Workers Vanguard No 755 - 30 March 2001

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 755 - 30 March 2001

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WfJRIlERS ' ." ' IJ .R' 0eNo. 755 30 March 2001

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All U.S./UN/NATO Troops Out Now!ans ang eMARCH 26-Less than two yearsafter the U.S.-led NATO onslaughtagainst Serbia, the Balkans powderkeg threatens to explode in the imperialists' faces. Having used thestruggle of the ethnic Albanian Ko-sovo Liberation Army (UCK) as apretext for their war of dominationagainst the former Serbian regime ofSlobodan Milosevic, the imperialistsnow find the UCK pushing the regiontoward renewed intercommunal conflict. "West Is Alarmed as WarfareGrows in Balkans Again," read aheadline in the New York Times (17March).The former Yugoslav republic ofMacedonia, which provided a platform for NATO's war against Serbia,is embroiled in a potential civil warwith the National Liberation Army,which claims to be distinct from theKosovo guerrillas but whose Albanian initials are also UCK. On March21, a German KFOR (Kosovo occupation force) tank convoy and a thousand troops moved into the town ofTetovo amid heavy fighting betweenMacedonian troops and UCK irregulars. Earlier this month, a U.S.-ledKFOR unit engaged in a firefightwith UCK commandos on theKosovo border. Responding to European calls for more "robust" actionagainst the Albanian separatists, U.S.secretary of state Colin Powell nowpromises to help augment the Macedonian regime's "military capabilities" and support its "efforts to bol-

ReutersU.S. occupation forces patrol border between Kosovo and Macedonia. Albanianseparatists, pawns of 1999 U.S./NATO war of domination against Serbia, are nowdeemed "extremists."

ster a democratic, multi ethnic state."Given substantial Macedonian Slavand Albanian minorities in Greeceand Turkey's posture as patron of the Balkan Muslim peoples, the UCK's effortsfor a "Greater Albania" could easily pullthese historic enemies-and NATO partners-into a full-scale war.In Bosnia, which remains occupied byupwards of 20,000 troops under UnitedNations auspices, the nationalist CroatDemocratic Union threatens to secedeand bring down the "multiethnic, democratic" house of cards set up by the U.S.imposed Dayton Accord in 1995, revivingthe spectre of renewed ethnic slaughteramong Bosnian Muslims, Croats andSerbs.Serbia, anointed a "democracy" bythe masters of Wall Street, Frankfurtand the City of London in the wake ofMilosevic's ouster last fall, has chafedunder repeated raids by a local UCKoffshoot into the imperialishimposed"ground safety" zone along its southern border with Kosovo. NATO has nowinvited Serbian military forces back intothis area.While opportunist leftists tailed behindtheir respective capitalist governmentsin beating the war drums for "poor littleKosovo" two years ago, the International

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For a Socialist Federationof the Balkans!Communist League fought for the defeatof the U.S.INATO imperialists throughworkers revolution and for militarydefense of Serbia. That war had nothingto do with defense of the Kosovo Albanians. It was aimed from the start atasserting U.S. dominance in Europeand realizing longstanding plans to inserta substantial NATO military presencein Serbia. We denounced the predatory"peace" dictated by the world's bloodiest mass murderers, who wreaked moredestruction on Yugoslavia than hadHitler's Nazis in World War II, declaringin WV No. 715 (11 June 1999):

"This imperialist conquest is a blow notonly to the people of Serbia and throughout the.Balkans but to working people

and the oppressed the world over. It will. place the Kosovars-Serbs, Gypsies andAlbanians alike-under the direct thumbof the imperialists, exacerbating national hatreds in the region. It will fuel therapacity of the American bourgeoisie athome and abroad. It will sharpen theconflicting appetites of the major capitalist powers, accelerating the drive to aneven bloodier war in the future."

Kosovo was turned into a NATO prot ~ c t o r a t e , divided into British, French,German, Italian and American zoneSof occupation, with the U.S. calling theshots as supreme overlord of NATO.Beneath the seeming amity among theimperialist occupiers lie very differentinterests. Germany is intent on reasserting its traditional sphere of influence,

AFP photosBalkan cauldron boiling: Macedonian police fire on Albanianseparatist positions outside Tetovo (above). Albanian comman-dos on the march along Serbian border.

especially in the northern Balkans;the D-mark is now the main currencyin Kosovo and elsewhere in the Balkans. Britain's ambitions were madeclear by the bizarre ceremony stagedlast week in London's Claridge'sHotel, as Crown Prince Alexanderwas granted Serbian citizenship inthe suite where he was born in 1945,a prelude to re-establishing the monarchy. That suite was d e ~ i g n a t e d "Yugoslav territory" the day he wasborn in order to ensure his claim tothe (abolished) Serbian throne! Francelikewise has historic appetites in Serbia, and Italy in Albania, while Russia has reverted to its prerevolutionary posture as "big brother" of theSlavic peoples.The renewed flare-up in the Balkans comes as the U.S. flaunts anincreasingly bellicose foreign policy.The wholesale expUlsion of some 50Russian diplomats last week is themost provocative action of this sortsince the height of the Reagan administration's Cold War offensiveagainst the Soviet Union in the 1980s.Simultaneously, the Bush administration provocatively hosted a representative of the Chechen separatistsbrutally suppressed by Russia as"terrorists."Tensions between Washington andits West European "allies" have alsogrown more strident. Today's NewYork Times headlines, "Europe andBush: Early Storm Clouds to Watch."The Europeans oppose Americanplans for a "star wars" anti-missilesystem and the U.S. denounces European plans to build a "rapid reactionforce" as a counterweight to NATO.

