WfJltNEItS ',111",11' 25No. 533 30 August 1991

Bankrupt Stalinism Opens Floodgates to Capitalist Restoration

Soviet Workers:e eal elsin- usounlerrevo ulionl

Laski/Sipa

munist League (Fourth Internationalist)continues this struggle.

Stalinism was the political rule of abureaucratic caste parasitically sittingatop the proletarian property formscreated by the October Revolution of1917. Whether during the bloody purgesof the 1930s or the myriad "reforms"from Khrushchev and others, this sys-tem based on lies and repression ofthe working class not only blockedfurther progress toward socialism butclogged every pore of Soviet society.After decades of self-sacrifice extractedfrom the proletariat in the name ofbuilding "socialism in one country,"Gorbachev's perestroika was the lastdesperate attempt of the Stalinist bu-reaucracy to preserve its position byadopting capitalist measures. But likeNikolai Bukharin's appeals to the richpeasants (kulaks) in the late 1920s to"enrich yourselves," perestroika fueledthe forces of capitalist restoration whichhave now reached their fruition withYeltsin's countercoup. .

Boris Yeltsin is not a "Westernizer"-he is an extreme Russian chauvinist whointends to sell out the Soviet Union to

continued on page 10

who opposed Yeltsin's plans for whole-sale privatization and Gorbachev's mar-ket reforms, looked to the so-calledhardline "patriotic" wing of the bureauc-racy. There is no room anymore for suchillusions.

The coup's collapse and the ascen-dancy of counterrevolution in the SovietUnion buttresses, for the present mo-ment, Bush's proclaimed "New WorldOrder" militarily dominated by the U.S.Following its annihilation of Iraq, thetriumphalist and vengeful American rul-ing class threatens to tum its wrath, unre-strained by the deterrent of a powerfulUSSR, against myriad peoples of theworld. Cuba, in particular, is in Bush'scross hairs, and its defense is more thanever a duty of all opponents of Yankeeimperialism.

From the time of Stalin's bureaucraticusurpation of power in 1924, LeonTrotsky and the Left Opposition wagedan unrelenting fight for the internation-alist program of the Bolshevik Revolu-tion. Under the deadly blows of Stalinistterror and slander, the Trotskyists perse-vered as the best and only consistentdefenders of the remaining revolution-ary gains. Today the International Com-

throw a giant wrench in the worksand prevent the rapid consolidation ofcounterrevolution.

Soviet Stalinism has breathed itspathetic last gasp. Even up to the coup,many of the most advanced workers,

August 21-Pro-Yeltsin crowd in frontof Russian "White House" (below).Bush and Yeltsin congratulate them-selves earlier this year.

Red Square: Soviet tank facing the Kremlin during coup attempt.

AUGUST 27-The working people ofthe Soviet Union, and indeed the workersof the world, have suffered an unparal-leled disaster whose devastating conse-quences are now being played out. Theascendancy of Boris Yeltsin, who offershimself as Bush's man, coming off abotched coup by Mikhail Gorbachev'sformer aides, has unleashed a counter-revolutionary tide across the land of theOctober Revolution. The first workersstate in history, sapped and underminedby decades of Stalinist bureaucraticmisrule, lies in tatters. The state powerhas been fractured, the CommunistParty-its bureaucratic core-shatteredand banned from the KGB and armedforces, the multinational union is rippingapart as one republic after another pro-claims secession.

But while Yeltsin & Co. now seea clear field to push through a forced-draft reintroduction of capitalism, theoutcome is not yet definitively decided.As the imperialists rejoice and the pro-capitalist petty bourgeoisie exult, Sovietworkers are facing a disaster of cata-strophic proportions: every gain forwhich they, their parents and grand-parents sacrificed is on the choppingblock. An explosion of even greaternationalist strife is looming. The lash ofcapitalist exploitation being introducedamid universal economic dislocationthreatens widespread hunger and massunemployment in the coming winter. TheSoviet proletariat, whose capacity formilitant action was dramatically shown ~in the miners strike of the summerof 1989, has not been heard from.Opposition from the factories againstthe ravages of capitalist assault could

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CLASS-STRUGGLE DEFENSE NOTES

"An Injury to OneIs an -Injury to All"

!!.!!!'!!!...'s!.!!~!! ~DIRECTOR OF PARTYPUBLICATIONS: liz Gordon

EDITOR: Jan Norden

PRODUCTION MANAGER: Jorge Ramirez

CIRCULATION MANAGER: Karen Valdez

EDITORIAL BOARD: George Foster, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan, Len Meyers, James Robertson,Reuben Samuels, Joseph Seymour, Alison Spencer, Marjorie Stamberg

The Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (FourthInternationalist) .

Workers Vanguaid (USPS098-770j published biweekly, except 2nd issue August and with 3-week interval Decembsr,by the Spertacist Publishing Co., 41 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial),(212) 732-7861 (Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. Domesticsubscriptions: $7.00/24 issues. Second-class postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send address changesto Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.

Duke protest, the latest of many labor!black mobilizations against fascist terrorinitiated and organized by the PDC andSL (Washington 1982, Philadelphia 1988and elsewhere), was a small but impor-tant point of struggle against the reactionfueled by the Middle East slaughter.

Today's fighters against war, union-busting and racist reaction owe a specialdebt to those imprisoned in the struggle.In the U.S.' dungeons are dozens ofpolitical prisoners, thrown behind barsfor standing up to racist capitalist repres- .sion. They must not be forgotten! Wehave been active in the campaign to freeformer Black Panther Party leaderGeronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). As an expres-sion of solidarity we send monthly sti-pends to 19 class-war prisoners: Geron-imo and other former Black Pantherssuch as Mondo we Langa (David Rice) .and Ed Poindexter, prison activist HugoPinell, members and supporters of thePhiladelphia MOVE organization, andIrish Republican Socialist Party memberEddie McClelland.

A central focus of our recent work isthe campaign to save death row politicalprisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Jamal-aformer Black Panther Party spokesman,prominent radio broadcaster known asthe "voice of the voiceless," well-knownsupporter of the MOVE organizationand president of the Philadelphia chapterof the Association of Black Journalistsat the time of his arrest-was shot andframed up, charged with killing a cop in1981. Long a target of PhiUy cop terrorbecause he used his radio booth tospeak for the poor, the homeless and

continued on page 13

FBI wiretap logs proving Geronimoanswered a phone at a Panther housein Oakland just before the murder;statements from former PantherTyrone Hutchinson that in 1970 he

peported overhearing two associates ofFBI fink Julius Butler admit theycommitted the murder, but was toldby the cops to keep his mouth shut.Butler, the witness on whom thegovernment's frame-up rested, was anLAPD informant as early as 1966 andFBI fink by May 1969.

Lead attorney in the application fora new trial, Robert Bloom, said of thejudge's cavalier dismissal of Geroni-mo's demand for a new trial, "In 25years of practicing criminal law, Ihave never seen anything like this."

Because Geronimo remains true tohis political beliefs, state authoritiesare determined to make his prison helleven hotter. Geronimo's disciplinaryconfinement was based on a bogusmarijuana trafficking charge on theuncorroborated testimony of a jail-house snitch. Federal court judgeWeigel's ruling denying Geronimo'sappeal of the marijuana frame-up

continued on page 13

Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), America'sforemost class-war prisoner, was dealta double blow by the courts of Cali-fornia. On August 15, just one dayafter receiving Geronimo's 284-pagepetition for a new trial, Judge GaryKlausner dismissed it as "withoutmerit." Just days earlier, federal courtjudge Stanley Weigel refused to orderGeronimo released from "the hole"(disciplinary confinement) at Teha-chapi prison, where he was thrown onApril 1 as he was preparing his statecourt petition for a new trial.

Geronimo, a victim of the FBI'sracist COINTELPRO conspiracy tocrush the Black Panther Party, hasbeen locked away in California pris-ons for more than 20 years for amurder that the FBI, the cops andmillions of people know he did notcommit. The petition for a new trialpresented new evidence concealedfrom Geronimo at trial and for almosttwo decades thereafter: statementsfrom six former Black Panther Partymembers that Geronimo was withthem in Oakland at the time of the1968 Santa Monica murder; testimonyfrom two legal investigators who saw

'.>

Labor support for Mumla'Abu-Jamal grows. Power of labor must be mobilizedIn defense of all victims of capitalist state repression.

back, and now the city of Wichita is hos-tage to anti-abortion fanatics while poorwomen die from back-alley abortions.Workers, minorities, gays and women-we're all under the gun in this "NewWorld Order." It is time for the organizedworking class to get off its knees tosmash this onslaught against their rights,won through years of bitter and oftenbloody struggle.

The Partisan Defense Committee is aclass-struggle, non-sectarian legal andsocial defense organizatiof which cham-pions cases' and causes in the interestsof the whole of the working people.Launched by the Spartacist League in1974, the PDC seeks to mobilize thepower of labor in defense of all thosetargeted by capitalist reaction. Fightingfor justice against the world's mostdangerous capitalist power, we recognizea special responsibility to oppose our"own" government, which props up re-pressive regimes all over the world. Sowhen American troops headed for theGulf, the SL and PDC fought at home forthe defeat of U.S. imperialism and indefense of its victims around the world.We defended all those whose civil lib-erties and rights were among the firstvictims of the war-Arab immigrants,antiwar protesters and GI "resisters."

