or
have any dealings with Israeli businesses.”[3]
In a statement issued the same day, the South African Transport and
Allied Workers Union, a COSATU affiliate, said, “we salute the Swedish
dock workers for their blockade of all Israeli ships. We call for an
escalation of the boycott of Israeli goods and call upon our fellow
trade unionists not to handle them. We call upon our members not to
allow any Israeli ship to dock or unload in any South African port.”[4]
In February 2009, following the Israeli assault on Gaza, members of
SATWU refused to unload cargo from an Israeli ship in Durban.
The South African Municipal Workers’ Union, another COSATU
affiliate, declared that it would “immediately work towards (making)
every municipality in South Africa … an Apartheid Israel free zone.” It
said that it would “engage every single municipality to ensure that
there are no commercial, academic, cultural, sporting or other linkages
whatsoever with the Israeli regime.”[5]
In Turkey the dock workers’ union declared that it would “boycott
ships from Israel, which has become a machine of death and torture. In
this framework, no member of our union will give service to Israel in
any docks where we are organized. The Liman-Is union invites all unions
and NGO’s organized in our country and throughout the world to join
this boycott and protest campaign.”[6] Unions in the Port of Kochi
(Cochin) in India also refused to handle Israeli cargo.
In the first action of its kind in the United States, on June 20
more than 700 unionists and community activists picketed at several
entrances to the Port of Oakland, California, protesting the arrival of
an Israeli-owned vessel. Two shifts of members of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union refused to cross the picket line. The
cargo was unloaded only 24 hours later, after the picket lines were
lifted.
The protest was organized by the Labor / Community Committee in
Solidarity with the Palestinian People, an ad-hoc coalition of local
labour, Palestine solidarity, and social justice groups. Several
hundred unionists responded to the call of the San Francisco and
Alameda County labour councils and other unionists to support the
action.[7] Statements of support for the action were issued by the
Oakland Education Association, the Palestinian General Federation of
Trade Unions and the Cuban labour federation, the Cuban Workers
Central, among others.[8]
Opposing the boycott
One group that did not support the action in Oakland was the U.S.
Socialist Workers Party. The SWP is opposed to boycotting Israel. It
reaffirmed this stand at its national conference a few days before the
picket in Oakland.
The group first elaborated its position on the Palestinian struggle
in a series of articles that appeared during the first half of 2009 in The Militant, a weekly newspaper that expresses its views. These articles argued that:
There is no Zionist movement today.
Anti-Zionism is a cover for anti-Semitism.
Israel’s rulers plan to give up control of most of the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel is not an apartheid state.
The BDS campaign is not only wrong. It is anti-Semitic.
The democratic, secular Palestine that the SWP envisages must grant a special right of immigration to the Jews of the world.[9]
This line of argument places the SWP in the Zionist camp. To be
sure, the SWP opposes Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, but the
thrust of its argument is directed against the solidarity movement. It
endorses the slanders advanced by Israel’s supporters that anti-Zionism
in general and the BDS movement in particular are anti-Semitic. The
group also supports a privileged position for Jews in Palestine.[10]
A complete reversal on Zionism
These positions represent a breathtaking turnabout for a group that
for decades unconditionally supported the Palestinian people and
thoroughly opposed Zionism.
The SWP’s previous position on these questions was explained in a
resolution it adopted at its 1971 convention. The opening paragraphs of
that resolution read:
The Socialist Workers Party gives unconditional support
to the national liberation struggles of the Arab peoples against
imperialism, that is, we support all these struggles regardless of
their current leaderships. Our foremost task in implementing such
support is to educate and mobilize the American people against U. S.
imperialist actions in the Mideast.
Israel, created in accordance with the Zionist goal of
establishing a Jewish state, could be set up in the Arab East only at
the expense of the indigenous peoples of the area. Such a state could
come into existence and maintain itself only by relying upon
imperialism. Israel is a settler-colonialist and expansionist
capitalist state maintained principally by American imperialism,
hostile to the surrounding Arab peoples….
The struggle of the Palestinian people against their oppression and
for self-determination has taken the form of a struggle to destroy the
state of Israel. The currently expressed goal of this struggle is the
establishment of a democratic, secular Palestine. We give unconditional
support to this struggle of the Palestinians for self-determination….
Our revolutionary socialist opposition to Zionism and the Israeli
state has nothing in common with anti-Semitism, as the pro-Zionist
propagandists maliciously and falsely assert. Anti-Semitism is
anti-Jewish racism used to justify and reinforce oppression of the
Jewish people….
Zionism is not, as it claims, a national liberation movement.
Zionism is a political movement that developed for the purpose of
establishing a settler-colonialist state in Palestine and that rules
the bourgeois society headed by the Israeli state today in alliance
with world imperialism. [11]
It is immediately apparent that what the SWP says today is the polar
opposite of these positions. Contrary to Marxist practice, the SWP has
neither acknowledged the reversal nor explained why in its view it is
necessary.
Zionism and anti-Zionism
The first indication that the SWP had changed its position on these questions came in an article in the March 2, 2009 issue of The Militant. The article quoted SWP leader Norton Sandler as follows:
“Class-conscious workers should drop the term Zionism,’
in the current context, Sandler added. ‘There is no Zionist movement
today. The reality is, it has become an epithet, not a scientific
description; a synonym for ‘Jew’ that helps fuel Jew-hatred, which will
rise as the capitalist crisis deepens.”[12]
Sandler’s claim that the Zionist movement had vanished from the face
of the earth was so at odds with current reality and with the SWP’s
previous position that it was challenged by some readers of the paper.
Sandler’s reply appeared in the April 13 issue.
I made these remarks at a January 31 public meeting in
London. I was not addressing the history of the Zionist movement, or
how the state of Israel came into being as an expansionist
colonial-settler state. Zionism in the late 19th century and the first
half of the 20th century was a bourgeois political current contending
with the communist movement for the allegiance of workers who were
Jewish. Israel was established in 1948, more than six decades ago.
There is no Zionist movement today and there hasn’t been for a long
time.[13]
Sandler’s historical survey evades the challenge posed by the
readers. He merely repeats his assertion of the non-existence of
Zionism today and “for a long time,” as though the repetition is proof
enough.
This claim is simply ludicrous.
Zionism — promoting the existence of an exclusive Jewish state — is
a political movement that transcends religious or ethnic factors.
As the SWP’s 1971 resolution states, Zionism is the ruling ideology
of the Israeli state. The founding principles of that state proclaim
that it is a Jewish state — meaning that it is a state that claims to
be the homeland for the Jews of the world and whose Jewish citizens
enjoy privileges denied to other inhabitants. Israel is the dominant
military power by far in the Middle East, thanks in no small measure to
the support it receives from Washington. Israel’s ruling Zionists
command an arsenal that includes between 100 and 200 nuclear
warheads.[14]
Ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Western powers have
favoured the dispossession of the Palestinian people, first through
massive Jewish immigration to Palestine and subsequently through their
support of the Jewish settler state. They have maintained this policy
for nearly a hundred years because it was — and is — in the interests
of these powers to promote the existence of an ethnically defined
Jewish state, with special privileges for Jews, as a divisive force in
opposition to the national liberation struggles of the peoples of the
Middle East. That’s why President Barack Obama and Prime Ministers
Stephen Harper and David Cameron are as committed to Zionism as
Benjamin Netanyahu.
Zionism is also a highly organized and influential international movement.
North America is home to many prominent Zionist organizations such
as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the
Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, B’nai B’rith, the
Zionist Organization of America, the Canada-Israel Committee and the
Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy. Right-wing Christian
Zionists also actively advocate and raise funds for Israel. Supporters
of human rights for Palestinians confront organized Zionist opposition
every step of the way, from charges of anti-Semitism to hostile picket
lines outside public meetings and disruptions during meetings, often
organized by the vigilante Jewish Defence League.
In all these cases, Israel advocacy and support is based on Zionism — the idea that Israel must remain a Jewish state.
In the March 2, 2009 article quoted above, Sandler and the SWP
allege that it is anti-Semitic to oppose Zionism. Their logic is rather
peculiar since it hinges on the SWP’s denial that Zionism exists. But
the conclusion is all too familiar. It is the common coin of most
defenders of Israel and its policies. Here the SWP finds itself in the
company of openly reactionary forces.
To be sure, Holocaust deniers, rightist politicians and others —
actual Jew-haters — cloak their anti-Semitism in the garb of opposition
to Zionism. The crimes of the Israeli state, which claims to represent
all Jews, facilitate the propaganda of these hate-mongers.
But it is a reactionary slander to tar all opponents of Zionism as
anti-Semites. It is a slander first and foremost against the
Palestinian people who understand only too well what Zionism means and
what it has done to them. For decades they have struggled heroically to
overturn Zionism, and their struggle continues today. The vast majority
of the world’s oppressed and exploited support them.
It is also a slander against the anti-Zionist wing of the Palestine
solidarity movement, including the small but growing number of Jews who
oppose Zionism. Forces far more powerful than the SWP have laboured
mightily to make this label stick, but they have failed.
An end to Israeli expansionism?
In his April 13 article Sandler also expresses the view that the
expansion of Israel’s borders is drawing to a close. “The majority of
the Israeli ruling class has given up the dream of a ‘Greater Israel.’
They are forced to opt for what they consider the only pragmatic
solution — maintaining a majority Jewish state within borders of their
own choosing. This is hardly the Zionist movement’s dream of an Israel
from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.” (Other articles
published between February and June 2009 make the same claim.)
Here Sandler and the SWP merely echo the Israeli rulers who never
tire of claiming that their only aim is an Israel with defensible
borders living in peace next to a Palestinian state. This has been Tel
Aviv’s mantra ever since it occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967
war. Israel’s actions reveal a different plan. Seen
from the Palestinian perspective, history since 1967 has been one of
unrelenting Israeli expansion onto Palestinian land and continual
ethnic cleansing by the Zionist state. Approximately half a million
Israeli settlers now live in the occupied West Bank, some nine percent
of the Jewish Israeli population. The settlements, the wall, the
Jewish-only road network, the draining of the water resources — these
and many other features of the occupation are turning the West Bank
into a series of isolated and dependent cantons. The settlement
enterprise has not halted for a moment, not even during the recent
phony temporary “settlement freeze” declared by Netanyahu under
pressure from Obama. Meanwhile Israel maintains an iron grip on the
Gaza Strip.
“Greater Israel,” Israeli rule from the Mediterranean Sea to the
Jordan River, has been the reality for more than forty years — that is,
for more than two thirds of Israel’s existence. During this period
Israel has steadily strengthened its hold on the conquered territories
(although the Palestinians have resisted tenaciously and scored some
successes along the way).
The reality of “Greater Israel” that Palestinians face every day is
documented in countless reports from the United Nations and many other
organizations, including Israeli human rights groups. But Zionist
propaganda appears to carry more weight with the SWP.
No Israeli apartheid?
Another major article appeared in the April 6, 2009 issue of The Militant.
“Israel boycotts and divestment serve as cover for anti-Semitism” was
written by Paul Pederson, a member of the paper’s staff. He stated:
There are sweeping differences between the apartheid
regime in South Africa and the capitalist regime in Israel—in terms of
organization of labor, the character of the regimes, and the historical
conditions under which they emerged. The attempt to paint them as the
same simply obfuscates the real social and class relations in Israel
and the tasks facing the toilers there to chart a revolutionary course
forward. Applied to Israel the term “apartheid” is simply an epithet,
rather than a scientific description of a social structure.
Perhaps the most glaring difference between the anti-apartheid
struggle in South Africa and the fight for Palestinian national rights
today is the existence of a revolutionary organization—the ANC under
Nelson Mandela—in the case of South Africa.[15]
The first sentence asserts that “there are sweeping differences
between” South Africa and Israel. This is an empty platitude. There are
also sweeping differences between capitalist rule in the U.S., Canada,
and Great Britain. But there are also fundamental similarities, just as
there are in the case of apartheid-era South Africa and Israel.
The second sentence is another platitude, asserting that the false comparison leads to false conclusions.
The third sentence states the SWP’s political position — Israel is not an apartheid state.
This is a straightforward question of fact: is the Israeli system of
rule fundamentally similar to the apartheid system in South Africa?
Does it meet the common-sense or legal understanding of the term?
Israel was established in 1948 by the massacre and expulsion of most
of the native inhabitants, who generations later still cannot return to
their homes. It practices systematic discrimination against the
Palestinian citizens of Israel, and structural discrimination against
these Palestinians is enshrined in its laws and the entire legal
apparatus. In addition, Israel rules over millions of other
Palestinians in the occupied territories through a combination of
measures that ultimately rest on its military control. These
inhabitants are systematically deprived of their land, their water, and
other resources to the benefit of Jewish Israelis. The Jewish settlers
who live on Palestinian land enjoy full rights of citizenship while
Palestinians are denied basic human rights.
This, in a nutshell, is the Israeli system of rule over the
Palestinians. It bears a striking similarity to the system of apartheid
in South Africa even if it differs in many particulars. (For a more
detailed analysis see “Not an analogy: Israel and the crime of
apartheid” by Hazem Jamjoum.[16])
In the course of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa,
large numbers of people around the world came to understand that
apartheid is a crime against humanity that must be eradicated wherever
it might appear. In 1973 the General Assembly of the United Nations
adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment
of the Crime of Apartheid, which specifies that a regime commits
apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and
maintain the domination of one racial group over another. The Rome
Statute of the International Criminal Court also defines apartheid as a
crime. This statute came into effect in 2002, long after the end of the
apartheid regime in South Africa.
Of course the experts on what is apartheid, and what it is not, live
in South Africa. It is no accident that many unions and solidarity
organizations in South Africa have endorsed the idea that Israel is an
apartheid state.[17]
One of the most thorough and authoritative studies of Israeli
apartheid in the occupied territories was published by the South
African Human Rights Council in May 2009. The 302-page report by an
international panel of experts concluded “that Israel, since 1967, has
been the belligerent Occupying Power in the OPT [occupied Palestinian
territories], and that its occupation of these territories has become a
colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.”[18]
Today’s solidarity activists draw strength from this understanding
of the crime of apartheid. They look at Israel in light of the
experience gained in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and
they are inspired by the victory that was won there. Their explanations
of the Israeli apartheid system have been convincing and have helped to
build the movement.
Returning to the article cited above, only one element of the
argument remains. Israel is not an apartheid state, Pederson states,
because the Palestinian leadership is not revolutionary.
It is, to say the least, rather bizarre to assert that the nature of
the Palestinian leadership determines the nature of the Israeli state.
Nevertheless, the assertion is revealing. It expresses how the SWP has
come to condition its support for struggles against imperialism on its
view of the leadership of such struggles. This provides a handy excuse
for refusing to support them. In 2003 the SWP refused to support the
large demonstrations against the war in Iraq. Its Canadian sister
organization expelled supporters who argued that Marxists had a duty to
defend the Iraqi people against imperialism by taking concrete action
against the war. The SWP justified its abstention from the struggle by
pointing to the bloody and reactionary record of the Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein. Over the last few years the SWP has adopted a similar
approach toward the Palestinian struggle.
Suffice it to say that this has more in common with dead-end
sectarianism than it does with Marxism. The SWP used to understand this
quite well. The 1971 resolution cited earlier begins with these words:
“The Socialist Workers Party gives unconditional support to the
national liberation struggles of the Arab peoples against imperialism,
that is, we support all these struggles regardless of their current
leaderships.”
Israel boycott, a growing and dynamic movement
As noted earlier, the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction
Israel (BDS) has made great strides in the past few years. BDS is now
one of the most dynamic and fastest growing components of the
international movement in solidarity with Palestine.[19]
Israel’s rulers recognize the power and potential of the boycott movement.
On July 14 the Israeli Knesset (parliament) approved the initial
reading of a bill designed to punish residents of Israel who promote
boycotts of the state or Israeli products. If enacted into law it will
allow punitive fines to be levied against such persons. The bill is
primarily aimed at Palestinians living in the West Bank and the small
but growing number of Israeli citizens, Jewish and Palestinian, who
form the “Boycott From Within” movement supporting the international
boycott. In a speech to the Knesset Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
denounced the Boycott From Within movement as a “national scandal.”
Neve Gordon, a professor at Ben Gurion University who endorsed an
academic boycott of Israel last year, has received death threats.
Gideon Sa’ar, the minister of education, has threatened to punish any
lecturer or institution that supports a boycott of Israel.
In February the REUT Institute, one of Israel’s most influential
think tanks, published a report in which it warned of a dangerous
decline in Israel’s international support. It urged the government to
take more effective action against the forces promoting the
“delegitimization” of the state of Israel, including the international
BDS movement.[20] The institute devoted the June 10 issue of its
magazine to a detailed analysis of the movement, noting that:
the damage caused by the BDS Movement lies in its
promotion of delegitimization towards Israel through creating the
comparison — whether implicit or explicit — between Israel and the
former apartheid South African regime. Therefore, BDS should be viewed
first and foremost as a tool to brand Israel as a ‘pariah state’ with
the ultimate aim of undermining the legitimacy of its political
structure.[21]
Although only five years old, the boycott movement has scored some
notable successes, winning increasing support in many quarters.
National trade union federations in South Africa, Ireland, Scotland,
Quebec, and elsewhere have endorsed the boycott, as have numerous
unions in various countries. On July 22 the annual conference of Unite,
the largest union in Britain, with two million members, voted
unanimously in favour of a complete boycott of Israeli goods and
services. Earlier this year Israeli Apartheid Week, an educational
activity promoting BDS, took place on more than 50 campuses worldwide.
The number of participating campuses has grown steadily from year to
year.
Grass-roots organizing has been particularly effective in Europe,
where a divestment campaign forced the French multinational Veolia to
withdraw from a major transportation project in Jerusalem and the West
Bank. Israeli businesses have acknowledged a decline in their sales
because European consumers are boycotting Israeli agricultural products.
In the United States and elsewhere, the movement is increasing its
pressure on pension funds and university endowments to divest from
companies such as Lockheed Martin, ITT, United Technologies, General
Electric, Caterpillar and Motorola that profit from Israel’s occupation
of Palestinian lands while helping it carry out its war crimes. On June
2 students at Evergreen State College in Washington state voted by a
large majority to demand that the college’s foundation divest from
companies that profit from the Israeli occupation and that the college
ban the use of Caterpillar equipment on campus. Rachel Corrie, an
Evergreen student, was killed by a weaponized Caterpillar bulldozer as
she attempted to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in the
Gaza Strip in 2003.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has been a particularly
vocal supporter of the college divestment campaigns in the United
States.
An appeal from Palestine
The BDS movement responds to an appeal for solidarity issued on July
9, 2005 by more than 170 Palestinian organizations, including trade
unions, political and social organizations, and women’s and youth
groups. The signatories represent the three components of the
Palestinian nation — refugees, Palestinians living under in the
occupied territories, and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The appeal from Palestine said:
We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call
upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience
all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment
initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in
the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states
to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite
conscientious Israelis to support this call, for the sake of justice
and genuine peace.
These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until
Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s
inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the
precepts of international law by:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian
refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in U.N.
resolution 194.[22]
The BDS call does not advocate a particular political solution to
the conflict. Its approach is to develop a grass-roots mass political
campaign in favour of these three basic pillars of human rights for the
Palestinian people. This approach serves not only to overcome divisions
among the Palestinians, it also stands on the universal principles of
human rights that have animated the struggle against racism in South
Africa, the United States, and elsewhere.
The movement took another step forward in 2008 with the formation of
the Palestinian BDS National Committee, a broadly representative group
of Palestinians that serves as the leadership of the international BDS
campaign.
The rapid growth of the movement can be attributed to a number of
factors: its origin in Palestine; the unity among Palestinians that it
expresses; its new, rights-based approach to the struggle; its
consistent anti-racism (which includes opposing Islamophobia and
anti-Semitism); and the movement’s Palestinian leadership. The movement
also offers many opportunities for grass-roots organizing of boycott
and divestment campaigns as well as educational activities. As it has
grown the movement has acquired experience and developed an increasing
number of local leaders. It has also become more diverse, developing
targeted academic and cultural boycotts of Israel similar to those used
in the struggle against South African apartheid.
Israel boycott, ‘a cover for anti-Semitism’?
These developments have not gone unnoticed at the SWP’s
headquarters. The group has taken up the cudgels against the boycott
movement, waging a sustained campaign against it in the pages of its
newspaper. Leaders of the group have denounced BDS in meetings
organized to build the solidarity movement, from Israeli Apartheid Week
to the recent U.S. Social Forum.
The SWP’s campaign is fundamentally dishonest. The Militant
has not reported any of the basic facts about the boycott movement. The
SWP has also chosen to ignore the appeal of Omar Barghouti, a leader of
the Palestinian BDS National Committee, who wrote in a recent article
that: “genuine solidarity movements recognize and follow the lead of
the oppressed, who are not passive objects but active, rational
subjects that are asserting their aspirations and rights as well as
their strategy to realize them.”[23]
In the SWP’s eyes BDS is “a cover for anti-Semitism.” The article by Paul Pederson cited previously said this:
In the absence of any revolutionary perspective,
campaigns such as the anti-Israel boycott can appear to be a radical
substitute. But, as the crisis of capitalism deepens, the “anti-Israel”
character of these campaigns is simply a modern form of Jew-hatred. All
who genuinely support the battle for Palestinian national rights must
oppose it.
Not to be outdone, in his reply to critical readers in the next issue of The Militant Norton Sandler compared advocates of BDS to the Nazis:
In London earlier this year the Marks & Spencer
department stores and Starbucks coffee shops were targets of protests
over the Israeli assault on Gaza. These businesses are supposedly
Jewish-owned. … Jewish businesses were a prime target of the Nazis in Germany after 1933. Why aren’t U.S.-owned businesses targets during protests against Washington’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars?[24]
The SWP’s allegation that the boycott movement is anti-Semitic and
akin to Hitler’s targeting of Jews in Germany is beneath contempt. It
assumes that readers of The Militant will not try to
ascertain the facts for themselves. But facts are more powerful than
such slanders, and the facts about the BDS movement are readily
available.
(For example, The Militant repeatedly alleges that boycott
activities in the United Kingdom target the Marks & Spencer
department store chain because the company’s owners are Jewish. Like
virtually everything else the SWP writes about the BDS movement, this
is untrue. The Boycott Israeli Goods website lists seven major
retailers in the U.K. that sell Israeli products. Each of them has been
the target of pro-Palestinian protests in recent years. According to
the website, Marks & Spencer has deep historical ties to the state
of Israel. Also, “in 1998, Sir Richard Greenbury, then CEO of Marks
& Spencer, received the Jubilee Award from Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu. In 2000, the Jerusalem Report stated that ‘M&S supports Israel with $233 million in trade each year.’”[25])
Supporters of the SWP might want to reflect on the fact that the
group’s campaign against boycotting Israel places them to the right of
the Episcopal Peace Fellowship in the U.S., which recently endorsed
boycott, divestment and sanctions, and the Methodist Church of Great
Britain, which has called on its followers to boycott all products from
Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.[26]
A fateful leap toward Zionism
Already well on its way toward the Zionist camp, the SWP took another fateful leap at its national conference this June. The Militant reported that the conference featured a series of classes.
One on ‘World Capitalist Crisis, Israel, and the Roots
of Jew Hatred’ took up the need for a multinational, working-class
leadership to fight for a democratic, secular Palestine. Communists would fight for Palestine to be a refuge for all Jews facing persecution.
Conference participants discussed how the call for a boycott of Israeli
products is not a road toward winning self-determination for the
Palestinians, but a dangerous concession to anti-Semitism.[27]
This passage does more than repeat the familiar slander against the
boycott movement. It introduces a new and far-reaching change in the
SWP’s program. Its call for a democratic, secular Palestine now has a
distinctly Zionist flavour — Palestine must be a homeland for world
Jewry.
This has several major implications.
For one thing, what is it about Palestine that makes it the proper
destination for Jews who may feel the need to emigrate? Why not the
United States, Canada, or Australia, much larger and wealthier
countries? Religious Zionists believe that Palestine is the Holy Land
and that God has granted the Jews the right to settle there. Secular
Zionists advance other reasons. Both agree that the Palestinians must
not obstruct Jewish immigration and colonisation. But what is the SWP’s
reason for selecting Palestine for new waves of Jewish settlement?
Furthermore, the SWP appears to give little weight to the
possibility that “Jews facing persecution” at some point in the future
might choose to defend their rights in the countries where they reside,
struggling alongside the oppressed and exploited of those countries. It
is Zionism, not Marxism, that insists on the need for a sanctuary for
Jews in Israel/Palestine.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, the SWP’s vision for Palestine
fails to mention the Palestinian refugees, victims of Israel’s wars.
Many of them live in dismal refugee camps near Israel’s borders.
According to Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, there
are more than seven million Palestinian refugees. One in three refugees
in the world is Palestinian.[28] Any settlement that deprives them of
their right to return home, to receive redress for their dispossession
and to live as full citizens in the land of their choice is an unjust
settlement that will not endure.[29]
While barring all Palestinian refugees, Israel accords automatic
citizenship to immigrants who are Jewish. The SWP appears to want to
maintain this arrangement in some form in the new state that they
envisage. Whatever else one might say about it, this state would be
neither democratic nor secular.
Although a logical extension of the positions first developed in
early 2009, the SWP’s discovery of Palestine as a homeland for the Jews
and its silence on the Palestinians’ right of return marks a fateful
leap toward Zionism.
Bending to imperialist pressure
The SWP’s embrace of Zionist arguments against the Palestinian
struggle are the clearest and most extreme examples of the group’s
steady rightward evolution. Unfortunately they are not an isolated
case. A few other examples show the pattern.
For a number of years following the U.S.-led invasion and occupation
of Iraq in 2003, the SWP refused to support the anti-war movement. It
wrote article after article criticizing what it called the “middle
class radicals” leading the movement while itself doing virtually
nothing to oppose the war and occupation. It also repeatedly condemned
acts of resistance by Iraqi fighters to the occupation of their country.
More recently the SWP refused to support the Honduran people in their struggle for democracy.
In June 2009 the Honduran army staged a coup d’état, overthrowing
the elected government. President Manuel Zelaya had angered business
leaders by raising the minimum wage. He had also alarmed Washington by
joining the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America (ALBA),
an alliance initiated by Venezuela and Cuba that conducts mutually
favourable trade between Latin American countries, thereby weakening
the U.S. grip on the continent. In Honduras workers, peasants,
aboriginal people and other toilers mobilized in large numbers against
the coup, which they understood was a blatant attack on their
democratic rights. Their struggle continued for months, while Cuba,
Venezuela, and much of Latin America did all they could to restore
constitutional rule in Honduras. The Honduran masses resisted valiantly
but ultimately were defeated by the combined power of Washington, the
Honduran army and the local oligarchy.
The SWP urged its followers to remain aloof from the struggle
against the coup, which it characterized as “part of (the) infighting
between wings of the capitalist class.” The July 20 issue of The Militant also
falsely asserted that constitutional procedures had been followed after
the army “arrested” the president.[30] An editorial in the next issue
declared that “the interests of Honduran workers and farmers do not lie
in whether Zelaya returns to the presidency.” It warned against “the
false claim by middle-class radicals that Zelaya’s ouster was a
‘right-wing’ coup ‘made in USA.’” The editorial also attacked ALBA.[31]
In August 2008 Georgia provoked a war with Russia, attempting to
reclaim territories then under Russian protection. Georgia was an ally
of the U.S., which had provided it with $277 million in military aid
since 1997. It had troops in Iraq serving under U.S. command. Soon
after the war with Russia broke out, the U.S. sent additional supplies
to Georgia. It also mobilized international public opinion against
Russia. The Militant’s coverage echoed the imperialist
propaganda. “Russian troops out of Georgia!” was the title of an
editorial in the September 1, 2008 issue, which characterized the
fighting as a Russian invasion and occupation.[32]
In September 2005 a Danish newspaper published blatantly
anti-Islamic caricatures, provoking massive protests by Muslims in many
countries. The SWP turned its back on their cry for dignity and
equality and their outrage against the xenophobic intent of the
cartoons’ publishers. The Militant joined in the reactionary
uproar against the demonstrations, smearing them as “often violent
protests.”[33] The SWP refused to recognize that the protests embodied
the fight against both national oppression and imperialism.
This is a pattern of repeatedly bending to imperialist pressure in
times of crisis. It is a disgraceful course of conduct for a group that
calls itself socialist, particularly one located in the United States,
the heartland of imperialism.
[17] See, for example, the statement by the South African Municipal
Workers’ Union quoted earlier in this article. Many other examples
could be cited.
[18] “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A re-assessment of
Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under
international law”, Executive Summary, p. 5. Links to Executive Summary
and full report at http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Media_Release-378.phtml15.
[29] The July 26, 2010 issue of The Militant published an
excerpt from a report by the SWP’s central leader, Jack Barnes, in
which he states that a new, revolutionary leadership in Palestine will
be built around struggles on many fronts. Barnes provides a list of
such progressive causes. He does not include the right of return of the
Palestinian refugees. http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7428/742853.html26
LeftViews31
is Socialist Voice’s forum for articles related to rebuilding the left
in Canada and around the world, reflecting a wide variety of socialist
opinion.
Update on SEP and IMT's Different Way of Seeing the Iranian Revolution From the SEP's "The crisis of the Islamic Republic and the tasks of the Iranian working class"-12/29/09:
"...tens and probably hundreds of thousands joined anti-government protests...in...cities in central Iran that had been considered government strongholds. While many of the protesters wore green, thereby identifying themselves with Mousavi's call for reform of the Islamic Republic, many also took up slogans that directly challenged its existence, including 'Death to the Dictator!' A report in the New York Times said the opposition protests had begun to attract participants from working class south Teheran.
"The protagonists of the Green Revolution [the SEP's way of denigrating 2009's upheavals as a mere middle class, pro-imperialist reform movement] ...find themselves in the nominal leadership of a movement that seems to be taking on a quasi-insurrectional character." [emphasis added]
COSMOS LEFT to the SEP and World Socialist Web Site: Looks like the International Marxist Tendency was right [see below] when it said what was unfolding in Iran earlier in 2009 was the "beginning of a revolution"--not just a middle class protest orienting toward US imperialism that you saw.
Beginning of the Iranian Revolution: They Saw it From a Different Point of View
June 27, 2009--As the massive demonstrations erupted spontaneously in Iran following the June 12 presidential election, various Marxist organizations in the US and around the world reacted so differently one could legitimately ask if they were watching the same phenomenon. Specifically, I will focus on the Socialist Equality Party (wsws.org) and the International Marxist Tendency (marxist.com). COSMOS LEFT agrees with the SEP on some issues and the IMT on others. This is a reflection of what the future holds in store for the class struggle in the US and elsewhere: the working class will have to sift through the strongest of the Marxist parties and cobble together the best political characteristics of each to hammer out the program and revolutionary workers party that will overturn capitalism and form a socialist workers government.
From the World Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party):
"....Mousavi’s call for a new election based on charges of fraud—picked up and amplified by the US and European media—was the principal demand of last week’s mass protests, which were confined largely to urban middle-class and more privileged layers attracted to the opposition candidate’s promise of 'reform.' ("Iran: Protests wane as conflict within regime continues," 6/23/09) [emphasis added]
From the International Marxist Tendency (Marxist.com):
"As news comes in that the regime has declared the elections valid, the
deepening economic problems, the crumbling base and the splits in the
elite on the one hand, and the growing unity among workers’
organisations (and other joint activities with women, students and
national minorities) and the mass disenchantment of the great majority
of the population on the other, are preparing the ground for another,
and even bigger movement in the near future...." ("Iran: Clumsy fraud provokes mass demonstrations and forces a recount - Part Two," 6/30/09)
"Some on the left are questioning whether the movement in Iran is a
progressive one. They have been taken in by propaganda that states that
the movement is all an 'imperialist plot' to overthrow the Islamic
regime. This ignores the very essence of what is happening in Iran,
which is the beginning of a revolution. What is required to move everything forward now is decisive action by the working class...." ("Iran: regime steps up terror -- general strike is needed!", 6/26/09) [emphasis in original]
"Yesterday we received this letter from the USA commending the IMT
for our consistent and strong support for the struggle of the Iranian
people against the reactionary dictatorship ruling over them. He also
said he is appalled by the fact that many people, even on the left, do
not understand the real meaning of the current movement against
electoral fraud." [From the editors of In Defence of Marxism, website of the IMT]
The Letter:
"I am writing to you to commend you on your consistent and strong
support for the struggle of the Iranian people against the reactionary
dictatorship ruling over them. I have been visiting your website
occasionally for the past nearly 9 years and I can say with certainty
that your group has supported the Iranian people more than any other
group on the Left or Right. While it should be obvious that Iran has
for the past 30 years been under the rule of religious thugs who are
passionate enemies of liberty and democracy, it is so odd that many on
the Left cannot seem to grasp this obvious fact. Sadly, this also
includes those whom I have respected greatly in the past. One
extraordinary example of this tendency is the reaction of George
Galloway to this election fraud. He reacted by congratulating
Ahmadinejad on his 'victory,' not by supporting the people's movement
against him and the regime. For a man of the Left, this is shameful
behavior. Another example is the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)
with whom I am sure you are familiar. Having followed religiously and
respected their analyses in the past, I was horrified to discover that
at this pivotal moment in world history, they have chosen to devote
their energy to proving that this election was not a fraud and to
attacking other leftists who say otherwise. In other words, they have
come to the defense of the Islamic Republic. I am both shocked and
appalled at this and it is of special importance to me, since several
of my relatives live in Iran. I am glad at least that your group has
taken the correct position, but perhaps you could also try to enlighten
your fellow leftists on the other side of the Atlantic. Thank you for
your time." [emphasis added]
"A.Z. "June 29, 2009"
The World Socialist Web Site Replies to the IMT:
The above letter from "A.Z." obviously struck a nerve in the editorial offices of the WSWS. In a July 7 article entitled "Iran, imperialism and the 'left',"Alex Lantier wrote:
The issue raised by this criticism of the WSWS is the means by which the “left” allies of Mousavi hope to realize their political aims. The writer of this attack is furious that the WSWS refused to line up with those factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie, backed by US and European imperialism, in their struggle against Ahmadinejad. The standpoint adopted by this critic is the destruction of the Islamic Republic is to be welcomed, regardless of the class forces, within Iran and internationally, who are carrying out the operation. This is not only the position of the letter writer quoted approvingly by the IMT. The French NPA issued a public statement in which it declared that it supported all opponents of the Islamic Republic. This declaration came just as French President Sarkozy was taking the lead in mobilizing the EU against Iran!