Reflecting its own imperialist appetitesin the oil-rich Near East, France recentlycame out-openly against the U.S.-dictatedUN embargo of Iraq, as has Russia.Within the European Union itself, virtually everything from the influx of asylumseekers to the recent outbreak of footand-mouth disease serves as a pretextfor tightening borders and fomentingnational chauvinism. And such tensionsamong the major capitalist powers arebound to deepen as an international recession takes hold.Washington's main target is thebureaucratically deformed workers stateof China. The London Guardian (24continued on page 10


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National Guard Called OutAgainst Nursing Home StrikersMARCH 25-When 4,000 members ofthe New England Health Care Employees Union (NEHCEU), District 1199,staged a one-day strike against Connecticut nursing homes on March 20, Republican governor John Rowland and theemployers acted as if they were facing a

nursing homes unionized, a high ratiocompared to most other states, busting the union has been a priority for theprofit-gouging bosses, who wring thelast pennies out of elderly patients whilebrutally exploiting the largely black andimmigrant workforce. When the governor raised Medicaid reimbursements,from which the nursing homes derivemost of their profit, by $200 million twoyears ago, the extra funds were largelyused to hire non-union workers whilestaff at unionized homes was laid off.Connecticut

workers insurrection. Rowland mobilizedNational Guard troops to herd scabsthrough picket lines. The state coughedup $6 million to the nursing homes topay for the scabs, and nursing assistantsand food and maintenance workers at 16nursing homes were locked out for fivedays.

Rowland's lie that he mobilized theNational Guard to protect the safety ofthe patients didn't go over very well.There is widespread sympathy with overworked, underpaid health care workers inthis racist capitalist society, where thebottom line isn't patient care but profitboosting. The two central demands of theNEHCEU are greater staffing levels anda modest wage increase of 6 percent overeach of the next two years. The linkbetween the union's struggle for betterworking conditions and better healthcare was not lost on the patients, some ofwhom joined the picket lines. Onewoman told the Hartford Courant (22March): "My mother went to the picketline in her wheelchair."

In the face of this concerted strikebreaking campaign, locked-out workerscontinued to walk picket lines. Two daysago, the union held a large rally andmarch around the St. Mary Home in WestHartford, where management had tried toget housekeepers, laundry workers anddietitians back to work. But they stayedout in solidarity with locked-out nursingstaff. On the day of the strike one dietitianat St. Mary's declared, "We're all part ofthe union. We stick together." With upwards of 30 patients per nurseand a lack of necessary supplies, manyith nearly 15 percent of the state's

Imperialism and the BalkansIn the early part of he 20th century, intensifying interimperialist rivalries spurredGreat Power intrigues in the Balkans thatpaved the way for World War I. With capitalist counterrevolutions in East Europe and tl:l&;Soviet Union once again fueling the murderous nationalism which had characterized theBalkans, the region has again become' acockpit for war. NATO's war against Serbia

TROTSKY two years ago, carried out under the guise LENINof "humanitarian" concern for the KosovoAlbanians, was intended to establish_U.S. hegemony over the region. In a 1908 article,Leon Trotsky exposed the imperialists' machinations and the attendant fratricidal conflicts as inevitable preludes to.war.The states that today occupy the Balkan Peninsula were m a n u f ~ c t u r e d by Europeandiplomacy around the table at the Congress of Berlin in 1879. There it was that all themeasures were taken to convert the national diversity of the Balkans into a regularmelee of petty states. None of them was to develop beyond a certain limit, each separately was entangled in diplomatic and dynastic bonds and counterposed to all the rest,and, finally, the whole lot were condemned to helplessness in relation to the GreatPowers of Europe and their continual intrigues and machinations ....The Treaty of Berlin constitutes the formal foundation of European equilibrium as awhole. Apart from so-called "moral" obligations, it is guarded, apparently, by armies,fortresses, and warships, and is the object of a constant vigil by diplomats. Yet all thisin no way prevented one participant in the Congress of Berlin, namely, Austria, fromviolating the treaty as soon as a favorable moment occurred. The miserable incapacity

of the "concert" of Europe to prevent the violation of a treaty placed under its protection provides a merciless disproof of illusions about the possibility of realizing thePeace of God by means of arbitration between capital ist states. .

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-l!.,eon Trotsky, "The Balkans, Capitalist Europe, and Tsarism,"The Balkan Wars (/912-13) (1980)

! ~ ! ! ! I ! ! o ' ! . 4 . , ! . . ' ! ! L ~ ! ! ! EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Anna Wood manPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Irene GardnerEDITORIAL BOARD: Barry James (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Ray Bishop, Jon Brule,George Foster, Liz Gordon, Walter Jennings. Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour,Alison SpencerThe Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (FourthInternationalist)Workers Vanguard (ISSN 0276-0746) published biweekly. except Skipping three alternate issues in June, July andAugust (beginning with omitting the second issue in June) and with a 3-week interval in December, by the SpartacistPublishing Co., 299 Broadway, Suite 318. New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377. GPO. New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:[email protected] subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.Opinions expressed in signed a r t i c / ~ s or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is March 27.