When KKKer David Duke sought tocarry his program of fascist terror northwith a speech at Boston's Ford HallForum on March 28, a PDC-initiatedunited-front protest of 1,500 blacks,unionists, socialists, minorities, women,gay rights activists, students, Jews andCatholics turned out to say, "Stop KKKHitler-Lover David Duke!" The anti-

Petition for New Trial Denied,Geronimo Still in "the Hole"

30 August 1991

but thin patriotic fervor it unleashed,Bush & Co. stepped up their war onlabor, blacks and Hispanics at home.Racist cop terror is epidemic, a nationaldeath penalty is in the works, segregatedschools and school prayer are on the way

No. 533

A decade of Reagan/Bush reaction:1981, PATCO union leaders in shackles;1985, Mother's Day bombing of PhillyMOVE; 1991, precision bombing of aBaghdad civilian shelter. With theirbloody victory over Iraq, and the broad

Stalinism: Gravedlgger ofthe October Revolution

More than halfa century ago, Leon Trotskywarned that Stalinism was a mortal dangerto the survival of the Soviet Union. Havingusurped power from the Soviet workers bygutting the Bolshevik Party of Lenin andTrotsky, the nationalist bureaucracy headedby Stalin proceeded to undermine the gainsofthe 1917 October Revolution andsabotage

TROTSKY revolutionary struggle worldwide. While de- LENINmoralized "anti-Stalinists" simply wrote off .

the first workers state, Trotsky's Left Opposition fought to restore soviet democracy andBolshevik internationalism to the USSR. As Trotsky emphasized time and again, the onlyalternative to capitalist restoration was a proletarian political revolution to defend theremaining gains of October by ousting the treacherous bureaucracy. Now the utter col-lapse of Soviet Stalinism has opened up the floodgates of bloody capitalist counter-revolution. The key to defense of the Soviet working people against BushiYeltsin'scounterrevolutionary onslaught is the forging of a Leninist-Trotskyist party.

Under the conditions of the transitional epoch, the political superstructure plays adecisive role. A developed and stable dictatorship of the proletariat presupposes thatthe party functions in the leading role as a self-acting vanguard, that the proletariatis welded together by means of trade unions, that the toilers are indissolubly boundup with the state through the system of soviets and, finally, that the workers' state isaligned through the International into a fighting unit with the world proletariat. In themeantime, the bureaucracy has strangled the party and the trade unions and the sovietsand the Communist International.. ..

Which is closer: the .danger of the collapse of the Soviet power that has been sappedby bureaucratism or the hour of the consolidation of the proletariat around a new partythat is capable of saving the October heritage? There is no a priori answer to such aquestion; the struggle will decide. A major historical test-which may be a war-willdetermine the relation of forces. It is clear, in any case, that, with the further declineof the world proletarian movement and the further extension of the fascist domination,it is not possible to maintain the Soviet power for any length of time by means of theinternal forces alone. The fundamental condition for the only rock-bottom reform ofthe Soviet state is the victorious spread of the world revolution ....

Every political tendency that waves its hand hopelessly at the Soviet Union, underthe pretext of its "nonproletarian" character, runs the risk of becoming the passiveinstrument of imperialism. And from our standpoint, of course, the tragic possibilityis not excluded that the first workers' state, weakened by its bureaucracy, will fallunder the joint blows of its internal.and external enemies. But in the event of this worstpossible variant, a tremendous significance for the subsequent course of the revolution-ary struggle will be borne by the question: where are' those guilty for the catastrophe?Not the slightest taint of guilt must fall upon the revolutionary internationalists. Inthe hour of mortal danger, they must remain on the last barricade. .

Today the rupture of the bureaucratic equilibrium in the USSR would almost surelyserve in favor of the counterrevolutionary forces. However, given a genuine revolution-ary International, the inevitable crisis of the Stalinist regime would open the possibilityof revival in the USSR. This is our basic course....

The problem of the world revolution as well as the problem of the Soviet Unionmay be summed up in one and the same brief formula: The Fourth International.

-Leon Trotsky, "The Class Nature of the Soviet State" (October 1933)

2 WORKERSVANGUA~D .

Cops, Nationalists, Zionists Fan Flames in Brooklyn

Death in Crown Heights-

Hassldlm, Hispanicsand Blacks

The conflict between the Hassidicsects and the black and Hispanic minor-ity populations in Brooklyn is com-pounded by economic conditions whichplace these communities at loggerheads.Complaints that the highly organizedHassidic community gets favored treat-ment from the authorities are not just aproblem of perception, but a problem inreality.

In Williamsburg, where the SatmarHassidic sect is concentrated, the sur-rounding Puerto Rican and Dominicancommunity (Los Sures) is constantlybeing squeezed. The Satmars have beenable to obtain city-owned land to builda 6,Ooo-seat synagogue, a yeshiva andprivate housing on public redevelopmentland. Legal services lawyer MartinNeedelman, denounced as a "traitor" and"self-hater" by the local Hassidic lead-ers, has brought lawsuits against the cityfor preferentially renting public housingunits to Hassidim (non-white minori-ties were kept to 25 percent). In 1986,through control of the community schoolboard, the Satmars got a wall builtthrough PS 16, to separate Hassidic girlsfrom the Hispanic children in the rest ofthe school. In addition to this incrediblepiece of apartheid, close to 100 Hispanicstudents were to be pushed out of thegrade school.

Also in 1986, the Shomrim (Orthodox"watch patrols") were initiated, vigilantegangs known to beat up blacks and Lati-nos suspected of robbery. These patrolsreceive $10,000 in subsidies fromAlbany (EI Diario, 29 March 1989). InCrown Heights, the aggressive vigilantepatrols go back to the late '60s and theorigins of the JDL. A lot of the tensionsbetween Hispanics and Hassidim in Wil-liamsburg .are replicated between theblack community and the Lubavitcher.Thaddeus Owens, Jr., a black communityorganizer and son of the judge whopresided in the Yusuf Hawkins case, toldhow he grew up in Crown Heights,where his family got along well withHassidic neighbors, sometimes perform-ing tasks like turning off an oven for afamily that could not do so because ofthe Sabbath:

"Mr. Owens said his feelings turned souras he saw public housing in the area dis-proportionately.allocated to Hasidim andthe police took their side in confronta-tions with blacks. He also charges thatHasidic Jews attempted to redraw com-munity board lines in their favor andgain control of the local school board,"

-New York Times, 23 AugustWhile blacks and Hispanics and,

indeed, many Hassidic Jews in thesecommunities are horribly. downtroddenand impoverished, a wealthy layer of the

continued on page 15

nationalists. And so did the opportunist"leftists."

Today most of the connections that inmore economically prosperous timeslinked the ghetto and the factory havebeen shattered, so that any social con-nection to a wider world is being lost.As the ghetto turns in on itself in des-peration, there's a new focus on small-time local merchants as "the enemy,"whether it's Sal's Pizza, or the Koreanfruit stand, or the "men in long blackcoats" and their shops. In a narrow worldbounded by garbage-ridden streets,where you can't get out because youhave no job, nowhere to go, and nomoney to go there anyhow, that's all youcan see (except for luscious, hopelessTV commercial dreams).

There is a long history of communalviolence in Crown Heights. Back in1978, the police in Crown Heights mur-dered a black businessman-in broaddaylight 15 cops clubbed Arthur Millerto the ground and then strangled him todeath. In an unrelated incident two dayslater, a black youth named Victor Rhodeswas jumped and beaten to a pulp by asmall army of Hassidic goons patrollingagainst "outsiders." Then the Rev. Her-bert Daughtry and a group of blacknationalists consciously went after theJewish community instead of the killercops, instigating a march of jeeringblacks through the Jewish'. .lll'eas ofCrown Heights. Most leftist groups sup-ported that anti-Semitic provocation. Weof the Spartacist League warned that thiswas heading straight for race war, inwhich blacks would inevitably lose.

The Hassidim are not the oppressors.They are only a tiny minority communitywho want to recreate the sealed-offworld of the 18th century Russian/Polishshtetl (village) in the middle of Brook-lyn,not unlike the Amish in Pennsylva-nia. But in Crown Heights the shtetlmeets the ghetto, and on top of the sharpeconomic contradictions, you have asharp culture clash as black CaribbeanRastafarians with their long dreadlocksare thrown together with ultra-OrthodoxJewish men with their payes (sidelocks).But both blacks and Jews have the rightto go about their lives and not be scape-goated or persecuted. The same goes forany other people or religion in the world.

One of the most vicious splits betweenJews and blacks in New York Citywas the 1968 teachers strike. And muchof the so-called "left" bears a lot ofresponsibility for that disaster. In '68the same phony black militants likeJitu Weusi (Les Campbell), Carson andtheir left supporters used anti-Semiticslurs to mobilize Brooklyn blacksagainst the predominantly Jewish UnitedFederation of Teachers (UFT), underthe name of "community control." Theliberal Republican Lindsay administra-tion and Ford Foundation, ruling-classforces who wanted to break the teachersunion for their own reasons, backed the

The Politics of Death

Paraskevas/Newsday

mob) was beaten, and writer Vinette K.Pryce almost had her leg broken as shewas roughly searched and shoved into apolice van. White reporters got it fromangry black mobs as well: veteran com-mentator Jimmy Breslin barely escaped,clad only in his shorts and his green presscard. The same night Mayor Dinkins wassurrounded and booed wildly by a crowdwhen he tried to visit the community.

Chris Gierlich

group Workers World Party marched inthis demonstration, which was tanta-mount to a call for an anti-Jewishpogrom. The Workers World banner read,"Stop the War Against Black America."There is a war against black America,but the Lubavitchers aren't running i~-Washington and Wall Street are. ,

As the explosion built, an army' ofcops moved in, beating not only ghettoyouth but reporters. Hundreds of blackyouths were arrested, although by theend of the week the police had alsoarrested over 40 Hassidic men. The cops,no doubt furious that a few of their num-ber had actually gotten hit by debris anda few rooftop missiles, roughed up jour-nalists, including from Newsday, theNew York Times and the AmsterdamNews. Am News photographer ChrisGriffith (brother of Michael Griffith,murdered by a Howard Beach lynch

communal war in Crown Heights is deadwrong, deadly dangerous and must bestopped! The Jewish community is notthe enemy of black people, despite theslanderous poison spread for years byanti-Semitic black demagogues like LouisFarrakhan, and most recently CUNYprofessor Leonard Jeffries (and despitethat walking incitement to anti-Semitism,loudmouth racist ex-mayor Ed Koch).