The political and theoretical bankruptcy of the petty-bourgeois left finds particularly glaring expression in an essay by IMT leader Alan Woods, published on June 26, on the Iranian crisis (“Iran regime steps up terror—a general strike is needed!”). It gives a more detailed exposition of the political misconceptions underlying the IMT reader’s attack on the WSWS.
Woods attempts to refute the fairly obvious fact that the Mousavi protest movement was a right-wing movement: “Some on the left are questioning whether the movement in Iran is a progressive one. They have been taken in by propaganda that states that the movement is all an ‘imperialist plot’ to overthrow the Islamic regime.”
What “propaganda” is Woods referring to? For several weeks, the mass media in the US and Europe waged an unrelenting campaign to disorient and manipulate public opinion. The flagship of “progressive” liberalism, the Nation, legitimized the media campaign with reports filed by a correspondent who had previously defended the Shah’s regime. In the face of this massive disinformation campaign, a small number of publications, including the WSWS, sought to analyze the social and political basis of the Mousavi-led protests. For Woods, anything that contradicted the official mass media-sanctioned story line is illegitimate.
As for Woods’ claim that critics of the official story line were presenting the opposition demonstrations as nothing more than an “imperialist plot,” this is simply an attempt to set up a straw man. The analysis presented by the WSWS explained that the demonstrations reflected real divisions within the Iranian regime. We also noted that among the demonstrators were elements sincerely opposed to the Islamic regime. However, the demonstrations were politically led by sections of the Iranian bourgeoisie, drew its main forces from the privileged sections of the urban middle class, and based on a program deeply antagonistic to the interests of the working class. Moreover, the issue of an “imperialist plot” was not as insignificant as Woods would like his readers to believe. Woods can only justify the IMT’s support for Mousavi’s movement by glossing over the class program of its leadership and the related aims of the imperialist powers.
He writes: “There is not the slightest doubt that the US is covertly trying to effect regime-change in Iran, and has been doing so for the last three decades. We know that Washington has set up a special fund for this purpose.” However, Woods writes as if these facts had not played a role in the situation and could safely be dropped from consideration: “But the curious thing about the present situation is how circumspect the Americans have been.” [Emphasis added]
This is an extraordinary statement. As in every other aspect of the IMT’s line, it is simply adapting to the line of the mass media, which claimed that Obama was adopting a restrained attitude toward events in Iran. In reality, the US response to the Iranian crisis, including Biden’s recent threats, has unfolded in the context of a basic US policy of encircling Iran (invading neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and keeping bases throughout the Persian Gulf) and subjecting it to constant threats of attack. This policy is not circumspect, but aggressive and criminal.
Woods has more work to do to fully evade the issue of imperialist intervention in Iran. He supports the Venezuelan regime of Hugo Chavez, a bourgeois populist whom Washington would also like to remove from power. Woods has to acknowledge “the reaction of many people in Venezuela (not just Chavez), who have drawn a parallel between the reactionary movements of the middle-class escualidos trying to destabilize the Bolivarian government [i.e. the Chavez regime] and the Iranian protests.”
Woods reacts angrily: “What has this got to do with the situation in Iran? The government of Iran is not a progressive, pro-working class government but a reactionary theocratic dictatorship... The facts show there is nothing progressive about the rule of the mullahs in Iran, and there is no basis whatsoever for comparing it to Venezuela and Bolivia.”
The basic issue at stake is Woods’ unprincipled and cowardly attitude towards imperialism. He does not adopt a principled class opposition to imperialist interference in all oppressed countries. Rather, he objects to imperialist intrigue in the Third World bourgeois regimes that he likes, and ignores it when it affects regimes he dislikes.
Woods then tries to explain his perspective for the Mousavi protest movement. He says that it “has a confused character,” but hopefully notes that “the early stages of a Revolution are always characterized by an incoherent and confused situation.” As an example of a confused and complex situation, he cites the February Revolution of 1917, the initial overthrow of the czar that set the stage for the Bolshevik Party to take power in the October Revolution several months later.
These analogies are untenable. The February Revolution was a mass working-class uprising that overthrew the czar; the Mousavi protest movement was a middle-class protest that lacked mass support.
Woods gets even further entangled when he describes how the Mousavi protest might evolve. Noting “democratic illusions” of pro-Mousavi protestors, he says that Iranians will receive a “harsh education” about the “big illusions in the ‘democratic’ leaders.” He explains: “The ‘reformers’ only want a cosmetic change, which means no change at all. The bourgeois Liberals want a change that will place them at the helm of power and protect their privileges by more efficient means of control.”
This is his view of the political leadership of the movement he defends against all charges of not being progressive!
Woods’ reasoning is that of a reactionary petty-bourgeois politician who easily adapts himself to bourgeois public opinion. His essay is an example of the politics of the overwhelming majority of “left” groups that support the Mousavi movement—a support that speaks volumes on their own social and political orientation. These petty-bourgeois groups make no class analysis of the movements they support, passing over Iran’s history as an oppressed, semi-colonial country in silence as they fall in line with the latest color-coded “democracy” campaign.
Has the Socialist Workers Party Reversed its Support of Affirmative Action?
COSMOS LEFT has detected a shift in the Socialist Workers Party's position on affirmative action that suggests the SWP is moving closer to its long-time nemesis--the Socialist Equality Party. A starting point for this thesis will be a discussion of a chapter from an upcoming Pathfinder book by SWP leader Jack Barnes entitled, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. The chapter is called "The Cosmopolitan 'Meritocracy' and Class Stratification of Black Nationality."
Affirmative action is one of the central issues in the international class struggle because it gets to the root of one of the prequisites of the socialist revolution--the working class overcoming the divisions within it put there by the capitalists to divide and conquer. For this reason, it is one of the thorniest issues in the Marxist camp.
Historically, the Socialist Workers Party has strongly supported affirmative action because 1) it is a necessary remedial measure needed to combat centuries of racism and discrimination that persist, a measure accompanied by quotas to ensure its enforcement has teeth and 2) it is an indispensable instrument to unify the working class so it's strong enough to politically overthrow the capitalists and form a revolutionary workers government. Flowing from this, the SWP has supported proleterian Black nationalism as exemplified by Malcolm X as revolutionary.
The Socialist Equality Party, on the other hand, has been a consistent opponent of affirmative action because they see it as a manifestation of "identity politics" that places race above class, a measure that only benefits a small percentage of better off African Americans while perpetuating the divisions within the working class. The SEP agrees with the bourgeois opponents of affirmative action that the remedial measure is reverse racism that discriminates against white workers, and that Malcolm X was a practitioner of identity politics who was an obstacle to unifying Black and white workers.
After reading Barnes's "The Cosmopolitan 'Meritocracy' and Class Stratification of Black Nationality," I wrote the following to the World Socialist Web Site, the online voice of the Socialist Equality Party:
Comrades,
Is the SWP changing its position on
affirmative action and coming closer to that of the Socialist Equality Party?
This week's Militant includes a chapter
entitled "The Cosmopolitan "Meritocracy' and Class Stratification of
Black Nationality" from an upcoming Pathfinder book, MalcolmX, Black Liberation, and the Road to
Workers Power.
Here's the excerpt:
"...Today the privileged layers Obama is
part of are proud of being color-blind in a way that is new to bourgeois
society in the United States. The glue holding them together is not color but
social class—or, to be more accurate, their entrenchment in a certain section
of a social class. Whatever their racial or national background or sex,
virtually none of them perceive affirmative action as it has evolved today as a
threat to their status, and it’s not uncommon for some of those who are Black,
Latino, or female to insist, in their own individual cases, that they got where
they are without need of quotas.
"Affirmative action in the misshapen
forms increasingly implemented by the capitalist rulers has more and more been
incorporated into advancement of the meritocracy to the degree the bourgeoisie
deems it necessary to the maintenance and reproduction of stable bourgeois
social relations. Given this supraclass character, the main function of affirmative action as it has come to be
applied by the bourgeoisie in the United States is to reinforce illusions in imperialist democracy. It is used to
further divide African-Americans and other nationally oppressed layers along
class lines, and to deepen divisions within the working class as a whole. [emphasis added]
"That’s why communists and other
vanguard workers explain that while unconditionally opposing the rollback of
any programs that would restore racist or anti-woman patterns of hiring,
promotions, firings, or college admissions, we
give no political support to how the bourgeoisie has implemented what they call
affirmative action over the past two decades. What the working class
conquered through victories such as wresting the Weber decision in 19795—like
other gains by the toilers, if the class struggle does not continue to
advance—has more and more often been perverted into programs that provide a
golden key for a relative few to enter an increasingly exclusive club further
up the income rungs of U.S. society. [emphasis added]
"With unemployment sharply rising today,
and with the jobless rate for workers who are Black more than 75 percent higher
than for workers who are white, the victories the working class has won through
decades of struggle against racial divisions—divisions that are part and parcel
of the workings of capitalism, and are consciously fostered by the bosses to
pit us against each other and weaken the labor movement—are increasingly
threatened. So long as capitalist
relations exist, the fight for quotas in hiring, promotions, seniority-based
layoffs, and college admissions—that is, openly stated numerical targets or
separate lists for those facing discrimination based on their race or sex—will
continue to be an indispensable element in forging class solidarity along the
road toward the revolutionary fight by the working class to take state power,
hold it, and aid those the world over fighting to do likewise.6[emphasis added]
6. In the opening decades of the twentieth
century, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, responding to the increasingly Russian
chauvinist policies of a rising privileged social caste in the government and
party apparatus of the young Soviet workers and peasants republic, explained
the proletarian character of measures to overcome the legacy of national
oppression in a workers state. In a December 1922 letter to the upcoming
Communist Party congress, Lenin wrote that internationalism “on the part of the
oppressors or ‘great’ nations, as they are called (though they are great only
in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the
observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality, through
which the oppressor nation, the great nation, would compensate for the
inequality which obtains in real life. Anybody who does not understand this has
not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question; he is still
essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to
descend to the bourgeois point of view.” From “Letter to the Party Congress” in
Lenin’s Final Fight (Pathfinder, 1995), p. 220 [2009 printing].
Comrades, is it me, or is there a
contradiction in Barnes's analysis?First he concedes that"affirmation action in the misshapen forms increasingly implemented
by the capitalist rulers has more and more been incorporated into advancement
of the meritocracy to the degree the bourgeoisie deems it necessary to the
maintenance and reproduction of stable bourgeois social relations... [given
this, it is used by the ruling class] to "reinforce illusions in
imperialist democracy. It is used to further divide African-Americans and other
nationally oppressed layers along class lines, and to deepen divisions within
the working class as a whole."
Barnes then states that communists should
"give no political support to how the bourgeoisie has what they call
affirmative action over the past two decades."
But in the next paragraph, after noting
rising unemployment and a 75% higher unemployment rate among Black workers than
white workers, factors that are weakening the victories workers have achieved
in overcoming racial divisions, Barnes states, "So long as capitalist
relations exist, the fight for quotas in hiring, promotions, seniority-based
layoffs, and college admissions--that is, openly stated numerical targets or
separate lists for those facing discrimination based on their race or sex--will
continue to be an indispensable element in forging class solidarity along the
road toward the revolutionary fight by the working class to take state power,
hold it, and aid those the world over fighting to do likewise."
Am I missing something, or is there indeed a
contradiction there? And what is your response to this apparent shift on the SWP's
part regarding affirmative action?
In response, COSMOS LEFT received the following reply from the Socialist Equality Party:
I have not made a detailed study of the SWP's recent positions; however, it is clear from the article that you send that it is in no way going back on its complete support for identity and racial politics. Barnes denounces affirmative action "as it has been implemented" but supports affirmative action in general, as you note. This is in fact a false distinction. Affirmative action as it has been implemented is the natural product of affirmative action in general. It has always been based on cultivating a section of the minority population to support the capitalist system. Obama is the natural outcome of this process. Genuine equality can not be achieved on this basis, but only through the unity of the working class across all races on a socialist program. It is not a question of racial or other quotas, but the demand for quality education and jobs for everyone.
Our basic response I think remains the same as that articulated in the Statement of Principles:
32. Another form of opportunism, which has played a significant role in undermining the struggle for the unity of the working class and lowering class consciousness, is the promotion of innumerable forms of “identity” politics - based on the elevation of national, ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, gender, and sexual distinctions above class position. This shift from class to identity has been at the expense of an understanding of the real causes, rooted in the capitalist system, of the hardships that confront all working people. At its worst, it has promoted a competition among different “identities” for access to educational institutions, jobs and other “opportunities” which, in a socialist society, would be freely available to all people without such demeaning, dehumanizing and arbitrary distinctions. Affirmative action programs have benefited, for the most part, a relatively small layer of the middle class. The demand for legal and social equality, which dominated the historic civil rights movement of the African-American masses during the 1950s and 1960s, was undermined by a class shift in political focus, which replaced the fight against mass poverty with the securing of preferential treatment and privileges for a few. This shift, promoted by the Democratic Party and its allies among the advocates of petty-bourgeois identity politics, has had a devastating impact on the conditions of life for the broad mass of minority workers. The SEP demands full equality for all people, and defends unequivocally their democratic rights. All forms of discrimination based on national, ethnic, racial, religious, or linguistic heritage, or on gender or sexual orientation, must be abolished. The SEP advances this essential democratic component of its program within the context of the fight for socialism, based on the political unification of all sections of the working class.
[End of SEP's letter]
This was COSMOS LEFT'S reply to the SEP:
Thanks for your response. I still think you are downplaying the extent to which the SWP has come closer to the SEP's position on affirmative action. We have never heard such formulations on affirmative action from Barnes before, formulations that sound very much like your #32 Statement of Principle.
Barnes denounces affirmative action "as it has been implemented" but supports affirmative action in general, as you note.
Actually, Barnes seems to be denouncing everything about affirmative action except for the specific aspect of quotas, or more specifically, that the fight for quotas is essential for forging the kind of class solidarity needed for the proletariat to win state power.
Finally, the excerpts from Lenin's 1922 letter to the Communist Party Congress contained in footnote 6 of Barnes's article appear to support the principle of affirmative action, including quotas--"internationalism on the part of the oppressor nations must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality, through which the oppressor nation would compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life." [emphasis added]
What is your response to this argument?
[End of COSMOS LEFT'S reply]
As of yet, COSMOS LEFT has not received a response from the SEP to the email containing Lenin's apparent endorsement of affirmative action.--July 21, 2009
The Legacy of Leon Trotsky and U.S. Trotskyism: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
JULY 25--27, 2008 at Fordham University, New York City
Agenda: Permanent Revolution and the Evolution of World Realities Social Movements and Class Struggle in the United States What Kind of Political Organization Do We Need? Lessons of the SWP Experience
This diverse group of veteran Trotskyists will discuss the relevance of Trotsky's theoretical and political tradition; the relevance of such concepts as permanent revolution, workers states, workers democracy, Lenin, Bolshevism, democratic centralism, imperialism, nationalism; how permanent revolution is playing out today in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia.--July 26, 2008
April 25, 2008--At an April 16 meeting on the University of North Texas campus, Socialist Workers Party leader Mary-Alice Waters was asked the following question after praising Cuba's "revolutionary government" for its land reform and literacy campaign while standing up to US imperialism:
"But how can you defend Cuba? Isn't it a dictatorship?"
Waters replied: "No, it is not a dictatorship. Working people exercise greater control over the most fundamental policies that determine their lives than here in 'democratic' America. This is expressed not only through elections but through workplace assemblies and many other forms. [emphasis added]
“It is mass popular support that has enabled the Cuban
Revolution to advance, under the most difficult circumstances, and to
stand up to imperialism.”
Excuse me, Comrade Waters? Cuba is not a dictatorship? Then what exactly have you been telling the workers of the world for more than 4 decades when describing the Cuban revolution as a socialist revolution? Of course Cuba is a dictatorship! No, it's not a military dictatorship, nor a fascist dictatorship, nor a dictatorship of "democratic" capital over labor.
Cuba is a dictatorship of the proletariat, and has been since 1961, two years after Cuba's workers and peasants overthrew Batista's dictatorship and began the process of concentrating political, economic, military and state power in their hands. Communist leaders in the United States should give honest answers to honest questions from information-hungry students, in this case, explain that in Marxist terms, a dictatorship is nothing other than such concentrated political and economic power in the hands of one class or another, ie, the exploiters or the exploited.
Responsible communist leaders don't shirk from using the word "dictatorship." They explain the above-mentioned Marxist definition of "dictatorship." They patiently explain that the key question is which class possesses that power; which class holds the reins of society. What you don't do is sound like one of Barack Obama's mealy-mouthed, evasive replies that avoids mentioning "dictatorship." Unless, of course, your party long ago "cowardly adapted to the most reactionary right wing forces," as the World Socialist Web Site believes the SWP did a while back.
No, responsible communist leaders explain that the reason Cuba's working people are in a position to "exercise greater control over the most fundamental policies that determine their lives" is precisely because they possess state power, precisely because Cuba's government is their government, precisely because they constitute the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This egregious error by the SWP leader did not come from left field. When a revolutionary workers party abandons Leon Trotsky and his balls-on theory of permament revolution, as the SWP did in 1983, that party is not far from losing sight of other ABCs of Marxism.
The "problem" that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez alluded to is the fact that the country's new Minister of Labor, Jose Ramon Rivero, confessed his political allegiance to the co-leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky.
No problemo.
Lenin on Religion
As we watch George W. Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and the Christian Right attempt to strip the US of its secular progressive foundation and violate the 1st Amendment by imposing a nonexistent Christian basis to the Constitution, it is illuminating to reflect on what Russian revolutionary leader Lenin had to say on the subject of the separation of church and state and its relevance to the class struggle:
"As regards religion, the policy of the R.C.P. [Russian Communist Party] is not to be confined to decreeing the separation of the church from the state and the school from the church, that is, to measures promised by bourgeois democrats but never fully carried out anywhere in the world because of the many and varied connections actually existing between capital and religious propaganda.
"The Party's object is to completely destroy the connection between the exploiting classes and organized religious propaganda and really liberate the working people from religious prejudices. For this purpose it must organize the most widespread scientific education and anti-religious propaganda. It is necessary, however, to take care to avoid hurting the religious sentiments of believers, for this only serves to increase religious fanaticism."
--From the 1919 Draft Programme of the R.C.P. (B) [Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)], "Section of the Programme Dealing with Religion," as quoted in Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 134.
The following statement on Israeli aggression against the people of Palestine was issued by the Press Office of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías on June 29. The translation is by Socialist Voice. The original can be found at: http://www.minci.gov.ve/noticiasnuev.asp?numn=10463.
Prensa Latina reported on June30 that Bolivia’s foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, has also made a statement condemning the Israeli aggression.
The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, condemned in the name of the Venezuelan people the most recent aggression that Israeli troops have waged against Palestine, as well as the violation of the airspace of Syria.
He made his assertion this Thursday during an act celebrating the promotion of officers and sub-officers of the Presidential Honor Guard Regiment. He said that Israel must respect the Palestinian people, "a people who have struggled for years for peace and independence. We send our solidarity to Palestine’s president and people."
The Israeli army took over the south of the Gaza Strip and in the early morning dozens of tanks advanced from the north. The Israeli attack included the arrest of ten ministers, 20 parliamentarians, and members of the Palestine resistance.
They have been using the entire military power accumulated by the State of Israel with support from US imperialism to bomb, penetrate, and invade Palestinian territory in defiance of UN resolutions and world peace. Also, in defiance of the United Nations, they have violated the airspace of the Arab Republic of Syria with overflights of the residence of the Syrian president, using the excuse that Syria protects terrorists. Nothing, absolutely nothing can justify to anyone in this world the transgression of the sovereignty of states and of the liberty of peoples," the Venezuelan president said.
That’s why and herein lies the importance of the battle we have been waging, our battle that we know has taken on or has extended itself into the world arena; our struggle is for peace, our struggle is for a world in equilibrium, as Bolivar said." Venezuela determined to enter the UN Security Council All this explains, in the words of President Chávez, the determination of the United States government to block Venezuela from being chosen next October as a member of the Security Council of the United Nations. "Of course, the United States does not like it when any country or person raises their voice against imperialist outrages. We have raised our voice against the imperialist outrages of the United States and we will keep on raising our voice because we’ve had enough with outrages in this world (…) we want peace and we want respect." President Chávez said Venezuela’s nomination to the post is a challenge for the Bolivarian government, one that is accepted nobly. He extended thanks for support given by the governments of Brazil and Argentina because they recognize that Caracas defends the voices of the weakest people in the world. He is confident that one by one more governments will come to support this proposal despite imperial pressure to block Venezuela’s entry as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. US spokespeople are already pressuring other governments to try to stop Venezuela’s election as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. "The Unites States says that Venezuela will not make it to the Security Council, and we say: Venezuela is going to the Security Council, we accept the challenge and take the on the battle worldwide, we say this openly." He commented with satisfaction on the results of a study carried out by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It shows that the people of the United States and Venezuela are the ones who feel most pride in their countries. Fair play, political influence, social security, democracy, the military, and history were some of the factors appraised in the study. The head of the Venezuelan state affirmed that this result shows that with each passing day the women and men of this nation are more proud of having been born in this homeland.
A Statement From the Cuban Foreign Ministry:
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba, has learnt with great concern of Israel's large-scale military operation that began in the Gaza Strip in the early hours of June 28, 2006 with the mobilization of around 5,000 soldiers, hundreds of tanks and other military hardware, during which it attacked the principal electricity station in the area, leaving half of the territory without electricity, indiscriminately bombarded several bridges connecting different parts of the Strip, reoccupied important southern portions of Palestinian territory, and detained many high-ranking figures from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Israel has used the capture of an Israeli soldier by the Palestinian occupation resistance as an excuse to launch its barbaric aggression, ignoring the fact that the Israeli army has killed 52 Palestinians just in the current month of June, according to recognized international organizations.
This inhumane and criminal aggression took place just when an agreement had been reached among the Palestinian political forces, which is contributing to the renewal of peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis, in line with the relevant resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.
At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba rejects the violation of the Arab Republic of Syria's airspace by Israeli military aircraft which, together with the barbaric actions in the Gaza Strip, once again exposes the Middle East to a dangerous escalation of violence that is putting international peace and security at risk.
As in the past, Israel is acting with the arrogance and impunity afforded it both by U.S. economic and military support and its permanent veto on the UN Security Council.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba wishes to express its most vigorous condemnation of the barbaric Israeli military aggression against the Gaza Strip and calls on the international community and peace-loving forces to mobilize in demand of the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip; a cession of Israeli state terrorism; and respect for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people, including the establishment of an independent, sovereign state with its capital in East Jerusalem, the return of refugees, and the unconditional return of all Arab territories occupied in June 1967, as the only way of reaching a just and lasting peace for all the people of that convulsive region.
Havana, June 29, 2006
Canadian Comrades: Where the SWP Goes Wrong on Cartoon Protests
March 19, 2006--COSMOS LEFT received the following correspondence from Socialist Voice, a Canadian Marxist group that split from the Socialist Workers Party's sister organization in Canada, the Communist League, over its line on the Iraq war. Readers of this page know that is a principal reason why COSMOS LEFT broke politically from the SWP several years ago. The editors of Socialist Voice, Roger Annis and John Riddell, have recognized that the Iraq war and other issues confronting working people worldwide "pose the need for Marxists and other working class fighters to forge new links across longstanding organizational barriers..."
On that basis, COSMOS LEFT considers those in and around Socialist Voice to be co-thinkers.
SOCIALISTS MUST OPPOSE ANTI-MUSLIM BIGOTRY
WHERE 'THE MILITANT' GOES WRONG ON CARTOON PROTESTS
By Sandra Browne and Robert Johnson
EDITORS' NOTE: Protests against the anti-Islamic caricatures published in Denmark have been widely supported by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. However, capitalist media claim that these actions endanger freedom of speech, and some socialist groups echo this view. Sandra Browne and Robert Johnson analyze the views of one such current, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. Both were prominent activists for several decades in its Canadian sister organization. --
Roger Annis and John Riddell
"People are no longer willing to pay taxes to help support someone called Ali who comes from a country with a different language and culture that's 5,000 miles away." --Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the caricatures for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, quoted in the Feb. 12 New York Times.
"To Muslims, the caricatures vividly brought back the scenes of Israeli bulldozers demolishing Palestinian homes in Jenin, the invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of Baghdad, terrors of Abu Ghraib and humiliations of Guantanamo Bay.
"Cultural arrogance was added to political aggressiveness. Muslims have grown used to the torrent of terrifying images that associate them and their faith with the most horrifying of practices, from
violence and cruelty to fanaticism and oppression. When it comes to Islam, all boundaries and limits could be dispensed with. The unacceptable becomes perfectly acceptable, proper and respectable.
"The truth is that today racism, intolerance, xenophobia, and hatred of the other hide behind the sublime façade of free speech, the defence of `our' values and protection of `our' society from `foreign' aggression.
"Let us not be deceived about this rhetoric of liberalism and free speech. The Danish cartoons have nothing to do with freedom of expression and everything to do with hatred of the other in a Europe
grappling with its growing Muslim minorities, still unable to accept them." -Soumaya Ghannoushi writing for Aljazeera.net
"Muslims have, in effect, been vilified twice: once through the original cartoons and then again for having the gall to protest them. Such logic recalls the words of the late South African black
nationalist Steve Biko: `Not only are whites kicking us, they are telling us how to react to being kicked.'" --Gary Younge, "The Right to be Offended," The Nation, February 27
In the weeks following the publication of the anti-Muslim caricatures by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, many large actions of protest have taken place around the world. The mobilizations have been particularly massive and sustained among the Arab and Muslim peoples, the direct targets of the caricatures. But other fighters against racism and chauvinism have joined the protests.
Meanwhile, the imperialist rulers and their ideological followers are doing everything they can to dampen and discredit the mobilizations. This has led to a sharp polarization of political opinion and action. It has also posed a test for socialists. Many have rallied to the defense of Muslims. But others have echoed ruling-class themes.
The February 27, 2006, issue of The Militant provides a particularly blatant example of this. The newspaper expresses the views of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, and its stand on this issue illustrates how far the SWP leadership has retreated from revolutionary Marxism
on the struggle of oppressed nationalities against imperialism.
1. TURNING THE VICTIMS INTO THE CRIMINALS
As Soumaya Ghannoushi explains, the publication of the caricatures and the reaction they provoked had nothing to do with the issue of free speech and everything to do with the mounting tide of war,
oppression, chauvinism, and racism that has been particularly directed against peoples and nations who are Muslim.
This international context includes:
** The rise of racism in Denmark spearheaded by the Danish government and the record of xenophobia and anti-Muslim incitement of the publishers of Jyllands-Posten where the caricatures first appeared. Their publication was a deliberate provocation.
** The presence of Danish troops in the imperialist armies occupying Afghanistan and Iraq.
** Recent European Union decisions aimed at preventing or delaying Turkey's adhesion to the EU because of its large Muslim population
** Afghanistan has been invaded and occupied by imperialism. Iraq has been invaded and occupied by imperialism. Palestine is occupied by the Zionists. In all of these countries imperialism has brought nothing but death and destruction. The social fabric of these societies is being destroyed. The U.S. has been building and reinforcing military bases in other countries of the Middle East and Central Asia. The threat of a war against Iran grows ever closer.
** In the imperialist countries the ruling class seeks to justify its current and coming aggressions with a fierce ideological campaign, an important component of which is directed against Muslims at home and abroad. The campaign is multifaceted, but an underlying theme is that Islam is an aggressive, backward, warlike religion whose adherents must be conquered and "civilized." Official racism is instituted through the immigration laws, operations of the secret police, secret trials, "rendition" to ensure that detainees will be tortured, the Guantanamo concentration camp, etc. Rightist and openly racist forces are emboldened in this context, take the bit between their teeth and
push much further.
** This is the reality that immigrants in this country who come from the countries under attack face, as they do in the U.S. or Western Europe. The situation is much worse for those who live under
imperialist occupation or threat of attack.
The protests against the caricatures occur against this backdrop. They are an expression of deep outrage at all of these aggressions and indignities heaped upon the toiling masses, many of whom are
Muslims. At their most basic level they are a cry for dignity and equality, and a sign that there are many among the protesters who are willing to fight against the warmongers and merchants of hate.
The Militant's view
The Militant presents an entirely different view of the protests.
The coverage is presented in a lengthy article by Sam Manuel, "Imperialist powers use reactionary demands on banning Danish cartoons to attack rights, boost support for war," and an
editorial "Censorship hurts working class." (See references, below)
Nowhere in either the article or the editorial does the paper acknowledge that the published caricatures including the one depicting Muhammad as a terrorist are anti-Muslim, xenophobic and
intended to deepen racist suspicion toward Arab peoples. Nowhere do the writers acknowledge the rightful anger of millions worldwide at such affronts and their legitimate demands for an end to them. Nowhere do they recognize that the victims of these attacks and working people are right to strenuously protest such treatment by the imperialist rulers.
Surely The Militant does not prefer that Muslims turn the other cheek in the face of such an outrage. Why then is it unable to utter a single word of support to the protests? Why are words such as "racist", "anti-Muslim," and "chauvinist" entirely absent from its coverage?
The character of the paper's treatment of the issue is exemplified in the first paragraph of the front-page article by Manuel:
"WASHINGTON--Washington, London, and other imperialist powers are taking advantage of often violent protests against controversial cartoons, including one showing Prophet Muhammad with a lit bomb in his turban, to expand popular support for their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and threats against Iran and Syria."
The caricatures are characterized as "controversial cartoons." The choice of words is no accident since the editorial repeats the same expression. The concept that the drawings were a chauvinist provocation is foreign to the coverage.
Moreover, the author smears the mobilizations by calling them "often violent protests." This again turns the victims into criminals. Nearly all of the deaths and injuries associated with the demonstrations occurred when the police and armies of pro-imperialist governments attempted to quell the protests by force. (Later in Manuel's article he does acknowledge the lethal role of the security forces in two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He then resumes his narrative portraying the protests as reactionary.) The article also makes a point of mentioning the torching of the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria. Apparently the editors consider this instance of destruction of private property to be especially noteworthy, but they do not explain why.
The Militant states on its masthead that it is "published in the interests of working people." That statement is contradicted by its refusal to express solidarity with the protests in any way. This
refusal is a profound disservice to the paper's readers.
Instead the paper attempts to portray the protests as a reactionary mass mobilization, one which aids U.S. imperialism in its war drive and which favors censorship.
This is itself a crude caricature unsupported by the facts. It turns reality on its head and amounts to what Malcolm X called "turning the victim into the criminal."
Censorship, the working class, and the mass protests
To be sure, Marxists oppose any attempt by capitalist governments to stifle political, cultural, religious or other forms of expression. The working class can only advance toward taking power through the free exchange of ideas. History has shown that capitalist governments do not hesitate to direct their powers of censorship and "anti-hate" laws against the labor movement when it suits their purpose, particularly in times of social crisis. This why, for example, Marxists oppose the recent jailing of the right-wing author David Irving in Austria for denying the Holocaust in his1989 speeches. Such ideas must be vigorously opposed, but they cannot be defeated through repressive thought-control laws.
The most effective way to respond to rightist ideas and provocations is through debate and effective mass mobilization. Indeed, by repeatedly mobilizing in the streets in their many tens of thousands
from Tangier to Jakarta, Muslims and their supporters have struck a powerful blow against the racists and xenophobes.
In the semicolonial world many pro-imperialist governments sought to suppress the protests, often violently. But others recognized the depth of anger the caricatures triggered and sought to direct the
protests into channels that did not threaten their rule. Some political and religious leaders of the protests did indeed call for censorship. It is correct and necessary for socialists to oppose such demands. But this can and should be done in the context of supporting unambiguously the mass mobilizations against the caricatures.