No. 755 30 March 2001

Hartford,March 20:Nursing homeworkers picketgovernor's homeduring one-daystrike.

patients are deprived of proper medicalattention. A union Web site noted, "Staffing levels in Connecticut nursing homesrank next to last among New Englandstates. There has been a 166 percentincrease in the number of times Connecticut nursing homes are cited for violations of resident care standards."This strike graphically illustrates thatthe capitalist state-consisting at its coreof the military, cops, courts and prisonsis not a neutral arbiter but an instrumentfor the repression of workers and minorities in defense of capitalist profits andclass rule. This strikebreaking orchestrated by the governor's office takes placein the context of a vendetta by the Republican Bush administration again'st organized labor. Rowland's actions againstthe nursing home strike may seem likeoverkill, but were intended to intimidatethe entire labor movement. For their part,leading Connecticut Democrats haveseized on the opportunity to criticize thegovernor in speeches to union rallies,while the Democratic state comptrolleris investigating whether strike-relatedpayments to the nursing homes were

On February 11, comrades of theSpartacist League's Los Angelesbranch and friends gathered in memory of comrade Susan Adams at thegrave of abolitionist fighter OwenBrown on a wooded hilltop in nearbyAltadena. The roughhewn marker.reads, "Owe.n Brown, son of JohnBrown, the Liberator, Died Jan. 9,1889, Aged 64 Yrs." Alongside hisfather, the great abolitionist, OwenBrown and his brothers battled thepro-slavery militias in "bleeding Kansas" in the 1850s, carrying out raidsto free slaves. After a wreath was laid,a comrade noted, "It's appropriatethat we honor our comrade, SusanAdams, today. She fought on manybattlefronts for our party, to the benefit of every section of the International Communist League."On 16 October 1859, John Brownand his men, including Owen and two, of his brothers, launched thefamousraid on the Harpers Ferry federalarsenal, seeking to spark an antislavery insurrection. Fighting bravelyagainst overwhelming odds, Brownand his band managed to hold out for

AP"necessary" to protect the residents. TheNEHCEU leadership responded to theunion-busting by soliciting DemocraticParty support for a toothless federal lawsuit charging that Rowland violated theNational Labor Relations Act by takingmanagement's side.Beware: the Democrats are no friendsof labor. It was the Clinton White House. which ended "welfare as we know it,"creating the climate for Rowland to setup a union-busting, slave-labor "workfare" scheme in the state four years ago.The mobilization of the National Guardagainst the strikers should have been metby mass mobilizations of labor throughoutthe state, building picket lines that scabsd a ~ e not cross. But the pro-capitalistunion tops chain the power of labor to thecapitalists and their state through theirties to the Democratic Party and by putting their faith in the courts of the classenemy. To unleash the power of theunions, it is necessary to oust the labormisleaders and replace them with a classstruggle leadership based on a program ofthe political independence of the workingclass from the capitalists.

more than 30 hours, but eventuallynearly all were killed, wounded orcaptured by U.S. troops commandedby Robert E. Lee.John Brown was tried for treasonand executed along with four otherabolitionist martyrs, while OwenBrown escaped to California with aprice on his head. Speaking at thememorial, a comrade noted that"When abolitionist leader FrederickDouglass returned to Harpers Ferry in1881 to commemorate his friend JohnBrown, he spoke for all of us forwhom the Civil War was a class waragainst the system of slavery: 'I f JohnBrown did not end the war that endedslavery, he did, at least, begin the warthat ended slavery'."Owen Brown settled on this hilltopin Altadena, called "Little RoundTop," near Brown Mountain, namedafter his father. In later life, he wasoften honored by black Civil War veterans in the area, and his funeral wasattended by thousands, who sang theanti-slavery anthem "John Brown'sBody," as did our comrades andfriends in tribute to Susan.

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On Soviet Russiaand Kemal Ataturk

Bronx, NY3 December 2000Dear WV:I'm confused. I had always thought,and have often read in your press, thatthe subordination of the interests of theinternational revolutionary movement toSoviet nation-state Realpolitik was a phenomenon of the post-1924 Stalinist theory of "socialism in o n ~ country." I wastherefore surprised to read about thefollowing episode in 1919-1921, at theheight of the influence of Lenin andTrotsky. In 1919, in Berlin, Karl Radekestablished ties to Turkish nationalists.In the following year, this led to friendlyrelations between the Soviet governmentand Mustafa Kemal, which culminated ina treaty with Turkey in March 1921. During this period, however, Mustafa Kemalcrushed a peasant movement in Turkeywith ties to the Third International, andin January 1921 engineered the murdersof the entire leadership of the TurkishCommunist Party, who had been trainedin Germany by the Spartakusbund. Thesedevelopments seem not to have ruffledgood relations between Turkey and Rus-.sia, as evidenced by the commercialtreaty between the two countries signedtwo months later. According to one historian, the execution of the Turkish communist leadership was "noted and putaside by both sides in almost statesmanlike fashion" (BOIent Gokay, A Clash ofEmpires, 1997, p. 108). This is the kindof episode we normally associate withe.g. Soviet relations with Nasser's Egyptin the 1950's, but this happened rightin what Trotskyists consider the heroicperiod of revolutionary internationalism.How do you explain this?