Today Al Sharpton and his allies likeAlton Maddox and Sonny Carson havestirred up murderous violence with theirvile rhetoric around Crown Heights, aswell as a provocative march againstthe Lubavitcher synagogue on Saturday(the Jewish Sabbath), August 24. Themarch was funneled at the last minuteinto a Sharpton-Maddox "United AfricanMovement" meeting in a black highschool. As they passed by Jewish homesand community centers, the marcherstaunted, "Whose Streets? Our Streets!"Criminally, the supposedly socialist

News ayGavin Cato (above) killed Intragic car accident. YankelRosenbaum, Australian student,stabbed to death hours later.

Berman/SipaRabbi Schneerson (above),power broker for right-wingZionists. Rev. AI Sharpton, FBIfink and sinister demagogue.

store, stormed a firehouse and foughtrunning battles with the cops. Theymarched past the Lubavitcher WorldHeadquarters on Eastern Parkway, bom-barding it with rocks and grotesquelytaunting this community of Holocaustsurvivors with chants of "Heil Hitler!"Black people should not so readily praiseHitler-they were included in his list of"Untermenschen" (subhumans). Hassi-die vigilante squads and the .fascistic.Jewish Defense League, armed to 'theteeth, mobilized in response. These thugsstormed into buildings to get blackyouths who they claimed were throwingrocks at the policemen from the roof.

The explosion of hate broke outexactly two years after the murder ofblack teenager Yusuf Hawkins by whiteracists in Bensonhurst. And the steamingethnic cauldron is boiling, bringing NewYork to the edge of race war. This inter-

Gavin Cato, a seven-year-old blackchild from Guyana, and YankeI Rosen-baum, a 29-year-old Hassidic scholarfrom Australia, died on the streets ofCrown Heights, Brooklyn, -onAugust 19.They were strangers in a strange andincreasingly ugly land. Gavin's fatherbrought him here searching for a betterlife. Yankel, the son of Polish concentra-tion camp survivors, came to study thepre-Holocaust world of Eastern Euro-pean Jews. What they' found here wasdeath, their blood spilled on the dirty,cracked ghetto pavements. A reckless

- accident, a vicious murder, and if an evilwitch had taken a sharp stick and stirredthis city's steaming summer cauldron ofghetto misery and ethnic conflicts, thepoisonous result couldn't have been anyworse than the tragedy that exploded thatAugust night.

Gavin Cato and his cousin Angelawere playing on the sidewalk near theirhome, when they were struck by an out-of-control car. Gavin was crushedagainst a wall, his cousin's leg broken.The car was bringing up the rear in asmall motorcade headed by an unmarkedpolice car, escorting Rabbi MenachemSchneerson, world head of the Luba-vitcher Hassidic sect, from his regularcemetery visit. The story quickly sweptthrough the black community that theHassidim were whisked away by a pri-vate Jewish ambulance service while theblack children lay bleeding; Years ofsimmering resentment by the oppressedblacks against the Hassidim for their"special relationship" with the cops andcity politicians came to an ugly head.Later that night, Yankel Rosenbaum wassurrounded by a gang of young blacksand stabbed to death.

For the next three nights, young blackshurled bottles, set fires, overturnedsquad cars, hit the "Sneaker King" shoe

30 AUGUST 1991 3

Intifada at an ImpassePax Americana Targets Palestinians

Israel Out of the -Occupied Territories!For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

APale.tlnlan representatives Falsal Husselnl (left) and Bethlehem Mayor EllaFrel) meet with U.S. secretary of State James Baker In Jerusalem.

4 WORKERS VANGUARD

loss in income from'Palestinians who hadbeen working in the Gulf states.

On the eve of Washington's murderouswar on Iraq, we warned that "the massiveinflux of Jewish immigrants from the So-viet Union has given Israel a pretext tolaunch a new drive for Lebensraumagainst the Palestinian people" (WV No.518, 18 January). Israel seized on theGulf War to intensify its drive toward a"final solution," planning an air and landsweep through Jordan which would havemeant driving the Palestinians out of theWest Blink (New York Times, 7 March).The military operation was shelved un-der American pressure. But designs, formass expulsion were not. A Jewish

. American artist living in a West BankPalestinian area in late March wrote:"People are now discussing mass depor-tations as if they were commenting onthe price of bread" (Palestine Focus,July-August 1991).

After more than a thousand Palestini-ans martyred and many tens of thousands.more injured or arrested, the Intifada hasseemingly ground to a halt, caught in itsown crisis of perspectives. If young Pal-estinian fighters sense despair, it is withgood cause: their people today face morepersecution, more repression, more iso-lation and even less prospect of a home-land than before. Over the decades, allthe options offered by nationalism havebeen tried and all have failed-from im-potent "armed struggle" to respectableUnited Nations resolutions, from reli-ance on the Arab bourgeoisies to directappeals to the imperialist powers.

The petty-bourgeois nationalist PLO,not for the first time, is being crucifiedby the very forces it has looked to forredemption over the years. While loudlyproclaiming their support to the dispos-sessed Palestinian nation as proof oftheir anti-Zionist and anti-imperialistcredentials, 'in fact the bourgeois Arabregimes have been no less ruthless thanIsrael in suppressing the Palestinians.The PLO's reliance on various kings,sheiks and colonels has more than onceled to a bloodbath of the Palestinian peo-

"ple. Its insistent appeals to the U.S. andother imperialist powers to broker a dealwith Zionist Israel are now being real-ized-at the expense of the Palestinian

lashed back with the Intifada, thrustingIsrael's brutal occupation and oppressionunder the international spotlight. WhenSaddam Hussein seemingly stood up toIsrael's imperialist patron and struck intothe Zionist heartland with Scud missiles,Palestinian youth cheered from the roof-tops of their concentration camps andhoped that national salvation was finallyat hand. .

But the cheering soon evaporated.Washington's murderous war machinebombed Iraq back to a "pre-industrialage." Now, the "catastrophe of '48" isbeing played out again in Kuwait.Scarcely more than 100,000 of the400,000 Palestinians who had lived andworked in the emirate remain, and thoseare subjected to a murderousreign ofterror by the ruling family: The PLO'sclaim to be "sole legitimate repre-sentative of the Palestinian people" hasnever had less legitimacy among the im-perialist powers and their regional lack-eys. The disarming of PLO units in Leba-non has put an end to the organization'slast independent base of operations. AndArafat's refusal to toe the American lineduring the Gulf War has cost him $250million in aid from the oil-rich Gulfstates. Now exultation by sections of thePalestinian movement over the short-lived Moscow coup against Gorbachevis being used to further isolate the PLO.

In the Occupied Territories, the youngPalestinian fighters who have enduredtorture and imprisonment in Israelicamps, who have seen brothers and sis-ters gunned down by undercover armydeath squads or fascistic "settlers," sur-vey a horizon which is bleaker than everbefore. With nearly 60 percent of WestBank land already in Israeli hands,. the

. Zionists have been "creating facts"aimed at making the "green line" (thepre-1967 border) a historical footnote,as Shamir's fascistic "housing" ministerAriel Sharon sharply escalates the ex-propriation of Arab agricultural landsand the construction and expansion ofarmed-to-the-teeth Jewish "settlements."The seven-week-long war "curfew" anddraconian pass laws have driven analready impoverished population to theedge of starvation, with 50 percentunemployment exacerbated by a massive

of the country and will continue."But there is one point on which Assad,

Baker and Shamir are in firm agreement:going after the Palestinians and the PLO.Weeks after the Israeli bombing raids inLebanon, Syrian-backed forces swoopeddown on the Palestinians from the north.Brushing aside PLO pleas for "negotia-tions," the Lebanese army disarmed andousted the PLO from its bases in Sidonand Tyre, dragged off hundreds of fight-ers and restricted the rest to their refugeecamps. Deprived of antiaircraft weapon-ry, the Palestinians are now sitting ducksfor further Israeli bombing raids. Andwith the camps surrounded and effec-tively defenseless, there are widespreadfears that the Lebanese Deuxieme Bureau(secret police) will resume its practiceof raiding the camps to round up PLOactivists.

The New PalestinianCatastrophe

At no time have the Palestinian peoplefaced a crisis of such proportions. Drivenfrom their homes and deprived of theirland in the 1948 war, for more than40 years the Palestinians have endureda seemingly endless nightmare of per-secution, repression, isolation, despair.Forced into diaspora, they managed tobecome the chief labor force and eco-nomic backbone of Kuwait and the otheroil-rich Gulf states. Tortured and tor-mented by Zionist repression, they

Israeli police beat upPalestinian protesters

in Jerusalem inaftermath of AI Aksa

mosque massacre,October 1990. Zionists

are aiming at "finalsolution" of "Palestinian

question" throughmass expulsions,

mass slaugHter.

Fresh from its easy kill against Sad-dam Hussein's Iraq and the slaughter ofmore than 100,000 people, Washingtonis determined to forge a "New Order" inthe Near East under exclusive U.S.hegemony. The Gulf crisis changed thepolitical map of the region. The U.S. isnow firmly implanted there, easing itsreliance on Israel as its chief client state.Iraq's previous position as a militarycounterweight against Israel (and Iran)is gone. And Assad's Syria, erstwhileleader of the "rejection front" againstany negotiations with the Zionist stateand former "International TerroristNo. I" in Washington's books, is now aclose and compliant ally of the U.S. AsSecretary of State James Baker shuttlesfrom one Near East capital to anothertrying to lash together a regional "peaceconference," it is clear to all that the biglosers in this Pax Americana will be thePalestinians.

More than three and a half years afterthe start of the heroic popular uprisingin the Occupied Territories, the Intifadais seemingly at a dead end. The PalestineLiberation Organization, which tried toexploit this courageous struggle as a bar-gaining chip to get the U.S. to pressureIsrael into conceding some variant of a"mini-state" in the Occupied Territories,finds itself besieged on all sides. Thewar swept away the fictional distinctionbetween "progressive" and "reactionary"Arab regimes, and both feudalist sheiksand bonapartist colonels have droppedeven lip service to the Palestinian na-tional cause. In their pursuit of Americanpatronage, Syria and the other Arab re-gimes have acquiesced to even the mosthumiliating of Israel's demands as trans-mitted by Baker.