NDP calls for protests
Even the reformist New Democratic Party has a better position than the SWP on this issue.
On February 14 Alexa McDonough issued a statement on behalf of the NDP entitled "NO TO ISLAMAPHOBIA [sic]. NO TO ANTI-SEMITISM. NO TO RACISM OF ANY KIND." Not surprisingly the statement leaves much to be desired. It attempts to place equal emphasis on freedom of expression and religion on the one hand and opposition to hatred and intolerance on the other. It calls on all sides to avoid excesses.
Yet for all that, the NDP states unequivocally that the cartoons are "abhorrent depictions" that should be protested and says that "(i)ntentionally denigrating Islam or any other faith is offensive,
destructive and understandably inflammatory."
Given this stand, it would certainly be logical to invite the NDP to speak at future protests and to expect to be able to draw NDP supporters to participate in it. This would provide aid and comfort
to the embattled Muslim community; they have been attempting to forge a broader front against racism, but they are opposed by powerful forces and their success has been limited to date.
The SWP, in contrast, opposes the protests from the sidelines.
2. REVISING MARXISM, ABSTAINING FROM STRUGGLES
Faced with imperialism's drive to terrorize, occupy and impose its political will on the Arab and Muslim world, workers and socialists of the oppressor nations have a special responsibility today to
defend and to give all possible aid to the struggles of the oppressed for their liberation.
This is not a new question for the labor movement. Since the beginning of the imperialist era over 100 years ago, some of the sharpest debates and divisions among socialists have been over this
very issue. In its early years the Third (Communist) International expressed the common interests of the workers in the imperialist nations and the masses struggling for their freedom from imperialism
in the strategic slogan, "Workers and Oppressed Nations of the World, Unite."
This strategic line formed part of the historic program of the SWP, which applied it for more than 50 years to many of the burning issues of the day including the fight against colonialism in Africa and
Asia, the fight against the Vietnam War, struggles in Palestine and Ireland, and solidarity with Cuba.
To cite one such example, in 1982 the military junta of Argentina, its hands dripping with the blood of tens of thousands of Argentine workers, students, and others that it had murdered in its "dirty
war," sought to prolong its highly unpopular rule. It invaded the Malvinas, a group of islands that historically belong to Argentina but were occupied by Britain. In the ensuing war the Socialist Workers Party unconditionally supported Argentina; the Cuban government did likewise and campaigned to rally Latin America to the cause of Argentina, even while it was led by the murderous generals.
Yet today when the targets of the chauvinist caricatures rise up to proclaim their revulsion and their human dignity, The Militant harshly denounces the protests and denies their role as part of the fight against imperialism and national oppression.
The concluding paragraph of the editorial must be read in that light. It states:
"The opposite is true. Muslims, like other believers, are divided into classes. Among the swelling ranks of working people--from the Middle East to North America, from Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Pacific--there is a growing convergence among those who recognize the need to safeguard and extend democratic rights in order to defend the life and limb of the working class and its allies, and to fight for a world without class exploitation, national oppression, or sex discrimination."
This passage fails to recognize the oppression that imperialism is today systematically directing against Arabs and Muslims on the basis of their race and religion. This oppression has not only a class but a national character. The chauvinist outcry against the Dubai Ports World deal clearly illustrates the fact that capitalists who are Muslim can also become targets of the mounting rightist propaganda of imperialist rulers. (Of course the burden of such oppression falls most heavily on the workers, farmers, and other toiling layers in the semicolonial world and among the immigrant populations in countries like the U.S. and Canada.)
The conclusion of the editorial is a shameful revision of revolutionary Marxism. It contradicts not only the historic program of the SWP but the teachings and practice of such revolutionaries as
Malcolm X, Fidel and Che, Lenin and Trotsky.
A further point should be noted. The Militant's refusal to call for protests against the racist caricatures mirrors its longstanding failure to promote protests against the war in Iraq. It condemns
virtually all acts of resistance by Iraqi fighters to the occupation of their country. The paper abstains from and criticizes virtually all of the major protest actions against the occupation organized in
the U.S., Canada, and other countries. It justifies this stand by citing its disagreements with the leaderships of these actions. The SWP appears to have lost the ability to join in united fronts and to
support actions that objectively weaken U.S. imperialism's stranglehold on Iraq, whatever may be the political positions of the forces leading such actions.
The Militant does not mention the considerable and growing opposition to the war among the U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. This omission is all the more striking in light of the SWP's record of leading work among GIs against the Vietnam war and orienting the antiwar movement in this direction. The paper is also silent on the large and growing opposition to the war among the U.S. population as a whole.
Similarly, The Militant has utterly failed to systematically defend Iraq's sovereignty and expose the colonialist oppression of the Iraqi people. The war and occupation have brought dreadful living
conditions, many Iraqi deaths, checkpoints, curfews, raids, jailings, torture and political interference, all imposed with imperial arrogance by the U.S. and its allies. This information is credibly documented elsewhere, but is kept out of the pages of The Militant.
In statements and editorials the party and the newspaper occasionally repeat their call for the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq. But The Militant gives no indication that the SWP is carrying out any practical activity to further that goal. It does not report on any antiwar campaigning by the party whether in the factories and mines, on the campuses, outside military bases, or elsewhere. Yet the party does not hesitate to sharply criticize those who protest or resist the occupation.
This course of conduct is also in complete contradiction to revolutionary Marxism and to the outstanding record in earlier years of the SWP and The Militant.
3. GROWING DIVERGENCE WITH CUBA'S LEADERSHIP
For several decades after the victory of the revolution in 1959 The Militant was the best source of information in English on events in Cuba and the views of the leaders of the revolution. Speeches by
Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raul Castro, and other leaders appeared in the newspaper in a timely way; many of these were then published in book form by Pathfinder Press.
This is no longer the case. The SWP and The Militant are still partisans of the Cuban revolution, but their approach and coverage has become highly selective and disconnected from many of the big
issues of the day. Articles on Cuba in the paper deal with almost exclusively with historical themes and with Cuba's humanitarian and internationalist aid to other countries. Publishing projects that
involve Pathfinder are also reported. While this is information is certainly of some interest, The Militant has chosen not to report on many key statements by Cuban leaders and on other developments related to Cuba that are vitally important to fighters around the world.
In fact, for Cuba 2005 has been a "wonderful, triumphant year", as John Riddell reports in Socialist Voice #67. Important advances have been registered both domestically and internationally, and the
forward motion is continuing. Fidel Castro and others have given many talks in recent months about changes and challenges inside Cuba, Cuba's view of the world situation and what the Cubans and others are doing to advance the international struggle. Much of this material is available, in English, on the Web.
So far The Militant has been silent about these important developments. Fighting workers and youth can no longer look to the paper to learn what the revolutionary leaders and people of Cuba are doing and saying. They must find this information elsewhere.
The reason for this silence is not hard to understand.
Mesmerized by its greatly exaggerated appraisal of the strength of U.S. imperialism, bewailing the leadership challenges faced by our class, and dismissive of the masses in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere who are rising up in new waves of struggle, the SWP's view of the world is very different from that of the Cubans. Moreover, our Cuban comrades are acting boldly on their assessment of the new objective possibilities, and are reaching out to build the most powerful anti-imperialist united front that they can. They are forging ever-stronger ties with Venezuela and have embraced the election of Evo Morales as president of Bolivia, offering concrete aid to the Andean country in every possible way.
In their support for struggles for justice around the world and for Latin American unity against U.S. imperialism, the communist leaders of the Cuban workers state are in fact applying the strategic line of "Workers and Oppressed Nations of the World, Unite" and adapting it to today's conditions.
Moreover, they explain what they are doing in no uncertain terms, to all who will listen. All of this means that as the objective situation improves for our class and the possibilities for struggle grow, the chasm between what the Cuban comrades are doing and saying, and what the SWP stands for, grows larger.
The SWP's rejection of the national liberation struggle, so clearly captured in their opposition to the international antiracist protests, is also a rejection of the communist course of the Cuban leadership.
***********
THE AUTHORS: Sandra Browne and Robert Johnson were members and subsequently organized supporters of the Communist League and its predecessor organizations for more than three and four decades respectively. Robert Johnson was a central leader of the organization through the mid 1960s to the early 1980s. The Communist League is the sister organization in Canada of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party.
Sept. 25-26, 2005--The Militant was once an outstanding tribune of the working class. Today it is a sectarian, workerist rag that continually provides a left cover for George Bush and the most reactionary wing of the US capitalist class. In the lead article of the Sept. 25 issue, Argiris Malapanis wrote the following:
"Despite complaints by Louisiana and New Orleans Democrats of underfunding, however, the state of Louisiana had received $2 billion over the last five years from the Bush administration for Army Corps of Engineers civil projects—more than any other state. Only a tiny portion of these funds were used to reinforce the levee system, however, which was not designed to withstand a storm with the force of Katrina."
This passage could have been lifted directly from a Republican or Bill O'Reilly playbook designed to deflect blame from Bush by putting it on the Democrats. Now the Militant will say it's only trying to forge working class independence and liberate workers from the clutches of the lesser-evil Democrats, but the World Socialist Web Site has consistenly shown it is possible to target the entire capitalist political establishment--federal, state and local--as well as the bipartisan disaster that is this bourgeois government--without helping the Republicans' diversionary and scapegoating schemes.
As usual, the Militant leaves its readers with a woefully superficial analysis bereft of a multitude of facts that lets Bush off the hook. Last year the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to examine how New Orleans could be protected from a killer hurricane, but Bush ordered the study nixed. In 2001, FEMA reported that the destruction of New Orleans by a Katrina-type hurricane loomed as one of the three most likely disasters facing the US, along with a terrorist attack on New York City and a San Francisco earthquake. In response federal funding for flood control was diverted to the Iraq war. And in 2004, Bush slashed spending to hold back the flooding of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Further, Bush's decision to unleash developers on the wetlands no doubt increased Katrina's storm surge level.
Similarly, the Militant's analysis of the maneuvering and infighting between Louisiana Governor Blanco and Bush over the federalization of the National Guard was superficial and, with the exception of the last sentence, could have been written by the White House or any two-bit bourgeois news service:
"Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco has also accused the Bush administration of not moving fast enough to send troops to the state in Katrina’s wake. The White House initially relied on National Guard troops sent to the region, now numbering 46,000, which are under the jurisdiction of state governors. According to the September 9 Washington Post, Blanco resisted a Bush administration effort to exert federal control over all local police and state National Guard units.
"The Bush administration itself and its backers are claiming that it could not deploy federal troops rapidly into a situation where they would have to enforce 'law and order' against 'looters' because the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids use of the military for domestic policing. The Gulf Coast disaster is now being used by both Democrats and Republicans to argue for greater use of troops within the United States."
The twin parties of war, racism and repression are not only arguing for greater use of troops within the US, they're doing it, and the WSWS does a better job than the Militant explaining the dynamics behind the rulers' expanded deployment of US troops in such articles as "New Orleans becomes a war zone: A dress rehearsal for martial law?"
And unlike the WSWS, the Militant says nothing about the undeniable evidence that Washington prevented aid from reaching New Orleans until it had amassed a large enough military force to occupy the city.
A similar dynamic is still unfolding on the pages of the Militant regarding the occupation of Iraq. The Militant continues to give credence to Washington's position by reducing the Iraqi Resistance to "Baathists" and by parrotting the Pentagon's line about "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This simplistic approach explains nothing and only bolsters Washington's propaganda campaign. While the Resistance contains remnants of Hussein's Baathists, it also includes nationalists and a myriad of Islamic fundamentalist groups. Most of the Resistance attacks are directed against the foreign occupiers and those Iraqis collaborating with them. The Militant has never told its readers about the credible reports that Zarqawi was killed in Northern Iraq several years ago. The Militant passes along the Pentagon's line that Sunni extremists and Baathists are behind the terrorist attacks on Shiites. However, the recent events in Basra have only strengthended the widespread perception in Iraq and elsewhere that "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is actually a creation of US and British intelligence.
The Militant's simplistic, sweeping use of "Baathists" is also misleading because, as the WSWS has reported, "US officials in Iraq are reconstituting elements of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's secret police, the Mukhabarat, and integrating them into the US occupation authority."
It is a slander to Iraqi workers under the gun of US imperialist firepower for the Militant to falsely characterize the Resistance as "Baathists" while echoing Washington's line that these Sunnis are the ones slaughtering Shiites in terrorist operations. We don't know for sure who is behind these heinous acts. Some may be the work of British, American or Israeli provocateurs, as Basra's recent events suggest. Others no doubt are committed by Islamic extremists from "Al Qaeda in Iraq" or otherwise. But to use"Baathists" and Al Qaeda in Iraq interchangeably in assigning blame for the slaughter of Shiites is both simplistic and slanderous to Sunni workers and all Iraqis.
As a statement by the five leading Sunni-based guerrilla organizations fighting the occupiers stated:
"The call for murdering all Shiites is a fire that would burn all Iraqis—Sunni and Shiite... The main objective is liberating Iraq from the occupiers and establishing a national free regime... The resistance does not target any Iraqi, regardless of their sectarian or racial loyalties, unless they are connected with the occupier”.
Readers may wonder why COSMOS LEFT still encourages working people to read the Militant given its wretched line on Katrina and Iraq. The answer is that just as Marxists always defended the nationalized property relations and planned economies of the Soviet Union and the other deformed workers states despite the counterrevolutionary bureacratic leaderships, so COSMOS LEFT urges workers to glean what remains of the revolutionary Marxist program in the Socialist Workers Party, despite the political degeneration of the present party leadership.
Now if the Socialist Workers Party would only come to their senses and reverse the SWP's junking of Trotsky's "Permanent Revolution" and its abandonment of a cardinal tenet of Leninism--the unconditional defense of semi-colonial nations attacked by imperialism, which the Militant has done in opposing Iraqi resistance to the imperialist occupation, then the SWP can find itself again as a revolutionary workers party.
"Social patriotism" is the term Marxists have employed since World War I to describe the phenomenon whereby socialists give political support to "their" bourgeois governments in wartime, abandoning fundamental communist principles of proletarian internationalism and revolutionary defeatism. Communists call for the political AND military defeat of their respective bourgeois governments in order to strengthen working people in our fight for socialism.
The Militant's "Oppose faulty gear for GIs" was a textbook case of social patriotism; it is still another illustration of what the World Socialist Web Site described as the SWP's "cowardly adaptation to the most reactionary right wing forces." It should be no surprise that this adaptation led to the SWP's lapse into social patriotism during the current Iraq war. This page has traced the political degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party to the decision by National Secretary Jack Barnes to break with Leon Trotsky and his theory of Permanent Revolution, which had been the backbone of the international Marxist movement for decades.
As the Militant's July 18th retraction points out, the call to "oppose faulty vests for GIs"can only be interpreted as meaning "our GIs." But it's not our military. It's not the military of the working class. It's their military--the military of the capitalists, the tiny clique of exploiters who get rich off our labor. Perhaps if the Militant hadn't junked Trotsky, its editors would have remembered what he included in the founding programmatic document of the Fourth International: "Not one man and not one penny for the bourgeois government!"("The Transitional Program: The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International", 1938).
It was not wrong for the Militant to cover the struggle by workers at Point Blank Blank Armor to unionize and fight for higher wages and better safety on the job. Indeed, Trotsky's Transitional Program stated that "[w]ar is a gigantic commercial enterprise, especially for the war industry. The '60 Families' are therefore first-line patriots and the chief provocateurs of war. Workers control of war industries is the first step in the struggle against the 'manufacturers' of war."
It is absolutely correct for revolutionary socialists to condemn war profiteering and remind workers that our lives are expendable to the bosses and their military officer caste. Where the Militant went wrong, which even its editors eventually realized, was joining the call for "better quality" military equipment. This is where it veered into social patriotism, because measures that strengthen the army of the exploiting rich weaken working people from Detroit to Baghdad.
But one may ask: Aren't the armed forces composed of predominantly working people whom communists wish to win over to the revolutionary workers movement? Isn't it a prerequisite for any successful revolution to win over the proletarian ranks of the army, navy, marines and air force?
Our answer is an unequivocal yes. And the way to win over the ranks of the army is to conduct political agitation and disseminate revolutionary politics and Marxist ideas among soldiers and sailors, as the Socialist Workers Party did during the Vietnam War. This includes fighting for the idea of a "citizen-soldier,"whereby the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantees are extended to soldiers, something the imperialist military command denies them.
We fight for the democratic right of soldiers to discuss and debate the true reasons they're being asked to kill and die in Iraq and elsewhere. In so doing, we introduce rank and file soldiers to the demands affecting them laid out in The Transitional Program:
"Complete abolition of secret diplomacy; all treaties and agreements to be made accessible to workers and farmers [add to that all "national security" classified files related to 9/11 and terrorism]; Military training and arming of workers and farmers under direct control of workers' and farmers' committees; Creation of military schools for the training of commanders among the toilers, chosen by workers organizations; Substitution for the standing army of a people's militia, indissolubly linked up with factories, mines, farms, etc."
The fact that the SWP publicly reversed itself and admitted it had succombed to social patriotism is a hopeful sign. Perhaps the party's rank and file can yet reverse the SWP's decline and restore its revolutionary character.--July 15-16, 2005
SWP Echoes Bill O'Reilly in Slamming Moore, Defending Bush
"Cowardly adaptation to the most reactionary, right-wing forces."--World Socialist Web Site on the rightward trajectory of the Socialist Workers Party.
July/August 2004--In still another indication of the political degeneration and rightist trajectory of the Socialist Workers Party, Militant reporter Martin Koppel reviewed Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" in language that could have been written for Fox News Channel's leading fascist demagogue, Bill O'Reilly:
"Given the Kerry campaign’s lack of appeal, many liberal Democrats are campaigning against Bush more than for Kerry, and their 'Dump Bush' efforts are getting more high-pitched. An example of this is the Michael Moore 'documentary' film Fahrenheit 9/11. Asked by USA Today whether his anti-Bush movie is aimed at galvanizing the 'choir' of faithful Democrats, Moore said, 'The choir needs a wake-up call. A large part of the choir isn’t energized by John Kerry and is not voting.'
"To try to energize the pro-Kerry troops, Moore’s film pushes conspiracy theories about Bush 'stealing' the 2000 elections and about a nefarious Bush-Osama bin Laden connection. He promotes the Democrats’ argument that Bush is incompetent to deal with 'terrorism' and resorts to low-level personalized attacks including the fallacy that Bush is 'stupid.' This tone, common to other liberals and radicals, has been part of the coarsening of discourse in bourgeois politics."(July 27th Militant: "Nader campaign wanes, Kerry lacks appeal")
What a shameful display of unprincipled journalism and dishonest politics! While it's true that Moore is still entangled in the swamp of lesser evilism and its "Anybody but Bush" variation, it is disingenuous and simplistic to suggest that Moore made "Fahrenheit" to "Dump Bush." As David Walsh said in his June 30 World Socialist Web Site review of the film, "This is not a film that provides aid and comfort to the leadership of the Democratic Party. In searchingly examining the history of the past four years, Moore reveals the Democrats as largely complicit in a bipartisan strategy, indeed a ruling elite consensus, aimed at establishing US global hegemony."
This analysis is obviously too sophisticated for Barnes and his Kool-Aid followers who still try to pass for the cadre of a revolutionary workers party.
AUGUST 21, 2004:
"Fahrenheit" wasn't made to "try to energize the pro-Kerry troops" or to push "conspiracy theories" about Bush stealing the 2000 election and a "nefarious Bush-Osama bin Laden connection." It was made to get people to think. To question. To consider the facts that the Militant and Bush supporters like Bill O"Reilly try to keep from US workers. More specifically, Fahrenheit was made for the very reasons that Walsh opined had been accomplished by the film's release--giving "great numbers of people in the US the opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to the war in Iraq, the policies of the Bush administration and their general disgust with the political and media establishment."
As for Koppel's claim that Fahrenheit "pushes conspiracy theories about Bush 'stealing' the 2000 election"--yes readers, it's true, the Socialist Workers Party continues to proclaim with a straight face that Bush did not steal, or even attempt to steal, the 2000 election in Florida. In fact, the SWP will tell you it was GORE who tried to steal the election. Yeah, Gore made a half-hearted and feeble atempt to get over by initially asking for a recount in Democratic counties. But as anyone with a brain will tell you, Bush DID steal the election with the help of the Supreme Court, the Florida legislature, the Jeb Bush/Kathryn Harris regime, the Republican thugs who prevented the Miami/Dade recount, and much more that you can read about in "Socialists and the 2000 Elections" further down this page.
Koppel expanded his dishonest attack on Fahrenheit in an Aug. 31 film review, "'Fahrenheit 9/11': a pro-imperialist screed aimed at electing Kerry." What's striking about Koppel's rant is that its the most space the Militant has devoted to such meaty issues as the 2000 election, Sept. 11, and the Bush/bin Laden relationship over the last four years! Like Bill O'Reilly, the Militant has censored reams of material about these topics for apparently the same reason O'Reilly did: they're both in business to cover up for George Bush. It's all part of the "cowardly adaptation from the most reactionary, right wing forces."
You expect this from a fascist demagogue like O'Reilly. You don't expect it from a revolutionary workers party.
If nothing else, Moore should be credited with forcing the SWP to talk about Sept. 11, bin Laden, Bush and the 2000 election--issues that have been dutifully avoided by the Militant for almost four years.
Koppel's Aug. 31 film review expounded on the SWP's bizarre view that Bush did not steal the 2000 election:
"To bolster the case for replacing Bush with a Democrat, Moore resorts to various conspiracy theories, that is to the view that certain major events in U.S. politics were determined not by the normal functioning of bourgeois politics but by secret plots by a few individuals or groups. One is the fraudulent argument that Bush 'stole' the elections."
That Bush stole the 2000 election is not a conspiracy theory. It is a well-documented fact that we all watched unfold before our eyes. A fact that is recognized by the entire world except the SWP, Bill O'Reilly, and Republican hacks.
The problem with the SWP's analysis is that "certain major events"--like the 2000 election and Sept. 11--were NOT determined by the "normal functioning of bourgeois politics." Both reflected an acceleration of the political crisis afflicting US--and world--capitalism. The 2000 election showed that bourgeois democracy's crisis is so acute it could not even count the votes and determine a winner. It is so acute that Supreme Court Justice Scalia was forced to admit that the American people do not have the constitutional right to vote for president. It's not normal when a Supreme Court judge has to concede that. In the words of the World Socialist Web Site, "It [bourgeois democracy) has proved impossible to achieve a genuinely democratic adjudication of the post-election conflicts with the framework of the existing constitutional structures" ("Lessons from history: the 2000 elections and the new 'irrepressible'conflict"--Dec. 11, 2000).
It is not "normal functioning of bourgeois politics" when a faction of the bourgeoisie moves to junk the legalities of capitalist democracy and employ extra-constitutional, thuggish methods to suppress a recount, sabotage votes, and rig ballots.
Sept. 11 was another "major event in US politics" that was not determined by the "normal functioning of bourgeois politics." Whether the Sept. 11 attacks were the result of US governmental complicity or criminal negligence, they were exploited by Washington to carry out long-planned wars to seize control of Central Asian and Middle East oil and natural gas supplies and to bolster US hegemony worldwide. The US rulers allowed the attacks to occur or they actively sponsored them in order to win public support for these long-planned wars. Either scenario is not an illustration of the "normal functioning of bourgeois politics."
In his Aug. 31 Fahrenheit review, Koppel states: "The film makes the absurd claim that decisive factors in the outcome were that 1) on election night, Bush's cousin John Ellis was in charge of the decision desk at Fox News, the first network that called Florida for Bush, and 2) his brother Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida."
AUGUST 22, 2004:
Here Koppel is employing the same methodology used by Bill O'Reilly--assuming his audience relies solely on him as a resource and has not stumbled upon the volumes of documentation proving Bush in fact stole the election. Readers should compare Koppel's superficial treatment and glib dismissal of the role Ellis played on election night with the Kate Randall's World Socialist Web Site article, "How Bush's man helped shape the outcome of the US election" (Nov. 17, 2000).
Randall pointed out that FOX's projection of a Bush win in Florida at a time when his lead was plummeting played a key role in stampeding the other networks to claim Bush had won, which provided the framework that shaped the entire post election fight--that Bush won Florida and Gore was a sore loser. Randall wrote:
"Did Ellis, fearing that the networks might move Florida back into the Gore column, decide to make a preemptive strike in the hope of stampeding the other networks and conning Gore into making a premature concession? Did the Bush campaign have a hand in Ellis's call?
"The strange and unexplained coincidence of a disappearing margin for Bush and Fox's unilateral call, combined with the secret communications between Ellis and the Bush camp, provide sufficient grounds for an investigation into the possibility of an illegal conspiracy to steal the election."
Ooh, but according to the SWP, conspiracies don't happen in bourgeois politics. They're a no-no in the mind of SWP leader Jack Barnes. They are no conspiracies, only the "normal functioning of bourgeois politics." Except it is false--and unMarxist--to deny the existence of conspiracies in bourgeois politics. To the contrary, all sorts of conspiratorial intrigues have occurred throughout the history of class society. What separates conspiracists from Marxists is that the former elevate conspiracies above the laws of the class struggle, while Marxists explain that conspiracies occur within the class struggle, within the parameters of historical materialism, and can never be the prime movers of history. What Marxists DON'T do is ignorantly claim that conspiracies never occur and that the 2000 election and Sept. 11 resulted from the normal functioning of bourgeois politics.
If you tell that to workers, they'll laugh in your face. Like they laugh when they hear the SWP say Gore tried to steal the election, not Bush.
In Defense of Cuba
COSMOS LEFT has been hard on the Militant and Socialist Workers Party for their coverage and line on the 2000 election, Bush, September 11, the global antiwar movement, and Iraq, while being laudatory in general toward the Socialist Equality Party and its Web site, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). Within this framework, this site has made quite clear that we strongly disagree with the WSWS on a number of vital issues in the working class movement, above all its stand on the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro's leadership.
The test the WSWS has failed is the crucible for every political tendency that claims to be revolutionary, that is, revolutionaries must recognize a revolution! If one cannot recognize a communist leadership and a workers state, then you're not much of a communist or a revolutionary. It's one thing to crank out well written essays from an editorial office; it's another to be in the trenches with fellow proletarian revolutionists, resolutely and unflinchingly defending them against imperialist aggression.
The biggest mistake made by Vann does not show up until page 7 of the 9-page article; this is not by accident. Vann is dead wrong on the class character and social base of the Cuban Revolution, no small error for a Marxist tendency. Vann states:
"The Cuban revolution did not bring about socialism or a workers state on the island. Political power fell into the hands of a guerrilla army led by Castro and based in the Cuban nationalist petty bourgeoisie. While its initial progam was of a democratic and national reformist character, the Castroite movement was pushed to take more sweeping measures by both the demands of the Cuban masses and the intransigent US opposition to any amelioration of social conditions at the expense of private profit and US corporate interests."
It's true that the Revolution's leaders were radical democrats before they were revolutionary Marxists, and that the Cuban masses had a profound influence on the emerging revolutionary leadership. It's also true that the reason US imperialists were so intransigently opposed to any amelioration of social conditions at the expense of corporate profits is they correctly recognized that they were facing a serious, maturing, revolutionary leadership who were successfully organizing the Cuban masses to stand up to the Yankees.
The revolutionary government led by Fidel expropriated and confiscated the capitalist and landlord classes in Cuba. They also expropriated the imperialist holdings and nationalized major industries like sugar and oil. Further, the Revolution carried out a revolutionary land reform program that gave land to peasants and formed an alliance between the urban workers and rural peasants. The Cuban capitalists left Cuba for Miami and Hudson County, New Jersey. The Cuban government formed a workers state in Cuba, complete with a planned economy and a state monopoly of foreign trade.
The imperialists responded to these developments with an intense campaign of diplomatic hostility, military aggression, economic blockades, biological warfare and political subversion. They were horrified at the example being set by the Cuban working class when they overturn capitalism and run society in their own interests. The very actions of US imperialists themselves prove that they didn't believe Castro's regime constituted a bourgeois social character. They knew they had a communist leadership 90 miles from US shores, and that has not sat well with them for 44 years.
The evolution of the Cuban workers and farmers government and its communist leadership in 1959-60 is far more complex than Vann's simplistic formulation that "Political power fell into the hands of a guerrilla army led by Castro and based in the Cuban nationalist petty bourgeoisie." In reality, the revolutionary government was formed through the fusion of Fidel's July 26th Movement, the Revolutionary Student Directorate, and the Cuban Communist Party. The new revolutionary government enjoyed widespread support from the urban masses in Havana because they had backed strikes and demonstrations by these workers against the Batista dictatorship.
This was no Mao-style peasant guerrilla army encircling the cities and hostile to the urban workers. From the beginning the Cuban revolutionary leadership has rooted itself in the Cuban working class, organizing and mobilizing the masses against the Cuban propertied classes and then US imperialism. We have seen the dialectical relationship between the masses and a leadership unfold before our eyes for 44 years. The strength of the Cuban leadership is that it has matured and evolved from a radical petty bourgeois nationalism to a revolutionary proletarian internationalism.
They have not been perfect. They have made mistakes along the way. It's true that, unlike the Bolsheviks, the Castro leadership did not start out as conscious communists. But the point of departure of the Socialist Equality Party seems to be that since the Cuban Communists were not Trotskyists building a Trotskyist party, then a revolution could not have happened, and a workers state has never existed. This is putting sectarian dogma ahead of the interests of the international working class. A socialist revolution occurred in Cuba. It is the duty of communists to recognize that fact and defend the revolution against imperialism. It's the duty of communists to explain the truth about the revolution to workers in your own country.
Vann reduces the revolutionary government's overturning of capitalism in Cuba to "a series of state nationalizations. . .together with a turn to the Soviet Union for aid." He leaves out the central role played by the mobilization of the Cuban working class in expropriating the bourgeoisie. And there was nothing intrinsically wrong in receiving internationalist aid from the strongest workers state when the most powerful imperialist nation was trying to strangle the Revolution.
"The alliance between the Castro regime and the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy combined with the emulation of Castroite guerrillaism by left-wing forces in Latin America contributed to the disorientation of the workers movement throughout the continent and a series of catastrophic defeats."
One thing we've learned over the years is that the "alliance" between Havana and Moscow was not as rock-solid and ideologically based as the imperialists and the SEP would have us believe. From the October Crisis to the Horn of Africa to Angola, Cuba's foreign policy was distinctly independent of Moscow's. For years imperialism has been falsely describing Fidel as Moscow's puppet. Communist organizations should not be echoing this baseless charge, particularly after the factual record is so clear on the matter.
Acknowledging that Fidel was not a puppet of the Soviets does not mean there was not a price to pay for Soviet aid. There were concessions to Moscow, and an overreliance on the Soviet model of bureaucratic planning. But Vann ignores the measures employed by Fidel against bureaucratism as it was represented by Cuban Stalinist Anibal Escalante. And Vann leaves out Che's criticism of the Soviet and East European model and its overreliance on the market and material incentives, which can be found in Pathfinder's"Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism." Fidel did not impose "Castroite guerrillaism" on anyone. The responsibility for the failure of the Bolivian and other Latin American revolutions lies with the counterrevolutionary influence of Moscow's Stalinists, not with Havana. As the revolution deepened and became more proletarianized in Cuba the foreign policy of its leadership became more revolutionary, internationalist and anti-imperialist.
The internationalism of Cuba's working class played a decisive role in bringing down apartheid in southern Africa. The defeat of the apartheid South African army in Angola by Cuban internationalist fighters contributed substantially to the abolition of apartheid in South Africa. Cuba offered internationalist aid to Vietnam when it was under the gun from Washington. Cuba did everything it could to support the revolutions in Grenada, Nicaragua and El Salvador, given the relationship of forces existing in the world. It never dictated or imposed its strategies on other peoples.
Cuba has consistently opposed US imperialist aggression, from Grenada to Panama to the gulf war to Afghanistan to Iraq. It has spoken for the oppressed and exploited everywhere and been more than a thorn in the side of the enemy of humanity--US imperialism. The Cuban Revolution has refused to surrender despite enormous military, economic and political pressure from the world's most powerful imperialist colossus.
The claim that Fidel is a bourgeois nationalist like Nasser and not a communist is more than indefensible--it's laughable. One is incapable of explaining the history of US/Cuba relations since 1959 on the basis that Havana has not been a workers state with a communist leadership. And Vann's 9-page essay offers no evidence to support his assertion that the social character of the Cuban government is bourgeois nationalist. He only states it is in three separate sentences.
It is no accident that Vann can only devote three declaratory sentences out of nine pages to back his claim that Cuba is not communist. Because no such evidence exists. Indeed, most of Vann's article is forced to focus on the history of Washington's threats, provocations, and aggression against the Cuban Revolution, a fact that undermines Vann's absurd thesis that Fidel is a bourgeois nationalist who is no more of a threat to US imperialism than Nasser was.