Loren G.WVReplies:

relations with this or that capitalist state.In order to survive in the face of hostileimperialist encirclement, even a healthyworkers state would be obliged undercertain conditions to maneuver and seektemporary support among rival capitaliststates. The crime of the Kremlin bureaucrats was that they sold out the fundamental interests of the world proletariatfor the sake of temporary diplomaticadvantages. Under Stalin, the Communist International (CI) was transformedfrom an instrument of world revolutioninto an abject tool for furthering theKremlin's diplomatic aims. Vainly pursuing "peaceful coexistence" with theimperialists, the Stalinists subordinatedthe proletariat to a supnosedly "progressive" wing of the bourgeoisie.

Before discussing Lenin's support toKemalist Turkey, let's review the facts.Kemal, who was commander of the Turkish army in Anatolia, came to power inthe turmoil that followed the defeat ofthe Ottoman Empire in World War I. A1919 revolt by Turkish peasants, one ofseveral" popular uprisings in the Near

Letter

Ataturk LibrarySoviet military representatives with Kemal Ataturk (fourth from right), 1922.Bolshevik regime gave military support to Ataturk against British imperialismwhile helping to build Communist Party in Turkey.March 1921, a Soviet-Turkish Treaty wassigned providing for Soviet financial andmilitary aid to Turkey and affirming thatit was up to the countries adjoining theBlack Sea to guarantee freedom of commerce through the Straits. Strengthenedby the material support provided bySoviet Russia, Kemal succeeded in driving out the last Greek forces in Anatoliain September 1922. With the 1923 Treatyof Lausanne, the imperialists retreatedfrom their earlier demand that they be

significant defeat for imperialism in theNear East and a consequent gain for theworld proletariat.The Turkish Communist Party wasorganized in 1918 by Mustafa Subhi, amember of the Bolshevik Party whosehistory went back to the earliest Marxistpropaganda circles that came together inOttoman Turkey around 1910. The Turkish nationalists in power turned on thefledgling Communist Party, seizing Subhiand 16 other leaders when they tried toreturn to Turkey from Russia in January1921 and drowning them off the coast ofTrebizond. Following the Soviet-TurkishTreaty, the Kemal regime lifted the banon the Turkish CP and freed imprisonedCommunists. But after his victory overthe Greek forces in 1922, Kemal proceeded to crush the Turkish Communists.

The economic and military supportextended to the Turkish nationalist regime of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) bySoviet Russia in the early 1920s hasoften been cited by bourgeois historiansand Stalinists alike as an alleged precedent for the political support extended tobourgeois-nationalist regimes by theSoviet degenerated workers state in lateryears. This argument is based on a distortion both of Lenin's policy towardKemal's Turkey and of the policies of theStalinist bureaucracy which usurped political power from the Soviet proletariat in1923-24. Repudiating the Bolshevik program of international socialist revolutionin favor of the nationalist dogma of building "sociali sm in one country," the Stalinists promoted class collaboration in thecapitalist countries, disarming the workers and setting them up for bloody defeat,from the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27and Spain in 1936-37 to Iran and Iraq inthe 1950s.

Counterrevolutionary Russian general Kolchak with British patrons duringCivil War against Bolshevik rule.

According to Gokay in A Clash ofEmpires: "The murder of the Turkishcommunists in the early days of 1921 represents the first example of the failureof a peculiar Soviet dilemma in theEast-to support the anti-communistleadership of national liberation movements and at the same time to sponsor andorganise the local communist movementsto overthrow them via the Comintern."But the CI did not "put aside" or cover upthe murder of the Turkish Communists.Both Zhizn Natsionalnostei (Life of theNationalities, 14 May 1921), the publication of the Soviet People's Commissariat of Nationalities, and the CI's Kommu-nisticheskii Internatsional (7 June 1921)printed a letter by a 'Central Committeemember of the Turkish Communist Partygiving a full account of the murders.

We Trotskyists opposed the Stalinistbureaucracy not, per se, because it established friendly diplomatic or military

i , S p a r t a c i ~ t f o f l l l l } . . " "..""


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An Internationalist Salute toOur Comrade Susan Adams

Comrades, friends and family came together at memorial gatherings of the InternationalCommunist League in the San Francisco BayArea, New York and Paris on the weekend ofMarch 3-4 to honor our comrade Susan.Adams. A leader of our international party fornearly 30 years, Susan died at her home in Jersey City on February 6 after a two-year struggle with cancer. Susan's family held a memorial meeting in Los Angeles on February 10.Other ICL tributes took place internationally.One measure of the impact Susan had onour party and its fight for an internationalcommunist society is the outpouring of lettersand remembrances by ICL members aroundthe globe, as well as by former members,friends and sympathizers and even politicalopponents. A speaker at the Bay Area memorial saId, "Susan was somebody you couldtrust. She was upright and forthright. Andbecause she was quite bright, she was verypowerful. Everybody who has known her wasstrongly touched by her."It was in the Bay Area that Susan spent herfirst formative years as a communist cadre in1971-73. Much of the rest of her life wasdivided between work in our New York center and in Paris as a leader of the Ligue Trotskyste and our broader work in Europe, formany years in collaboration with her formerhusband, William, now an ex-member.Before the memorial meeting in Paris, comrades marched to the Pere Lachaise cemetery,where they laid a wreath at the wall whichcommemorates the thousands of proletarianfighters butchered by the bourgeoisie following the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune. Wreaths were also laid at LeonTrotsky'S gravestone in COY,oacan, ~ e x i c o , atKarl Marx's grave in London's HighgateCemetery, at the monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin and in agrove of redwoods in the Bay Area where theashes of our comrade Toni Randell had been buried afterher death in 1982. One Bay Area comrade explained,"It's a tradition in the communist movement to commemorate a special occasion by laying a wreath on the graveof someone who has made a key contribution to thestruggle against capitalist reaction." .One comrade at the New York memorial who had beena member of our British section in the 1980s recalled anincident at the annual political fete near Paris organizedby the reformist Lutte Ouvriere group: "I remember veryclearly one day a cadre of Lutte Ouvriere had died andthere was nothing in their paper about her. Susan was disgusted by this and she let them have it: 'You don 't evenbury y.our dead, you don't honor your dead'."Our comrades are a precious resource, the bearers ofthe Marxist program for the liberation of humanity. Insaluting Susan's lifetime of struggie ,as a communistleader, we seek also to educate and train a new generation of revolutionary fighters, a task to which she devotedmuch of her energy.

