workers vanguard no 696 - 11 september 1998

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 696 - 11 September 1998

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WfJIIIlEIiS 'AN"AIID 0tNo. 696 ~ ~ 3 11 September 1998

Chaos in Russia, Dep-ression in East AsiaWall Street Bubble Bursts

Stock prices plunge amid growing financial turmoil around the world: Russians throng Moscow bank (left), Japan sinks deeper into recession.SEPTEMBER 6-The sharp plunge instock prices last Monday, the steepestpoint decline since the record-setting fallof last October's "Black Monday," senttremors coursing through the international financial circuit. The tabloid NewYork Post (1 September) blared, "KissYour Assets Goodbye!" The chief economist for the giant Wall Street firm of Morgan Stanley talked of "a sense of despairand desperation" in financial markets.The London Economist (5 September)pointed "to mounting concern that the

turmoil in emerging markets will end inworldwide depression."The immediate trigger for the collapsecame when Russia's months-long financial disintegration turned into a totalmeltdown in mid-August. The bankruptcy of the regime of President BorisYeltsin-in every respect-is manifest.As the ruble has dropped in value againstthe dollar by nearly two-thirds, bankshave been besieged by angry crowdsseeking to get out what money they can,while the already impoverished populace

is frantically trying to buy any food andother necessities they can. Yesterday,the head of the country's central bankquit and the Russian parliament rejectedfor the second time Yeltsin's bid toreappoint Viktor Chernomyrdin as primeminister. Chernomyrdin fumed that thecountry was on the verge of going "up inflames."Coming on top of the East Asian economic crash and the deepening recessionin Japan, the Russian collapse sowedpanic in stock markets around the globe,

leading to plunges over the past two anda half weeks ranging from 9 percent inTokyo to 14 percent in Frankfurt and 32percent in Rio de Janeiro. But as a number of commentators have pointed out,Russia's real weight in the world economy cannot account for what has beenhappening to stock markets from EastAsia to South America and Wall Streetexcept perhaps as an irrational overreaction. Russia's entire annual output, atpresent exchange rates, is smaller thancontinued on page 9

Kim Oae Jung Enforces IMF AusteritySouth Korea Regime OrdersBrutal Cop Attack on Strikersu.s. Troops Out of Korea!

SEPTEMBER 5-Some 10,000 SouthKorean riot police stormed six MandoMachinery auto parts plants two days agoto drive out workers occupying the factories. Cops hauled off up to 1,600 strikers intwo plants alone, including union leaders,and bloodied untold numbers of workers.This brutal assault was ordered by SouthKorean president Kim Dae lung in order tobreak the IS-day strike against threatenedmass layoffs at the country's largest autoparts supplier. Coming amid a wave ofworker unrest against layoffs and other

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attacks dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) "bailout" of the crisisridden South Korean economy, this massive cop strikebreaking was a warning bythe Kim regime to the whole of the SouthKorean proletariat.Kim's election as president last December was hailed by a host of leftists and liberals in South Korea and in the West as avictory for "democracy." Kim won hisspurs as a "reformer" while he was a political prisoner under the former U.S.-backedmilitary dictatorship. But he came to officewith the solid backing of U.S. imperialism.A White House spokesman hailed his election as a "big opportunity," while the NewYork Times (20 December 1997) declared- that his "credibility with the unions" puthim in a "good position to convince hiscontinued on page 11

ReutersMassive police assault unleashed by Kim Oae Jung government todrive out strikers occupying auto parts plant in Asan, South Korea,September 3.


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Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!South Africa: Protest Lynch MobMurder of Immigrants!