Vann's essay insults the Cuban toilers and their revolution from the outset by equating "Castroite repression" with US provocations in the lead-in headline and by implying that the "repressive crackdown" by Fidel forced Bush into "considering drastic new measures against Cuba." Vann is also wrong to equate the role played by Washington in provoking hijackings and sabotaging immigration agreements with Cuba's alleged attempt to use emigration [the Mariel 1980 boatlift and the "rafters" in the mid-90s] as a "means of venting social pressures at home and exerting political pressure on Washington."
Does the WSWS deny Cuba the right to exert political pressure on Washington to defend itself? Is the WSWS saying Cuba doesn't have the right to turn the tables on Washington when it tries to use emigration as a weapon against the Revolution? Vann mentions the Mariel boatlift, but he omits the US-instigated provocation at the Peruvian embassy which preceded it. Further, Fidel's policy of not stopping Cubans who want to leave Cuba for the Yankee Paradise is consistent with his view that socialism can only be built by those who want socialism voluntarily, who feel it in their bones and don't have to be coerced.
The Cuban workers and peasants made a revolution. US imperialism has tried to drown that revolution in blood with counterrevolution. Cuba has a moral and political right to defend itself against Washington's ongoing campaign to overthrow the Revolution. Given this reality, Fidel's "within the Revolution--everything is permitted; outside the Revolution--nothing" makes complete sense.
Cuba is not going to allow Washington to openly organize counterrevolutionary political opposition. The fact that Cuban undercover agents exposed the "dissidents'" connections to Washington should be applauded by revolutionaries, not criticized. As Vann says, ". . .the axis of the so-called dissident movement has been the US State Department, the CIA and the US Interests Section in Havana."
The Cuban people are not served by socialists in their editorial offices judging Cuba's revolutionary leadership with the same moral yardstick used to gauge Washington's conduct. "Socialists oppose capital punishment in the United States and must reject its use in Cuba as well. Summary one-day trials that result either in executions or sentences of up to 28 years in prison are a mockery of fundamental democratic rights, no matter who the defendant is or what government is responsible for the prosecution."
But it DOES matter what government is responsible for the prosecution! The death penalty in the hands of a capitalist regime is used as a weapon of terror against the working class. The death penalty in the hands of a revolutionary government when the life and death of the revolution is at stake is quite another matter. The Bolsheviks used the death penalty during the Civil War. Trotsky ordered deserters to be shot. Does the Socialist Equality Party oppose the Bolsheviks' "repressive crackdown" against the rebellious Krondstadt sailors in 1921? [see "On Kronstadt and Trotsky: A Reply to Justin Raimondo," below]
The Socialist Equality Party talks about the death penalty in the abstract, which is impossible in a class divided world. The death penalty in the hands of a workers government is a qualitatively different than it is in the hands of an imperialist power. Of course, part of the problem is that the SEP denies that Cuba is a revolutionary workers government, which is what prevents it from having the correct line on the death penalty.
Even a revolutionary democrat like Abraham Lincoln employed "draconian acts of repression," including suspension of habeas corpus, when the Union's existence was threatened by the Confederate slavocracy.
With this said, the case can certainly be made that the Ochoa executions in 1989 and the recent ferry hijacking executions were unjustified. If anything, the latter execution have more validity, given the current context. Lives WERE threatened, and will be again in any future ferry hijackings, and given Washington's history of sponsoring terrorist attacks and military invasions against Cuba, the ferry hijackings are a counterrevolutionary crime.
In a particularly bizarre formulation, Vann states "The decision to carry out the executions and send 75 people to prison was undoubtedly just as politically calculated as the US provocations." Again the misplaced political equivalency placed on a revolutionary workers government and US imperialism. [Even allowing for the SEP's erroneous categorization of Havana as a bourgeois nationalist regime, Lenin taught communists to block with bourgeois nationalist regimes in conflict with imperialism.]
Obviously, the executions and prison terms were politically calculated. Does the SEP deny Havana the right to make political decisions when it's under the gun of US imperialism? Just as obviously, the harsh measures were intended to send a message to Washington and their counterrevolutionary allies in Cuba: don't fuck with the Cuban Revolution. Before the ferry hijackings escalated, Havana decided to nip them in the bud to prevent a repetition of the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue airspace provocations, which Vann was curiously silent about in his essay.
No doubt Vann would characterize Cuba's shooting down of those Brothers to the Rescue airplanes as a repressive, draconian measure. But to the many oppressed and exploited in the world, Cuba's bold act of self-defense was an act of inspiration and a blow against the Empire.
In this time of heightened peril, communists should be unconditionally defending the Cuban Revolution against imperialist attacks, not writing sectarian tracts that falsely equate alleged "Castroite repression" with US provocations and aggression.--April 28, 2003
SWP Attacks Antiwar Demonstrators, Aids Bush
December 2003/December 2004--Two articles in the December 8 Militant confirm the rapidly accelerating decline and political degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party. In Tony Hunt's "Bush visit to UK bolsters imperialist 'war on terror' " and "What's the 'war on terrorism,' resistance in Iraq?" by Argiris Malapanis and Sam Manuel, the SWP continues its contemptible practice of praising Bush while attacking antiwar demonstrators and opposing Iraqi resistance to Washington's occupation.
Hunt's article continues the Militant's general approach to the Bush administration--fawning over Bush's political and military successes instead of exposing his lies in front of the working class. The SWP's newspaper consistently stands in awe of Bush's victories while overstating them, its editorial proclamations sounding as if they could have been penned by the White House or Defense Department.
Hunt writes that Bush's state visit to London was a big success that strengthened American and British imperialism. Further, Hunt claims, this success was "only reinforced by the anti-American, pro-British tone" of the massive antiwar demonstrations that were organized by the Stop the War Coalition under the slogan, "Stop Bush."
Hunt opines that the Coalition and other forces organizing the antiwar protests were "[f]ocusing their fire on the U.S. government and portraying Blair as a mere 'puppet' of Washington . . . they buttressed the nationalist framework of the British rulers' efforts to assert their own imperialist interests in the world."
The first half of the above-quoted formulation is a distortion of the Stop the War Coalition's position, and the second half is an unsubstantiated opinion.
Hunt's claim that the Nov. 21 London protests were "anti-American" and "pro-British" is a lie. This is a quote from the Stop the War Coalition's Nov. 20 solidarity statement to sister demonstrations in the US: "We, the Stop the War Coalition in London, England, the Mobilization to stop the FTAA in Miami (U.S.) and the School of the Americas Watch Movement in Columbus, Georgia (U.S.), are mobilizing tens of thousands of people this week in the United Kingdom and the United States to HOLD BOTH OUR GOVERNMENTS ACCOUNTABLE. Our struggles are interconnected and we organize in solidarity with each other. We recognize OUR GOVERNMENTS' FOREIGN POLICIES ARE NOT BRINGING SECURITY TO THE WORLD any more than their economic policies are bringing prosperity." [emphasis added]
The London demonstrators were not "anti-American"--they were anti-Bush and anti-imperialist. The demonstrations did not "aid British rulers"--they inflicted substantial political damage to Blair. Read John Pilger excellent Dec. 2 Znet article (www.zmag.org), "Bush and Blair Are In Trouble."
This point is corroborated in a WSWS Nov. 20 article by Chris Marsden, "Bush's London visit highlights mass opposition to US and British governments," which he writes, "Blair has, if anything, been politically damaged by the visit. Significantly, he chose to defend it to an audience of top-ranking executives at the Confederation of British Industry conference on November 17, and even there his remarks had a defensive ring."
COSMOS LEFT does not agree with the Stop the War Coalition organizers on every issue, and fully recognizes that not all the demonstrators have reached revolutionary conclusions and many still harbor reformist and nationalist illusions. But that in no way negates the fact that hundreds of thousands mobilized in a demonstration against the invasion and occupation of Iraq that humiliated Bush, further damaged Blair, and showed that mass opposition to imperialist wars exists in the UK.
Whatever their flaws, London's Nov. 21 demonstrators are a lot smarter than the SWP about world politics. Haley, a voice-over artist interviewed by the WSWS in its "Britain: Massive turnout at demonstration against Bush and Iraq war" (Nov. 21), had this to say: "Neither Bush nor Blair represents their country. Bush was elected in a phony election. He was a friend of the bin Laden family for years, and the whole terrorism thing is a cover-up for a money-led drive for world domination."
Those three sentences by a voice-over artist from Kent, England, explain more about world politics than the last three years of Militant issues. The SWP remained absolutely silent as Bush stole the 2000 election, breaking that silence only to enlighten its readers that it was Gore who tried to steal the election. Similarly, the SWP has barely mentioned September 11, let alone Bush's long-time financial ties to the bin Ladens and the CIA's role in creating Al Qaeda. Currently, to the extent the Militant talks about the war on terrorism, Al Qaeda, or anything related to Sept. 11, the paper miseducates workers about the connections between US and Israel intelligence and "terrorist" groups like Al Qaeda, and does little more than give credence to Washington's phony war on terrorism. More on this shortly.
Completely ignoring the overwhelmingly proletarian composition of the London demonstrators, Hunt instead chose to focus on one protester quoted in the right-wing Daily Telegraph--John Hayes, "a millionaire with more than 100 employees--a pitiful attempt to besmirch the London demonstrators by tainting them with a capitalist class character. This is workerism at its crudest.
In analyzing Bush's Nov. 19 London speech that defended the "three pillars" of US foreign policy, Hunt does little but echo Bush's propaganda and give left cover to US imperialism: "Bush indicated that Washington's goal is not to establish dictatorships but to press for certain benchmarks of bourgeois democracy in a way that will advance the U.S. rulers' dominance in the Mideast politically, not just militarily. These include elections, religious freedom, freedom of the press, and 'new protections for women.'"
Instead of exposing and dissecting the lies and hypocrisy oozing from Bush's fraudulent speech, Hunt stands in awe of Bush's supposed tactical wizardry, passing along as fact Bush's fallacious arguments. The Militant gives no evidence substantiating its absurd assertion that Bush is pushing for bourgeois democracy in the Middle East. Where? Iraq? The country where Washington issues publishing guidelines about what can and cannot be published?
Women's rights? Where? Afghanistan? Iraq? The West Bank?
Elections? Excuse me, Bush? Compare Hunt's examination of Bush and bourgeois democracy with Patrick Martin's treatment in "Bush's London speech: A defense of aggression and lawlessness" (Nov. 20, 2003, www.wsws.org):
"The basic premise--that Bush is a tribune of global democracy--overlooks the fact that he is an unelected president, selected not by American voters, but by the far-right majority on the Supreme Court, which intervened in the 2000 election to halt vote-counting in Florida and place Bush in the White House."
Of course, the Militant is unable to acknowledge this truism, because the SWP has covered for Bush's theft of the 2000 election by arguing that it was Gore who tried to steal the election. What Bush did--manipulation and suppression of the votes on an unprecedented scale--no big deal to the SWP.
When a revolutionary workers party makes a mistake of this magnitude, it will pay a high price politically, because the gravity of the error is illuminated over time, particularly when the methods used by Bush to seize power are directly relevant to the methods his gang used in waging war on Iraq and Afghanistan. The SWP--and the working class--are paying the price for the Barnes' leadership serious errors.
While Hunt covers up for Bush with fawning praise, Martin tells the truth: "In a potted review of the 20th century, Bush presented the United States as the consistent protagonist for democracy, skipping over nearly a century of aggressive military intervention in Latin America to prop up pro-American dictatorships, as well as the Cold War alliances with such tyrants as the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in the Congo and military rulers in many other countries."
THAT'S educating the working class about US imperialism.
While Hunt writes "Clearly referring to Saudi Arabia and other countries, he [Bush] added, 'We will expect a higher standard from our friends in the region," Martin tells it like it is: "Even more bizarre was Bush's denunciation of the region's corrupt elites, since US policy--and the Bush family's own personal financial interests--have long been intimately bound up with those elites, above all the Saudi princes."
THAT's how you educate working people--by exposing and dissecting the ruling class liars.
Martin continues: "He [Bush] repeated one of the standard nostrums of US foreign policy, that 'democratic governments do not shelter terrorist camps or attack their peaceful neighbors.' This commonplace is never challenged by the ignorant and servile US media, but it is flagrantly untrue."
Unlike Martin, Hunt ignores the century-long track record of US foreign policy refuting this Bush lie that saw the US invade or attack "Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Grenada and Panama--to speak only of neighbors--as well as waging war in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq, and sponsoring dozens of military coups and guerrilla insurgencies (including the Afghan mujaheddin from which the Al-Qaeda terrorists emerged)."
Hunt managed one breakthrough in his thoroughly unreadable piece--he actually mentioned "Al-Qaeda" in reference to the two Istanbul bombings on the second day of Bush's visit: "A statement purporting to come from a unit of Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks." Run a search on the Militant Web site for Al Qaeda and September 11. Don't be overwhelmed by the coverage. Incredibly, the first and one of the only times the Militant has mentioned Osama bin Laden was when it printed one of the published bin Laden speeches, without providing a word of historical context about bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the CIA.
After reading Argiris Malapanis and Sam Manuel's "What's the 'war on terrorism,' resistance in Iraq?" one is tempted to include the Militant as part of the "ignorant and servile US media" that Hunt talked about.
Their "Reply to a Reader" is a response to Militant reader Richard Young, who suggested that a "clearer explanation of Washington's 'war on terrorism" is needed."
Malapanis/Manuel begin their answer already on the defensive.
"This has been a central feature of lead articles and editorials in the Militant this year. [A self indictment; if it's been a central feature, why are readers clamoring for a clearer explanation?]
"The Militant doesn't assume, however, that readers go back to previous coverage. For a fighting working-class newsweekly seeking new readers constantly, frequent explanations of phrases such as 'war on terror,' not assertions, are necessary." [What a mouthful. The Militant also doesn't assume that readers don't go elsewhere to get the facts and historical context they're not getting from the Militant. The Militant doesn't assume that readers go back to previous coverage to see how poorly that coverage stands up over time. And yes, readers need timely explanations, not assertions, about statements in the Militant that can't be understood beyond the realm of the party hacks that constitute most of the present SWP.
[What's embarrassing for the Militant is that after admitting Iraq and the war on terrorism has been a central feature of lead articles and editorials for almost a year,readers still need a clearer explanation from the SWP on the subject.]
Malapanis and Manuel begin the attempted clarification by recounting the July 7 Militant editorial that said: "Washington is leading an international coalition of imperialist powers and their allies under the banner of 'smashing terrorism' to defend the imperialist system and extend its domination. They are doing it by concentrating on their most vulnerable foes--armed opposition groups able to maintain themselves as an alternative because of the declining political prospects of the national bourgeoisies in the semicolonial world. The U.S. and other imperialist powers have wide support for going after all these groups that often carry out suicide bombing attacks and other similar such actions. There are no disagreements among the imperialist powers, or within bourgeois public opinion, on the policy of targeting 'terrorists.'"
January 2004--Before we resume this essay, I thought it would be relevant for readers to consider a recent letter to the Militant editor published in the January 19 issue:
"I am totally flabbergasted by your attitude toward the war in Iraq. Your paper has been bad mouthing the antiwar movement, American and European, before and after the beginning of this war.
"It has spoken in glowing terms of possible democratic prospects in the area, due to Bush?s intervention (Saudi Arabia). It speaks about French and German ?lucrative? deals with Iraq as if this is a reason not to get involved in any interimperialist controversy. One can suppose that any commerce between nations that involves lucre is imperialist even if neither France nor Germany have killed or destroyed in Iraq as the U.S. has done.
"It currently discusses the nature of the resistance in Iraq as being not quite what is desirable, or that it is not believable. The paper consistently fails to tell working people what to say or do about this war.
"It is time that it come clean and do as any communist paper is supposed to do. I want to hear your advice for fighting imperialism. So far the Militant?s advice in this respect has been to recount tales of courage in the Sierra Maestra 50 years ago, but I don?t think it recommends to follow that example at this time.
"In short, it seems to me that this abstentionism is the result of sectarianism on the part of the leaders of your party."
While the letter's author is wrong to discount the role of French and German imperialism in Iraq and the relevance of the Cubans' heroism in the Sierra Maestra to world politics today, the author's criticism of the SWP's sectarian approach to Iraq dovetails with everything this essay is about. The writer expresses the sentiments of many workers around the world who are shaking their heads in dismay over the political degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party.
APRIL 11, 2004:
The sheer weight of events in Iraq this week requires the long-overdue conclusion of this essay. The insurrectionary upsurge by Shiite and Sunni toilers from Falluja to Baghdad to Najaf demolishes the entire line of the Socialist Workers Party on Iraq and confirms the thrust of the criticism we began articulating in December.
Just listen to what the Militant's Sam Manuel and Argiris Malapanis said in their Dec. 8th reply to a reader, "What's the 'war on terrorism', resistance in Iraq?":
"A number of groups in the middle-class left have attempted to paint up the resistance to the U.S. occupation as a national liberation movement....An article by Richard Becker in the May 15 WORKERS WORLD. . .concluded with the following: 'Having achieved their victory...the occupiers now confront a people who have a long and proud history of resistance. The anti-war movement here and around the world must give its unconditional support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance.' "
A completely accurate assessment that has been confirmed in the real world. But it wasn't in the SWP's world. Manuel and Malapanis continue: "A more recent article by Fred Goldstein in the November 6 WORKERS WORLD stated, referring to the guerrilla attacks on U.S. and other occupation forces in Iraq, 'The war of resistance is moving in the direction of a genuine people's war with widespread popular support.' "
Again, the nationwide armed uprising that erupted this week affirms the correctness of Goldstein's stance. But the SWP didn't see it this way. Instead, Manuel and Malapanis had this to say: "The logic of these statements is a stance of political support for the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein and favoring its return to power. [This could have been penned by bourgeois pundit Thomas Friedman, then and now.] The recent attacks on U.S., Italian and other troops in Iraq have been largely carried out by remnants of the brutal party-police state the Baathist Party led, not a popular guerrilla force like the National Liberation Front of Vietnam that earned that popularity through its decades-long fight against French, Japanese, and U.S. imperialism. The attacks have been concentrated in the Sunni-dominated region of central Iraq, which had been the Baathist Party apparatus's main stronghold. That's why the claims by the U.S. forces of support or least acceptance of their occupation by many, if not most, Iraqis are not simply a hoax."
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Fast forward to December 2004, and the Militant is still sounding like a Pentagon press release, dutifully singing the praises of Washington's military success in Iraq while erroneously describing the Iraqi resistance as an exclusively Baathist operation. Staff writer Sam Manuel began his Dec. 28 article with this copy that could have been written by Rumsfeld's press secretary:
"Pursuing their goal of destroying organized military units of the deposed Saddam Hussein regime, U.S. warplanes dropped heavy bombs on Baathist positions along the Syrian border the second week of December. U.S. fighter jets also bombed pockets of resistance on the outskirts of Fallujah as part of ongoing operations to rid the city of Baathist groups...."
Manuel's conclusion was no better: "As U.S. forces and their allies have continued to strike blows at Baathist opponents and their backers in Iraq, more political forces are getting on the bandwagon to participate in upcoming national elections scheduled for January 30...."
While it may be true that senior officers from Hussein's army are playing a lead role in directing the insurgency, to paint the entire Iraqi insurgency with the broad brush of "Baathism" is an outrageous lie. The overwhelming majority of Iraqis who have fought the occupiers from Baghdad to Ramadi to Samarra to Najaf to Falluja have been Iraqi workers and residents of those towns. The armed resistance enjoys popular support throughout Iraq. As James Cogan stated in his Dec. 13 World Socialist Web Site article, "The slaughter in Fallujah as done nothing to stem the fighting against the U.S. occupation" ("Razing of Fallujah fails to break Iraqi resistance").
This is so not because of Iraqis undying love for Hussein, but because the country's workers and peasants despise the US occupation and regard Allawi as a puppet of Washington.
Manuel also falsely claims that Iraq's Shiites and Kurds don't care about the Sunnis who were slaughtered in Fallujah because Hussein's Sunni-dominated police state had long repressed the other major nationalities: "Because of this record, there has been little outcry in Iraq against the U.S. assault on Fallujah, despite the city's devastation and the uprooting of virtually all its residents...."
More to the point is that there has been little outcry from the Militant against the U.S. assault on Fallujah, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Militant reader Gary Cohen:
"In the article on the U.S. victory in Fallujah in the December 7 Militant, the focus is on the military triumph of U.S. imperialist troops. The article barely mentions the death and destruction wrought upon the working people of the city.
"In addition to Baathist fighters, many civilians were killed and their homes destroyed. About 300,000 residents fled the U.S. invasion, according to the Boston Globe. They will be returning to destroyed houses and rubble-strewn streets."
July 3, 2004--The following article was written in 1951 by James P. Cannon, leader of the Socialist Workers Party at the time. It was published in the Militant on July 16 of that year. Cannon was the founder and leader of the American Trotskyist movement. His thoughts on Marx and the Fourth of July have a particular relevance to today's events. They serve notice on the flag-waving national chauvinists and reactionaries of all stripes that they don't own a monopoly on the revolutionary traditions of 1776. Indeed, they belong to the working class. The Revolutionary War was the first American Revolution. The Civil War that crushed the slavocracy and unified the nation was the second American Revolution. The coming American socialist revolution will accomplished the unfinished bourgeois democratic tasks of these first two revolutions and complete what the revolutionary colonists began in revolting against British colonialism.
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"I’m a Fourth of July man from away back, and a great believer in fire crackers, picnics and brass bands to go with it. You can stop me any time and get me to listen to the glorious story of the greatness of our country and how and when it all got started. The continent we inhabit has been here longer than anyone knows—but as a nation, as an independent people, the darlings of destiny favored above all others, we date from the Declaration of Independence and the Fourth of July.
"The representatives in Congress assembled 175 years ago were the great initiators. When they said: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident,' they started something that opened up a new era of promise for all mankind. That’s what I am ready to celebrate any time the bands begin to play—the start and the promise. But nobody can sell me the Fourth of July speeches which represent the start as the finish and the promise as the fulfillment. I quit believing in them a long time ago. As soon as I grew old enough to look around and see what was going on in this country—all the inequality and injustice still remaining—the beneficiaries of privilege, claiming the heritage of our first revolution, struck me as imposters. I recognized the standard Fourth of July orators as phonies, as desecrators of a noble dream. They didn’t look like the Liberty Boys of ’76.
"But that never turned me against the Fourth of July, as was the case with so many American radicals and revolutionists in the past. I thought the Fourth of July belonged to the people. I always regarded its renunciation as one of the biggest mistakes of American radicalism. It is wrong to confuse internationalism with anti-Americanism; to relinquish the revolutionary traditions of our country to the reactionaries; to let the modern workers’ revolutionary movement, the legitimate heir of the men of 1776, appear as something foreign to our country.
"That is why it did my heart good to see The Militant blossom out this year in a special Fourth of July issue, with its front page manifesto greeting the people of Asia, fighting for their national independence, in the name of our own revolution of 1776—and a whole page of special articles devoted to this revolution and its authentic leaders. The articles in this special issue are obviously the result of serious study and historical research. They throw new light on the most important features of the revolution which have long been obscured, and even deliberately hidden, to serve the special interests of the present-day Tories. These revelations put a powerful propaganda weapon into the hands of those who see in the coming revolution of the American workers not a negation, but a continuation and completion of the revolution for national independence of 175 years ago.
"The authors of these remarkable articles were guided in their research by a theory which required them to look for the essential facts and study them in their inter-relationship. They sought to uncover the motive force of the class struggle—the key to the real understanding of all history. The theory which inspired the authors of these articles to study the first American revolution, and guided them in their work, is Marxism—which Congress and the courts would outlaw as a 'foreign' doctrine, and the teaching of which in the schools is now virtually prohibited.
"The procedure through which these articles in the Fourth of July issue of The Militant finally took shape is an interesting story in itself. They are the work of students in our party school of Marxism. We are committed to the proposition that the cadres of our party have a historical task to accomplish. That task is to organize and lead the coming revolution of the American working class. How better can one prepare to take effective part in such a colossal enterprise than to study the revolution out of which this nation was born? And how can one study revolutionary history seriously and profitably without the aid of the only revolutionary theory of history there is? That’s our point of view anyway. And we are serious enough about it to take a group of our leading people of the younger generation out of everyday activity for six months every year to study the history of their country and this 'foreign' doctrine which alone explains it.
"You will never find two subjects which fit better together. Marx sketched the whole broad outline of American capitalism as it is today in advance of its development. In return for that, American capitalism in all its main features is the crowning proof of Marxism. Our students go to Marx to study America, and study America to verify Marx.
"Marxism is a hundred years old, and has been refuted a thousand times by professional pundits. Not satisfied with that, its opponents—who have far more than a scientific interest in the matter—continue to refute Marxism daily, weekly and monthly in all their publications and other mediums of misinformation and miseducation. Our students know all about that, and examine all the refutations conscientiously as part of their study of the doctrine itself. In the course of this examination and counter-examination they become real Marxists. They learn their doctrine thoroughly, and in learning they proceed to apply it. Marxism is not a dogma to be studied for its own sake, but a theory of social evolution and a guide to action in the class struggle. It is not a substitute for the knowledge of concrete reality, past and present, but a theoretical tool for its investigation and interpretation. Our students understand it that way. They went to Marx—and discovered America.
"And that, in my opinion, is a very important discovery. We have nothing to do with jingoism, or any kind of vulgar national conceit and arrogance. We are internationalists, and we know very well that our fate is bound up with that of the rest of the world. The revolution which will transform society and bring in the socialist order is a world-wide affair, a task requiring international cooperation to which we contribute only a part. But our part in this international cooperation is the revolution here at home. We must attend to that, study it and know it. And we can’t do that properly unless we know our country and its history and traditions. They are, for the greater part, good. The country itself is good, and so are the great majority of the people in it. Their achievements are many and great. There is nothing really wrong with the USA except that the wrong people have usurped control of it and are running it into the ditch.
"The cure for that is not to throw away the country and its traditions, but to get rid of the usurpers by the process popularized by our forefathers under the name of revolution. This new revolution will have to complete the work started by the men of 1776. They secured the nation’s independence. The Second American Revolution of the Sixties, known as the Civil War, smashed the system of chattel slavery, unified the country and opened the way for its unobstructed industrial development. The task of the Third American Revolution is to take this great industrial machine out of the hands of a parasitical clique who operate it for their own benefit, and operate it for the benefit of all.
"That’s the general idea. But it is not quite as simple as it sounds. There are complications and complexities. The workers have to make their way through a jungle of traps and deceptions. They need a map and a compass. They need a generalization of the experiences of the past and a theoretical guiding line for the future. That’s what Marxism is. The American workers will come to Marx, and with him they will be invincible. 'Marx will become the mentor of the advanced American workers,' said Trotsky. We have the same opinion, and we are working to realize it.
"Karl Marx, the German Jew, who lived and worked out his profound theory in England, is native to all countries. The supreme analyst of capitalism is most of all at home in the United States where the development of capitalism has reached its apogee. Marx will help the American workers to know their country, and to change it and make it really their own."
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Thanks to the World Socialist Web Site and one of their readers for inspiring all class conscious workers to spread Cannon's thought-provoking holiday message.--COSMOS LEFT
On Kronstadt and Trotsky: A Reply to Justin Raimondo
June 17, 2004--The essay below is a response to a June 16 article by Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo entitled, "The Essential Dishonesty of Christopher Hitchens." Raimondo is a libertarian antiwar conservative who has done a good job exposing and analyzing the War Party's lies regarding the invasion of Iraq. While COSMOS LEFT shares Raimondo's revulsion toward the scoundrel Christopher Hitchens, a former leftist who has veered sharply to the right and is now in bed with Bush on the Iraq war, we will not allow Raimondo to make his point by slandering Trotsky as a totalitarian murderer. Nor can we let go unanswered the attempt by Raimondo and others to link Trotsky to the predatory wars of aggression being pushed by the neoconservative cabal surrounding George Bush.
On Kronstadt and Trotsky: A Reply to Justin Raimondo
The fact that the crisis of capitalism is causing internecine warfare among conservatives doesn't give even antiwar ones like Justin Raimondo the right to distort history and slander Leon Trotsky as he does in "The Essential Dishonesty of Christopher Hitchens: Liar, hypocrite, coward, drunk."
First, let me make clear this is not a defense of Hitchens, who is a dishonest liar, hypocrite and coward. I share Raimondo's contempt for Hitchens and the latter's support for the Iraq war. But I am here to defend Trotsky. I am here to answer those who attack his legacy by crudely attempting to connect Permanent Revolution with Leo Strauss's Permanent Conquest.
Raimondo takes issue with Hitchens' characterization of Trotsky as the embodiment of "defiance and dissent": "I'll bet that isn't what they thought at Kronstadt, where dissent was felled by Trotsky's sword."
It was a little more than "dissent," Mr. Raimondo. The mutiny by disaffected sailors at Kronstadt was an attempt at a military coup against the Soviet government. It occurred in March 1921, just after the conclusion of a bloody Civil War, an historical tidbit Raimondo leaves out of his analysis. The Soviet leadership feared that Britain and France, using the mutiny as an excuse, would deploy their navies to occupy Kronstadt. The Bolsheviks knew whoever controlled Kronstadt controlled Petrograd. If that happened, capitalist restoration was inevitable. The life and death of the young Soviet republic were at stake. TheBolsheviks were not about to hand over the Revolution to their class enemies after all that had been sacrificed during the Civil War.
Documents from the Soviet archives that were contained in books published in 2000 and 2001 confirm that the Bolsheviks were right, and the authors of these works were by no means Bolshevik sympathizers ("The Unknown Trotsky: the Red Bonaparte" [Krasnov VG, Moscow 2000; and "Kronstadt 1921" (Moscow 2001).
These documents prove that, contrary to the myth pushed by antiBolsheviks over the years that the Kronstadt mutiny enjoyed widespread support among Red Army soldiers, there were only two cases where Red Army troops switched sides or didn't fight. One was during the first unsuccessful attack on Kronstadt, when soldiers from the 561st Red Army regiment--largely recruited from former Machno, Wrangel and Denikin prisoners--joined the rebels. But it was not unusual during the Russian Civil War for peasants to change sides after military defeats. The second instance is when peasants in the 236th and 237th Red Army infantry regiments proclaimed, "We'll not go on the ice,"and "We'll go to our villages." These peasants weren't too keen about traipsing across the ice to seize the fortress heavily defended by battleships.
But there were no mass desertions from the Red Army.
These documents also show that inside Kronstadt there was no mass movement in support of the rebellion, a fact that even an anticommunist like Krasnov had to acknowledge. Instead, Kronstadt was beset with fights between the older revolutionary sailors and the new largely peasant recruits. Some ships declared their neutrality; others fought against the rebels.
Further, the 7th Army intelligence report tells us that many rebel sailors and soldiers wanted to cross over to the Bolsheviks, but were intimidated by their leaders.
Statements by the crews from several ships reflect concern about what was unfolding: "The men of the White guards that are leading the rebels can do a lot of damage to the Republic, and they may not even hesitate to bomb Petrograd!"
Indeed, that's the conclusion the Bolsheviks came to as well. And they were right.
The documents also showed that workers in the town outside Kronstadt moved against the mutineers and liberated the town BEFORE the Red Army got there. And that the sailors knew what they were talking about when they said, "the men of the White guards that are leading the rebels," because we've learned that the true leadership of the mutiny was not in the Kronstadt soviet but instead could be found in the "Court for the Defence of the Kronstadt Fortress", led by White generals Koslovsky and Dmitriev.
Dissent, Mr. Raimondo? Or was it counterrevolution that was stamped out at Krondstadt? Documents from these two books showed that the former Tsarist prime minister and finance minister sent 225 thousand francs to the Kronstadt rebels. The Russian-Asian bank transferred 200 thousand more. The French prime minister, Briand, promised "any necessary help to Kronstadt."
It appears that the Kronstadt workers and sailors had a better understanding of the class dynamics unfolding than intellectuals like Raimondo who have perpetuated the myth of Kronstadt.
As for Trotsky's role in Kronstadt, Ted Grant, in his 1997 book, Russia: from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, wrote:
"Another lie concerns the role of Trotsky in the Kronstadt episode. Actually, he played no direct role, although as Commissar for War and a member of the Soviet government, he fully accepted political responsibility for this and other actions of the government."
Trotsky's Red Army did not ruthlessly stamp out "the very possibility of defiance in Soviet Russia," Mr. Raimondo. The Red Army did ruthlessly stamp out counterrevolution and the chance for world imperialism to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union. When harsh measures are needed to save a revolutionary republic, resolute leaders carry them out. Ask Abraham Lincoln's spirit why he revoked habeas corpus.
One would have to be "dumb as a stump" to accept at face value Raimondo's description ofTrotsky as a "much-feared prophet of 'military communism'" who was also "a totalitarian, a Leninist, and a murderer."
Trotsky was not a "prophet" of war communism, and to say so is to reveal a confusion or a conscious distortion about what really happened. War communism was not a goal but a tactical necessity forced on the Bolsheviks by the pressures of the Civil War and world imperialism. The decision to forcibly requisition grain from peasants and subordinate all aspects of economic life to the needs of the civil war was not desired by a revolutionary working class leadership seeking to forge an alliance with the much more numerous peasantry. As soon as the Civil War was over, the Bolsheviks ended war communism and replaced it with the New Economic Policy, which was an attempt to mend relations with the peasantry by resuscitating market forces.