As proposed by the U.S. and agreedall around, the Israelis do not have toconcede an inch of occupied territory asa basis for negotiations, Palestinian rep-resentatives will be vetted by Israel-noPLO allowed-and they may participateonly as part of a Jordanian delegation.Some "peace" conference!

Meanwhile, key Israeli military andpolitical leaders talk ever more openlyof war with Syria. With Washington'sblessings, Damascus moved to consoli-date its hegemony over the perpetuallyfeud-ridden statelet of Lebanon, codifiedin early June in a treaty of "broth-erhood, cooperation and coordination"with Beirut. The Israelis marked thesigning of the treaty with the fiercestbombing raids over Palestinian refugeecamps in southern Lebanon since the1982 invasion. And when Baker saysthat continued Jewish settlement inthe Occupied Territories is the "great-est obstacle to peace," Israeli primeminister Yitzhak Shamir sneers in re-ply: "Settlement continues in all parts

5

For Trotskyist Parties in theNelfi' ,East! " .-

This region is a powder keg in moreways than one. While military expendi-ture- worldwide went up 40 percentbetween 1960 and 1986, in the NearEast it shot up 600 percent. Imperialist

continued on page 13

latest drive against the Palestinians.Even so, the PLO "welcomes" Assad andembraces Hussein, just as yesterday itembraced the Kuwaiti ruling family,whose fabulous wealth was largely cre-ated by Palestinian labor.

Dancing, to the nationalists' tune, theStalinists uphold the "national integrity"of balkanized states carved out by theimperialists. In 1975, the Lebanese CP,which had hundreds of Christian mem-bers, forged a bloc with "left" Muslimclan leader Kamal Jumblatt, aborting theprospect of a plebeian upheaval whichcould have cut across communalistdivisions. In a September 1988 PoliticalBureau statement, it pledged its alle-giance to the "unity" and "Arab affinityof Lebanon." LCP general secretaryGeorges Hawi denounced the "Palestin-ian resistance" for turning the countryinto a "playground" (Al-Nida, 27 Sep-tember 1987). And a joint statement bythe Jordanian, Palestinian and IsraeliCPs called for "a combat alliance ofSyria, the Palestinian revolution and theLebanese patriotic forces" (Al-Talia, 26November 1987). What they got was a"combat alliance" against the Palestin-ians! Yet the Israeli CP nonetheless hailsthe shotgun "agreement signed betweenthe Lebanese army and the Palestinian

, forces" (Zo Haderech, 10 July).To counter the Zionists' annexationist

"Jordan is Palestine" line, the JordanianCP echoes the British-installed Hashem-ite monarch in arguing that "the Pales-tinians living in Jordan are Jordanians"(Central Committee statement, 7 August1988). So the Jordanian CP denies thenational rights of the Palestinians insidethe artificial Hashemite state, the Leba-nese CP denounces Palestinian affrontsto their bourgeoisie's integrity, and thePalestinian and Israeli CPs invite thebutcher Assad into Lebanon! This iswhat these "fraternal" Stalinist partiescall internationalism.

What passes for a Trotskyist alterna-tive in the region is exemplified bythe Revolutionary Communist League inIsrael, affiliated .fo Ernest Mandel'sUnited Secretariat, whose erstwhileenthusing over "Arab revolution" guer-rillaism gave way to outright liberalismas the USec moved right and the PLOshifted gears. An RCL statement onthe Gulf War prominently called for "animmediate end to the bombardment ofpopulation concentrations in Iraq, SaudiArabia, Israel and Lebanon." Behind this"evenhanded" pacifist statement was ablatant capitulation to the Zionist war-mongers' hysteria over the Iraqi Scudmissile attacks on Tel Aviv. Despite itsclaim to stand "against the Americanwar, against the American peace," theRCL joined the Stalinists in pacifistpleading for a "cease-fire" and fosteringillusions in a Pax Americana with a callfor "an international conference...for thesolution of all the open political ques-

'tions, including those of Kuwait andPalestine." ,

4'.*-,\., ...

ers and expel the Israeli army, the mostpowerful in the Middle East; it will takea miracle to do that" (Information Bulle-tin, February 1989). The miracle the Sta-linists pray for is "to make Israel andthe United States accept the idea of aninternational conference,"

If anything; the Palestinian CP hasbeen more cringing than Arafat in itsappeals to imperialism. It was the PCPwhich, beginning in 'the mid-l97Os,pushed for the PLO to adopt its bantustan"mini-state" line. For years, the Stalin-ists have focused on the call for an in-ternational peace conference. Now theStalinists have become open apologistsfor a Pax Americana. Calling for sup-port to a petition campaign in favorof the American proposal, the Hebrew-language weekly of the Israeli CP says:"Even if the organizers of the petitionsupport an American solution... the mostimportant thing is to join them and tohelp them get as many signatures as pos-sible: (Zo Haderech, 5 June).

In swearing fealty to the PLO as the"sole legitimate representative of thePalestinian people," the Palestinian CPcodifies its subordination of the workersand peasants to the would-be ruling classof a Palestinian Arab capitalist state.The Palestinian bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders in turn place their faithin their class brothers among the Arabregimes. As the price for support, firstby Nasser's Egypt in the 1960s and thenby Kuwait and others, the PLO promised"non-interference in the internal affairs"of the Arab states--even when it meantthe slaughter of Palestinians.

The first fruit of this policy was the1970 Black September massacre of10,000 Palestinians by Jordan's KingHussein, forcing the PLO to move itsmilitary operations to Lebanon. Sixyears later, it was Syria's turn to attackthe PLO there, foreshadowing Assad's

on recruiting fedayeen guerrillas in therefugee camps of Jordan and Lebanonin the 1970s, the Palestinian CP (whichwas part of the Jordanian CP until 1982)established a mass base through organ-izations like the General Federation ofLabor Unions and the Union of WorkingWomen's Committees. By the time of _the Intifada, the CP could lay claim totaking "the initiative in establishing thepopular and patriotic committees" whichdirected the uprising. But as PoliticalBureau member Nairn Ashhab conceded,the Intifada could not "defeat the invad-

Young Sparlacus

Krulwich/NYTimes PeterBlakelyGeorge Bush atUnlveraltyof Michigan commencement bewails supposed "censorship" of campus racists. like the murderous thugs who destroyed occupiedantl-apartheld shanties at Dartmouth.

In May the President of the UnitedStates donned cap and gown to delivera commencement address to the gradu-ates. of the University of Michigan, aspeech which grabbed headlines across.the nation. Fresh from. the slaughter. of100,000 Iraqis, George Bush. declaredwar on ..the enemy within."Ludicrously,in the present climate of right-wingtriumphalism, he railed against the"notion of 'political correctness'" as an"inquisition," "censorship" and "bully-ing." "Political extremists roam theland," Bush claimed, "abusing the priv-ilege of free speech, setting citizensagainst one another on the basis of theirclass or race." The University of Mich-igan, like so many other campuses acrossthe country, has been rocked by violentattacks against blacks, gays, Jews andother minorities-and Bush came to givethe presidential seal of approval to therace-haters and spur the witchhuntagainst the newall-purpose bogeyman,the "PC monolith."

What is "PC"? If you want to fightagainst racist attacks, abortion clinicbombings, union-busting and imperialistwar, then maybe you're "politically cor-rect" and a dangerous enemy to Westerncivilization. Among rad-lib academiccircles "PC" used to be a self-conscious

6

and jocular term by which one IeftistChallenged another's "politically cor-rect", credentials. Some of :the most.humorless may go a bit overboard-typically this milieu rests on ladies withfourlegs ("chairpersons,,) and is servedby. restaurant workers from outer space("waitrons"). There are some politicsteo-s-an ivory tower battle to undo thereal and hideous history of racial, sexualand class oppression through sectoral-ist and triumphalist glorifications of"mystory." Over the last year however,the term "PC" has become what onewriter aptly called "the bloody shirt" ofthe right wing.

It's also a big-time Big Lie campaign.A mighty media wurlitzer has churnedup a mountain of magazine cover stories,op-eds and books screaming that thecampuses have been seized by "tenuredradicals" and leftist "thought police"subverting wholesome American youthwith satanic verses 'of "multicultural-ism." Yet, as anyone who has set footon a campus in the last five years knows,America's colleges are hardly commu-nist valhallas. In a country with a shrink-ing economy and a growing non-whitepopulation, with "death of Communism"ideologues and yahoos riding high, thecampuses have become nasty havens for

aggressive racists who've been attackingminorities .with alarming intensity.

It is on behalf of these bruising big-ots that Bush, whose administrationjust slapped an anti-abortion' gag orderon clinic counselors; now grotesquelyclaims the mantle of "free speech," toincite every retrograde punk to violenceby championing their "right" to hurlfighting words like "N----r!" Otherprime targets are the few professors andcourses in black and women's studiesdepartments, slim gains remaining fromthe big civil rights and Vietnam antiwarstruggles of the '60s. \'.

During the Vietnam War the campuseswere organizing centers of political pro-test, "breeding grounds of subversion"in the eyes of the White House/penta-gon/CIA. Then anti-imperialist youthchanted, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kidsdid you kill today?" This time around,Bush & Co. want to ensure that the uni-versities are brought firmly into line withthe "New World Order," with mobschanting "USA! USA!" and showeringconfetti on the soldiers and their warcriminal commanders. New Left illu-sions to the contrary, petty-bourgeoisstudents are not inherently radical butcan swing all the way to the fascist farright. To mold this generation, the bour-

The Big Liecampaign:bourgeoismedia whips upwitchhunt todrive red-libsoff thecampuses.

geoisie's agenda includes weeding outanything remotely pink from the curric-ulum. purging '60s leftovers from thefaculty. driving minorities out of highereducation in the .name of "maintainingstandards" and inciting straight-out rac-ist violence. Hitler had a similar programfor universities in his "New Order"-Gleichschaltung-the forcible repres-sion of independent thought and action,a lockstep march to total. conformity.