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Spartacist

1948-2001We publish below excerpts from remarks at the NewYork, memorial by Susan's husband, Franl;ois" herbrother Tom and her longtime friend Helene Brosius.Also speaking in New York were Bruce Anwar, whoworked with Susan in Paris; Sam Kaehler, who workedwith her in Moscow; and Alan Wilde, a young partycadre. Paul Costan, a former member who had workedwith Susan in our Detroit branch in the early '70s,addressed the Bay Area memorial. Eibhlin McDonald of

the Spartacist LeaguelBritain spoke in Paris.* * *Helene Brosius: A few weeks ago, at the end of a toughday of doctors and decis ions, Susan 'looked up and saidto me: "After all, I've done everything I wanted. to do inmy life." And as much as it made me want to hold herand not let her go, I also knew that what she said hadtruth to it: Susan was a Marxist revolutionary to herbones, single-mindedly driven to build a revolutionaryproletarian party, to reforge the Fourth International.

Comradesand friendshonor Susan atPere Lachaisecemetery inParis afterlaying wreathat Wall of theCommunards,March 3.

She wanted simply to be a communist. Andthat she was-until her last breath.Susan's father, Angelo Adams-Angecame from Greece at age four and made a goodlife here. He wanted to have the best for hisfamily-Betty and the five kids. Sue was theoldest, then Mark, Joni, Tom and Marian, whohave all come today. The break with her fam- 'ily was difficult all the way around and itdidn't even begin to heal until much later.Sue's rejectiQn of Catholicism was conscious, vehement and finally political. Shewrote an exceptional article for our journalWomen and Revolution called "The Cult of theVirgin Mary" in 1977, at the time of "bornagain" president Jimmy Carter's election victory. "Marxists find contemporary religion,"she wrote, "an odious thing.""We understand, however, that what sustainsreligious affiliation in the scientific age is notso much intellectual conviction as socialoppression. Thus, while the anti-clerical spiritwhich animates Voltaire's earnest wish that'the last king .. , be strangled with the entrai lsof the last priest' may be sincere and even justified, such a 'war against god' does not transcend petty-bourgeois idealism, Religion willdisappear only when the society which createsthe need for it is destroyed."To her chagrin, her understanding did not-all at once-release the grip that a Catholicupbringing had on her own psychology. Thiswas a lifelong effort.Sue well understood that religion alsoserved as an instrument for the oppression ofwomen. She was a thoughtful, ferveJ)t partisan of women's liberation, understanding thatit will come about only as a result of socialistrevolution. It is fitting that a last contributionof hers is the wonderful talk on "Women andthe French Revolution." This was a severalyears' labor of love for Sue. In 1994, shewrote of this work to a fellow member of theW&R editorial board: "At ,a time when thebourgeoisies of the world attack the Enlight-enment, it has been quite literally a real pleasure to read

of the hope in rationality and human progress of thisperiod."Susan's liberal arts education actually did include agood dose of science and math, but in these and technical matters in general she always seemed at a bit of aloss. What did stick was an appetite for and range ofknowledge of literature-especially European literature-which was wonderfully intertwined with herunderstanding of European history. This was the foundation upon which she developed as an exceptional Marxist intellectual.It was the '60s, and'like thousands of kids she wasturning hard against the manifest injustices of racistAmerican imperialism. At UC San Diego she threw her.-self into New Leftpolitics and the new SDS chapter. Butunlike many New Leftists, she started to study. Shedevoured Marx and Lenin and was drawn to the proworking-class wing of SDS led by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. She actually managed to graduate,despite an arrest that year for sitting in at thechancellor's office-and she went off to Stony Brook onLong Island for graduate school. It seems that no soonerhad she arrived there than she broke from PL and startedworking with Spartacist in the Revolutionary MarxistCaucus of SDS.I wouldn't say she was too smart for PL-becausethey had some intelligent people. Nor is it exactly true,as her mentor in PL evidently told her when she wasleaving, that she "always read too many books." I thinkit was that she really considered and absorbed what sheread. In her application for SL membership she wrotethat she was drawn to our "consistency with the principles of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky" as opposed to the "attimes reactionary Stalinoid politics of PL."Her New Left origins poked through from time totime. Her father, Ange, the successful banker, was beingprosecuted in the early '70s. Sue was in a real quandary-support her father, the class enemy? As she putit, Jim "kicked my ass, so to speak." Her memory wasthat he said something like: "What's wrong with you,