There was much debate among the Bolsheviks over the implementation of both war communism and the New Economic Policy. In fact, Trotsky had originally opposed war communism, but when the Party approved it, he threw himself behind the policy, recognizing it was a temporary necessity needed to save the Revolution.
As for being "a totalitarian, a Leninist, and a murderer," well, one out of three isn't bad, Mr. Raimondo. Trotsky proudly called himself a Leninist, as do I. Trotsky is no more or less a murderer than every other military commander in history.
Totalitarian? At great risk to himself and his family, Trotsky spent the final two decades of his existence fighting against Stalin's totalitarianism and for socialist democracy; a struggle that eventually cost Trotsky his life.
Raimondo has been one of those who have disingenuously tried to link Bush's reactionary policies today with Leon Trotsky, or as Raimondo put it, "those of us who find the neocons' Trotsky cultism more than a bit dubious."
There is a link--andRaimondo alludes to it--between the internal factional debates in the Trotskyist movement during the 1930s and '40s and contemporary neoconservative figures like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams. The link is Max Schactman, a leader of the SWP during the 1930s who broke with the Party over the class nature of the Soviet Union, and, flowing from that, over the question of unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against any imperialist attack. Schactman and his colleague James Burnham argued that Stalin's signing the nonaggression pact with Hitler proved that the Soviet Union was not a workers state and thus not deserving of the Fourth International's unconditional defense against an imperialist attack.
Trotsky sharply disagreed with the Schactmanites, arguing that despite Stalin's crimes, the social and economic gains of the October Revolution remained and must be defended by the international communist movement against any imperialist attack. The Soviet Union was a transitional society between capitalism and socialism. It would go forward by the working class overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy in a political revolution, or be thrown in reverse by the bureaucracy trying to restore capitalism. We now know how correct Trotsky was.
As Bill Vann of the World Socialist Web Site stated in a May 2003 article, "Trotsky showed that those backing Schactman and Burnham would be propelled far to the right by the logic of both their arguments and their philosophical method, which was rooted in a rejection of dialectical materialism. He warned prophetically that those who begin by rejecting dialectical materialism end up not infrequently in the camp of reaction."
Events proved the "Old Man" to be right again. Not long after, Burnham was writing for the National Review and advocating atomic war against the Soviet Union.
Schactman took a little longer, but by 1950 he supported Washington's aggression in Korea. Soon after he was an advisor to the anticommunist AFL-CIO and ended up a strong supporter of Senator Henry Jackson from Washington, an ardent Cold Warrior and military hawk. Schactman endorsed Jackson's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Schactman's followers changed their name several times before settling on "Social Democrats USA."
It is from this cesspool of militarism and reaction that Schactmanites like Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, and Abrams emerged.
As Vann put it, "Whatever connection these elements may have had with Schactman were the result not of the latter's former connection to Trotskyism, but rather their agreement with the politics of anti-communism, militarism and Zionism that Schactman had embraced over the course of some three decades following his break with the Fourth International."
"There is no doubt that both Schactman and Kristol [Irving] used political skills that they had gained in the Marxist movement to further the cause of reaction. Far from being responsible for the political evolution of these individuals, however, the Trotskyist movement fought out the political differences and rejected the opportunist tendency they represented long before it had evolved into an open supporter of US imperialism...."
So much for Raimondo's view that "Schactmanism is the 'bridge' between the 'Old Man' and his present-day epigones." Present-day epigones? Are you saying that Feith and Wolfowitz are direct descendants of Trotsky, Mr. Raimondo? Are you calling them communists? Or, are you repeating Stalin's lie that Trotsky was an agent of German, US, British, or Japanese imperialism?
The notion that Trotsky's Theory of Permament Revolution paved the way for Leo Strauss and his neocons' policy of "Permanent Conquest" is one of the most intellectually dishonest and despicable fabrications in history. Permanent Revolution explained the dynamics of world revolution in the epoch of imperialism, holding that the capitalist classes in the semicolonial nations were too weak to accomplish the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution; that only the working class in alliance with the small and middle level peasants could win the fight for bourgeois democracy; and that from this revolutionary struggle for bourgeois democracy the workers and peasants would go all the way and make a socialist revolution by overthrowing capitalism and forming a workers and peasants government.
Permanent Revolution was also Trotsky's conception of the relationship between the Russian revolution and the world revolution--that the challenges facing the Soviet working class and all other workers of the world could only be solved on the basis of the world economy, that is, on the basis of the most advanced capitalist economies. Permament Revolution was Trotsky's answer to Stalin's fallacy that socialism could be built in one country.
Permanent Conquest is a strategy of US imperialism to subjugate the entire world under the domination of Washington so that US corporations can more easily plunder the world's workers and resources.
Permanent Revolution is a strategy for the working class. Permanent Conquest is a strategy for the capitalists. The theories have nothing in common. There is no ?kinship? between them.
As Trotsky himself once said, "even slander should make some sense."
June 16, 2004
Postscript on Socialists and the California Recall
October 2003--Just what we need to run California: a groping Nazi sympathizer. The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California signifies the degeneration and diseased state of US bourgeois democracy. It showed that the big business elite that bankrolled the recall successfully exploited the anger and alienation of Californians and steamrollered their millionaire front man into office. It showed that the Democrats could not formulate an alternative to Schwarzenegger, and paid the price for their anti-working class policies and their acquiesence in the bipartisan attacks on working people. It demarcated another step in the collapse of the Democratic Party.
It was also an indictment of the centrist, "new Democratic" wing of the Democratic Party represented by Bill Clinton and Gray Davis. Contrary to Bill O'Reilly's erroneous analysis that the recall proved how out of touch the "far left" Democrats are with the people, it showed how these centrist Democrats personify the rightward evolution of the party as a whole over the last several decades. These are the Democrats who support the death penalty, favored ending welfare as we know it, impose sharp increases in electricity rates and taxes, and back huge cuts in health care and education.
This was a throw-the-bums out, anti-incumbent election result. Schwarzenegger capitalized on the widespread discontent over Davis and the Democrats' stewardship of the state's economy and government. The capitalist politicians and the media ensured that no serious discussion of the crisis facing the working class was discussed. The only debate that included the five major candidates was a "travesty," as SEP candidate Burton aptly put it in a September 26 campaign statement, . . . "ninety minutes of sound bites and mud-slinging" that "was an insult to the people of California and the nation, whose living standards are being devastated by the policies of war and social reaction pursued by Democrats and Republicans alike in Washington and Sacramento."
What was striking about this phony "debate" and the entire campaign is that none of these "major" candidates said a word about the war in Iraq and the effect it is having on California and the entire country. They all talked about the crisis in California as a strictly local, parochial matter, as if one can divorce it from the crisis of capitalism nationally and internationally.
While much was made at the last minute about Schwarzenegger's groping and sexual harassment of women, little was said about the actor's May 17, 2001, meeting with Enron boss Kenneth Lay held to discuss how Enron could derail a plan by Davis and Bustamante to make Enron, Reliant, Dynegy and other corporate thieves pay back the $9 billion in profits they stole from the people of California.
The best aspect of the California recall election was that it gave revolutionary socialists the opportunity to present a working class alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. The two parties that campaigned for a working class program and breaking from the two party shell game were the two parties we debate on this page: the Socialist Workers Party (the Militant) and the Socialist Equality Party (World Socialist Web Site).
The SWP ran the kind of dull, lackluster, lifeless campaign that one would expect from the organization behind the Militant newspaper. The SWP candidate did not bother to attend a debate sponsored by the Peace and Freedom Party involving socialist and radical political parties. The SWP continues its practice of refusing to participate in an honest debate with other tendencies in front of working people. In June, the SWP barred COSMOS LEFT from a public meeting. Then it contemptuously ignored a campaign debate with its opponents. Both acts are cut from the same cloth: the SWP is not confident enough in its own policies to debate them publicly.
The SWP shows all signs of being in internal disarray. They're correcting themselves in the Militant every other issue. First the demonstrations in Iran protesting the Khameni regime were objectively pro-imperialist. The next week, thankfully, the Militant reversed itself, calling them anti-imperialist. One issue the US invasion of Iraq was not a major defeat for Iraq's working class; the next week Argiris Malapanis scolded the Militant for this indefensible position.
It is no accident that Britton won less than 600 votes in the California recall, a pathetic tally. By contrast, SEP candidate John Christopher Burton received over 9,000 votes statewide. This is too wide a disparity to ignore. It demonstrates that the SEP's Burton did a much better job in campaigning for his party's program than did the SWP's Britton. It's not a healthy sign, comrades of the SWP, when your organization doesn't have enough guts or respect for workers to show up at a campaign debate and take on your rivals.
Workers notice these things, comrades. And while you're at it, junk Jack Barnes and restore Trotsky and Permanent Revolution to its rightful place in the Socialist Workers Party. Then maybe you'll find your way out of the wilderness Barnes has led you into.
The WSWS was predictably harsh in its analysis of the SWP's campaign, noting in the October 10 article by Andrea Peters that the SWP "supported the recall and aligned themselves with the far-right forces attempting to overturn the recent gubernatorial election. The SWP put forward no coherent program and made no attempt to explain the pressing political and economic questions facing Californians."
Peters may be overstating her case when she claims the SWP made NO attempt to explain the pressing political questions facing Californians. It may have been an inadequate attempt, perhaps even a failed attempt, but NO attempt seems too far-reaching. Some of the Militant articles covering Britton's campaign did articulate an independent working class program in a coherent manner, but it is certainly true that the Militant's analysis was not as thorough as that found on the WSWS.
While overall the SEP's analysis of the recall election has been sound, I disagreed with several of their points. At the SEP Oct. 5 meeting in Los Angeles, WSWS Editorial Board Chairman David North said that "In 1963, . . . the ICFI (International Committee of the Fourth International) had undergone a crisis when the American Socialist Workers Party broke with Trotskyism, arguing that figures like Fidel Castro in Cuba proved that "independent revolutionary parties of the working class were not necessary."
North was explaining that the genesis of the SEP was rooted in the split that enveloped the Fourth International during the 1950s and '60s. Some forces in the International, led by Ernest Mandel and Michel Pablo, had capitulated to Stalinism when it seemed like it had become a potent revolutionary force after Stalinist-led revolutions occurred in Yugoslavia and China. Pablo believed the Stalinists could reform themselves into revolutionaries, that a Third World War between the Soviet Union and the US was inevitable, and that from the ashes Stalinist Communist Parties would lead socialist revolutions in the West.
In 1953, the American SWP, led by James P. Cannon, along with Gerry Healy, leader of a British Trotskyist party, broke with Mandel and Pablo to form the International Committee of the Fourth International. Ten years later, in response to the Cuban Revolution, Cannon and Mandel led a tenuous reunification of the Fourth International. The two Trotskyist leaders recognized that the victorious socialist revolution in Cuba proved that workers could win state power without Stalinists at the helm. The revolutionary leadership that had coalesced around Fidel Castro had outflanked the Cuban Communist Party from the left. This was a glorious breakthrough that was welcomed by all true revolutionaries.
For the Healyites (the progenitors of the Socialist Equality Party), however, the Cuban Revolution was a problem. They couldn't fit it into their sectarian dogma of how socialist revolutions are supposed to happen. Since the Cuban Revolution was not led by a Trotskyist party, then a socialist revolution did not take place, a position at odds with the Cuban masses and US imperialism.
The Healyites and other sectarian elements left the reunified Fourth International and formed their own International. Out of this dogmatic morass came the Workers League and the Spartacist League, both of which have undergone their own brands of degeneration over the years, a history that is beyond the scope of this essay.
The SWP did break from Trotskyism, but David North is off by 20 years. It was Jack Barnes's 1983 "Their Trotsky and Ours: Revolutionary Continuity Today" that heralded the SWP's divorce from Trotsky and his theory of Permanent Revolution, not 1963 when the Fourth International reunified.
With that background, let's return to North's claim that the SWP's position is that "figures like Fidel Castro . . . proved that 'independent revolutionary parties of the working class were not necessary.' "
I don't know the source of this quote, but it's a safe bet that the quote is taken out of context. I doubt the SWP ever reduced the Cuban Revolution to "figures like Fidel Castro." The Revolution was--and is--deeper than this or that historical personality. The Revolution was made by Cuba's workers and peasants, who will defend it long after Fidel departs.
North's problem is not just with the Socialist Workers Party. North has a problem with Cuba's workers and peasants, who had the audacity to make and defend their revolution without checking first with Gerry Healy's followers. If Leon Trotsky were alive, he'd be much more comfortable with the SWP's defense of the Cuban Revolution than with the SEP's sectarian opposition to it.
Barry Grey's October 6 article, "California recall election: media push for Schwarzenegger leaves Democrats in disarray" contained an uncharacteristic misstatement of fact. While discussing Arianna Huffington's candidacy, Grey says: "If Huffington was opposed to the recall, she kept her opposition to herself. Instead, she helped legitimize the recall drive by echoing the Republican line that Davis was solely responsible for the budget crisis and calling for his ouster."
My distinct recollection of one debate's exchange is that Huffington stood out from the others and explicitly stated that California's fiscal crisis was in large part caused by Bush's massive tax cuts and resulting federal deficit.
Finally, John Christopher Burton's speech at the SEP's October 5 public meeting was weakened by his response to the assertion by an audience member that "unions were the only place in contemporary America where workers are organized as a class." Burton called this an "utterly false and reactionary perspective. How can workers be organized 'as a class' through the unions when the unions are allied with the political representatives of the capitalist class that exploits the workers?"
Because there is a big difference between the union bureaucracy and the union rank and file, Comrade Burton, something your party seems incapable of grasping.
Burton went on: "As far as the speaker was concerned, the organization of workers 'as a class' had nothing to do with the level of political consciousness of the workers. In reality, the unions function to reinforce anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary conceptions--such as individualism, nationalism and opportunism--among the workers."
The SEP has never understood the difference between trade union, or "class" consciousness, and political, or socialist, consciousness. They are not the same entity, and it's the job of communists to build a bridge between the two. Unions are the only place in America where workers are organized as a class. Contrary to Burton, this is not an "assertion of trade unionism as the embodiment of class consciousness." Trade union consciousness is an elemental foundation of class consciousness, but it's not the "embodiment" of it.
". . . From the foregoing it seems, at first sight, easy to draw the conclusion that the trade unions cease to be trade unions in the imperialist epoch. They leave almost no room at all for workers’ democracy which, in the good old days, when free trade ruled on the economic arena, constituted the content of the inner life of labor organizations. In the absence of workers’ democracy there cannot be any free struggle for the influence over the trade union membership. And because of this, the chief arena of work for revolutionists within the trade unions disappears. Such a position, however, would be false to the core. We cannot select the arena and the conditions for our activity to suit our own likes and dislikes. It is infinitely more difficult to fight in a totalitarian or a semitotalitarian state for influence over the working masses than in a democracy. The very same thing likewise applies to trade unions whose fate reflects the change in the destiny of capitalist states. We cannot renounce the struggle for influence over workers in Germany merely because the totalitarian regime makes such work extremely difficult there. We cannot, in precisely the same way, renounce the struggle within the compulsory labor organizations created by Fascism. All the less so can we renounce internal systematic work in trade unions of totalitarian and semi-totalitarian type merely because they depend directly or indirectly on the workers’ state or because the bureaucracy deprives the revolutionists of the possibility of working freely within these trade unions. It is necessary to conduct a struggle under all those concrete conditions which have been created by the preceding developments, incluing therein the mistakes of the working class and the crimes of its leaders.In the fascist and semi-fascist countries it is impossible to carry on revolutionary work that is not underground, illegal, conspiratorial. Within the totalitarian and semi-totalitarian unions it is impossible or well-nigh impossible to carry on any except conspiratorial work. It is necessary to adapt ourselves to the concrete conditions existing in the trade unions of every given country in order to mobilize the masses not only against the bourgeoisie but also against the totalitarian regime within the trade unions themselves and against the leaders enforcing this regime. The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. [emphasis by Trotsky] This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy. . . .The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination and disciplining of workers and for obstructing the revolution, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat." [emphasis by COSMOS LEFT]
This is the challenge facing communists in the imperialist epoch--waging a struggle to turn the unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses, into instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. You don't, as the saying goes, throw the baby out with the bath water, which is what the SEP is doing. Their sectarian stance is an abdication of a fundamental communist responsibility.
Trotsky had more to say on this basic duty of a communist party:
"From what has been said it follows quite clearly that, in spite of the progressive degeneration of trade unions and their growing together with the imperialist state, the work within the trade unions not only does not lose any of its importance but remains as before and becomes in a certain sense even more important work than ever for every revolutionary party. The matter at issue is essentially the struggle for influence over the working class. Every organization, every party, every faction which permits itself an ultimatistic position in relation to the trade union, i.e., in essence turns its back upon the working class, merely because of displeasure with its organizations, every such organization is destined to perish. And it must be said it deserves to perish."
Take heed, comrades in the Socialist Equality Party. The Old Man was right.
SWP Makes Wrong Call on California Recall
September 2003--After months of silence, the Socialist Workers Party, through its weekly newspaper The Militant, finally informed its readers that it supports the California recall initiative. In the Sept. 29 issue, Joel Britton, the SWP's candidate for governor in the recall election, is reported by the Militant as saying that while he did not campaign for the recall initiative, he is urging a "yes" vote to remove Davis from office.
"Whenever working people have the opportunity to remove a capitalist politician from office we should take advantage of it," Britton stated.
The SWP devotes all of one sentence to this crucial issue.
It shows.
The Militant qualifies this endorsement of the recall by informing workers that Britton "did not campaign" for the initiative. Good thing, or otherwise SWP members would have been campaigning alongside the thousands of full-time petitioners who were paid $1 a petition by right wing Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, the multimillionaire who personally financed the recall.
"Whenever working people have the opportunity to remove a capitalist politician from office we should take advantage of it."
Are you serious, Mr. Britton? This could be the biggest whopper in the Militant since the SWP claimed it was Al Gore who tried to steal the 2000 election, or at least since the Militant declared that the US occupation of Iraq was not a major defeat for the Iraqi working class.
Earth to the SWP: The California recall is not an "opportunity to remove a capitalist politician from office." It represents instead a continuation of the ongoing drive by right wing, far right capitalist layers of the Republican Party to undermine democratic rights and ram their reactionary agenda down the throats of the public. As the WSWS states, the recall developed "as a perversion of the original intent of the recall procedure, which was established nearly a century ago to deal with corruption of politicians by wealthy individuals and corporate interests. The 2003 recall became the vehicle for a campaign, financed by an ultra-right multi-millionaire, to nullify an election whose results he did not accept."
One thing the recall is not is an "opportunity to remove a capitalist politician from office." This is a dangerous, misleading formulation that will only foster illusions in the capitalist electoral process among working people. The only way to remove a capitalist politician from office is through a socialist revolution, not at the voting booths.
Britton's statement suggests a belief in the legitimacy of bourgeois democracy that is not becoming of a revolutionary communist party that's supposed to adhere to the Third International under Lenin. What separated the Third from the Second International is that the latter held that workers could peaceably evolve toward socialism through parliamentary elections, while the former says the only road for workers is a social revolution that overturns capitalist property relations.
American bourgeois democracy is so decayed the rulers can barely hold elections and count the votes. Revolutionary socialist parties do not run candidates in these phony elections to win them, and they should not foster illusions among the working class that it is possible to "remove" capitalists from office through the polls.
The California recall IS an opportunity for socialist parties to pose a working class program and perspective independent of the twin capitalist parties of war, racism and reaction. It IS an opportunity for revolutionaries to transform the recall into a referendum on Bush's policies of war and repression, as the Socialist Equality Party candidate John Christopher Burton is doing.It is an outrage that a proletarian organization that claims to represent the principles of the Third International under Lenin sounds more like a social democrat supporting the reformist Second International.
The only principled position for communist organization to take regarding the California recall is to urge working people to vote "No" to defeat this latest attack on democratic rights by the most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class, while offering an independent working class program irreconcilably opposed to Washington's imperialist wars against workers everywhere.
Unfortunately, the Socialist Workers Party has been inexplicably cavalier in its response to the escalating assault on democratic rights spearheaded by the ultrarightists in the Republican Party. Beginning with the Clinton impeachment and continuing with the theft of the 2000 election and now the California recall, the SWP has underplayed, understated, and apologized for the ultraright elements surrounding Bush. In so doing, the SWP continues to miseducate US workers and leave the them unprepared for what is unfolding and what lies ahead.
This dynamic is magnified exponentially when you consider the Militant's complete abdication of its responsibility as a working class tribune regarding September 11. Despite the fact that from September 12, 2001, Bush and the rulers have used the terrorist attacks as the centerpiece for the entire propaganda campaign to wage wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond, the Militant has ignored September 11 and refuses to intelligently examine the stench surrounding the day's events.
The Militant was once a vibrant, politically inspiring and motivating workers newspaper. Today it reads as a stale, lifeless, sectarian publication; and if you're looking for a Marxist analysis of September 11 and how the rulers have cynically used it to whip up support for their wars, you won't learn a thing in the pages of the Militant.
While the SWP downplays the acceleration of the ruling class offensive under Bush, while it looks the other way and covers up the ultrarightist assault on civil liberties reflected in the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election and the California recall, the SWP acts like Stalinists and undemocratically bars a long-time political supporter from a public meeting.
The SWP is a shell of what it once was, and I'm talking politically, not numerically. The party of James P. Cannon, a revolutionary workers organization with an outstanding legacy of fighting for the working class, leading workers in the struggle for industrial unions, defending the Communist Party when Washington prosecuted its members for opposing World War II, helping to build the women's and civil rights movements, playing a decisive role in organizing massive opposition to the Vietnam War, and above all, defending the Cuban Revolution--this once mighty proletarian force has been transformed into a workerist sect that separates itself from, and criticizes, mass movements just as the Spartacist League used to do.
The source of this degeneration can be traced to the decision by the Jack Barnes leadership in 1982 to junk Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution. It's been a downhill slide for the Socialist Workers Party ever since.
One day the US working class will reclaim the roots of the Socialist Workers Party, restore Permanent Revolution to its rightful place as a guiding light for the international working class, and reknit the revolutionary continuity to Trotsky that was broken by the Barnes leadership.
Review of SWP Meeting: "Europe and America: To the Victor Go the Spoils"
June 20-21, 2003--Since COSMOS LEFT was not allowed to attend the June 7 Socialist Workers Party meeting (see "COSMOS LEFT barred from SWP Public Meeting" below), this analysis of SWP leader Jack Barnes's speech at the meeting is based on the June 30 Militant article by Patrick O'Neill and Sam Manuel. This essay will focus on those aspects of Barnes' talk that are relevant to the points raised by "A Critique of the Militant's Coverage of the Iraq War" and "Review of Jack Barnes's March 23 Speech," both of which are further down this page.
Barnes returned to the question that he did not answer at the March 23rd meeting concerning the SWP's position on the Vietnam Syndrome. During that presentation, Barnes stated that support for the Iraq war would increase as US casualties mounted. COSMOS LEFT had asked if that meant the SWP agreed with the elder Bush when he pronounced the Vietnam Syndrome dead 12 years ago.
According to O'Neill/Manuel's article, Barnes explained "why the U.S. rulers and their officer corps are no longer plagued by the Vietnam Syndrome--a phenomenon in mass psychology stemming from U.S. imperialism's defeat in Vietnam that has mostly died out with the older generations that were directly affected by it."
So Barnes does agree with Bush Senior's 1991 judgment that the Vietnam Syndrome is dead. But Barnes is as wrong in 2003 as Bush was in 1991--because the Vietnam Syndrome STILL HAS NOT BEEN TESTED--not after Afghanistan, not after Iraq.
What constituted the essence of that "mass psychology stemming from US imperialism's defeat in Vietnam" is the opposition of the American people to a protracted US military conflict involving substantial combat losses.
But Washington escaped that test when it conquered Iraq with relatively few casualties in the initial campaign. Thus Barnes is ceding ground to Bush that he has yet to conquer. There was no bloody siege of Baghdad--largely because Rumsfeld bribed the city's Republican Guard officers. Baghdad fell without the Vietnam Syndrome being tested.
The steady escalation of guerrilla-style attacks on US troops since May 1 is bringing fresh relevance to the Vietnam Syndrome issue, although you'd never know it from Barnes's June 7th talk. According to the Militant article, Barnes did not utter a single word about the 54 Americans killed since Bush announced the war was over on the USS Abraham Lincoln.
The prospect of increased American casualties is already causing consternation among some ruling class circles that this will cause an erosion in support for Bush. Because, contrary to Barnes's blanket assertion that the "US rulers are no longer plagued by the Vietnam Syndrome"--that issue has not yet been definitively settled.
While Barnes concedes that "[d]ifficulties in organizing a U.S.-run occupation regime were going to occur no matter what," the SWP leader scoffs at "liberal critics" and "many in the U.S. petty-bourgeois left" for suggesting Washington faces a "quagmire" in Iraq.
It's true that Iraq is not Vietnam, where a socialist revolution fueled a genuine guerrilla war that ensnared Washington in a long and bloody quagmire. But once again, Barnes is underestimating and glossing over the problems facing Washington in Iraq. The World Socialist Web Site is more on the mark when it says, "just as Vietnam became the focal point for an eruption of political and social struggles within the US, so too will Washington's crimes in Iraq repel the broad mass of the American people, becoming a focal point for the deeply felt anger and disgust of working people for the right-wing clique headed by Bush and the financial oligarchy which it serves" ("Washington's war of terror in Iraq", June 18, 2003).
The article continued: "In the 1960s and 1970s the word 'quagmire' became synonymous with the US military and political disaster in Vietnam. In Iraq, the Bush administration has landed US imperialism in a new quagmire, whose implications are even more catastrophic for the American ruling elite."
But not according to Barnes. He thinks that things are moving merrily along for Bush. Yes, Barnes acknowledges the blips and glitsches, and correctly reminds his audience that Washington's military successes should not obscure the historic weakness of imperialism. But according to the Militant, Barnes opined that "Having accomplished their main aims in the Iraq invasion and occupation, they are continuing along the same course, stealing a march over their imperialist allies and carving out a bigger piece of the resources of the semicolonial world."
It sounds as if it's the SWP that is more in awe of US power than those Barnes points his finger at. "These facts need to be pointed out not to exaggerate the power of the US armed forces, but in order to understand the enemy and the implications of what's necessary to defend any conquests of the toilers under assault by imperialism."
Compare this with the World Socialist Web Site article, "Washington's war of terror in Iraq" (June 18, 2003): "They [Iraqi people] will continue to resist and their struggle will inspire the oppressed masses throughout the Middle East to rise in opposition to US imperialism and its accomplices in the region--the oil sheikdoms and corrupt Arab bourgeois regimes from Jordan to Egypt to Syria and Lebanon. Future historians will record the US 'victory' in Iraq as the catalyst for an unprecedented eruption of popular struggles against imperialism not only in the Middle East, but internationally."
The SWP and WSWS also view the issue of weapons of mass destruction from completely different vantage points. According to Barnes, "far from being paralyzed by the fact that U.S. forces have discovered no 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq, the White House has simply asserted that this was just one of the main reasons for assaulting Iraq."
A communist organization doesn't let a US president off the hook by giving him credit for "simply" asserting that weapons of mass destruction was just one of the main reasons for invading Iraq. A communist party nails that president for the liar he is, exposing him in front of the working class for deliberating lying to the American people and the world, fabricating rationales for war to justify an invasion of a sovereign nation.
As Barnes points out, "regime change" was a goal shared by the US bipartisan capitalist political spectrum and the major imperialist powers. But Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction--and the alleged imminent threat that posed--was at the heart of Washington's case for military action that it presented to the world, including the American population. Along the way, Bush threw in Hussein's nonexistent links to bin Laden and September 11---unproven, untrue, but the propaganda has worked to a disturbing extent. The final pretext for war--"liberating" the Iraqis and spreading "democracy" in the Middle East--was not heard until AFTER the invasion had begun.
Further, Bush's pretext of weapons of mass destruction was a response to the massive global antiwar demonstrations--a movement that the SWP kept its distance from and consistently expressed disdain for.
In letting Bush off the hook on Iraq, the SWP continues to make the same mistakes it made during the 2000 election--underestimating the weight of ultrarightist forces in Bush's camp; presenting an overly superficial analysis of the two bourgeois parties that glosses over the different class forces between them; and failing to recognize that the Bush administration represents an intensification and escalation of the capitalists' offensive against the working class.
As the Militant has done since the 2000 election, Barnes claims that Bush is nothing special, nothing unusual, no different than Clinton, a continuation of Clinton's bipartisan antilabor course; and that the Iraq war was not a special project of Bush but the inevitable byproduct of Clinton and Bush's policies and world imperialism's hostility towards Iraq.
This obscures the qualitative escalation in the US rulers' war against working people from America to Iraq since Bush came to power. The WSWS gets it right because it is not handicapped in this manner. After noting that Clinton also required Iraq to prove a negative that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the WSWS June 21 article makes the correct factual observation: "Now the Bush administration makes use of the crimes of the Clinton administration against the Iraqi people to justify EVEN GREATER CRIMES." [emphasis added]
Barnes ridicules the idea that the Iraq war is "Bush's war," correctly pointing out that Clinton's policies paved the way for Bush's, and that Democrats supported Bush's invasion, as did the major imperialist powers. But Barnes goes too far in the other direction, ignoring the fact that right-wing think tanks like the Project for a New American Century, which have been lobbying for the military conquest of Iraq for a decade, are the leading influences in the Bush White House.
While Barnes scoffs at the notion that Bush is different from Clinton, the WSWS notices that "There is NO PRECEDENT in American history for the sheer scale of falsification engaged in by the Bush administration, the Republican Party and their media chorus. The 'credibility gap of the Vietnam War era is NOTHING COMPARED to the lie machine of the current government." [emphasis added]
The SWP's point of departure seems to be that any hint of a specific criticism of Bush, or any Republican, undermines an independent working class political perspective and is a concession to class collaborationism and lesser evilism. COSMOS LEFT does not agree, nor, it can be safely stated, does the Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS. The SWP's analysis of the class dynamics surrounding the Democratic and Republican Parties is simplistic and superficial. Yes, Clinton paved the way for much of what Bush is now doing. But from Election Night 2000, the Bush forces have intensified and escalated the class war against working people and democratic rights. They have not merely represented a continuation of the bipartisan antilabor assault. They have been all about deepening that assault.
Of course, the SWP is silent about the connection between the Bush cabal's seizure of power and its policies since 2001 because the SWP thinks it was Gore who tried to steal the election, not Bush. Which is where I started parting company with the Barnes leadership.
The SWP's refusal or inability to offer a Marxist analysis of the specific class dynamics behind George Bush is also inexplicable because it denies the role of the individual in history. All Marxists recognize the tremendous contribution to the working class movement that was made by Plekhanov in his classic book on that very subject.
George Bush is a fitting personification of the gangster, predatory wing of the capitalist class he represents. This is the latest confirmation of the role of the individual in history. Marxists are not compromising working class independence and are not giving into lesser evilism when they point this out.
Before concluding this analysis of Barnes's June 7th talk, we'll cover a few more minor points of contention with the SWP leader's address.
Barnes explained how Iran is next in the cross hairs of US imperialism for regime change. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Washington has longed to reestablish a puppet regime in that strategically important nation. Barnes noted that Washington's approach towards regime change in Tehran is different than it was in Iraq--a conclusion shaped by the fact that Washington knows its forces would meet resistance from the Iranians, who, unlike the Iraqis, have not been demoralized by a crushing defeat.
Because of this, Barnes said, US imperialism is threatening "forceful intervention" instead of military invasion, a strategy including economic sanctions, naval and air interdictions of suspect cargo leaving Iran, intrusive inspections of nuclear facilities, and surgical strikes against nuclear plants.
All this is true. But even here Barnes is underestimating Bush's recklessness, adventurism, and triumphalism. Indeed, on June 20, John Bolton, the US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, told the BBC that military action against Iran remains an option.
Barnes and the Militant are correct in warning that Washington has targeted Iran as next in line for regime change. However, it must be noted that the SWP's line on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq weakens its agitation opposing US aggression toward Iran.
While the relationship of forces facing US imperialism in Iran is different from Iraq, in some ways the rhetoric accompanying the ratcheting up of tensions with Iran closely parallels what we heard about Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction, ties with terror, repressing its people, these are exactly the lies that came from Washington and its media surrounding Iraq.
But the Militant, in dismissing the importance of Bush's lies about Iraqi WMD, has politically disarmed itself and is in a weaker position to expose Bush on those very same lies regarding Iran.
Finally, Barnes made some long-overdue comments concerning the composition of the US armed forces--volunteer, young, highly trained and motivated. This is true, and merits further elaboration from a communist leader. Barnes further said that the morale of these troops will not take big blows until "they strike the kind of unbending resistance and take the terrible casualties that were inflicted on the U.S. armed forces by the workers and peasants of Indochina in the Vietnam War."