In effete Harvard Yard, just days be-fore the fascist David Duke rode intotown this spring, an ultra-conservativecreep hoisted the Confederate flag ofslavery' to challenge the "tyranny" ofthe "politically correct." In April, threestudent members of the University ofChicago Gay and Lesbian Alliance re-ceived death threat letters covered witha lethal neurotoxin absorbable throughthe skin. In Long Island, Jermaine Ewell,a black high school youth, was beatenwithin an inch of his life by a posse ofwhite Hofstra students for talking to awhite girl. On and off campus, this isthe real face of the anti-"PC" crusade.

Just what is it that these"PC" hunterswho rail about constraints on their "freespeech" (yet rule the country and ownthe media) want to say? Take the caseof Douglas Hann, who was recentlyexpelled from Brown University after hestood in a courtyard screaming a stringof vile racial epithets at blacks, Jews andgays. He threatened one black woman,telling her that "My parents own youpeople." Sure enough, less than two.weeks after Hann's outburst, racist graf-fiti and white-supremacy leaflets beganappearing around campus.

We shed no tears for the expulsion ofthis pig, but neither do we call for speechcodes or reliance on university adminis-trations to fight racism, as many mis-guided leftists do. Ninety-nine out of ahundred times, speech codes will be usedagainst the left and anti-racists. Reinstat-ing Hann has become a reactionary causecelebre, uniting right-wing SenatorHenry Hyde (author of the amendmentthat cut off Medicaid funding for abor-

WORKERS VANGUARD.

aninnies" and claimed slaveowners werethe real victims of the system.

All across the domestic front Reaganand Bush's vigilante squads scrutinizedpublic school districts for the use oftextbooks with so-called "atheistic" andsubversive deviations. Tennessee funda-mentalists sued a school board for read-ing "heathen" stories like Goldilocks,The Wizard of Oz and Cinderella inclasses. In California, Little Red RidingHood was pulled from the shelves in oneschool district because a heroine whoscampers off to grandmother's housewith a bottle of wine in her picnic basketconveys "the wrong message" aboutalcohol to children! In Mobile, Alabamaa judge banned 45 textbooks and de-clared "secular humanism" a religion, sothe religious and racist dogma of crea-tionism must get equal time in "science"classes.

This racist, right-wing indoctrinationhas provided fertile soil for thegrowth of ignorance and bigotry. TheNational Institute Against Prejudice andViolence reports soaring racist attackson _Ameri

"Deconstructionists" seek to expose the'injustices of Western civilization as pre-sented in classic texts. Feminists write"herstory" and black nationalists write"Afrocentric" curricula. An example ofhow "PC" tinkering serves to mask thehideous reality of capitalism is seen inthe current debate over use of the word"slave" vs. "enslaved person" in schooltextbooks. In a debate on this questionin Newsday (16 August), Henry LouisGates Jr. wrote:

".. .if your class has a tendency to thinkof slavery as an electivevocation, I sup-pose the longer phrase might help them.But there's a trade-off. After all, a pow-erful tradition of abolitionist rhetoricturned on the awful fact that the condi-tion of slavery truly negated one's verypersonhood. 'You have seen how a manwas made a slave,' Frederick Douglassfamously wrote, pouncing on the con-trast; 'you shall see how a slave wasmade a man'."

As Marxists our aim is to change real-ity, not merely the perception of it. Thus

. as opposed to empty "sensitivity train-ing" for racist thugs, we have initiatedunited-front labor/black mobilizations,enrolling the power of the integratedunion movement, that have stoppedfascist terrorists like the KKK andskinhead/Nazis in their tracks. And tofight the injustices of the present it isimportant to understand the past-a his-tory of class struggle. To that end wepublish a pamphlet series on Black His-tory and the Class Struggle so thattoday's fighters can reclaim the lessonsthat are deliberately omitted by the edu-cational system to perpetuate bourgeoisideology and the racist status quo.

A pernicious aspect of the "PC"curriculum debate is the tendency foreach oppressed constituency to elevateits own particular race, sexuality orethnicity above all others. Since chattelslavery, the ideology of race has beenthe white-supremacist justification forawhole system of exploitation whereblacks are integrated into production but .kept forcibly at the bottom. For ThirdWorld nationalists and their rad-libcheerleaders to present racial differencesas fundamental and insurmountable is toprovide a "PC" gloss on the ethnic polar-izations fueled by the white ruling classto keep the producers of the wealth ofthis country divided.

As Leninists, our aim is to unite theentire working class to fight the specialoppression of blacks, women and otherminorities. As an example, when theNazis threatened to storm the Gay PrideDay parade in Chicago in 1982, we mo-bilized steel workers, Holocaust survi-vors and the black community to defeattheir common enemy and defend them-selves through a united-front action. Thebattles at hand require the leadership ofa multiracial workers party that will actas a "tribune of the people" in cham-pioning the'cause of all the oppressed,fighting to achieve black liberationthrough revolutionary integration in asocialist society. It is by joining thestruggle to build such a party thatradical-minded students and campusworkers (and even professors) can helpto unify the working class to overthrowthis whole rotten system and open thedoor to human freedom.

benefit from such idiotic and cowardlycensorship. There is a proud tradition-with which we openly solidarize-ofscathing argument and even rude polem-ics in the history of the revolutionarymovement. It is through such clash ofopinion that one actually learns some-thing. We've certainly enjoyed ourdecade-long political scrap with Cock-burn over vital issues for the left andlabor movement, such as why Marxistsmust oppose imperialist sanctions anddefend Iraq against the American bour-geoisie (see, e.g., "Pinko JournalistTurns Yellow," Workers Vanguard No.518, 18 January). Ten years ago, Cock-burn's more polite reference to us was"Marxism-Leninism-Bonkerism" whenwe enraged the popular-front left by ourun- "PC" call for the military victory ofSalvadoran leftists and opposition to anegotiated sellout. Poor Alex just ranafoul of the same foul crowd, andwe can't help asking, "Who's 'bonkers'now?"

Workers Vanguard, the SpartacistLeague and the Spartacus Youth Clubsare most assuredly not "PC." For ourhard commie politics, e.g., our forthrightdefense of the Soviet Union againstimperialist attack and internal counter-revolution, our opposition to the craven,Democratic Party-ensconced "left," ouropposition to government interventioninto the Teamsters union, we too haveearned the enmity of muddleheaded"PC" rad-liberals.

In 1984 at San Francisco State Univer-sity we were "banned" by "PC" bean-sprout totalitarians. Campus feministsled by Julianne Malvaux couldn't toler-ate our Marxist politics and deemed ourconstant exposure of their.support to theloser Democrat Mondale an "assault."We offered a lesson in dialectics, asking:"What is the business end of a femalegreat white shark? The answer dependson whether one is a horny male greatwhite shark or a deeply committed femi-nist skindiver." They wanted a red-hunt.. .and in willful mockery of theirefforts we gave them one, going under-ground as the "Red Avengers" and sur-facing in disguise to hold fund-raisingrallies for embattled Nicaragua to pro-cure Soviet MIGs. In the end we defeatedthese would-be McCarthyites, as wepromised we would in our first under-ground communique:

"The Spartacus Youth League of SanFrancisco State University has beendriven underground by gestapo personsand rabid dobermanpinschersof the fe-male persuasion crawling between thetoes of the FBI. We go underground be-cause sinister elements in the studentgovernment and the Women's Center,bookburners inspired by sentiments atbottom not different than those of CIAtool Pinochet of Chile, leave us no re-course if we are to distributeour Marxistliterature.... Venceremos!"

"PC" thinking is a form of idealism,a false consciousness that obscures thematerial basis of oppression. The currenttrend among leftish academics, particu-larly now that many are "rethinkingMarxism" (the title of one voguish jour-nal) is to advance a sectoralist studyof one's own sexuality or ethnicity.

Marxism vs. Idealism

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Furor Over CUNY Prof. Jeffries

White Racist Backlash AgainstAnti-Semitic Demagogue

As New York City continued to festerduring this long hot summer, becomingever more racially polarized, the tabloidgutter press seized upon the anti-Semiticstatements of Leonard Jeffries, chairmanof the African-American studies depart-ment at City College, t6 fuel white racistfear and loathing of black people. In-deed, counterrevolution in the SovietUnion was the only news to push Jeffriesoff the front page.

While ostensibly addressing the con-troversy over "multiculturai" textbookrevision at a conference in Albany onJuly 20, Jeffries seized the. opportunityto rave about a "conspiracy, planned andplotted and programmed out of Holly-wood, where people called Greenbergand Weisberg and Trigliani and what-not. .. had a particular control over themovies" and together with "their finan-cial partners, the Mafia, put together asystem of destruction of black people."While citing just about every ethnicgroup for the horrors of the slave trade,Jeffries singled out Jews for their roleas a merchant class. (He whitewashesany mention of the African kings whogot their cut selling their own and otherAfrican peoples.) Denouncing right-wing Assistant U.S. Secretary for Edu-cation Diane Ravitch as a "sophisticatedTexas Jew," who had "blinded us on theattack coming from the Jewish commu-nity-systematic, unrelenting," Jeffriesblamed the Jews for black oppression.

Leonard Jeffries is an anti-Semiticbigot. But the people hounding him areeven more virulent bigots, and they havethe prerogatives of state power. Follow-ing the New York Post's 5 August "ex-pose" of Jeffries' remarks, an enormousoutcry was raised by everyone from Sen-ator Al D' Amato (a racist pig who calledblacks "animals") to Governor Cuomo,to the New York Times, to State Educa-tion Commissioner Thomas Sobol, call-ing for disciplinary action against Jef-fries. The fascistic Zionist JewishDefense League (which cut its teeth asa paramilitary anti-black organization inBrooklyn) demonstrated against Jeffriesand lynched him in effigy at JFK airportupon his return from Ghana two weeksago.