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girl? That's your father. C a n ~ t you see he's being prosecuted for things that everyone does and probablybecause he's Greek. Get yourself out there to his trialbefore it's over." She did. She was always grateful forJim's advice.Only three months after joining the Spartacist youthgroup in 1971, Susan had a ~ h a n c e to display thecourage which turned out to be so characteristic of her.We had been bloodily ejected from an anti-Vietnam Warconference of NPAC, led by the Socialist Workers Party.As comrade Al Nelson described it recently, "It was themost protracted violence I have ever witnessed in theworkers movement. Seymour had his nose broken; I hadbald spots on my head where tufts of hair had been tornout." The next day, Susan volunteered to be a mole, toelude the massive SWP goon squad stationed there toexclude known or suspected "disrupters" and to reportback what was being said in the aftemlath of this savageexclusion. Al wrote: "We met a couple of blOl:ks awayand discussed her assignment and its dangers. I remember being extremely impressed with how calm anddetermined and brave she was."The summer of '71 Susan moved to the Bay Area,which is where I first met her. I was pleased to endorseher application for membership in the SL in December1971. And when I left for New York the'following summer there was no question in my mind that Susan wasthe comrade to take over as Bay Area organizer, thoughthere were other comrades who had more experiencethan she did. 'In the next years, as new opportunities arose for theparty, Susan was the clear choice for one difficult andcritical assignment after another. She taught, expectedand inspired the utmost professionalism. She wasuncommonly able at locating and resisting the poison ofsubjectivity in herself and other comrades. But perhapsmost valuable was her unbending drive for programmaticclarity. Not that she was immune to the ambient pressuresin her political work, but she was fearless in her determination to arrive at and deepen the party's understandingof them. Even when-and maybe especially whenthere was a disaster that she' d been party to.Thus, more often than not, Sue was sent to the frontlines of our party work. After just over a year in theparty, in February 1973, she was picked to be foundingorganizer of "the Detroit branch. Unfortunately, it wasthe eve of an economic downturn and the collapse of theauto industry in Detroit. But that local was a major stepfor our organization. In summer '74, she came to NewYork to head up the national youth organization, theSpartacus Youth League, which was growing rapidlyand, with many difficulties, taking on independentorganizational reality for the first time.In 1976, she was off to Europe as an international rep.France, the world center of the ostensibly Trotskyistorganizations, was the jumping-off point for our European work and, other than Australia, our first interna- ,tional foothold. The job required constant travel aroundEurope, wide knowledge of the left and workers movement throughout the area, vigilance for opportunities,, patience and care in cadre development.After spending a year in New York in '78-79 as ourinternational secretary, it was off to Europe again, thistime as a central leader of the French section (to the surprise of our French comrades, a few of whom wouldhave preferred to eat in McDonald's every night ratherthan have an American woman leading their section).For the next ten years, she was our central cadre inEurope. In 1989-90, she played a leading role when theInternational poured its energies and resources into thepotential political revolution in East Germany.

30 MARCH 2001

Susan and Franc;ois

In 1992, just weeks after a gut-wrenching fight withthe French leadership, which of course included her,at an international conference, Susan took on one of themost important and difficult assignments there has everbeen in our organization-the work of reimplantingBolshevism in the land of October, our Moscow Station. Our comrade Martha Phillips had been murderedin Moscow earlier that year. Moscow was a dizzyingwhirlwind of archival, opponents, campus, labor andeducational work. A prime achievement of Moscow Station was the publication of Trotsky's The Third Interna-tional After Lenin in Russian and its distribution. In1995, she returned to the center in New York after a 20-year absence from the country, and took on a full rangeof duties in the leading committees of the Internationaland the American section.Sue's life is a thread running through the history of ourparty. In the mid-'70s, Sue forged a powerful nationalyouth leadership. But after the heady days of the NewLeft, the mid-'70s slumped pretty fast into quiescence.Coming out of the'60s, Sue had an appreciation, at timessurely tinged with moralism, for the value of that kind ofstruggle. In a 1975 national r e p ~ r t , she deplored the callowness of the recruits, their "lack of depth which comesfrom the binocular vision of having once been Maoistsor Stalinists or even New Leftists. Trotskyism seems selfevident to too many of our young comrades and commitment to being a revolutionary has meant for them commitment to going to meetings, reading books, debatingopponents and giving up dope. As wretched as the NewLeft was, one understood that becoming a radical meantrisking jail, fights with the cops, etc. (or at least riskingsuspension from school!). And as r9tten and misleadingas were the ideologies of Che, Cleaver and Malcolm X,becoming part of a movement of which they were theheroes involved a level of commitment which our youngcomrades have not had to consider." A good dose of po itical education was needed, she concluded, and "somegood and hard political fights this year."In this period, Susan worked on the article "Rape andBourgeois Justice," a polemic against the liberal, NewLeft and feminist views of capitalist class injustice."Rape and Bourgeois Justice" still stands as a guidingstatement for us on the intersection of sex, race andclass in this capitalist society. Collaboration on this article further cemented a lifelong working relationshipwith Jim Robertson, a personal and political tie as formative and consequential as any in her)ife.

Susan givingreport atSL/U.S.NationalConference,in 1972.