This is true, and there's very little chance that the Iraqi guerrilla resistance will ever pose the same threat level to US troops that the Vietnamese workers and peasants mustered, for the reason that is discussed elsewhere on this page: in Vietnam, a socialist revolution fueled the national liberation struggle, while in Iraq, the workers and peasants were defeated and demoralized by the Hussein regime.
However, the small but growing level of guerrilla resistance that is killing an American soldier every day is already lowering the morale of US forces. The Wall Street Journal, strongly prowar, reported recently that Washington is concerned that US "incursions inevitably will alienate parts of the population and generate sympathy for those the US is trying to isolate."
The Journal also reported that US soldiers "have a hard time distinguishing between ordinary civilians and enemy fighters."
One American soldier complained "You can't tell friend from foe. We didn't want anything to do with these people anymore."
The WSWS, in "Washington's war of terror in Iraq," correctly observes that these statements are "eerily reminiscent of those made by an earlier generation of American troops who were sent on the basis of lies to kill and be killed in a distant land--Vietnam. And already US military officials are talking about the struggle for the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis.
US soldiers live in constant fear of being ambushed by a hidden sniper or hit by a sudden grenade. they are frightened and jittery. Soldiers are terrified of approaching children.
"It was not supposed to end this way for the brigade's 5000 soldiers and officers...Six months after arriving in Kuwait and almost three months after entering Iraq, they were ready to go home..." A US infantryman told a reporter, "You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home...Tell him to come spend a night in our building."
Now, this is a long way from the "big blows" to US morale that Comrade Barnes is talking about. But it's significant, and communists should do everything they can to push this process forward, instead of marveling over Washington's successes as the SWP seems to be doing.
As Sarti and Weston state, "If this situation continues the top military commanders will find it increasingly difficult to carry out the job Bush has given them. The whole thing could start to unravel. And, most importantly, the morale of the US troops is going to filter back home, and the truth about what is really happening in Iraq is going to dawn on the millions of ordinary Americans who have been duped by Bush and co."
In the last section of Barnes's talk, the SWP leader correctly stated that the US imperialist victory in Iraq helped expose the political bankruptcy of the Stalinists, the social democrats, the Greens and most centrist groups. These groups act out of fear towards the power of US imperialism, Barnes said, and are now more energized than ever to engage in lesser evil politics.
The Socialist Workers Party, on the other hand, will field a slate of candidates in the 2004 campaign that will present a program of independent working class political action. Barnes announced that this campaign will in part discuss the questions raised by a "great debate" that has begun in the international workers movement, a debate over the strategic questions of the working class line of march towards state power and how to defend gains by the working class under attack by imperialism. Barnes said that what has caused this debate is the latest imperialist campaign of provocations and threats against the Cuban Revolution.
COSMOS LEFT welcomes this debate. Indeed, the stated purpose of "What Is to Be Done" is to further that debate and stimulate a much needed exchange of ideas in the international labor movement. However, when COSMOS LEFT attempted to engage Comrade Barnes in this debate by asking questions at the March 23rd meeting (see below), the SWP leader responded by contemptuously dismissing those questions and then barring me from the June 7th public meeting at Hunter College. If the SWP is going to participate in a true debate, it needs to show a higher tolerance for opposing views than that.
COSMOS LEFT encourages readers to visit the Militant's Web site and learn about key working class struggles, including campaigns that defend the rights of immigrant workers like Roger Calero and political prisoners like the Cuban 5 and Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti. COSMOS LEFT also urges readers to support the Socialist Workers Party candidates in the 2004 election and learn more about their independent working class political campaign.
In so doing, you may want to ask the SWP candidates to comment on September 11. As usual, Barnes's June 7th talk did not mention one word about the central role September 11 has played in Bush's war propaganda. The O'Neill/Manuel article can only manage, "Along with trying to hypnotize working people with their foreign policy course..." A vital component of that hypnosis is the fear factor emanating from 911 that Bush has successfully exploited. The Militant has barely mentioned September 11 since its occurrence, apparently believing to do so automatically strips a Marxist party of historical materialism and replaces it with the dreaded mantle of "conspiracy theories."
September 11 is a subversive problem for the rulers. Communists should not treat the terrorist attacks like the plague. Communists should concretely explain why September 11 is another reason we need to replace this capitalist government with one that represents the working class. We cannot trust that this capitalist regime can protect us. Communists should be able to have intelligent discussions with workers about the evidence that points to governmental complicity and/or a military standdown regarding the September 11 attacks; about Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin, and Pearl Harbor.
June 20-21, 2003--Since COSMOS LEFT was not allowed to attend the June 7 Socialist Workers Party meeting (see "COSMOS LEFT barred from SWP Public Meeting" below), this analysis of SWP leader Jack Barnes's speech at the meeting is based on the June 30 Militant article by Patrick O'Neill and Sam Manuel. This essay will focus on those aspects of Barnes' talk that are relevant to the points raised by "A Critique of the Militant's Coverage of the Iraq War" and "Review of Jack Barnes's March 23 Speech," both of which are further down this page.
Barnes returned to the question that he did not answer at the March 23rd meeting concerning the SWP's position on the Vietnam Syndrome. During that presentation, Barnes stated that support for the Iraq war would increase as US casualties mounted. COSMOS LEFT had asked if that meant the SWP agreed with the elder Bush when he pronounced the Vietnam Syndrome dead 12 years ago.
According to O'Neill/Manuel's article, Barnes explained "why the U.S. rulers and their officer corps are no longer plagued by the Vietnam Syndrome--a phenomenon in mass psychology stemming from U.S. imperialism's defeat in Vietnam that has mostly died out with the older generations that were directly affected by it."
So Barnes does agree with Bush Senior's 1991 judgment that the Vietnam Syndrome is dead. But Barnes is as wrong in 2003 as Bush was in 1991--because the Vietnam Syndrome STILL HAS NOT BEEN TESTED--not after Afghanistan, not after Iraq.
What constituted the essence of that "mass psychology stemming from US imperialism's defeat in Vietnam" is the opposition of the American people to a protracted US military conflict involving substantial combat losses.
But Washington escaped that test when it conquered Iraq with relatively few casualties in the initial campaign. Thus Barnes is ceding ground to Bush that he has yet to conquer. There was no bloody siege of Baghdad--largely because Rumsfeld bribed the city's Republican Guard officers. Baghdad fell without the Vietnam Syndrome being tested.
The steady escalation of guerrilla-style attacks on US troops since May 1 is bringing fresh relevance to the Vietnam Syndrome issue, although you'd never know it from Barnes's June 7th talk. According to the Militant article, Barnes did not utter a single word about the 54 Americans killed since Bush announced the war was over on the USS Abraham Lincoln.
The prospect of increased American casualties is already causing consternation among some ruling class circles that this will cause an erosion in support for Bush. Because, contrary to Barnes's blanket assertion that the "US rulers are no longer plagued by the Vietnam Syndrome"--that issue has not yet been definitively settled.
While Barnes concedes that "[d]ifficulties in organizing a U.S.-run occupation regime were going to occur no matter what," the SWP leader scoffs at "liberal critics" and "many in the U.S. petty-bourgeois left" for suggesting Washington faces a "quagmire" in Iraq.
It's true that Iraq is not Vietnam, where a socialist revolution fueled a genuine guerrilla war that ensnared Washington in a long and bloody quagmire. But once again, Barnes is underestimating and glossing over the problems facing Washington in Iraq. The World Socialist Web Site is more on the mark when it says, "just as Vietnam became the focal point for an eruption of political and social struggles within the US, so too will Washington's crimes in Iraq repel the broad mass of the American people, becoming a focal point for the deeply felt anger and disgust of working people for the right-wing clique headed by Bush and the financial oligarchy which it serves" ("Washington's war of terror in Iraq", June 18, 2003).
The article continued: "In the 1960s and 1970s the word 'quagmire' became synonymous with the US military and political disaster in Vietnam. In Iraq, the Bush administration has landed US imperialism in a new quagmire, whose implications are even more catastrophic for the American ruling elite."
But not according to Barnes. He thinks that things are moving merrily along for Bush. Yes, Barnes acknowledges the blips and glitsches, and correctly reminds his audience that Washington's military successes should not obscure the historic weakness of imperialism. But according to the Militant, Barnes opined that "Having accomplished their main aims in the Iraq invasion and occupation, they are continuing along the same course, stealing a march over their imperialist allies and carving out a bigger piece of the resources of the semicolonial world."
It sounds as if it's the SWP that is more in awe of US power than those Barnes points his finger at. "These facts need to be pointed out not to exaggerate the power of the US armed forces, but in order to understand the enemy and the implications of what's necessary to defend any conquests of the toilers under assault by imperialism."
Compare this with the World Socialist Web Site article, "Washington's war of terror in Iraq" (June 18, 2003): "They [Iraqi people] will continue to resist and their struggle will inspire the oppressed masses throughout the Middle East to rise in opposition to US imperialism and its accomplices in the region--the oil sheikdoms and corrupt Arab bourgeois regimes from Jordan to Egypt to Syria and Lebanon. Future historians will record the US 'victory' in Iraq as the catalyst for an unprecedented eruption of popular struggles against imperialism not only in the Middle East, but internationally."
The SWP and WSWS also view the issue of weapons of mass destruction from completely different vantage points. According to Barnes, "far from being paralyzed by the fact that U.S. forces have discovered no 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq, the White House has simply asserted that this was just one of the main reasons for assaulting Iraq."
A communist organization doesn't let a US president off the hook by giving him credit for "simply" asserting that weapons of mass destruction was just one of the main reasons for invading Iraq. A communist party nails that president for the liar he is, exposing him in front of the working class for deliberating lying to the American people and the world, fabricating rationales for war to justify an invasion of a sovereign nation.
As Barnes points out, "regime change" was a goal shared by the US bipartisan capitalist political spectrum and the major imperialist powers. But Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction--and the alleged imminent threat that posed--was at the heart of Washington's case for military action that it presented to the world, including the American population. Along the way, Bush threw in Hussein's nonexistent links to bin Laden and September 11---unproven, untrue, but the propaganda has worked to a disturbing extent. The final pretext for war--"liberating" the Iraqis and spreading "democracy" in the Middle East--was not heard until AFTER the invasion had begun.
Further, Bush's pretext of weapons of mass destruction was a response to the massive global antiwar demonstrations--a movement that the SWP kept its distance from and consistently expressed disdain for.
In letting Bush off the hook on Iraq, the SWP continues to make the same mistakes it made during the 2000 election--underestimating the weight of ultrarightist forces in Bush's camp; presenting an overly superficial analysis of the two bourgeois parties that glosses over the different class forces between them; and failing to recognize that the Bush administration represents an intensification and escalation of the capitalists' offensive against the working class.
As the Militant has done since the 2000 election, Barnes claims that Bush is nothing special, nothing unusual, no different than Clinton, a continuation of Clinton's bipartisan antilabor course; and that the Iraq war was not a special project of Bush but the inevitable byproduct of Clinton and Bush's policies and world imperialism's hostility towards Iraq.
This obscures the qualitative escalation in the US rulers' war against working people from America to Iraq since Bush came to power. The WSWS gets it right because it is not handicapped in this manner. After noting that Clinton also required Iraq to prove a negative that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the WSWS June 21 article makes the correct factual observation: "Now the Bush administration makes use of the crimes of the Clinton administration against the Iraqi people to justify EVEN GREATER CRIMES." [emphasis added]
Barnes ridicules the idea that the Iraq war is "Bush's war," correctly pointing out that Clinton's policies paved the way for Bush's, and that Democrats supported Bush's invasion, as did the major imperialist powers. But Barnes goes too far in the other direction, ignoring the fact that right-wing think tanks like the Project for a New American Century, which have been lobbying for the military conquest of Iraq for a decade, are the leading influences in the Bush White House.
While Barnes scoffs at the notion that Bush is different from Clinton, the WSWS notices that "There is NO PRECEDENT in American history for the sheer scale of falsification engaged in by the Bush administration, the Republican Party and their media chorus. The 'credibility gap of the Vietnam War era is NOTHING COMPARED to the lie machine of the current government." [emphasis added]
The SWP's point of departure seems to be that any hint of a specific criticism of Bush, or any Republican, undermines an independent working class political perspective and is a concession to class collaborationism and lesser evilism. COSMOS LEFT does not agree, nor, it can be safely stated, does the Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS. The SWP's analysis of the class dynamics surrounding the Democratic and Republican Parties is simplistic and superficial. Yes, Clinton paved the way for much of what Bush is now doing. But from Election Night 2000, the Bush forces have intensified and escalated the class war against working people and democratic rights. They have not merely represented a continuation of the bipartisan antilabor assault. They have been all about deepening that assault.
Of course, the SWP is silent about the connection between the Bush cabal's seizure of power and its policies since 2001 because the SWP thinks it was Gore who tried to steal the election, not Bush. Which is where I started parting company with the Barnes leadership.
The SWP's refusal or inability to offer a Marxist analysis of the specific class dynamics behind George Bush is also inexplicable because it denies the role of the individual in history. All Marxists recognize the tremendous contribution to the working class movement that was made by Plekhanov in his classic book on that very subject.
George Bush is a fitting personification of the gangster, predatory wing of the capitalist class he represents. This is the latest confirmation of the role of the individual in history. Marxists are not compromising working class independence and are not giving into lesser evilism when they point this out.
Before concluding this analysis of Barnes's June 7th talk, we'll cover a few more minor points of contention with the SWP leader's address.
Barnes explained how Iran is next in the cross hairs of US imperialism for regime change. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Washington has longed to reestablish a puppet regime in that strategically important nation. Barnes noted that Washington's approach towards regime change in Tehran is different than it was in Iraq--a conclusion shaped by the fact that Washington knows its forces would meet resistance from the Iranians, who, unlike the Iraqis, have not been demoralized by a crushing defeat.
Because of this, Barnes said, US imperialism is threatening "forceful intervention" instead of military invasion, a strategy including economic sanctions, naval and air interdictions of suspect cargo leaving Iran, intrusive inspections of nuclear facilities, and surgical strikes against nuclear plants.
All this is true. But even here Barnes is underestimating Bush's recklessness, adventurism, and triumphalism. Indeed, on June 20, John Bolton, the US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, told the BBC that military action against Iran remains an option.
Barnes and the Militant are correct in warning that Washington has targeted Iran as next in line for regime change. However, it must be noted that the SWP's line on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq weakens its agitation opposing US aggression toward Iran.
While the relationship of forces facing US imperialism in Iran is different from Iraq, in some ways the rhetoric accompanying the ratcheting up of tensions with Iran closely parallels what we heard about Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction, ties with terror, repressing its people, these are exactly the lies that came from Washington and its media surrounding Iraq.
But the Militant, in dismissing the importance of Bush's lies about Iraqi WMD, has politically disarmed itself and is in a weaker position to expose Bush on those very same lies regarding Iran.
Finally, Barnes made some long-overdue comments concerning the composition of the US armed forces--volunteer, young, highly trained and motivated. This is true, and merits further elaboration from a communist leader. Barnes further said that the morale of these troops will not take big blows until "they strike the kind of unbending resistance and take the terrible casualties that were inflicted on the U.S. armed forces by the workers and peasants of Indochina in the Vietnam War."
This is true, and there's very little chance that the Iraqi guerrilla resistance will ever pose the same threat level to US troops that the Vietnamese workers and peasants mustered, for the reason that is discussed elsewhere on this page: in Vietnam, a socialist revolution fueled the national liberation struggle, while in Iraq, the workers and peasants were defeated and demoralized by the Hussein regime.
However, the small but growing level of guerrilla resistance that is killing an American soldier every day is already lowering the morale of US forces. The Wall Street Journal, strongly prowar, reported recently that Washington is concerned that US "incursions inevitably will alienate parts of the population and generate sympathy for those the US is trying to isolate."
The Journal also reported that US soldiers "have a hard time distinguishing between ordinary civilians and enemy fighters."
One American soldier complained "You can't tell friend from foe. We didn't want anything to do with these people anymore."
The WSWS, in "Washington's war of terror in Iraq," correctly observes that these statements are "eerily reminiscent of those made by an earlier generation of American troops who were sent on the basis of lies to kill and be killed in a distant land--Vietnam. And already US military officials are talking about the struggle for the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis.
US soldiers live in constant fear of being ambushed by a hidden sniper or hit by a sudden grenade. they are frightened and jittery. Soldiers are terrified of approaching children.
"It was not supposed to end this way for the brigade's 5000 soldiers and officers...Six months after arriving in Kuwait and almost three months after entering Iraq, they were ready to go home..." A US infantryman told a reporter, "You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home...Tell him to come spend a night in our building."
Now, this is a long way from the "big blows" to US morale that Comrade Barnes is talking about. But it's significant, and communists should do everything they can to push this process forward, instead of marveling over Washington's successes as the SWP seems to be doing.
As Sarti and Weston state, "If this situation continues the top military commanders will find it increasingly difficult to carry out the job Bush has given them. The whole thing could start to unravel. And, most importantly, the morale of the US troops is going to filter back home, and the truth about what is really happening in Iraq is going to dawn on the millions of ordinary Americans who have been duped by Bush and co."
In the last section of Barnes's talk, the SWP leader correctly stated that the US imperialist victory in Iraq helped expose the political bankruptcy of the Stalinists, the social democrats, the Greens and most centrist groups. These groups act out of fear towards the power of US imperialism, Barnes said, and are now more energized than ever to engage in lesser evil politics.
The Socialist Workers Party, on the other hand, will field a slate of candidates in the 2004 campaign that will present a program of independent working class political action. Barnes announced that this campaign will in part discuss the questions raised by a "great debate" that has begun in the international workers movement, a debate over the strategic questions of the working class line of march towards state power and how to defend gains by the working class under attack by imperialism. Barnes said that what has caused this debate is the latest imperialist campaign of provocations and threats against the Cuban Revolution.
COSMOS LEFT welcomes this debate. Indeed, the stated purpose of "What Is to Be Done" is to further that debate and stimulate a much needed exchange of ideas in the international labor movement. However, when COSMOS LEFT attempted to engage Comrade Barnes in this debate by asking questions at the March 23rd meeting (see below), the SWP leader responded by contemptuously dismissing those questions and then barring me from the June 7th public meeting at Hunter College. If the SWP is going to participate in a true debate, it needs to show a higher tolerance for opposing views than that.
COSMOS LEFT encourages readers to visit the Militant's Web site and learn about key working class struggles, including campaigns that defend the rights of immigrant workers like Roger Calero and political prisoners like the Cuban 5 and Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti. COSMOS LEFT also urges readers to support the Socialist Workers Party candidates in the 2004 election and learn more about their independent working class political campaign.
In so doing, you may want to ask the SWP candidates to comment on September 11. As usual, Barnes's June 7th talk did not mention one word about the central role September 11 has played in Bush's war propaganda. The O'Neill/Manuel article can only manage, "Along with trying to hypnotize working people with their foreign policy course..." A vital component of that hypnosis is the fear factor emanating from 911 that Bush has successfully exploited. The Militant has barely mentioned September 11 since its occurrence, apparently believing to do so automatically strips a Marxist party of historical materialism and replaces it with the dreaded mantle of "conspiracy theories."
September 11 is a subversive problem for the rulers. Communists should not treat the terrorist attacks like the plague. Communists should concretely explain why September 11 is another reason we need to replace this capitalist government with one that represents the working class. We cannot trust that this capitalist regime can protect us. Communists should be able to have intelligent discussions with workers about the evidence that points to governmental complicity and/or a military standdown regarding the September 11 attacks; about Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin, and Pearl Harbor.
COSMOS LEFT barred from SWP Public Meeting
June 7, 2003--Today COSMOS LEFT was prevented from attending a public meeting of the Socialist Workers Party that was held at Hunter College in New York City. The event featured a talk by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes entitled, "To the victor go the spoils: Appearances and reality of world politics; Prospects for a revolutionary movement today."
The meeting was originally scheduled for May 18th, but was postponed on that day according to a notice on the front page of the online Militant. The next week's edition posted the rescheduled meeting date, June 7th. However, this week's online Militant curiously omitted any mention of the June 7th Hunter College event. When I called the Militant yesterday for clarification, the representative was rudely evasive.
I tried to dismiss the notion that the SWP would bar me as paranoia, but I had sharply challenged Barnes after his March 23 speech [described below in "Review of Jack Barnes' March 23 Speech: The working-class response to imperialism's assault on Iraq and deepening world depression"], and his terse and arrogant responses to my questions were not good signs. In fact, they were confirmation of the advanced disease state of the SWP leadership.
My intervention at that March 23 meeting was not disruptive. I attempted to engage in a sharp exchange of ideas, to let the SWP know that not all of its readers were mindless hacks incapable of independent thought. I raised valid political points which were distorted and not fully responded to.
But that apparently was too disruptive for the SWP leadership. The idea of anyone actually challenging Jack Barnes in public was more than the SWP can handle. The notion that Barnes might have to respond to challenging questions instead of the typical fawning by Party automatons drove the leadership to instruct its security detail outside of Hunter College to inform this writer that he was not welcome inside.
A relevant question is whether the strange absence of any mention of this meeting on the Militant's Web site was related to the SWP's decision to bar COSMOS LEFT. This was originally billed as a public meeting. Did this change? The SWP security person who stopped me implied that the public character of the meeting had not changed--only I was not welcome. Then, why not publicize the event on the site? They still could have prevented my entrance with the security team that was waiting for me.
I am not the first worker-bolshevik to be purged by this leadership, and will not be the last. Serious differences and falling outs in the revolutionary camp are nothing new. Lenin and Trotsky despised each other for many years before they united politically in 1917. In the end, the masses themselves will decide the issues raised on "What Is to Be Done."
For 23 years I was a loyal supporter of the SWP, a relationship that is described in some detail in the opening chapter of "An American Worker in Tiananmen Square." Political differences have emerged only in the last several years, a development that is chronicled on this page. They have been honest political differences which the SWP has never attempted to seriously respond to. Attempts to communicate in writing were rebuffed and ignored by the Party. Attempts to discuss these issues in public were met with derision, non-answers, and now a rupture in relations.
There has been no dialogue, no attempt to counter my political points. Barnes's answer is swift censorship in the tradition of Stalinism. This comes as no shock: when an organization junks Trotsky and his Permanent Revolution theory, one shouldn't be surprised if Stalinism starts creeping in.
Any organization has the right to police its own meeting and take steps to guarantee the safety and security of its functioning. But the physical barring of an individual is a draconian measure reserved for those people who truly pose a serious threat to the meeting. To suggest that I posed such a threat is absurd and without foundation. The only "threat" I represent is an independent mind capable of asking tough questions that need answering and debate within the revolutionary camp.
The SWP appears to be in internal disarray. Last month, Argiris Malapanis wrote an article that directly rebuked the prior week's Militant that stated the Iraq war did not represent a major defeat for the Iraqi working class. Malapanis's criticism dovetailed with COSMOS LEFT's views that have been expressed on this page. Perhaps my questions at the March 23rd meeting struck a chord with SWP members in the audience. Perhaps those same arguments had been expressed internally in the Party. Perhaps COSMOS LEFT was barred because Jack Barnes did not want COSMOS LEFT to serve as a pole of attraction for SWP members.
In any event, to physically prevent me from attending was an outrageous attack on democratic rights. That's exactly the kind of tactic that Stalinists employed against members of the Socialist Workers Party in the 1920s and '30s.
As readers can see upon reading this page, COSMOS LEFT has encouraged readers to visit the Militant's site, read it regularly, support labor struggles that the SWP is involved in and builds solidarity for, and defend Roger Calero and other political prisoners like the Cuban 5. My differences with the SWP leadership have not altered my support for the Party's program and respect for its legacy and accomplishments.
COSMOS LEFT will analyze Barnes' June 7th talk when the Militant publishes its account of the SWP leader's remarks. Thanks to the Internet, this voice will not be silenced by the SWP or anyone else.
A Critique of the Militant's Coverage of the Iraq War
"Cowardly adaptation to the most reactionary, right-wing forces."
Before exploring the weaknesses of the Militant articles, it's important to review where the SWP has been right on the Iraq war. Unlike the Stalinists in Workers World, the SWP was correct in explaining that ANSWER's be-all and end-all strategy of organizing mass demonstrations with the slogan, "Stop the War Before it Starts" was disorienting and setting millions of demonstrators up for demoralization when the reality of the imperialist victory set in. The SWP did a good job explaining the class dynamics behind the Iraq war, how it was an inter-imperialist war as well as a war against an oppressed semi-colonial nation, how it resulted from the internal contradictions and deepening crises of world capitalism, causing heightened antagonisms among the leading imperialist powers for control of the natural resources that run the capitalist economy, made more important as profit rates decline and a world depression unfolds.
The Party was also right in warning antiwar forces not to have illusions in German or French imperialism, as they opposed Bush for their own capitalist interests; nor to have illusions in the United Nations, which is a tool of US imperialism as long as it's useful and will be tossed away when it's not.
Finally, the Socialist Workers Party's position that the only effective strategy to oppose imperialist wars in this epoch is to organize the working class struggles that are unfolding and build a mass socialist movement with the aim of establishing a workers and farmers government. The fight against capitalist wars requires a political program that is anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and internationalist--not pacifist or patriotic or nationalist.
As this Web site shows, COSMOS LEFT had no problems with the Militant on these political points. It was the Militant's sectarian stance, the tone of its coverage of the antiwar demonstrations, and its early failure to report on or mention the actions before they occurred, that troubled COSMOS LEFT.
The tone permeating the Militant's coverage of the Iraq war has been sterile and ossified, lacking revolutionary proletarian humanity. The Militant erroneously believes that to express a trace of this working class humanity is to cave into maudlin bourgeois sentimentality. Rubbish.
After describing the US and UK's battles to take Baghdad and Basra, Koppel writes, "The U.S. and British armies have killed thousands of Iraqi troops in these assaults."Written like a two-bit bourgeois news service. Dry, stale, ossified. Read the World Socialist Web Site or marxist.com's accounts of these battles. There you will find more in-depth accounts of the human toll behind that sterile Militant formulation. Those were tens of thousands of Iraqi workers and peasants in uniform, comrades. Those were wholesale slaughters of our class that just took place, but you'd never know it from the Militant.
"After a week that seemed like a cakewalk, US and British forces met some resistance, having to regroup and send reinforcement to the south."
That's a strange, misleading, and even inaccurate sentence. The Iraqi resistance began to manifest itself the weekend of March 22-23, a fact SWP leader Barnes was acknowledging in the March 23rd talk analyzed in the essay below. The "cakewalk" came at the end of the military campaign, and even then the situation was more complex for that term to be accurate. Most of the resistance, ragtag and futile as it was, occurred earlier in the southern and central cities of Umm Qasr, Basra, Nasiriyah, and Najaf. Basra alone took over two weeks for British forces to conquer. This was no cakewalk. The US expected the war to be over in days. THAT would have been a cakewalk.
No, there was no popular uprising, as the Militant correctly notes. But it was more complex than the Militant's "some resistance from the government's paramilitary Fedayeen." First, much of the resistance in Basra, Umm Qasr, Nasiriyah, Najaf and even Baghdad was from irregular forces and armed civilians, not only the Fedayeen. Second, while futile, this resistance was heroic and inspired the oppressed all over world, particularly the Iraqi farmer who downed an Apache helicopter with his Czech rifle. It is elementary and obligatory for a communist paper to report this. It is one thing to be sober about the relationship of class forces. It is another to lace your newspaper with pessimism and misplaced praise for the imperialist warmakers.
Part of this undue praise for the imperialists on the part of the Militant was giving Washington too much credit in avoiding civilian casualties. While it's true the US was well aware the political costs of the invasion would be lower to the extent civilian casualties were minimized, the Militant is almost effusive in its praise of Washington for allegedly achieving that objective. It quotes NY Times reporter John Burns's account that journalists visiting the sites [Baghdad's telephone exchanges] that "in almost every case the missiles or bombs used appeared to have struck bull's-eyes in the roofs."
Given the treachery, cowardice, and bankruptcy of the Iraqi leadership, plus the fact that the Iraqi military had been essentially disarmed, the resistance that was put up by the Iraqis was heroic and will not be forgotten. Frankly, the Militant's downplaying of this reality is an insult to Iraq's working people.The Militant's account of the widespread civilian casualties can only be described as perfunctory. "Information compiled from dozens of TV and other international media reports indicated that, as of April 8, at least 900 Iraqi civilians and as many as 9700 Iraqi soldiers had been killed in the assault."
Under the headline, "Invaders try to avoid civilian casualties," the Militant says, "Some of the US missiles and bombs have civilian targets, including a working class neighborhood and a market in Baghdad on March 26 and 28, respectively, leaving dozens killed and sparking anger among local residents. In other instances, US troops did not hesitate to shoot with heavy weapons at civilian vehicles that did not immediately heed orders to stop at checkpoints, killing a number of unarmed women and children in the process."
Even non-communist journalists depicted a much more accurate sense of the imperialist-inflicted civilian slaughter than the Militant did. Read John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Wayne Madsen, Chris Floyd, Al-Jazeera. Visit Counterpunch, truthout.org, and Information Clearing House. It is in such publications you will get a feel for the devastation and carnage caused by the Anglo-American aggression.
The Militant claims "it is clear that US officials have been seeking to avoid massive Iraqi civilian casualties--in contrast with the 1990-91 assault, where Washington and London slaughtered at least 150,000 people. Unlike the indiscriminate, sweeping bombings unleashed then, in Baghdad the missiles have mostly been aimed at government buildings and military targets."
The thousands of Iraqi dead civilians and thousands more maimed would take exception to the Militant's claim that Washington went out of its way to spare civilians. The US dropped four 2,000-pound bunker blusters on a residential block to kill Hussein, killing 14 civilians. Was that an example of Washington trying to limit civilian casualties, comrades?
The WSWS reported: "Confirmed civilian casualties already number in the thousands. Hospitals are admitting 100 patients an hour. They are awash in the blood of women and children hit by fire, cluster bombs and shrapnel from cruise missiles. Overworked surgeons are performing amputations without anesthesia and lack even water to clean wounds. Corpses are stacking like cords of wood. the roads to Baghdad are littered with the burnt-out hulks of civilian vehicles, their passengers lying dead in the road beside them. These killings are calculated and premeditated. Once the US military encountered unexpected resistance from both Iraqi soldiers and civilians in the opening days of the invasion, the order was given to implement a policy of mass slaughter."
None of this was reported in the Militant. Nothing on how US troops killed over a dozen reporters. Not a word about the shelling of the Palestine Hotel or the targeting of Al-Jazeera. Nothing about US warplanes dropping cluster bombs on villages like Hilla, killing 33, mostly women and children, and wounding 310. The Militant states that, "So far the imperialist forces have not destroyed the capital's infrastructure, which would lead to a rapid health crisis from lack of electricity and running water."
Many parts of Baghdad are in ruins. From the WSWS: "On top of the loss of life inflicted on the Iraqi people, many of their cities and towns have been devastated. The power generation and communication infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. Water and drainage mains have been ruptured, cutting off water supplies and flooding suburbs with raw sewage. Bridges, highways and hundreds of government and civilian buildings have been reduced to rubble, along with hundreds of houses and office buildings."
The Militant continued its whitewashing of Washington's crimes: "The imperialist armies have been going out of their way to appear concerned about the 'humanitarian' situation. In southern cities, where the fighting between the invading forces and the regime's paramilitary combatants has led to critical conditions for the civilian population, US and British troops have made demonstrative moves to offer residents water and food."
What a bizarre formulation for a party that claims to be blocking with Iraq and calling for the military and political defeat of Washington. The Militant's line falsely echoes the bourgeois press here: the civilians were threatened equally by the imperialist and the Iraqi armies; the humanitarian crisis in Basra was equally caused by Bush and Hussein, but Bush came to the rescue with aid. This is rubbish. The shortage of food, water and medical supplies that reached critical proportions in Basra was caused by the imperialist invasion, not by the Iraqis. The Brits actually blackmailed Basra's residents, promising supplies only if they revolted against the regime. So the imperialists engineer the crisis by invading, blackmail the citizens, then turn around and play saviors with relief from the crisis they caused. And the Militant, shamefully, assists them in this endeavor.
The Militant continued its praise of Donald Rumsfeld with a section called, "'Rumsfeld doctrine' critics left in the dust." As this callout indicates, the SWP is almost in awe of the military success orchestrated by Rumsfeld: "Washington's successes on the Iraqi battlefield pushed back the carping by retired generals and liberal critics of the Bush administration's military strategy."
The Militant leaves out the criticism from active field commanders like Lt. Col. Wallace, whose quote, "This wasn't the enemy we war-gamed for" is destined to go down in history.
The Militant dismisses this, and tries to explain away Washington's early difficulties by saying, "The resistance in southern Iraqi cities, however, while not expected by US officials, was limited largely to guerrilla harassment by the regime's paramilitary forces. There has been no evidence of massive popular resistance, despite the anger of many working people at the hundreds of civilian deaths and thousands of serious injuries caused by US-British bombings, and at the severe hardships caused by the past 12 years of imperialist economic sanctions."