A City College faculty committeecriticized Jeffries but recommended thatno action be taken against him-how-ever, final word rests with the universityofficials and trustees. State or universitydisciplinary action against Leonard Jef-fries would not .only be wrong, butobscene. City College is also home toProfessor Michael Levin, a white-

Spartacist. LeaguePublic Offices

-MARXIST L1TERATURE-

Bay AreaThurs.: 5:30-8:00 p.rn., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m.1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)Oakland. California Phone: (415) 839-0851

ChicagoTues.:5:00-9:00 p.rn., Sat.: 11:00a.m-zoo p.m.161 W. Harrison St., 10th FloorChicago. Illinois Phone: (312)663-0715

New York CityTues.: 6:30-9:00 p.m., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m.41 Warren St. (one block below

Chambers St. near Church St.)New York. NY Phone: (212)267-1025

30 AUGUST 1991

ProfessorLeonard Jeffries

fuels racIalpolarization

in NYC.Supporters andJDL opponents

met him atKennedy Airport

(right).

supremacist who claims that "the aver-age black is significantly less intelligentthan the average white" (New York Ob-server, 7 May 1990), and calls for blackyouth to be herded into segregatedpolice-patrolled subway cars and barredfrom white-owned stores. Levin raisesonly a few eyebrows and receives not afraction of the tabloid outrage directedat Jeffries.

Leonard Jeffries' method is to put aplus where Levin puts a minus. But let'sface it, Jeffries' whacked-out theoriesabout melanin conferring biological andintellectual superiority on "sun people"of African descent would never get thatwide a hearing. Now the white racistbacklash has caused many blacks toclose ranks and rally 'round him, andthat's too bad-because Leonard Jeffriesis an enemy of black struggle. For allhis talk of a conspiracy against blackAmerica, he hobnobs with the police, thearmed fist of the racist ruling class, andlast week addressed the National BlackPolice Officers Association in Newark.

Jeffries has degenerated from a crack-pot cultural nationalist to an anti-Semitic;demagogue. When in 1982 the SpartacistLeague initiated the Labor/Black Mo-bilization that stopped the threatenedKKK march in Washington, D.C., Pro-fessor Jeffries enthusiastically endorsedour call to action, both individually andon behalf of the African-American Stud-ies Department. Yet by 1988, whenapproached by the Partisan DefenseCommittee for endorsement of our callto action against the Klan and skinheads'"White Pride Day" in Philadelphia, Jef-fries disgustingly retorted that the KKKwas "a white man's problem." Fortu-nately, large numbers of trade unionists,blacks, Jews, gays and others didn't buythis lie, 'and the Klan did not ride inPhilly on November 5th.

The ridiculous belief, expressed byJeffries and other pork-barreling blacknationalist demagogues, that the Ameri-can ruling class is comprised of Jewsand Italians, is a testimony to the patheticstate of what passes for black leadershiptoday. The real stagemasters of racist op-pression, as George Herbert Walker Bushhimselfcould tell you, do not even allowJews or Italians into their social clubs.

In the absence of a revolutionarysocialist alternative, the preachers ofnationalist despair play upon the in-creasing frustration of the black popu-lation, fueling murderous ethnic violence

such as what's boiled over in the streetsof Crown Heights against the Hassidim.Jeffries is one more voice in the chorusthat's leading this city to race war-awar in which the oppressed black popu-lation in a racist white country can onlylose. Leaflets went up all around Harlemdeclaring that "the Black communitywould hold the Post and Jewish peopleresponsible for any threat, misquotes,slander or acts of violence" against Jef-fries. The Amsterdam News fulminatedthat: .

"In order to discredit the leadership ofJesse Jackson, call him an anti-Semitefor referring to New York as 'Hymie-

town.' Cast Louis Farrakhan as ananti-Semite for referring to the' 'gutterreligion of the Jews.' Repudiate Jeffriesfor referring to Metro, Golden, Mayer[sic] as Jews. In the world of anti-Semitism, it is a sufficient act of anti-Semitism to call a Jew a Jew."

This stuff is anti-Semitic-and moregrist for the Zionist propaganda mills.Historically, American Jews were repre-sented in great numbers in the labormovement.,the Communist Party, and inthe front lines of the black freedomstruggle. It was people with names likeSchwerner and Goodman who joinedwith black youth like Chaney and gave

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their lives to fight Jim Crow in Missis-sippi. But times have changed. Particu-larly in the aftermath of Israel's 1967war against its Arab neighbors, Ameri-can Jewry has lurched to the right andZionism is now politically dominant. Aswe wrote about Jesse Jackson's disgust-ing "Hyrnietown" remark:

"American capitalism tended to set theJewish and black communities againstone another. In a number of U.S. citiesthe black ghetto exists today where theJewish ghetto of East European immi-grants existed yesterday. Thus, a blackghetto dweller often identifies Jews withhis landlord or shopkeeper... the oppres-sion of blacks and Jews in the U.S. isfundamentally different. Jews in the U.S.today Me generally well-off and com-fortable, while blacks are impoverished,miserable, brutalized by the cops andforced to live in ghetto hellholes. At thesame time, Jews, even if relatively priv-ileged, have a deep sense of historicoppression."

-WV No. 351, 30 March 1984

It is a measure of the terminal decayof American capitalism that communistsare the only people fighting for integra-tion of the schools and any semblanceof equality, while bigotry and preachersof pseudo-scientific racial supremacytake hold on the campuses. _

SJ>artaeist P~iShing Co. Box 13nGPO, New York,N'( 1D116

9

ReutersCOUporganizers' press conference: (from left) Tizyakov, Starodubtsev, Pugo,Yanayev and Baklanov.

Anatoly SapronyenkovHardliners of the OFT labor federation brandish portrait of Stalin during MayDay parade this year. Illusions that any sector of Stalinist bureaucracy wouldresist counterrevolution are now brutally exposed.

microphone, but his orders came on thedirect line from the White House On the'Potomac to the "White House" on theMoskva. Less than 24 hours after Bushexpressed dissatisfaction with Gorba-chev's appointment of General Moiseyevas the new defense minister, Moiseyevwas out. The Russian demagogue Yeltsinis portrayed as a great hero of "democ-racy." This "democrat" is calling for theformation of a new Russian army, the"National Guard," whose first decorationwould be the Order of St. George-thetsarist emblem and banner of the Russianfascists. A former White House officialcalled Yeltsin "a Slavic edition of HueyLong" (San Francisco Chronicle, 22August), the right-wing Louisiana dem-agogue who in the 1930s used populistrhetoric to build up a personal, authori-tarian regime. Even many pro-Western,"free market" intellectuals in the SovietUnion fear Yeltsin as a potential dictatorwho will ride roughshod over them. LikePoland's Lech Walesa, admirer of thenationalist dictator Pilsudski, he will tryto use his popularity to impose capitalist"shock treatment" on the workers.

The imperialist media are exultant,hailing "The Second Russian Revolu-tion." The New York Times sneeringlyrefers to V.1. Lenin as "little more thana demagogue with a lisp." (The Times isso intent on portraying a counterrevolu-tion victorious that its copious coveragenever once mentions the Soviet work-ers.) But in the Soviet Union.even someof the more liberal Yeltsinites are begin-

viks' fighting arm against White Guardsubversion. The next day they toppledthe statue of Yakov Sverdlov, a JewishCommunist (and first president of theSoviet republic. There, the pro-HitlerNTS distributed a leaflet that called forthe very measures that Yeltsin decreedthe next day. The Russian OrthodoxPatriarch presided over the burial ofthree who died assaulting the tanks. Brit-ish TV reported, "The images today wereof old Russia, pre-revolutionary, a coun-try throwirig itself back 75 years."

In the wake of the botched coup,Yeltsin, the former bureaucratic hackturned capitalist-restorationist, movedquickly and ruthlessly against his oppo-nents. In the best tradition of Stalin,Yeltsin dragged the politically enfeebledSoviet "president" Gorbachev beforejeering members of the Russian parlia-ment to crudely humiliate him. Apingthe tsar, the "democratic" Russian pres-ident Yeltsin haughtily issued a ukase(decree) banning activities of the Com-munist Party on Russian soil and out-lawed Pravda and other CP newspapers.The CPSU Central Committee and Mos-cow offices were sealed and surroundedby bloodthirsty gangs. Flaunting hispower over Gorbachev, Yeltsin namedthe new head of the Soviet army, KGBand interior ministry, who promptly out-lawed Communist Party activity in thesepillars of state power. The next dayGorbachev not only resigned as generalsecretary of the CPSU but called for dis-solution of the disintegrating party andconfiscation of its property.

Yeltsin may wield the pen and the

unraveling. In the afte~aih~, there hasbeen a lot of hoopla about the 'outpouringof popular support for "democracy."While up to 150,000 (out of a city often million), undoubtedly includingmany workers, turned out at one pointto hear Yeltsin, the fabled barricades out-side the "White House" were purelysymbolic, generally having only a fewthousand hanging around them. "Theywere mainly young ones, like myself,students, intellectuals, professionals,"said one participant. In addition to a cou-ple dozen Russian republic police,Yeltsin's bodyguards were rent-a-copsfrom a private security company (likethe strikebreaking Pinkertons in theU.S.). At most there were a dozen tanks,dispatched by pro- Yeltsin commanders,in' front of the building. Speaking of apossible assault, 'a Yeltsin "commander"said: "Of course, we could not hold themoff for more than five minutes." Butthere was no serious assault.