Sue found her assignment to international work inEurope in 1976 a tremendous challenge-terrifying andexhilarating at the same time. From a '76 letter to me:"France is very exciting and interesting these days. I can'thelp it, I like it when the whole world seems political andthe issues are urgently enough felt by people that theystand around in knots and argue and scream at each otherinto the night."It was, as she wrote, "the classical time of swimmingagainst the stream .... The popular front is on the road topower through the elections, drawing everyone else inits wake."Susan was of course a bit of a workaholic, diligentand sometimes earnest to a fault, though she learned toineasure that a bit. Languages really did not come easilyto her. She developed a fine command of French. Buther ear was n't very good so her pronunciation was poor,which was an obstacle when dealing with snobs. Shestarted intensive study as soon as she got there, and tenyears later she was stjll working on her Frenoh. Latershe studied German and, when she went to Moscow, shestudied Russian four to five hours a day at the beginningdespite the 'manic pace of the political work there.Sue had an impressive mastery of the basic Marxisttexts-Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Cannon-and aprodigious memory for what she read. She also knewour press and internal documents thoroughly. She usedthe literature like a precision instrument, pulling outexactly the right tool for the job. When she ran intoFrench parochialism, an enduring weakness of theFrench left, including the so-called Trotskyists, shewielded the weapon of founding American Trotskyistleader James P. Cannon.In 1983, she was delighted to succeed in bringing outa speech by Cannon upon his return from a quite unrewarding assignment in France in 1939. This was a twoedged sword in the struggle against our political opponents and for our French section. The fact alone ofpublishing Cannon was a polemic against the deeplyheld belief on the French left that nothing useful couldderive from America. Susan wrote in the introduction tothe Cannon pamphlet:"Given the program, the construction of the leading cadresis the key to the construction of revolutionary parties; andthe former requi'res an even higher degree of conscious

ness and a more deliberate design than the latter."Cadre development and particular attention to the youthwas a hallmark of her work, on which she brought tobear her wide-ranging intellectual storehouse. You'doften find her using lessons she'd learned-or wrestledwith-when she gave advice to others.She went as our rep to a five-day academic conference on Trotsky in Wuppertal, Germany just after thedisastrous 1990 East German elections which ushered incounterrevolution there. All the big-shot Trotskyist pretenders were there-from Mandel and Broue to MichelPablo. To their horror, she always introduced herself as aprofessional revolutionary. There was a group of Gorbachevite Soviet academics who were poking their headsup out of the glasnost opening. Everyone worth anything was talking about the 1923-24 period of the SovietUnion, which we also were critically examining in lightof some new documentation that had emerged from theSoviet archives. Broue had just published his Trotskybiography, which we were reviewing.She wrote a wonderful re.port, and you could tell howcharmingly and fruitfully she worked over the lot ofthem. Some of those pretentious academics must havewalked away fr()m a nice lunch only to look down andsee the knife in their stomachs. She drove Mandel into asputtering frenzy, at a lunch in front of a bevy of fawning young social democrats, over his uncritical printingof an article in praise of the Estonian Forest Brothers,Baltic fascists who fought with the Nazi Wehrmachtagainst the Red Army.

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IC .. . . . Spartacist photosL Moscow Station distributed Russian-language supplement titled "How the Soviet Workers State WasStrangled" June ~ 9 9 ~ Ukrainian miners strike, explained roots of capitalist counterrevolution atMoscow public meetmg m late 1992.(continued from page 7)12 months with her and watched her die and now Iknow it was far from false bravado when she said, "Ahhell, dying young isn't the worst thing in the world." Ithink that all of us unite today under the, I guess revolutionary, slogan,. "We love Susan!"Ever since I sat there on that snowy February 6th andheld her hand and shared some of her brave final breaths,I've been pondering those words, "dying young isn't theworst thing in the world." Over the last four weeks ofgrieving, I th"ink I've figured out some of what she meantanyway. What would Sue consider the worst thing in theworld? Well, it started becoming obvious to her family, Ithink, late in the '60s when we lived across the streetfrom the University of California in San Diego. Perhapsa location decision that my parents regretted eventually.It made it awfully easy to get to SDS chapter meetings,and I think the cigarette vending machines were how Ilearned to smoke. She headed otf to demonstrations upand down the state and got herself jailed for occupyingan administration building to protest the war-a veryearth-shaking event ih our family': of course, ' where theGreek immigrant father had to go face his daughter on theother side of the bars and bail her out.. And it got even more intense the week before gradwitJOn when George Winne self-immolated in the quad toprotest the war. Susan at that point refused to take part inthe graduation ceremony, or at least she did until hermother Betty took her aside and gently explained to her,"Your father has been working his fanny off for twentyyears in order to see his oldest daughter graduate fromfrom college, so I think that you better show up." So shegraduated. And I'll never forget the defiant look on herface as she strode across, grabbed her diploma quickly,and sailed across the stage with her head in the air andrefused to shake the bloodstained hands of the board ofregents representatives there that day. I'm sure some of