The Militant is deliberately downplaying the Iraqi resistance that occurred in the south, just as it deliberately downplayed the strength of the global antiwar movement from the beginning. Read Patrick Martin's March 25th "Iraqi resistance shatters US propaganda of 'liberation' war" at WSWS for a more accurate discussion of the initial Iraqi resistance in the south, described by one US pilot as a "hornet's nest" in which Iraqi fire came from "all sides."
What broke the backs of the poorly led Iraqis was the overwhelming air superiority of the imperialists, not the brilliant military tactics of Rumsfeld and Franks. Reading the Militant one gets the impression we're talking Napoleon and Hannibal here. We're not.
No, there was no "massive popular resistance" from the Iraqis. Given the treacherous and bankrupt leadership they were saddled with, how could there be? There was no socialist revolution in Iraq, as there had been in Korea and Vietnam; no revolutionary leadership possessing a genuine social and political base due to far-reaching land reform measures. What is the Militant's point here?
Koppel even finds time to heap praise on Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, the Central Commander officer who gave daily briefings on the war, who "won praise in the big-business media for not having lost his cool in face of hostile and often ignorant questions from liberal journalists."
Koppel does not provide one example of these allegedly "ignorant" questions, but at least some of them raised valid issues and criticisms about the conduct of the war and the misleading, erroneous claims by Washington. What liberal journalists, Comrade Koppel? Isn't the "big-business media" lavishing the praise on Brooks composed of liberal journalists as well? Brooks may have won praise from some quarters in ruling class circles, though the Militant provides no specifics, but he certainly has earned well-deserved contempt and ridicule as the joker who held up a deck of cards representing the 55 Iraqi government leaders on Washington's most wanted list.
Missing from the Militant's glowing account of Rumsfeld's military genius is the fact that he paid Republican Guard generals huge sums of cash and gold not to fight. This is emerging as the central reason Washington took seized Baghdad as easily as it did.
The April 21 Militant editorial took up many of Koppel's themes. "The US armed forces . . . are winning support among many Iraqis in the process." This is the kind of misleading spin that could have been written by a State Department flunky. Even at the time it was written there was plenty of evidence that the situation was more complex than Koppel's sweeping assertion. While some Iraqis have illusions in the imperialists, and as always there are collaborators, and many Iraqis are just traumatized, it should have been clear to Koppel that many Iraqis were seething with anger and humiliation and opposed to the US occupation.
Subsequent events have only confirmed this is so, and the April 28 Militant was forced to cover the unrest in Mosul that resulted in at least 10 deaths from US fire; the 20,000-strong protest in Baghdad that united Sunnis and Shiites; the Shiite mobilizations in the south; and the chaos and looting in Baghdad, which the Militant characteristically understated.
These initial struggles already refute the Militant's April 21 editorial, which stated that "resistance to the US-British trampling of Iraq's sovereignty, however, has been minimal, and is not likely to change in coming months."
Then came another bizarre formulation. "That is not because the Iraqi toilers are incapable of fighting. They have long been disarmed politically, relegated to the sidelines, and forced to act out of fear by a regime that has run a police-party state for 40 years. For that reason, the unfolding imperialist occupation of Iraq is not a major defeat for the working class. That defeat came long ago. It was registered in the bloody counterrevolution of his dictatorial regime in the 1970s and subsequent decades--with the aid of Washington, Paris, and Moscow."
How's that? The unfolding imperialist occupation of Iraq is not a major defeat for the working class? What a bankrupt political formulation! Yes, the US-imposed dictatorship of Hussein was a huge defeat for the Iraqi workers, as Washington used Hussein to crush the Iraqi Communist Party. And, in weakening the Iraqi working class, it certainly paved the way for future defeats. But to say what just happened to Iraq's working people is not a bloody defeat was too much even for Militant staff writer Argiris Malapanis.
In a reply to a reader in the April 28 Militant, Malapanis writes, "The US-British victory in Iraq and occupation of the country by imperialist troops is a blow to working people. That's why the statement made in the front-page editorial in last week's Militant, 'The unfolding occupation of Iraq is not a major defeat for the working class. That defeat came a long time ago...in the bloody counterrevolution that brought Saddam Hussein to power,' is wrong. It contradicts the editorial stance of the paper. . .which is based on long-held positions of the communist movement."
Thank you, Comrade Malapanis. Hopefully this means a rigorous internal discussion is occurring in the Socialist Workers Party. Malapanis reminded the Militant how in 1938 Trotsky summarized the Bolshevik position in an article called "Lenin and imperialist war," which stated quite clearly that "in a struggle between a civilized, imperialist, democratic republic and a backward, barbaric monarchy in a colonial country, the socialists are completely on the side of the oppressed country notwithstanding its monarchy and against the oppressor country notwithstanding its 'democracy.'"
This is precisely one of the main problems COSMOS LEFT has had with the Militant in its coverage of the Iraq war--that sometimes it's hard to tell if the Militant is defending the oppressed semicolonial nation against imperialist attack.
We encourage any debate that may be taking place within the SWP, and hope that it extends to a reconsideration of the Party's rejection of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. COSMOS LEFT believes that is where the SWP began losing its bearings.
COSMOS LEFT encourages readers to participate in this discussion. One glorious day, when the US working class breaks from the two-party capitalist shell game and charts an independent political course, American workers will join this debate too.
Review of Jack Barnes' March 23 Speech: "The working-class response to imperialism's assault on Iraq and deepening world depression"
March 30-April 1, 2003--On Sunday, March 23, 2003, COSMOS LEFT attended an important meeting of the Socialist Workers Party held for the last time in the West St. building that long housed the party's national office and Pathfinder Press printing operations. The SWP is selling that building, which once featured a brilliant revolutionary mural, and moving their offices to a Garment Center location. The meeting featured a talk by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes entitled "The working-class response to imperialism's assault on Iraq and deepening world depression."
COSMOS LEFT has been critical of aspects of the Militant's coverage and orientation toward the mass demonstrations protesting US aggression against Iraq, as shown by several sharply worded letters to the Militant printed below. In recent weeks, there has been been a palpable shift in the SWP's position in that the Militant has encouraged workers to attend the antiwar actions being organized, a vast improvement over the prior stance where the Militant wasn't even mentioning the mass demonstrations beforehand.
The Barnes presentation was particularly timely, as the meeting was taking place one day after the historic March 22 march against the war. COSMOS LEFT had noticed the Militant tables in Washington Square Park on Saturday, maintaining their distance from the standoff with the cops, Party members conducting their socialist agitation through bullhorns.
Overall, Barnes's talk was excellent and made several critical points that readers and all workers should seriously consider. "Wars don't change the underlying trends of politics. The curves of capitalist development are determined by deeper laws of the class struggle." Wars are a continuation of politics by other means, Clausewitz once said, which is another way of saying that wars accelerate the intensification of the class struggle. No war can change which class rules, Barnes said, but war does accelerate, like nothing else does, the weaknesses of classes, and can cause shifts that were unimaginable before the war.
Barnes made the point that what we are seeing is a resurrection of the interimperialist conflicts that were behind the first two imperialist slaughters of the last century, and that the logic of the current war is toward another interimperialist world war.The SWP leader correctly warned that Washington's threats to use nukes against Iraq along with the growing proliferation of nuclear weapons ensures that they will be used again.
Barnes then predicted an upsurge in support for the war as the US and British body count goes up, a point that will be discussed shortly. Yellow ribbons to "support our troops" are also on the way if they hadn't already started (which they had). It was only Sunday, March 23, but it was already clear that the Iraqis were going to fight hard for their homeland and not roll over for the invaders. Barnes said that the days ahead would be bloody and costly for the "coalition," but that contrary to all the chatter, this was not a shock to Pentagon brass and the rulers. They knew it would be a tough fight--they just didn't tell the troops.
Barnes correctly predicted that the surgical strikes would be replaced by massive bombings, and that the war of liberation would become a slaughter. He explained that at the end of the gulf war, Bush Sr. and the ruling class blinked. They thought that by stopping, they could keep the alliance intact and expand it to return finish the job. (COSMOS LEFT agrees but believes there's another dimension to this, namely, the Vietnam syndrome. Washington didn't want to unnecessarily put that to the test by risking large scale casualties in any urban warfare in Baghdad.)
Barnes explained that the US rulers laid the foundation for another attack on Iraq during the 1990s' boom. The boom's ending further intensified interimperialist antagonisms as the world moved into depression and Clinton proposed Homeland Security and a domestic military command structure. Despite the "prayerful buying of stocks" that greeted the onset of the war, Barnes stated, we are in the beginning of a world depression.
As Barnes noted, it's a good thing the stock market wasn't open over the weekend, because the news was already grim from the battlefield with reports of fierce resistance by Iraqi soldiers and civilians. Sure enough, the day after the meeting, the market dropped 300 points.Barnes noted that under the weight of growing trade, diplomatic and military conflicts among the imperialist powers, institutions like the UN, NATO and the European Union are shattering before our eyes. He discussed the growing rift between the French and English capitalists, and how the latter refused to dissolve the pound into the euro, the new currency dominated by the German mark and French franc, thereby giving up the advantage to any ruling class of having a national currency. Barnes also said that the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq guarantees that London's armed forces are being "blooded and wed together" with Washington's. This is true, but even here the SWP is being too superficial and ignoring cracks in the iron-clad alliance of the US and UK. The Militant should tell its readers about complaints from some British capitalists already that American companies are hogging all the spoils and snaring all the contracts for rebuilding Iraq. And that "blooded and wed together" marriage between US and UK soldiers may need counseling if more incidents occur like what happened 35 miles north of Basra last week, when one British soldier was killed and three more were seriously wounded after an American anti-tank aircraft opened "friendly" fire on them.
Lance Corporal of Horse Steven Gerrard, who survived the attack, said: "There was a boy of about 12 years old. He was no more than 20 metres away when the Yank opened up. There were all these civilians around. He had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy. He'd just gone out on a jolly."
Lieutenant MacEwen, another survivor, added: "After this I am quite pleased to be going home. 'Blue on blue" has always been one of my biggest fears. It is something that my friends and family joked about. 'Don't worry about the Iraqis, it's the Americans you want to watch.' "
That "blooded and wed together" marriage will be a rocky one if too much British blood is shed because of trigger-happy US troops. Bush's coalition of the willing is nothing of the sort, Barnes explained, noting that of the 35 nations allegedly participating in this coalition, 15 remain anonymous. Apparently, "'willingness' is not a free act in class society," Barnes remarked.
Barnes explored the background to the bitter divisions between French and US imperialism, particularly as they are playing out regarding Iraq. As imperialists have done for over 100 years, they are fighting over the world's booty, in this case, the colonial prize of Iraq--the oil in its ground and its strategic position in the Middle East.
Barnes explained that the economic ties between France and Iraq, worth billions of dollars, are key factors in the sharpening rivalry between France and the US. American companies have been shut off from the gravy train for the last 12 years, while the French capitalists have all the contracts. Even more important than Iraqi's oil to US imperialism, however, is that defeating Iraq would protect the monopoly position of the dollar as the currency used in oil transactions. Iraq broke from OPEC in 2000 and began accepting euros for their oil. Iran may also switch to the euro for oil, just one reason why that country is in the cross hairs of Washington's war criminals. Sorry about those errant cruise missiles, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
Barnes opined that if the US wins in Iraq, it will try to establish puppet regimes in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia and reshape the entire Middle East to its liking. We will take this up shortly.
Barnes ended by asserting that while Washington's unchallenged economic supremacy is coming to an end, the result of the unfolding depression and the structural crisis of capitalism. Its reliance on military supremacy is compensation for its relative economic weakness and decline. This fact gives the working class struggles taking place today particular significance, like the fight by UFCW meatpackers in the Midwest and the support by fighting workers to Roger Calero's defense campaign against the government's attempt to deport him.
As communist workers deepen their involvement in workers struggles, Barnes explained, "we need to find ways of discussing with others the dynamics of capitalist politics, including its tendency toward more violence and the use of extralegal gangs by the bosses." Barnes said that over time workers will recognize the need to build organize strike pickets and defense guards, along the road of organizing a revolutionary struggle for state power. The SWP leader said that many antiwar protesters young workers can be won to the communist movement through their own experiences in the class struggle and through reading and studying Marxism.
Overall, an excellent talk with valid points. But I had a few problems with aspects of the SWP leader's presentation. Barnes, following up James Harris's earlier report on the March 22 demonstration, downplayed the significance of the protests, misrepresented what happened at Washington Square Park and maintained its sectarian, workerist approach to the demonstrators.
Harris, Barnes and the April 7 Militant completely misrepresented what happened at Washington Square that Saturday, and its significance. They skipped over the numbers and militancy of the demonstrators and their defiance of the cops and the state's authority. The SWP fails to mention that the cops twice had to make tactical retreats from streets surrounding the park. There were too many demonstrators that day. Waves of protesters kept coming flowing down the street that borders the park on its north side, bolstering the ranks of the protesters challenging the cops on the west side of Washington Square.
"They just kept coming and coming. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before." I thought of this quote from a recent antiwar march in Athens as I watched demonstrators pour into Washington Square on March 22. It's also almost word for word how a US marine described an offensive by Iraqi soldiers.
But according to the Militant, it was the other way around. "The police presence around the park continued to grow. The situation remained largely peaceful, unlike the February 22[?] [they must mean February 15, which was a stationary rally] march during which cops were very provocative. In the evening, riot-gear-clad police closed in on the crowd, rounding up and arresting 91 protesters."
Just before that paragraph, the Militant said of the March 22 Battle for Washington Square Park, "Instead of a closing rally, a NYPD tape recording announcing that 'the march is now over' greeted the successive waves of tens of thousands who arrived at Washington Square Park, the end point of the demonstration. Many did not take the NYPD adviced and stayed for a while in the park, where political organizations set up literature tables, while musicians and street-theater groups entertained the crowds."
Interesting how the Militant leaves out the fact that protesters answered the cops' "The march is over. Please leave the area in an orderly fashion" with their own retort of "The war is over, please leave Iraq immediately." This is an illuminating example of how the Militant is mischaracterizing these actions from a sectarian, workerist perspective."
"Many did not take the NYPD's advice and stayed for a while in the park." That was the Militant's spin on the inspiring standoff that took place between demonstrators and the cops in the Battle for Washington Square Park. Workers reading the Militant's account of the day would have a completely inaccurate understanding of what happened.The SWP seems to be going out of its way in describing the various pro-war rallies taking place around the country. In New York's March 22 march, the Militant mentioned the group of 50 pro-war demonstrators that showed up to challenged the many tens of thousands opposing the war.
This tendency to almost stand in awe of the rulers showed up in another Barnes formulation. As the Militant reported Barnes's remarks, "If Washington gets the victory it is driving toward, it will be in a position to threaten and shape many of the semicolonial governments of the gulf region." Yes, that's obviously Washington's objective. But this is too one-sided, simplistic and superficial a formulation. It ignores the instability and guerrilla style resistance that awaits the US in Iraq following its Pyhrric victory, as well as the revolutionary convulsions throughout the entire region and in countries like Indonesia that are already under way in response to the US aggression.
As has been written, the US faces a Gaza-like occupation the size of California. A US "victory" will only expose Washington's weaknesses and growing internal contradictions. Barnes makes it sound like all the other semi-colonial governments will fall like dominoes after Iraq is conquered, but the reality is somewhat more complicated.
Barnes and the Militant sometimes come off as sounding too much in awe of Washington. Barnes, obviously an admirer of Rumsfeld's style, stated that Rumsfeld has emerged as the most effect spokesperson for the US ruling class. While this may be true, and a communist leader has the right to harbor professional respect for a military commander of the enemy class, one wishes that the Militant would spend more time exposing Rumsfeld on the facts before the working class instead of almost gushing in praise of him.
And while listening to Barnes rail against Chirac and French imperialism, there's an impulse to think you're listening to Christopher Hitchens, in that they both, for different reasons and in different degrees, go easy on Bush while excoriating Chirac. The Militant tends to overestimate pro-French sentiment in the antiwar ranks in its coverage of the March 22 protest and other recent actions.
Some time ago, the World Socialist Web Site, in discussing the SWP's bizarre line on the 2000 election (Gore stole the election, not Bush), said that the SWP was guilty of "cowardly adapting to the most reactionary, right wing forces." COSMOS LEFT dismissed that conclusion at the time--perhaps prematurely.
COSMOS LEFT participated in the question-and-answer session that followed Comrade Barnes's talk.
"I have a 2 questions and a comment. My question is, you said that public support for the war will increase as more American soldiers are killed in combat. Can you reconcile that claim with the Vietnam syndrome? Are you agreeing with George Herbert Walker Bush, when he pronounced the syndrome dead 12 years ago?"
There's no question that the initial combat casualties will be, and have been, grist for the war propaganda mill. But the universal consensus--from imperialist ideologues to communists--is that substantial losses on the battlefield for Washington translate into eroding support for the war among Americans.
Barnes's comment contradicted that on the surface. I was asking for a clarification of the SWP's position on the Vietnam syndrome. After 911, Barnes said that the rulers needed more than 3,000 dead civilians to get over the Vietnam syndrome, that Washington needed public acceptance of thousands of dead soldiers to bury the syndrome for good. This is precisely the point of an April 4 WSWS article by Bill Vann analyzing right winger Peggy Noonan's recent comments in the Wall Street Journal. Vann writes, "they [decisive sections of the ruling elite] believe that such a blood sacrifice is the only way to break down public resistance to Washington's pursuit of US corporate interests around the world by means of military aggression."
That opportunity is at hand with the current war on Iraq. High level US military officials have been quoted as saying they're prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of dead GIs to achieve their objective. Americans' reaction to that prospect is now the question of questions.
But it was not a question that Comrade Barnes chose to answer. The SWP leader, whether by design or omission, ignored my main question and responded only to the second question and comment.
"My second question is, you predicted that Colin Powell would be the Democratic nominee for president in 2004 or 2008. Could you comment on the possible Democratic candidacy of Wesley Clark, former general and NATO commander? Clark may not be as effective a candidate as Powell for the rulers, but he's another military leader waiting in the wings."
During his talk Barnes predicted that Powell would be the Democratic nominee for president in 2004 or 2008--a provocative and astute observation. COSMOS LEFT wanted to hear the SWP leader's views on the prospective candidacy of Clark, another military leader who is seriously mentioned as a Democratic aspirant. Barnes scoffed at the question defensively. Clark is nothing, Barnes said, and the significance of Powell's candidacy is that he's African-American, not that he's a military figure.
That's true, Comrade Barnes, but in your presentation you did not mention the racial factor--you only referred to his military credentials. What's important about a former NATO commander's presidential candidacy to the working class and the revolutionary workers party is that it's another example of the rightist political trajectory of the Democratic Party. My last comment to the SWP national secretary was the only contentious point.
"While the Militant's coverage of the international antiwar protests has improved in recent weeks, you are still underestimating their significance. For example, this week's lead article, in discussing Turkey's March 1 vote that denied Washington the use of Turkish soil to invade Iraq from the north, doesn't even mention the 150,000 Turks who demonstrated outside the Parliament in Ankara while the vote took place."
In reply, Barnes contemptuously dismissed the importance of the protests in Turkey or anywhere else. He seemed defensive about the Militant's omission of the March 1 Ankara mobilization, saying he doesn't concern himself with what's in a Militant article or what isn't--a strange assertion given that a Leninist party's newspaper has always been considered the central organizing tool of worker-bolsheviks.
The significance of the Turkish antiwar protests in particular has been illuminated by the initial military difficulties Washington encountered because it was prevented from using Turkey as a base for a ground invasion of Iraq from the north. The solidarity shown by the Turkish proletariat toward the Iraqi toilers objectively aided Iraq and harmed imperialism's war drive. And the March 1 Ankara antiwar demonstration was directly inspired by the massive February 15 international protests. How a communist leader in the belly of the beast can dismiss this phenomenon is beyond COSMOS LEFT.
Barnes said that relations between the Turkish capitalists and US imperialism were more complicated than reducing everything to demonstrations. COSMOS LEFT is not reducing all politics to antiwar demonstrations when it criticizes the Militant for grossly underestimating their significance in the unfolding class struggle internationally.
As the World Socialist Web Site said in a April 1 article: "A movement that embraces millions of people all across the globe must have deep objective significance--all the more so as it emerged more or less spontaneously. . . .These demonstrations, which have developed almost spontaneously, independent of, and in opposition to, all the traditional political forces of the bourgeois establishment, can only be understood as the preliminary expression of the emerging internationalist and socialist response to the crisis of the world capitalist system."
Another audience member asked Barnes for his opinion on something she has been hearing lately--that the US was becoming a fascist country.
Barnes replied: "What do you say to someone who thinks that way?"
You patiently explain, as Lenin counseled, and give an intelligent Marxist analysis, Comrade Barnes, instead of dismissing the remark with contempt. You explain that fascism can only be imposed on the masses when the capitalist rulers have crushed the working class politically and dismantled their mass organizations. That has not happened yet, though the exploiting rich and their political stooges are working on it. Worker-bolsheviks should clarify the existing confusion among working people, not make fun of them.
It's not as if a person who mistakenly believes fascism has arrived is hallucinating or mentally unstable, as Comrade Barnes implied.
Many students and young workers are horrified at the unfolding police state engineered by Bush and Ashcroft: the illegal detentions and round-ups of Muslims and Arabs; the secret evidence; the Patriot Act and Total Information Awareness; the escalating campaign to criminalize free speech; the vicious scapegoating of Muslims; the censorship and intimidation of political dissent by a corporate/governmental controlled press; the hysteria surrounding terrorism a la Hitler's exploitation of the Reichstag fire; the super-patriotism that borders on master race lunacy; the jingoism and extreme nationalism; the militarism and expansionism; and, above all, the merging of corporations and the state.
Barnes seemed too cavalier about all this. Another questioner brought up the censorship of the Dixie Chicks following a member's comment that she was ashamed Bush was from Texas. Barnes joked about how he wasn't familiar with their music and how it was only the "middle one" who criticized Bush. But he said nothing about the fact that it is capitalists like Bush crony and Clear Channel boss Tom Hicks who are sponsoring the censorship campaign against the Chicks. Use all of the rope the capitalists give you to hang them with, Comrade Barnes.
Since its founding in 1928, the Socialist Workers Party has linked the American labor movement to the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution, and the Third International under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. It played a central role in the 1930s working class upsurge that resulted in the Congress of Industrial Organizations, including the 1934 struggle by Minneapolis truck drivers that catapulted the Teamsters into a powerful national union. Eighteen SWP leaders went to prison in 1943 for their principled proleterian internationalist opposition to the second world imperialist slaughter of the 20th century. The SWP did excellent bolshevik work in the maritime unions during the 1940s, and kept the historical continuity with the Russian Revolution alive during the extremely difficult conditions of the 1950s' reaction and witch hunt.
During the 60s, the SWP did exemplary communist work in the civil rights and women's movements. And one of the Party's finest hours was its work in organizing mass demonstrations against the Vietnam war that helped force Washington to withdraw in humiliation in 1975.
The SWP's unflinching defense of the Cuban Revolution from its inception has been unparalleled. It fully deserves the respect and support it has won from the international working class for its outstanding proletarian internationalism. The Party has also done outstanding solidarity work in support of the Nicaraguan, Grenadian, and El Salvadoran revolutionary movements. And at home, the SWP's support for every struggle by the working class and the solidarity it has built for key fights by meatpackers, machinists, airline workers and more has been admirable.
In 1983, the SWP under Jack Barnes's leadership reevaluated its position on the pre-1917 differences between Lenin and Trotsky and concluded that it was the former who was correct on the dynamics of socialist revolution in semi-colonial countries, and that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was sectarian and mistaken.
Barnes wrote a brilliant document articulating this profound departure from prior SWP doctrine entitled "Their Trotsky and Ours." The SWP had been founded as a Trotksyist party, the American section of the Fourth International. "Their Trotsky and Ours" was the political rationale for the SWP's junking of permanent revolution, the essence of Trotskyism. The SWP still considered Trotsky a brilliant revolutionary working class leader and one of the giants of Marxism, but it no longer considered itself "Trotskyist," preferring instead the "Leninist" label.
COSMOS LEFT initially brushed aside its problems with the SWP's new position. "Their Trotsky and Ours" raised many profound points that were long overdue for a fresh look and rigorous debate. Some of these issues are discussed in Chapter 1 of "An American Worker in Tiananmen Square" and Chapters 10 and 11 of "An American Worker in Tiananmen Square (part 2)" on this site.
Today, as COSMOS LEFT considers its differences with the SWP in recent years, an evaluation of the SWP's 1983 decision to junk permanent revolution is under way. When a party junks the most important programmatic and theoretical acquisition of an outstanding workers leader like Trotsky, trouble lies ahead.
COSMOS LEFT missed an early warning sign in the 1980s. While the SWP did an excellent job building support for important labor struggles like the P-9 meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota and continued its stellar defense of the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions, COSMOS LEFT thought the SWP was a little late in recognizing that the Sandinistas were retreating from a revolutionary perspective.
Still, I was rock solid with the SWP until its coverage of the 2000 election and how Bush suppressed and manipulated the Florida vote count and muscled his way to power. As the weeks went by and the Militant barely said a word about the treachery unfolding in that state, COSMOS LEFT discovered that the World Socialist Web Site was providing outstanding Marxist analyses on a daily basis.
Initially unaware that the WSWS had split from the Healyites, a British Fourth International tendency that believed the SWP had been infiltrated by FBI agents who helped murder Trotsky in Mexico, and that Barnes was also an FBI plant, COSMOS LEFT wrote several sharp polemics to the Militant regarding its 2000 election analysis (see "Socialists and the 2000 Election" below).
COSMOS LEFT categorically rejects the Healyite slander against the SWP leadership. My agreement with the WSWS on the 2000 election, its analysis of Bush and the Democrats, 911, and the imperialist aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, in no way signifies any endorsement of this wretched Healyite legacy. COSMOS LEFT urges readers to read the Militant, whose analysis of the serious weakness of the current largely pacifist and patriotic leadership of the antiwar movement holds up three weeks into the war. While the WSWS is playing an important role in building a Marxist culture in the US, COSMOS LEFT profoundly disagrees with the WSWS on Cuba and Fidel (they deny he's a communist), affirmative action (they oppose it as "identity politics"), and on how to transform the trade unions into instruments of revolutionary struggle. The Militant represents the best working class position concerning the Cuban Revolution, affirmative action, and the need to build a class struggle left wing in the US labor movement.
However, the Militant has been wrong on the 2000 election, September 11, Bush and the forces behind him, and now the invasion of Iraq.
Socialists and the Antiwar Movement
The following three letters were correspondence sent by COSMOS LEFT to the Militant and the World Socialist Web Site that raised criticisms of various aspects of their coverage of the unfolding antiwar movement.
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February 4, 2003
Editor, the Militant:
Patrick O'Neill was right to point out the flaw in reader Lombardo's formulation that the growing antiwar movement ". . . is all that is stopping the launching of war." O'Neill's articulation of the objective, materialist foundations for the imperialists' war drive was also correct, as was his point that antiwar protests alone will not stop the rulers from going to war against Iraq and elsewhere; a reflection of the current relationship of class forces nationally and internationally that dictate the working class is not yet strong enough to stop imperialist war.
However, O'Neill ignores the thrust of Lombardo's complaint with the Militant coverage--he doesn't "understand why the Militant has so little coverage of the antiwar movement." This has become typical of the Militant's polemical style--the "straw man" strategy of focusing on the easy, obvious mistake of critics but failing to answer their stronger, valid points.
It's just false for the Militant to so categorically, disparagingly, and glibly dismiss the importance of the burgeoning antiwar movement sweeping the entire world. The protests are causing political problems for the rulers; they are contributing to the diplomatic antagonisms among the imperialist camp; and they are deepening the questions and tactical rifts among the US capitalists.
These factors--along with the north Koreans throwing a monkey wrench into Washington's war plans by exposing its hypocrisy and double standards--are complicating matters for the imperialists by making them pay a higher political price for their aggression.
What Lombardo and others find incomprehensible about the Militant's coverage is how reserved, understated, and uninspired you are in the face of an amazing phenomenon taking place that you're missing completely: that despite a massive, unrelenting propaganda bombardment by the ruling class media, and so soon after 911 (another matter the Militant has erroneously treated as some historical footnote), half a million Americans are in the streets protesting US imperialist wars, along with millions more around the world. There's something happening here. . . and the Internet has much to do with it. Its organizing capacities are positively subversive for the rulers. The Internet is countering the capitalist media's stranglehold on dissemination of facts and truth.
The level of grass roots organizing going on is mushrooming to a level we haven't seen. Young people are leading the way. In October over 2,000 NYC area students walked out of class to rally and march near Union Square. In October 20,000 showed up in Central Park with no publicity surrounding the action. Are you not excited about this? Let alone the hundreds of thousands in DC and SF on Jan. 18, the former in frigid temperatures. You don't seem to be. The party now comes off as an ossified, workerist sect, jealousthat they're no long mobilizing masses into the streets against imperialist war and sniping at those forces that are.
Yes, it's a different period than the Vietnam war, and the Iraqis are not defending their nation with a socialist revolution or with a revolutionary leadership. But that doesn't mean mass mobilizations in the belly of the imperialist beast don't serve a purpose. They tell Bush and the rulers, the world's toilers, and US workers, that Bush doesn't possess support for his aggression, that we're not cowered or intimidated by the government's drive toward police state repression.
This is important, comrades; Bush was counting on perpetuating the image to the world that Americans were behind him. That's over. For God's sake, comrades, the whole world's been waiting for the American people to take to the streets and rise up and no to imperialist aggression, and it's happening on an unprecedented scale, and the Militant is on the sidelines, criticizing the pacifist layers and other illusions and weaknesses in the current movement.
I'm sure the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, are very interested and inspired by reports of huge protests in the US against Washington's policies.
Then there's the potential out there, comrades, the potential to build the revolutionary party. The legions of young people, fresh forces, eager to fight, receptive to revolutionary ideas and programs. And as Lombardo pointed out, the involvement of many trade unionists at this stage, before large scale war begins, was unheard of at this stage of the anti-Vietnam protests. Communists have a duty to get in there and actively agitate to win over these fresh forces, because communists are the only ones telling the truth that the only way to end imperialist wars is to fight for an anticapitalist, antiimperialist program.
So O'Neill never answered Lombardo's essential question: why does the Militant act as if the antiwar movement is of little importance?
But perhaps the most solid evidence that the growing antiwar movement is more important than the Militant is giving it credit for is the rulers' reaction to it. The redbaiting is escalating in its vitriol. Not just right wingers, "progressives" like Corn, Cooper, renegades like Hitchens, Gitlin, and others are foaming at the mouth over the success of the rallies and unleashing tirades against Workers World.
These are heady times, comrades. Ashcroft and his henchman could be coming for all of us before long. I think elemental proletarian solidarity dictates that the SWP should defend Workers World against the vicious redbaiting taking place that threatens all working people.
Whatever differences the SWP has with Workers World, and they are profound, can still be discussed in the pages of the Militant while you explain to workers the imperative of defending communist groups under attack.
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November 8, 2002
Editors, the Militant:
Since there was no time for a discussion period at Sunday's meeting ("Campaigning for Communism, Responding to Political Openings"), I'll take up in written form some of the points I wanted to make concerning the Militant's coverage of and the Party's orientation toward mobilizations protesting US imperialist wars.
It was good to see the Militant in DC at the October 26th demonstration. Given the fact the Militant had not mentioned a word about the national actions in Washington and San Francisco prior to the 26th, I wasn't sure if the Party's counterposition of its anti-imperialist strategy of sponsoring and participating in the Dreke and Cuban youth meetings and the Guadalajara OCLAE conference to that of participating in "antiwar" mobilizations would dictate a total abstention from October 26th. I think this counterposition is sectarian and workerist, and the SWP was wrong to ignore the demonstration prior to its occurrence.
At the meeting, Martin Koppel talked about the importance of the socialist press informing workers about the facts. This is precisely where the Militant has slipped in recent years, from the 2000 election (which I covered in several communiques at the time) to 911 to October 26th. Despite your disagreement with the march, and I'll get to that shortly, objectively the October 26 action was an event of international significance. Workers in the Dakotas, Tennessee, Iowa, Louisiana, New Mexico, etc., who rely on the Militant for information and FACTS, had no idea hundreds of thousands of people were saying no to a war against Iraq until after the fact. And they should have known about it. Working people all over the world were waiting for Americans to finally take to the streets to protest US aggression, as they have been doing in large numbers, including over 300,000 in London on September 28, another fact the Militant denied its readers the benefit of consideration.
Martin said that the SWP did not agree with the "pacifist, American, patriotic" perspective of October 26th. It's true that many rank and file marchers and grass roots organizations harbor these illusions, as was the case during the Vietnam war protests. However, the principal demands formulated by ANSWER were No War on Iraq, US out of the Middle East, solidarity with Iraqis and Palestinians, Money for Jobs, Not for War. That's what brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets on October 26th. Are you that uncomfortable with those demands, comrades? Wasn't there enough validity in those demands to give critical support to October 26th?