Emboldened by the paralysis of thecoup leaders, the reactionary mobheaved Molotov cocktails at young tankdrivers. And then, barely two and a halfdays after the action began, the armywithdrew. At this point frenzied Yeltsin-ites begal!. rampa,g~ng through the_i!Y.A lieutenant colonelwho attended thedemonstrations was shocked: "I am sur-prised by how many of the young arethirsting for blood." Their first target was'the statue outside KGB headquarters ofFeliks Dzerzhinsky, a Polish Communistand founder of the Cheka, the Bolshe-

even the "Great Patriotic War." Insteadthey looked to the traditions of thetsarist empire-which Lenin called a"prison house of peoples"-declaring:"Our multinational people have lived forcenturies, proud of their Motherland."But in appealing to Russian nationalism,Yeltsin held the stronger hand.. Nor did the coup organizers manage

to assuage Washington and Wall Street.As soon as Bush took a hard line backingYeltsin (and incidentally demandingGorbachev's return), the coup began

UniformedPamyat fascistsburn Sovietflag outsideCommunistPartyheadquarters.

authors staked everything on a neutralacceptance of the coup by the imperial-ists, hinting that Gorbachev might bebrought back and leaving Washington'sdarling Yeltsin untouched. The GKChP'sstatement vowed to "support privateenterprise" and to observe every treach-erous commitment to the imperialists byGorbachev. Its chief economic spokes-man Tizyakov insisted that "the policyof the reforms toward a market econ-omy will not be reversed." There wasno mention of "Marxism-Leninism,""communism," or even "socialism."

For this was a "perestroika coup." Formonths there had been calls for a crack-down coming from hardline Stalin-ist/nationalist "patriots" like the "blackcolonels" of Soyuz. But what moved thecoup leaders, all of them Gorbachevappointees, to action was the imminentsigning of a new union treaty, whichwould have ceded significant centralpowers to the republics. The coup wasnot so much by the military, whichlargely stayed out of the fray, but bytop administrative and party hacks ofthe central apparat whose bureaucraticfiefdoms were threatened. Their avowedprogram was martial law to keep theUSSR from breaking apart, which comesdown to perestroika minus glasnost: theintroduction of the market but not so fast,and shut up. Thus one of the "gang ofeight," Prime Minister Pavlov, was theGorbachev regime's main spokesman forthe new law allowing widescale privati-zation of industry, and was'notoriousfor tripling food prices last spring. Atthe time, he told a British journalist:

"I must be very firm and say thatprivatisation has always been on theagenda of economic reform, and it wasalways, for obviousreasons,verycloselylinkedwith the liberalisation of prices....We want to bring about the normal sit-uation of capital as in other countries."

-London Independent (18 April)

Not exactly a program to inspireSoviet workers to support the plotters'bid for power! The coup leaders con-spicuously avoided any mention of theOctober Revolution, or for that matter

Perestroika Coup FiascoAs the crowd of yuppies, students and

assorted Russian nationalists, includingfascists and priests, gathered'at the startof the coup outside the Russian parlia-ment, Yeltsin's "White House," a callon Moscow workers to clean out thiscounterrevolutionary rabble was in or-der. Yet the coup plotters not only didnot mobilize the workers, they orderedeverybody to stay at work and at home.The working class did, and Yeltsin'scall for a protest strike fell flat. Butthe free-enterprise "cooperativists" andpetty-bourgeois self-styled "democrats"intoxicated by the allure of dollars andD-marks thronged into the streets. Andthe impotent "state of emergency com-mittee" (GKChP) did nothing. Any class-conscious Soviet worker who saw theurgent need to halt the capitalist-restorationist forces would certainlyhave been against Yeltsin, but critical ofthe coup-which wouldn't stop Yeltsin,and was therefore doomed to failure.

The ineptitude of the coup plottersastounded even imperialist commenta-tors. It was reported that they hadordered 250,000 handcuffs from a fac-tory in Pskov as well as stacks of blankarrest orders, but they failed even toseize the man who would clearly be thefocus for a pro-imperialist countercoup.Washington spokesmen ascribed thisfailure to follow the first rule of coup-making and arrest Yeltsin to a "miracle."They didn't even cut off his phones, andincredibly allowed TV to report Yeltsin'sappeals for soldiers to disobey theirorders! But these apparent stupiditieswere no mere oversight. The coup

the West. He is connected to a far-right,racist outfit in the U.S. called the "FreeCongress Foundation" (whose East Eu-ropean operatives include notorious Nazicollaborators) which takes credit for"training" him and his staff on how toseize power. His laws are being drawnup by advisers supplied by the U.S. gov-ernment.i.One of Yeltsin's first acts asMoscow party chief in the mid-'80s wasto legitimize the anti-Semitic Pamyatfascists when they emerged from theirratholes. While' he promises workingpeople that the free market will bringthem prosperity, in fact it will lead tothe elimination of what every Sovietworker considered a right until recently:a stable job, free health care, an educa-tion for their children-gains which allrest on the collectivized economy.

The alternatives posed before the So-viet bureaucratically degenerated work-ers state have always been: counterrev-olution or Trotskyism. Today Stalinismis dead. The key to frustrating the bloodyplans of Bush, Yeltsin and their counter-revolutionary cohorts is the early forgingof a Trotskyist nucleus in the SovietUnion, regrouping those elements inthe workers movement, the army andthroughout society who would fight forthe program of October.

(continued from page 1)

Soviet Union.;.

10 WORKERS VANGUARD

soldiers and officers must be formed tooppose the purges and prevent the armyfrom being used to attack the workers'interests. The anti-Communist mobs are theshock troops of a budding fascist move-ment, the future strikebreakers, jailersand torturers of militant workers andleftists. Already the NTS, former WW IIquislings of the Hitlerite invaders, haveraised their heads at the Yeltsinite mobi-lizations. The blackshirted Pamyat fas-cists are burning red flags. Next theywill be staging deadly anti-Semiticpogroms. Workers militias must beformed, aided by Red Army officers andsoldiers loyal to socialism, to defendagainst and crush the lynch mobs andpogromists. Illegalization of the Communist Partywill be used as a precedent to ban allgroups claiming to stand for socialismor communism. The red purge will beused to victimize militant workers wholead strikes against layoffs and privatiza-tion. Down with the witchhunting ban onthe cPt Don't let them drag away Jewishor Communist coworkers! The escalating nationalist secessionistmovements in the various republics arefueling fratricidal slaughter among thedeeply interpenetrated Soviet peoples. Itis urgently' necessary to organize multi-Rational defense guards to ward off com-munalist butchery. As Leninists, i.e., pro-letarian internationalists, we stand forfull equality ofall nations and national-ities in a genuinely socialist federation.

Working women, who have sufferedmost under perestroika's economic mis-ery, must be in the forefront not only ofthe battle to stop the closures of child-care centers, but in the forging of a gen-uinely communist nucleus. In Polandand the former DDR (East Germany)women are being driven from their jobsand abortion is considered a criminal act.Reawakened women workers of theSoviet Union-who have the most tolose under capitalist counterrevolution-must play a leading role as their grand-mothers and great-grandmothers did inthe Bolshevik Revolution.

The youth, many shocked into polit-ical awareness for the first time in recentdays, must find their way to the programof revolutionary internationalism. Re-version to the Slavophilic backwardnessofYeltsin & Co. precludes the genuinelyopen intellectual and artistic climate thatso many young people yearn for. Makeno mistake: life for youth in the Westdoes not resemble a music video! Thereality for working-class youth undercapitalism is a nightmare of uncertainty,unemployment, hopelessness with thevery real prospect of being cannon fod-der in the next imperialist war. Theyoung Soviet republic in the days ofLenin and Trotsky fought for women'semancipation, for every kind of socialemancipation, against censorship, forfreedom from state intervention in one'spersonal affairs.

Workers and soldiers soviets (coun-cils) must orient to defeating the

continued on page I2

munist leadership represents the greatestobstacle, leaving the working class preyto confusion, false polarizations anddefeatism in the face of their classenemies.

Both the Yeltsinites and the "hard-liners" compete on the terrain of coun-terrevolutionary Russian nationalism.Starting with Stalin himself, viciousGreat Russian chauvinism has charac-terized the bureaucracy, undermining themultinational USSR. ThePamyat anti-Semites' rise was protected by sectionsof the Gorbachev bureaucracy, in par-ticular Yeltsin's wing. Meanwhile, thenationalist secessionists-mostly fromthe better-off republics-yearn to bepawns of imperialism today, as many oftheir forefathers were for the Nazis. Inthe last fight of his life, Lenin insisted,against Stalin, that the, revolutionarySoviet state be a voluntary union basedon equality of nations.

Itis urgently, indeeddesperatelynee-essary for the working class to now es-tablish organizational forms to mobilizeits power' to resist and overthrow theforces of capitalist counterrevolution. As' every hustler is out to "get theirs,"workers will be" anxious to protect theirown threatened livelihoods. Independentworkers committees must be formed infactories, mines, railroad yards and otherenterprises to prevent '. layoffs andprivatization by' taking over the plantsand controlling production. Such work-ers committees can be the basis for genu-ine soviets, drawing into their ranks col-lective farmers, oppressed minorities,working women, Red Army' soldiers andofficers, old-age pensioners-t-all thosewho will be victimized by the "neworder." Yeltsin & Co. have already begunpurging the officer corps of the military.This has nothing to do with democracy.He wants to turn the Soviet army whichdefended the Soviet people against theNazi scourge into a compliant tool forinternal repression in the interests of thenew capitalist masters. Committees of

Soviet workershave not entered

the scene inthis hour of

deadly peril.1989 miners strikethrew up incipientworkers councils

(soviets), showedpotential powerof multinational

USSR proletariat.

er, pensioner and soldier will immedi-ately recognize that this process of coun-terrevolution is well under way. The statemonopoly of foreign trade has beenscuttled, the planned economy aban-doned. In their stead, imperialist corpo-rations from Pepsi-Cola to Chevron oilhave made encroachments on the Sovieteconomy. The Russian federation's new"land reform" lays the basis for destroy-ing the kolkhoz collectives, promisingrural poverty for the many and richesfor the new kulaks. "Cooperative" prof-iteers and black market speculators havegrown explosively in the vacuum of thecollapsed distribution system. But thisis only the beginning. Yeltsin nowintends to ram through capitalist resto-ration at breakneck pace. Yavlinsky, co-author of the Harvard-designed "grandbargain" to sell out the Soviet Union tothe imperialists, is now in charge of theeconomy. But for the Soviet workingmasses, the "magic of the marketplace"holds the promise of hunger and home-lessness. In an insiders' newsletter, themajor Wall Street brokerage firm MerrillLynch hints at the truth being hiddenfrom the Soviet masses:

"Although there is likely to be a surgeill optimism among the Sovietpeople asa new political order emerges, expecta-tionsaboutthe neworder's abilityto tumaroundthe economy are likelyto exceedwhatis realistically possible. If the expe-rience of eastern Europe is any indica-tion.the next several years will be pain-ful for the Soviet economy as workerslose lifetime jobs and state-owned enter-prises are restructured."