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you remember the despicable Reaganaut Clark Kerr; helooked shocked.Around the family dinner table in those days Sue wasdoing a lot of what I'm sure you were doing in thosedays, which was serving notice to your families thattimes were very definitely changing. Her father, as.many of you know, was an immigrant from a tiny village in Greece, a World War II vet, product of the GIBill. Her mother was an immigrant too in a sense, whowith her single mother in the 1920s moved north fromArkansas to Missouri to Chicago to follow the AmericanDream, as many people did. Mom of course was inmany ways a role model, especially for the girls in thefamily. And she went charging over the years throughbasically every door of opportunity that the sexist societyof the time was slowly opening and taught her daughtersto enjoy themselves kicking open more doors.Although Ange would always claim to be descendedfrom Alexander the Great, Socrates was more of his spiritual ancestor. They wanted to raise a bunch of kids,strangely enough, who would think for themselves andchallenge assumptions and distrust the common wisdom.They certainly convinced Susan, I think, that one of theworst things in,Jife would be to ever take anything onfaith. I think another thing worse than dying young forSusan would have been to ever violate Socrates' famousdictum, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Theunexamined life, of course, would be that of the distracted conventional life that most people lead withoutthinking about it.So all those things would be bad-the unexaminedlife, blind faith. But what would Sue consider the worstthing in the world? I think it's pretty obvious to everybody in this room. To know that the world needed tochange but not do anything abOut it. .Fran.;ois: Susan went as peacefully as she could. She.was very afraid of the suffering that she might endure,and she did not go through the worst of her fears. Shepassed her last. day listening to some beautiful Mozartarias. And she was also so happy to have so many peo-ple, comrades and family, visit her. .I really wanted to mention her sense of beauty. Shewas always saying that when she became political manythings came together-politics, sex, music, painting.She said there was Catholicism and religion one way andsex and many other things including politics the otherand she knew exactly where she was going. Part of herbecoming political and becoming a political leader wasstruggling against all these conservative psychologicalthings. She used to tell me a lot, "There's no way thatyou can approach political problems and think aboutthem if you let your psyche intervene."She was always finding projects. She always amazedme with the energy that she had. When I'd come backhome at 11 o'clock after a full day at 'work, she wouldsay, "Well, why don't we do the three following thingsnext?" She wrote in her diary, "I feel like I must finishmy projects and then have more."One that we completed and WV put so much work intowas "Women and the French R e v o l u t i o n . ~ I want to tryto explain where that came from. That was part of herattachment to fighting for women's liberation. Throughout her years in France, she did a tremendous job at training especially young women cadres in fighting againstthe political prevalence of society which says that they aremaybe good for this and that but not good for thinkingbecause that's a man's thing. She was always hammeringSpartacism against parochialism and male piggishness.Whell we expelled a comrade in the early'80s becausehe was beating his wife, none of the political opponentsin France could believe that. They were saying, "Well,

all right, he was beating his wife. But what was the realreason he was expelled, what's the political reason?"That's how piggish they were.Another project that she had is the indexing of the firstvolume of French Spartacist, which was very importantto her. It's part of the training of anew generation ofcommunist cadre and also part of our continuity. Onething that she was very proud of was being part of a generation of cadre that was trained in direct collaborationwith comrade Jim, who himself was trained in the SWPand by James Cannon, and this is our continuity withTrotsky and the Bolsheviks. She was very proud andalways very conscious of passing this experienee to ayounger generation.That also goes with her way of doing politics. Politicsis nothing spontaneous. It's hard work, it's conscious, itrequires thought and thoroughness in everything. Ifound a nice quote in her diary where she says, "Aninsight must have words and that is where the timecomes in. So, it's just not: voila!" It was part of hertraining and also her inspiration of young communists. Asmall story that for me illustrates that: When I was ayoung member in the Paris office and was putting aglass in the sink, she was passing through the kitchenand she said, ''I'm glad. I see that you're going to washthis glass." Being a young male, I'm not sure I wouldhave. Anyway, the point is that I don't think I ever left amess in any office that I worked in after that.The last thing that I wanted to mention is how muchshe loved her father. One story that she told me about himwhich she was very proud of: it was the beginning of the'60s and they were watching TV, watching a civil rights

April 1994 ICL meeting in Moscow announcingpublication of first-ever Russian edition of LeonTrotsky'S The Third International After Lenin.protest. Her dad was a really conservative guy, I think.Nevertheless, he turned to say, "I f my kids were prevented from going to school because of their ethnicity orcolor, I'd be out there with those guys in die streets."Finally, I just wanted to let everybody know that wehad a little ceremony to disperse Susan's ashes. Shewanted it to be done facing Ellis Island, which was thesymbol for her of coming from a family of Greek immigrants from her dad's side. And it also faces the ocean;she said it's between Europe and America, the twoplaces where she spent the two parts of her life.She wrote, "I f you are a revolutionary you really dospend all your life preparing to make a revolution."That's just what you do, and that's just what she did.

SUSAN ADAMSMEMORIAL COLLECTIONThe Prometheus Research Library is honoringour comrade Susan Adams by creating a specialcollection as a tribute to her lifelong commitment to the fight for women's liberation throughsocialist revolution. The PRL, central reference

archive of the Spartacist League of the U.S., isseeking contributions to expand its holdings ofarchival and current materials of the Marxist andworkers m o v e ~ e n t related to the woman question, particularly its international aspects. Thisspecial memorial collection will enable our comrades and visiting researchers to pursue furtherstudy in this area of great importance to Marxists. Those who wish to contribute may makechecks payable to Spartacist, earmarked "SusanAdams Memorial Fund." Mail to: Box 1377GPO, New York, NY 10116.

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BERKELEY-Orchestrating a nationalcampaign of provocation, racist ideologue David Horowitz recently submitted a full-page ad entitled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is aBad Idea-and Racist Too" to 51 collegeand university newspapers. The ad is asickening medley of lies. which claimsthat slavery has left no lasting impacton American society and that blac!

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Workers Vanguard No 755 - 30 March 2001