I stress critical, because I agree there are serious flaws in the leadership of October 26 and particularly in the muddle-headed principal demand: Stop the War Before it Stops! That leadership is not so much pacifist, American, or patriotic, however, as it is Stalinist--the Workers World Party, with all their class collaborationist baggage. So you should explain that to workers, educate about the Stalinist roots of WWP and why Stop the War Before it Stops was wrong because a) the war never really stopped, and b) the working class will not be strong enough to stop the imperialists from going to war. You intervene at the march with this revolutionary, proletarian internationalist perspective, explaining why the chief demand was wrong, what the way forward for working people is, etc.
You may reply, well, that's what we did. Yes, but it was a strange intervention--the Militant was the only paper at the rally whose propaganda was not specifically oriented to the historic event. Out of respect for the objective importance of the event, for the fact that the international working class has been waiting for protests against American militarism from within US borders, out of solidarity with the Iraqi workers and all the toilers in the Middle East under the gun, every other political tendency either had a lead front page headline or a political statement on how to oppose the coming war on Iraq. The Militant had a small article on the bottom left side of the front page called "U.S. holds war exercises in Kuwait and Qatar."
I’m sure the Militant tables did well at the demonstration. Everyone did well on October 26th. There were hundreds of thousands there, many young and revolutionary minded, open to revolutionary politics and Marxism. The Militant should have told workers beforehand the fact that a big demonstration has been called to demand no US attack on Iraq, and that while the organizers and some of the formulations had weaknesses, it was still important to be there with the Party's proletarian perspective. Then Militant readers would have been more aware, more factually informed, and could have benefited from the Party's valid analysis, instead of being left in the dark, like they are by the bourgeois press.
In doing absolutely nothing to build or even report on the march, in ignoring the fact that hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were headed to DC and San Francisco, the argument can be made that the SWP objectiveltried to derail October 26th. In not breathing a word about the action, then showing up and selling the Militant, the Party also leaves itself open to charges of opportunism.
I don't think the Iraqis or the Palestinians were thrilled upon learning the SWP did nothing to publicize a national action opposing US aggression against their countries.
And if workers have to rely on Arrin Hawkins and Betsy Farley’s reporting in the Nov. 11 Militant ("Demonstrators in Washington criticize U.S. policy on Iraq") for an accurate description of the October 26th DC action, they would have received only a slightly more truthful account than could be find in the NY Times coverage. The Times said "thousands"attended; the Militant made it to "tens of thousands." The Militant said similar protests were held in San Francisco and a number of other cities in the United States and other countries. The Times said "the rally was one of several held in American and foreign cities."Both papers failed to note that 100,000 mobilized in San Francisco.
The Militant’s article was purposely negative, stressing the pro-Democratic orientation of several speakers but ignoring the militant, anti-imperialist sentiments and spirit of the largely youthful crowd. Massive protests forced The Times to do a humiliating about-face and print a second account of the march four days later that was much closer to reality. I expect this kind of biased reporting from the Times. I don’t expect it from the Militant.
Comrade Barnes told the audience that sometimes the masses start marching whether the communist vanguard is prepared or not. Yes, and October 26th was one of those times. Barnes also commented on the phenomenon of the frog in the water and how sometimes we don't see the heat of the water coming up. But it's a little hard to be prepared and "knowledgeable in the battle" when your sectarian dogma blinds you to studying all the facts. And that's my point--in some ways the SWP leadership, by ignoring certain facts it doesn't want to deal with--Republican stooges using thuggish, brown-shirt tactics to shut down Miami-Dade County's recount; mounting and overwhelming evidence that elements of US intelligence and military were either complicit in 911 or ordered a stand-down; the October 26 march--is contributing to the misinformation and miseducation of workers and its own cadre.
But many in this world, including the author of these lines--did see--and feel--the heat of the water coming up while watching Bush seize power in the 2000 elections. "This is going to get ugly," I told people when he was inaugurated. The way this gang seized power, junking bourgeois democratic norms and using thuggish, extra-legal tactics and blatant fraud, suggested to me that Bush would intensify and accelerate the ruling class offensive.
But the Militant was not seeing or feeling the heat of the water. The Militant was still repeating the stale mantra that Bush would continue the bipartisan, antilabor course of Clinton. In my sharp polemics concerning the Militant's 2000 election coverage, I argued that Bush would accelerate and intensify the rulers' offensive against working people here and abroad. Yes, building on the foundation Clinton had prepared, but that what was on the agenda was not just a continuation of the bipartisan antilabor course, but an acceleration and intensification of it.
I could see the heat of the water rising during the first six months of Bush's administration. When Sen. Jeffords defected in June 2001, I wrote another letter to your office criticizing your blase coverage of another event that reflected the rapidly heating water.
Comrade Barnes' comment that if there was any conspiracy to murder Paul Wellstone, it came from the Democratic National Committee, was as absurd as the Militant's statement that it was Al Gore who tried to steal the election. (Earth to comrades: Yeah, Gore made a half-hearted attempt, but Bush actually did steal it.) Barnes's attempt at humor ignores a few FACTS that should cause any thinking person to rationally consider the possibility that this was a political assassination: the eerie similarity to Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan's death 2 years ago in a plane crash just before the election. As another Web site has pointed out, one might paraphrase Oscar Wilde here and say that to lose one senator is a misfortune, but to lose two senators, the same way, is positively suspicious.
Further, the suspicious circumstances of the plane's demise; the experience and skill of the 2 pilots; eyewitness accounts suggesting foul play; the fact that a plot was discovered to assassinate Wellstone in Colombia two years ago just before his visit to that co untry; past suspicious plane crashes in which US intelligence very likely played a role--Lockerbie, KAL 007, Hale Boggs and Dorothy Hunt over Alaska and 1972 and others, let alone the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy, LaMumba, Diem, etc; all of this, plus the current atmosphere of repression, war and right wing provocation, which has produced a series of murderous anthrax mailings that included attempts to kill Democrats Patrick Leahy and Senator Tom Daschle, undermine Comrade Barnes's cavalier, misplaced dismissal of possible foul play. This didn't appear to be overworked pilots flying Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper in a raging snowstorm. Reasonable people can ask legitimate questions whether Wellstone was assassinated. These bastards are quite capable of assassination, comrades, and you shouldn’t have to be reminded of that.
Once again the SWP is being overly simplistic and superficial in its analysis of the two capitalist parties, failing to detect the differences and antagonisms among bourgeois forces, and underestimating the neofascist elements connected to the Bush administration. Further, this whole glib, contemptuous stance of the Party rejecting any whiff of "conspiracies" from 911 to Wellstone's death is unscientific and ahistorical. All kinds of conspiratorial intrigues have occurred throughout the history of the class struggle.
What demarcates Marxists from "conspiracists" is that the former place these intrigues within the framework of the class struggle, while the latter elevate them as operating independently of class politics and above it. Why shouldn’t workers learn from the pages of the Militant that US and world history are replete with provocations, standdowns, assassinations, special ops, and staged terrorist attacks?
Couldn’t workers read Marxist analyses of the USS Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Levan incident and other accomplishments of the Mossad? Don’t you think workers would benefit from knowing about Operation Northwoods, the secret intelligence plan approved by the entire Joint Chiefs in 1962 that included plane hijackings, snipers, and the sinking of Cuban emigre ships, acts that would be blamed on Fidel in order to win public backing for an invasion of Cuba?
Shouldn’t workers be armed with the facts that have emerged surrounding 911? Isn’t this ammunition that can be turned around and used against the capitalists? Wouldn’t Lenin consider this rope that the imperialists are leaving for us to hang them with? Couldn’t workers benefit from an intelligent discussion in the Militant about the deadly chain of causality from US foreign policy in Afghanistan beginning in 1979 and culminating in 911? Shouldn’t workers know about the connections between the Bush and bin Laden families; about the politics of oil and gas pipelines and the role of Unocal and other oil companies; about the connections between the CIA, Pakistan, the Taliban and al Queda,;about all the specific warnings about 911 from the Russians, British, French, Germans, Filipinos, Israelis, about the CIA’s infiltration and monitoring of bin Laden and al Queda; about the FBI informant who was the roommate of Almihdhar and Alhazmi, the two alleged hijackers who lived openly in San Diego while they were on a CIA watch list; how the government lied about what they knew about Atta; how the FBI, CIA and NSA sabotaged the investigations of Zacharias Moussaoui; how Ashcroft was prevented from flying commercial aircraft in July 2001, about the strange events of the morning of 911 that can point to no other conclusion than there was a standdown ordered at a high military level; about the connections between the flight schools and the CIA; about the astronomical amount of call options bet on United and American stock days before 911 in the German bank of AB Brown, whose former director is now number 3 at CIA; about the strange case of John O’Neill, the former FBI counterterrorism chief in charge of investigating bin Laden who resigned in disgust over the Bush administration’s orders to lay off al Queda because of oil and Saudi considerations, and who died on his first day as chief of security at the World Trade Center.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but these are too many facts to deny your readers the benefit of consideration. Marxists can intelligently discuss these facts without lapsing into loony conspiracy theories. They are facts, part of the real world of sinister, shadowy intrigues that permeate the imperialist intelligence world, their nightmarish, Orwellian world. In ignoring them the Party leadership is contributing to the miseducation of its cadre and the working class.
With all of the above stench emanating from 911, for the Militant to devote its sole treatment of "conspiracies"to attacking Amiri Baraka’s "Somebody blew up America" was an outrageous, bankrupt exercise of intellectual dishonesty and one of the worst articles to ever disgrace the pages of the Militant.One doesn’t have to defend every formulation in Baraka’s poem or every aspect of Baraka’spolitics to hold that Brian Williams sounded more like Nation editor David Corn than a communist in his sneering, disparaging, glib dismissals of any hint of US government complicity or knowledge of 911. This is not the forum to factually dissect Williams’ literary hatchet job, but briefly, 1) Bush and other gang members did know, and it’s documented how they lied about what they knew beforehand; 2) Washington was warned by British, French, German and Russian intelligence about a pending terrorist plot to hijack planes and crash them into "symbols of national culture"; 3) there was massive betting in a German bank thatUnited and American Airlines’ stock would go down the week before 911; 4) the evidence mounts that the FBI and CIA did know much about the plot in advance and did sabotage any attempt to stop it, that they lied about the flight schools and that they had monitored and infiltrated bin Laden and al Queda.
The historical record--from the USS Maine to the Lusitania to the Reichstag to Pearl Harbor to the Gulf of Tonkin to Operation Northwoods--is filled with examples of staged terrorist attacks and provocations. It’s not a matter of "our" intelligence failing to protect "us" by failing to predict and prevent the attacks, or criticizing the Bush administration for being caught by surprise. One doesn’t haveto be a liberal to recognize the overwhelming evidence that high levels of the US government were either complicit in the terrorist attack or ordered a stand-down of air defense that morning. It’s another variant of the truthful formulation that the US rulers have turned this country into a bloody death trap. Lenin would expect communist parties in the US to use this rope that the capitalists are providing to help hang them with. Unlike many ex-members and friends of the Party who may share these criticisms, I’ve never opposed the turn to industry, I’m still with the Party on Cuba, on affirmative action, on the call for a workers and farmers government, on Palestine, on the view that the US lost the Cold War, on the revolutionary continuity from Lenin and the Bolsheviks through the first 5 years of the Comintern to Trotsky’s fight against Stalinism and his founding of the Fourth International, to Dobbs, Cannon, Skoglund, the Dunnes and the other outstanding comrades of the period. I support everysingle demand of the socialist campaign, the Dreke and Morales tour, the Party’s work in OCLAE and other anti-imperialist conferences. I’ve been inspired by all the victories, real and moral, of our class, from the Austin meatpackers to the Eastern machinists to the coal miners to the Dakota meatpackers. But I believe the Party can be active in thesestruggles and dispense with sectarian abstention and find time to give critical support to national actions that oppose any US attack on Iraq and call for US out of the Middle East.
Comrade Barnes said that since the world was pretty simple, the Militant didn’t need to provide a lot of analysis. It was getting it about right, and would continue in the same vein. I disagree. I think the Militant needs more--and better--analysis of many issues and events they're hearing much about in the bourgeois media but nothing in the pages of the Militant.
For the reasons discussed above the Party should look for ways to do a better job in educating workers. Instead of patting yourselves on the back for doing a great job, I think you should give serious consideration to criticism coming from outside the Party.
The Militant should stop censoring so many facts, and start applying Marxism to give scientific explanations to day to day issues and events, instead of leaving workers in the dark and even more subject to the ruling class media’s manipulation and misinformation.
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October 29, 2002
Editors, World Socialist Web Site:
"There is no greater mistake than the belief that the Democratic Party is an alternative for working people to the Republicans. This is a crucial political lesson of previous anti-war movements."
While I agree with the above quote and much of the rest of the excellent statement by the Socialist Equality Party that was distributed at the October 26th demonstration in Washington, DC ("A political strategy tooppose war against Iraq"), the sentences that followed concerning the lessons of the anti-Vietnam War movement are way off base:
"The mass movement against the Vietnam War ultimately and tragically failed to halt American militarism because it lacked a viable political perspective. Illusions in the Democratic Party kept the mass oppositionto the war safely within the channels of capitalist politics and the two-party system."
This is simply not true. The massive mobilizations that were organized in the US and internationally against Washington's criminal aggression in Vietnam did--along with the tenacity and fighting capacity of theVietnamese workers and peasants--force the US to withdraw. This was a huge political and military defeat for US imperialism that resulted in Vietnam's independence and unification. Over the years the Vietnamesethemselves have credited the international antiwar movement and the solidarity it built for contributing to the defeat of US imperialism and the liberation of their country from the yoke of imperialist aggressionand occupation. Given the class relationship of forces that existed at the time, the duty of communists in the US and elsewhere was to mobilize as many people in the streets as possible under the anti-imperialist slogans of "Out Now!", "Bring the Troops Home Now," "US Troops Out Now"--all demanding the total unconditional withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam.
The reason millions of Americans demonstrated against the war was precisely because communists who played a key role in organizing the protests did have the correct political perspective of mobilizing people independently of the two capitalist parties. Consciously waging a fierce political struggle to defeat the efforts of liberals and petty bourgeois radicals who did have illusions in the Democrats and did try to keep the mass opposition to the war safely within the two party capitalist system, communists successfully fought off the multi-issue, popular front proponents and led millions into the streets in a united front on the single issue of US out of Vietnam. People marched not in support of the Democrats, not in response to calls by Democrats to oppose the war, but in support of the anti-imperialist demand, "US Out Now!"
The fact that opportunistic Democratic politicians were speakers at some of the protests did not alter the anti-imperialist character of the demonstrations--something sectarian fools like the Spartacist League could never understand. And their presence did not mean that the mass opposition to the war was kept within the confines of bourgeois politics. The Democrats tailed the antiwar mobilizations; they didn't lead them.
The antiwar movement led by communists achieved the desired objective--forcing the US to withdraw from Vietnam in a humiliating defeat. It was not a tragic failure, an assessment most Vietnamese would no doubt share. No, it did not permanently halt American militarism, nor was it in business to accomplish that. Only a socialist revolution will abolish the US war machine, which was not possible given the relationship of class forces existing at the time. As communists built and led the massive demonstrations within the single-issue, united front framework discussed above, they forthrightly explained to workers that US militarism and imperialist wars will never end until the working class takes state power in a socialist revolution, abolishing thecapitalist mode of production for private profit and replacing it with production based on social and human needs according to a democratically organized plan.
This was the Leninist approach wielded by communists in imperialist countries during the Vietnam war: explaining this working class perspective; instilling proletarian internationalism; telling the truth about the Vietnamese revolution and the need for solidarity with working class struggles everywhere; forging unconditional solidarity with workers and peasants in semi-colonial countries fighting imperialist oppression; calling for the political and military defeat of US imperialism. In so doing, communists recruited the most class conscious and revolutionary minded of the antiwar cadre to revolutionary Marxism to build the communist movement and prepare for the day when the working class returned to the center stage of world politics.
We may be living through such a period today. While the SEP is correct in noting the minimal organized trade union presence at the Oct. 26 demonstration, there's much more antiwar sentiment among workers today than there was at the dawn of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Some of the evidence for this is manifested in antiwar resolutions passed by a number of state labor councils, such as the Washington State Labor Council, the San Francisco Labor Council, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers convention, the Detroit Labor Committee for Justice & Peace, the New York City Labor Against War, and others.
By far, the most convincing confirmation that the working class has moved to the center stage of the class struggle is the struggle by the West Coast dockworkers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Right now these workers are on the front lines of the class war. They are in the crosshairs of Washington's "war on terrorism," and the combativity of these and other workers around the country has to be the foundation of the fight against imperialist wars.
Indeed, the militancy of the dockworkers was captured in an interview with a female dockworker thatappeared in your Sept. 5 edition:
"Bush stole the election and engineered this phony war so that he can pass the laws that he wanted in the first place, so that the rich can profit. Now we have to fight with everything we have. If we strike, they may intervene. If they do that, there may be bloodshed."
It's true that much of the current "antiwar movement" is confused, disoriented, and pacifist. The central organizational and political leadership of the October 26th and other mass actions being called--the Stalinist Workers World Party--is seriously flawed, still carrying their class collaborationist baggage of orienting toward the Democrats.
Just look at the lead demand of October 26: "Stop the war before it starts." What a muddle-headed formulation! First, the war against Iraq never really stopped. Second, the working class is not presently strong enough to stop the imperialists from attacking Iraq. It was misleading and disorienting to make this the chief demand of the march; there's enough confusion out there.
That's why it's important for communist parties to intervene at these actions with a revolutionary, internationalist, proletarian perspective and program that shines a flashlight down the road the working class is headed--an international communist movement that will defeat and dismantle the last empire on earth.
Socialists and the 2000 Election
Letter to the Militant on 2000 election coverage
1/5/01
Dear Comrades,
This critique of the Militant's 2000 election coverage is written in the spirit of constructive criticism and fraternal disagreement. In 23 years I think this is only the third time I've had profound problems with the Militant's coverage and the party's analysis. The first was 1980, when I didn't agree with the party's initial critical support of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a position the Militant reversed soon after. The second instance was your coverage, or more accurately, your lack of coverage, of the antiwoman violence and harassment that occurred at the 2000 Puerto Rican Day Parade,a point I'll return to shortly when I discuss Greg McCartan's perspective on Katherine Harris.
The basic premise of the Militant's coverage of the 2000 presidential election--that above all, it demonstrated the irresolvable divisions and deepening factionalism within bourgeois politics over how to prepare for the coming class battles--is absolutely correct. However, beyond that, the Militant's coverage of what just happened was woefully inadequate. The web site of the International Committee of the Fourth International did a much better job in concretely explaining to working people how Bush's coup constituted an accelerated attack on democratic rights.
The Militant was far too muted, sounding more like a left-of-center news service reporting the events instead of a flashlight beam from a working class vanguard giving guidance and historical context. Frankly, I was stunned when several issues didn't even mention what was going on in Florida, while the IC's web site provided ongoing and specific analyses.
I'll start with the latest Greg McCartan article, entitled "Bush will continue bipartisan antilabor course." Not only has this become a stale, mantra-like formulation in the Militant, it's not entirely accurate. The selection of Bush by judicial fiat and usurpation signals an intensification of the ruling class offensive, both domestically and internationally, not a mere "continuation."
Yes, it's true that ruling class circles breathed a sigh of relief when the debacle was over, proclaiming the need to unite and move on, etc. But don't be shocked if hundreds of thousands show up in Washington on January 20th to participate in inaugural protests and express their outrage over the Bush hijacking. These protesters will be open to a communist analysis of what happened, and frankly, I think the Militant's falls far short of the IC's.
McCartan's statement, "When the Nov. 7 vote total in Florida turned out to be close enough to require an automatic machine recount, the Gore camp began looking for a way to steal the election from Bush" must rank as the most absurd sentence to ever appear in a Militant.
The follow-up sentence, ". . . Gore never requested a full recount in the state" [emphasis added] is just not true. While Gore blundered in not initially requesting a statewide count, he did so twice--once at the press conference in which he publicly challenged Bush to accept it, and later in a request to the Florida Supreme Court.
McCartan's description of the post-election framework as 35 days of legal maneuvering between two parties equally guilty of factionalism and demagogy flies in the face of reality and glosses over the very real differences between the Democrats and Republicans. The Militant's line sounded far too close to the Spartacists' description of the "Gore-Bush feud" as "more like a tempest in a tea pot than a political crisis of the bourgeoisie," which the IC correctly criticized.
It's deeper than that. While the Democrats were defensive, timid and self-abasing, clinging desperately to a dying bourgeois democracy, relying on lawyers and courts, discouraging Jackson and the unions from mobilizing the ranks, the Republicans, led by the Wall St. Journal wing of capital, were ruthless and offensive, quite willing to dispense with the formalities of bourgeois democracy and unleash shock troops to employ extraconstitutional and thuggish means to steal the election. I don't recall the Militant even mentioning the "bourgeois riot" by the Republican operatives who terrorized the Dade County board into halting the recount.
The IC is correct: "There is a vast difference between a movement against bourgeois democracy from the left and a movement against bourgeois democracy from the right. And woe to the socialist organization which does not understand the difference and which adopts a formal, mechanical and vulgar 'plague on both your houses' position."
McCartan ignores the fact that it was the Bush machine that went into action beginning November 7th, from Bush's cousin at Fox News who initiated the media stamped which falsely proclaimed Bush the winner in Florida (which defined the framework for the entire period that followed), to brother Jeb's Republican stooges who committed absentee ballot fraud in Martin and Seminole counties and whose election officials prevented Blacks from voting, to the Republican brown shirts who shut down the Dade County recount, to Katherine Harris hiring a right wing consulting firm that "cleansed" tens of thousands of mostly Black voters from the registration rolls for being "felons," and her blatantly arbitrary deadline shenanigans, to the Florida state legislature, and finally, the reactionary Republican Supreme Court bloc.
Were the Democrats also guilty of demagogy? Yes, there were about two notable manifestations of this: Gore spokesperson Lehane's calling Harris a Soviet commissar, and another Democrat who slandered Cuba, saying democracy may get a little messy sometimes and require recounts, but if you want simplicity go 90 miles south to Cuba where there are no elections. This is crude red-baiting that should be countered by class conscious workers, though thanks to Stalinism a kernel of truth exists in Lehane's point that Harris was a partisan hack invested with an arbitrary concentration of power which disenfranchised thousands of largely African American voters.
But there was a qualitatively different level of factionalism, demagogy, and coarseness from the Republicans and the ultraright filth coalescing around them (including physical intimidation, hysteria, threats, signs that read "If you can read this, you're a Republican"). It was the Republicans, not Democrats, who would have ignored the Supreme Court and were hell bent to send the ruling class into a full-blown constitutional crisis involving the Congress. Indeed, that's one reason Rehnquist and Company gave the election to Bush.
It's almost as if the Militant, in saying that it was Gore who tried to steal the election, is bending over backwards, indeed, using shock treatment, to show workers its class independence from both capitalist parties. But turning reality on its head won't impress any worker. And a communist party is not violating the principle of working class independence in noting there are differences between the Democrats and Republicans and that the two parties acted differently in the Florida election. Indeed, the Democrats made it easy to show how prostrate, impotent, and incapable they are of mounting a defense against the Republican-spearheaded assault on democratic rights. It's only the working class, and the mass organizations we build, that can accomplish this. Which is why it's important that we tell the truth and shine a flashlight down the road, instead of employing shock treatment to prove our working class independence.
The Florida election exposed how bankrupt and undemocratic bourgeois democracy really is. It not only gave communists a motherlode of opportunities to expose these limitations and explain why we need a socialist revolution, it also gives us the chance to explain how the historical experience of the African American oppressed nationality is integrally linked to the first two American bourgeois democratic revolutions, and how this historical development ensures that African Americans will be in the vanguard of the third American revolution. The biggest scandal of the 2000 election was the racist disenfranchisement of African Americans, a reality which the Militant finally caught up to in its January 8 editorial and feature article on the NAACP's demand for a Justice Department investigation.
The Militant should be giving Marxist, class-based explanations of the Electoral College, the three-fifths "compromise," the Dred Scott decision, the Civil War, Radical Reconstruction, the 14th Amendment, the 1876 Tilden/Hayes deadlock and its resolution (withdrawal of remaining federal troops from Reconstruction states), the similarity in psychology and methods between the slaveocracy and the Republican right today and how all this ties into the Gore v. Bush Supreme Court decision, particularly the court's cynical misuse of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and Scalia's brazen pronouncement that there is no US constitutional right to vote for president. This is what in part angered the US Supreme Court--the fact that the Florida Supreme Court illuminated the embarrassing truth that Florida's constitution goes further than the federal constitution in enshrining the right to vote.
With all of this to cover, the McCartan article spends three lengthy paragraphs whining about the "personal, antiwoman" attacks on Katherine Harris by "liberals," more evidence of the equal level of "coarseness" and "factionalism" committed by the Democrats. While some bourgeois journalists stooped to sexist formulations like "Cruella deVil" that were passed along eagerly by the tabloid media, the vast majority of discourse concerning Harris had to do with her arbitrary and partisan abuse of power as Florida's Secretary of State in preventing tens of thousands of votes from being counted. In other words--it was about politics. Every conversation with every worker I spoke to dealt with the political aspect of this partisan hack--not a personal one. And you don't have to be a liberal to attack Harris on political grounds.
I wish the Militant had showed half the concern and vigilance about antiwoman assaults when it covered last year's Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City. To my amazement, the Militant barely mentioned the widespread sexual harassment and attacks against women in Central Park that day, all under the watchful eye of the police. In so doing, the Militant missed an opportunity to tie this in with the excellent point made by Steve Clark in his article concerning the INS raid on Elian Gonzalez--that the cops' job is not to protect the public.
The sexual harassment and violence committed against women in Central Park were sickening. The Militant was inexplicably mum about it, choosing instead to give its readers an all-too-typical "newsy" and superficial coverage of the parade itself. This served to invite the unpalatable suggestion that the Militant was uncomfortable in spotlighting any manifestation of sexism committed by male members of an oppressed national minority.
Follow-up letter to the Militant on 2000 election coverage
2/18/01
Dear Comrades,
Apparently the Militant has decided not to respond to my letter of 1/05/01 that criticized its line on Election 2000. That communique raised serious political issues that deserve to be addressed. If it's your contention that Greg McCartan's February 5th reply to Edwin Fruit's Letter to the Editor served to answer my criticism and all others holding similar views, then I respectfully disagree, because the response to Fruit's mild objection that you may be "letting the Republicans off the hook" in saying that Gore tried to steal the election didn't begin to answer the more detailed arguments I made.
McCartan's "Democrats and the vote count in Florida" repeats the falsehood that Gore never asked for a statewide hand count. While Gore initially asked for a recount in three Democratic counties only, he later publicly challenged Bush to accept a statewide manual recount. Further, McCartan leaves out the fact thaton December 8th, the Florida Supreme Court actually ordered a statewide manual recount of all the so-called "undervotes" and it was Bush, not Gore who moved heaven and earth, including the Supreme Court, to stop it. Now we have learned that Gore's legal strategy of focusing solely on undervotes was another strategic blunder, because the most decisive irregularities had to do with the "overvotes," which, according to two just-published studies done by the Washington Post and the Tribune Co., revealed that Gore won Florida by nearly 30,000 votes.
Of course, the distinction between undervotes and overvotes would be lost on those Militant readers whose sole source of information was the Militant, because like so many facts concerning Election 2000, the Militant chose to omit such details as undervotes and overvotes from its pages. Marxists are supposed to start with facts and objective reality, comrades. However, to support the indefensible view that Gore tried to steal the election, McCartan zeroes in on Gore's initial seeking of a recount in the three counties and proceeds to rip this from the big picture, ignoring the mountains of evidence consisting of facts like the Republican thugs' shutdown of the Miami-Dade recount, Katherine Harris's arbitrary deadline maneveurs, the voter intimidation and absentee ballot fraud committed by Jeb Bush's stooges, the role played by Bush's cousin at Fox News, the Florida legislature's actions, and the reactionary Supreme Court decision that halted the Florida Supreme Court-ordered statewide recount.
Comrades, McCartan's statements, "Bush and the Republicans tried to prevent in court any moves that would give Gore the advantage. And they won out" do not come close to accurately describing the monumental attack on the right to vote contained in Gore v. Bush.
This was deeper than "factional fighting between sections of the ruling class" and "squabbles among capitalist politicians." The right to vote is a deeply felt issue among working people. While socialists explain that socialist democracy is fuller and more meaningful than bourgeois democracy, we must still champion and resolutely defend the most fundamental, progressive democratic rights, including the right of the masses to vote. This is key to both extending democracy and advancing the struggle for socialism. The Militant's lukewarm formulations ("the Militant is giving coverage and support to the protests and the NAACP lawsuit"), its looking the other way on the Bush and Supreme Court usurpation of this election, and its being completely wrong on who stole the election, are not examples of the kind of resolute defense of democratic rights that is needed.
In attempting to support his indefensible position that it was Gore who tried to steal the election, McCartan uses a straw man--the People's Weekly World of the Communist Party USA--a convenient opponent because it urged working people to vote for Gore, fitting into McCartan's scheme that the only radical, "socialist" organizations claiming Bush stole the election are those that endorsed Gore.
Why don't you take on someone your own size, comrades? The Socialist Equality Party, whose web site I quoted from in my earlier letter, didn't support Gore. The author of these lines didn't support Gore. Why don't you answer the SEP or this author? These and others don't hold the view that the "victims" in the 2000 election were either Bush or Gore. They say instead, that the victims were the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of workers, mostly African Americans, who were disenfranchised by the right wing coup led by Scalia and his gang of strict constructionists who reminded the world that the US Constitution grants no one the right to vote for president.
Does Gore give a whit about counting every vote? Of course not. But millions of workers do. And they are outraged, comrades; middle class radicals and petty bourgeois socialists are not the only ones outraged, as the Militant seems to think. Working people know, and the overwhelmingly proletarian African American community knows, that the onus of keeping African Americans from voting in Florida falls on the Republicans, who were well aware of the NAACP and Rainbow Coalition's massive voter registration drive prior to the election.
This is not to say the Democrats escape responsibility for the racist power structure of capitalist rule. This is not to say that Gore gave a whit about African American disenfranchisement, which was evident in court when his defense put two voting equipment "experts" on the stand instead of African American voters who had been complaining since Election Day about how faulty equipment, misleading ballots, lack of assistance, Republican operatives and Jeb Bush' state troopers were preventing them from voting.
The truth is coming out: a US civil rights commission is investigating allegations by the BBC that Database Technologies, the right wing private data services firm hired by Jeb Bush/K. Harris to "cleanse" Florida's registration rolls, disenfranchised thousands of African American voters by falsely identifying them as felons. As the Guardian states, "The scale of the errors, and their skewed effect on black, overwhelmingly Democratic voters, cost Al Gore thousands of votes . . .Moreover, the Florida state government, where Mr. Bush's brother Jeb is governor, did nothing to correct the errors, and may have encouraged them."
One civil rights commissioner said, "There is a lot of public concern that the contractor who was selected to do this is a firm that seems to have ties to the Republican Party." The connections between Choicepoint, the consulting firm that bought Database Technologies last year, and the Republicans are well documented.
Where am I wrong, comrades? If there are adequate responses to the arguments raised by the SEP's Web site and my letter concerning the 2000 election, I haven't heard them.
Workers I've showed McCartan's articles to are ridiculing and scoffing at the Militant for its line on the election. It pains me greatly to say that, but you should be aware of this reality. Don't just say that the Democrats are caving in to Bush and deepening the bipartisan assault on the working class. The point is that Election 2000 gave communists effective ammunition to use against the class enemy, but to do that you've got to make the right call on who hijacked the election. Communists have a revolutionary duty to take the rope the bourgeoisie provide and help them hang themselves with it. On that score the Militant has failed, which is disappointing to those who have looked to the SWP for guidance and have had unshakeable confidence in its leadership.
While I'm in substantial agreement with the SEP on the 2000 election, I vehemently oppose its views that the Cuban leadership is bourgeois nationalist and not communist, that capitalism has been restored in the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Bloc countries, and their reactionary line on Milosevic and Yugoslavia. But I don't think it's contradictory to hold that the Castro leadership is communist, that the former Soviet Union and its allies are still workers states, that the ousting of Milosevic was a victory and that workers had much to do with it, and even that not everything about Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution is wrong, while also believing that Bush stole the election.
I'm not aware of the details of the SEP's trajectory since their split with the Healyites in 1985-86, or even of the split itself, so I don't know where this group stands concerning the parent organization's slanders against Comrades Joe Hansen, George Novack and Jack Barnes in years past. I do know that I reject the SEP's characterization of the SWP as a cult around Comrade Barnes and its explanations of the Militant's views on the election that 1) the SWP lacks a genuine class independence from the capitalists; and 2) the SWP is cowardly adapting to the most right wing forces.
These are serious charges that are being read by people all over the world via the Web. Many of these readers know even less than I do of the history between the SWP and the Healyites. They're reading factional mischaracterizations and slander about the SWP from the SEP, but they're also reading a lot about Election 2000 that makes sense, and some accurate statements about the SWP's astonishing lack of coverage and overall weak analysis of the election. I would not ignore their attacks or the SEP in general, comrades, because they could be serious comp