- Wednesday's Global Report,21 August

Up until now Yeltsin has been able toblame the economic chaos and immisera-tion of perestroika on Gorbachev's "half-measures" and the sabotage of the oldStalinist apparat. The Russian' dema-gogue talks out of both sides of hismouth, visiting strikers one week andapproving anti-strike laws the next. Butnow Yeltsin will seek to implement hisreal program, to impose brutal capitalistausterity on the Soviet working class.He will beheld responsible for closingdown "unprofitable" enterprises, throw-ing millions of workers into the streets,raising rents and the price of food, shut-ting down childcare centers and attack-ing Soviet working people in all ways.At the same time, it will be very difficultin the next several months to Use thearmy, KGB or police to break strikes Orbreak up popular protests.

Despite Yeltsin's present ascendancyand the mood of anti-Communist hys-teria among the petty bourgeoisie, it willnot be that easy to carry out a capitalistcounterrevolution in the Soviet Union.In fact, one might expect a higher levelof strike action than took place underGorbachev's perestroika, During thisperiod the Soviet working class has beenpolitically disoriented and confused bythe ever-shifting lineup of Yeltsin vs.Gorbachev vs. the "hardline" Stalinists.Now the lines of battle are hard, andraw. But the absence of genuinely com-

APLeon Trotsky shortly before his assassination by Stalin's agents In Mexico,1940. Left Opposition intransigently defended USSRagainst threat of capitalist

~restoration. Right: Trotsky's 1935 article, "Where Is th& Stalin BureaucracyLeading the USSR?" In Bulletin of the Opposition.

Fight Capitalist. Enslavement!For decades, the "Stalinists and impe-

rialists have joined together in identify-ing the system of bureaucratic ruleinstalled by Stalin and his henchmen in1924 with beninism. Nothing could befurther from the truth. The Bolsheviksunder Lenin and Trotsky carried out theOctober Revolution as the first step ofthe world socialist revolution. BackwardRussia, the "weak link" of imperialistrule, was the scene of the first workersrevolution, but it had to be completedby the proletariat in the advanced impe-rialist countries if it was to sustain itselfand lead to socialism, a society of equal-ity based on abundance. It was on thebasis of the defeat of the European rev-olutions, centrally in Germany, in the1918-23 postwar period, that the usurp-ers Stalin/Bukharin "discovered" theprofoundly anti-Marxist notion that itwas possible to construct "socialism inone country." Trotsky denounced thisnationalist dogma as writing off theworld revolution, and predicted it wouldbe the undoing of the Soviet Union ifthe bureaucracy was not swept away bythe resurgent working class.

lit his decisive analysis of Stalinism,The Revolution Betrayed (1937), Trotskyasked prophetically, "Will the bureaucratdevour the workers' state, or will theworking class clean up the bureaucrat?"In developing this, he elaborated the pro-gram of proletarian political revolutionled by a Bolshevik party to re-establishSoviet democracy. The planned economywould be subordinated 10 the will of theworkers, freeing it from the arbitrary zig-zags of the faceless, grey bureaucrats.And instead of the conservative anti-revolutionary policies of Stalin's Krem-lin, the Soviet Union would againbecome the headquarters of internationalsocialist revolution. He also spelled outthe bleak alternative:'

"If-to adopt a second hypothesis-abourgeois party were to overthrow theruling Soviet caste, it would find nosmall number of ready servants amongthe present bureaucrats, administrators,technicians, directors, party secretariesand privileged upper circles in general.Apurgation of the stateapparatus would,of course, be necessary in this case too.But a bourgeois restoration would prob-ably have to clean out fewerpeoplethana revolutionary party. The chief task ofthe new power would be to restore pri-vatepropertyin the meansof production.First of all, it wouldbe necessary, to ere-ate conditions for the development ofstrong farmers from the weak collectivefarms, and for converting the strongcol-lectives into producers' cooperatives ofthe bourgeois type-into agriculturalstockcompanies. In the sphereof indus-try, denationalization would begin withthe light industries and those producingfood. The planning principle would beconverted for the transitional period intoa series of compromises between statepower and individual 'corporations'-potential proprietors, that is, among theSoviet captains of industry, the emigreformer proprietors and foreign capital-ists. Notwithstanding that the Sovietbureaucracy has gone far towardprepar-ing a bourgeois restoration, the newregime would have to introduce in thematterof formsof propertyand methodsof industry not a reform, but a socialrevolution."

Every Soviet worker, collective farm-

ning to get nervous about reaping thewhirlwind they have sown. Ogonyok edi-tor Vitaly Korotich is now warning of a"third force, which may be representedby certain young people of the fascistpersuasion." The leaders of the "demo-cratic revolution" are already promotingthe tsarist watchword of "Russia, oneand indivisible.'" Leningrad mayorAnatoly Sobchak lambastes centrifugalforces pulling apart the USSR: "This isinsanity. We are a nuclear country."Yeltsin aides talk of destabilization ofthe economy and warn Ukrainian seces-sionists that"these lands Were settled byRussians."

Meanwhile, thousands of Muscoviteshave been lining up to visit the Leninmausoleum, worried that this may betheir last opportunity to pay theirrespects to the founder of the Sovietstate.

,30 AUGUST 1991 11

It's Desperately Necessaryto Fight

Writing in 1935 on "The Workers'State, Thermidor and Bonapartism,'Trotsky noted: "The inevitable collapseof Stalinist Bonapartism would immedi-ately call into question the character ofthe USSR as a workers' state." This hasnow occurred. He added: "The fate ofthe USSR as a socialist state dependsupon that political regime that will ariseto replace Stalinist Bonapartism." Theimperialists and their flunkeys such asYeltsin want to accelerate the consolida-tion of a capitalist state. But it will notbe so easy. This is not East Germany, acompact, homogeneous country whichwas taken over by the existing Germanbourgeoisie, which simply moved in itsstate apparatus, laid waste to the DDReconomy and put half the working pop-ulation on welfare. When the cost turnedout to be higher than expected, Bonnkept pumping in billions of D-marks.

The Soviet Union, in contrast, is ahuge country, with over 100 nationali-ties, a tremendous potential for chaosand no one to finance a capitalist take-over. The U.S. could probably buy thecountry for a few tens or hundreds ofbillions of dollars, but the American rul-ingclass is as ideologically opposed tothat as it is to financing a decent socialwelfare or health care system in thiscountry. Soviet petty-bourgeois yuppiesbelieve in a utopian capitalism, dreamingthat they will suddenly achieve a stand-ard pfIiving like Scandinavia. In fact,economically and politically their fateunder capitalism would be more akin toMexico, or worse, with deep impover-ishment of the masses presided over byan authoritarian state. The forces backingYeltsin would like to be a capitalist class,but they are not yet one. Even in Poland,where the state is capitalist from top tobottom, a capitalist class has not yet con-gealed because they lack ...capital.

And there are additional obstacles: forone, the Soviet economy is organized onan all-Union basis and the departure ofmajor components, particularly if theUkraine pulls out, will wreak havoc.Moreover, many Soviet workers believethat the country belongs to them, andthey have a deep reservoir of commit-ment to egalitarianism which must berooted out for capitalism to be implanted.Thus although events are moving atbreakneck speed, these factors mayallow enough of a window for the Sovietproletariat to go into struggle before thecounterrevolution consolidates. Shouldthat happen, revolutionaries must seekto intervene to provide leadership, seek-ing above all to cohere a new revolu-tionary vanguard party, the necessaryinstrument for victory.

. opposed capitalist reunification.Within the Soviet Union represen-

tatives of the ICL have fought for a rev-olutionary internationalist perspective.Thus at a coal miners congress last Octo-ber in Donetsk, we helped block theeffort of right-wing, Yeltsinite forcesadvised by the American "AFL-CIA"federation to enlist Soviet miners in theinternational anti-Communist witchhuntagainst British miners leader ArthurScargill. The imperialist rulers hateScargill because he led the 1984-85 Brit-ish miners strike-which Soviet workersgenerously aided. This momentous classbattle gave the lie to the self-servingStalinist myth that workers in advancedcapitalist countries are incapable ofhard-fought class struggle.

We urgently seek to bring the programof Trotskyism to the Soviet proletariatand socialist-minded intelligentsia withour Russian-language Spartacist Bulle-tin, containing in addition to key docu-ments of the ICL the section on theUSSR from Trotsky's Transitional Pro-gram. In recent months, we analyzed themounting crisis in our article "Where Isthe Soviet Union Going?"(WV Nos. 520,521 and 522, 15 February, 1 March and15 March), including a program of strug-gle for genuine soviet power.

Poland, the German Democratic Repub-lic (DDR)-the International Commu-nist League' (ICL, formerly the intema-,tional Spartacist tendency) has stoodresolutely in defense of.the Soviet Unionagainst the capitulation of the Kremlinbureaucracy.

Where the Soviet Stalinists wagedahaltbearted war against CIA-armedIslamic reactionaries in Afghanistan,ultimately selling out and withdrawing,we said "Hail Red Army in Afghani-stan!" and called to "Extend Social Gainsof the October Revolution to the AfghanPeoples!" When in late 1981 Polish Soli-darnosc, under the guidance of Reaganand Pope John Paul Wojtyla, made abid for power in the name of "bour-geois democracy," we raised the call:"Stop Solidarnosc Counterrevolution!"General Jaruzelski's countercoup tempo-rarily spiked these Clerical-nationalistfront men for Wall Street and Washing-ton. But the Stalinists had neither themoral authority nor the program toundercut counterrevolution, and eightyears later the same Jaruzelski, withGorbachev's approval, abdicated politi-