JOHANNESBURG, September6-Threedays ago, a rabid mob, whipped into afrenz;y against "fore"igners" at a rally ofunemployed in Pretoria, brutally murdered three immigrants from other African countries on a commuter train. The'immigrants were chased through the trainby thugs wielding sjamboks (leatherwhips). A Mozambican man was thrownfrom a window and killed by an oncoming train. Two Senegalese men were electrocuted and burned alive after they triedto escape their attackers on the roof of thetrain.These horrific anti-immigrant lynchings cry out for a mass protest mobilising the power of labour in defence ofimmigrant rights. This should be aimedagainst the neo-apartheid regime of thebourgeois-nationalist African NationalCongress (ANC), which has orchestratedand manipulated a xenophobic backlashagainst immigrant workers. Spartacist

South Africa, section of the InternationalCommunist League, calls for a proletariancentred fight for full citizenship rights forall immigrants!At every level of society, immigrants.are under vicious attack in the "new"South Africa. The apartheid sjambok and"pass" are now used against migrantsfrom throughout the continent. Massroundups of immigrants stacked into cattle cars are routine, while top echelons ofthe ANC Women's League make thousands of rands by running the Lindeladeportation centre in Randfontein. Hawkers in the Johannesburg area have beenharassed, beaten up and had their waresconfiscated by jobless rivals. Police aidwhite racist farmers by deporting immigrant workers at month's end, just beforepayday. Inkatha Freedom Party tribalistchief Gatsha Buthelezi runs point for theANC at the Ministry of Home Affairs,deporting an increasing number of

Human Labor and theDialectics of Nature

TROTSKY

The development of human civilization,especially since the Industrial Revolutionbeginning in the late 18th century, hasbrought about significant and unanticipatedchanges in the natural environment. Today,bourgeois politicians and intellectuals voiceconcern over environmental problems, someeven speaking of looming ecological catastrophe, but offer no solution o ther than, atbest, ineffectual reforms within the frame LENIN

migrants, with nearly 200,000 peoplekicked out last year.In the 1994 elections which installedNelson Mandela in power, many immigrants had been granted temporary identification papers and voter cards andencouraged to vote. But when they cameto collect permanent identity documents after the vote, they were arrestedand deported. Mandela's governmenta nationalist popular front based on a tripartite alliance with the South AfricanCommunist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions(COSATU)-has become the primarypolitical agent for the Randlord capitalists and their senior partners on WallStreet and in the City of London financialcentre. With its "one nation" rhetoric, theANC consciously pits indigenous SouthAfricans against immigrant workers inorder to divert attention from the realenemy: neo-apartheid capitalism, underwhich the overwhelming majority of thepopulation is kept in desperate povertyand blacks remain at the bottom.South African capitalism has longrelied heavily on migrant workers, coming mostly from Mozambique, Lesotho,Zimbabwe and Swaziland, who form astrategic component of labour in the goldand diamond mines. The dirtiest jobsin the mines, as well as on constructionsites and farms, are derisively known as"Maputo work," a reference to the capitalof Mozambique. Following the ANC'selection in 1994, South Africa became amagnet for immigrants from across thecontinent looking for jobs and shelter.Impelled by poverty and desperation,many continue to risk being killed by

crocodiles in the Limpopo River ormauled to death by lions in Kruger Parkas they seek entry into the country.Many migrants arrive from neighbouring countries that sheltered South African exiles during the anti-apartheid struggle. Some are refugees from war andfamine in places like Rwanda, Nigeriaand Congo-countries where the SouthAfrican bourgeoisie has sought to playa role as the junior partners of U.S. imperialism, brekering imperialist deals in therenewed neocolonial scramble for Africa.Many of these immigrants strongly identified with the ANC, seeing it as theleader in the struggle against apartheid.Defence Minister Joe Modise, a formermember of the ANC's guerrilla wing,Umkhonto We Sizwe, now recommendscranking up the voltage on South Africa'selectrified border fences to "lethal mode."The fight against anti-immigrant terrormust be linked to the struggle to build aLeninist party which will mobilise theproletariat against all forms of oppressionand exploitation, including organising theunemployed. In a country where "official" unemployment among the blackmajority hovers at 50 per cent, there is a. real danger that the jobless poor can berecruited as strikebreakers against theunions. A march in Pretoria led by Unemployed Masses of South Africa, with placards reading "We want jobs, not foreigners," was the immediate inspiration forthe brutal murder of the three immigrants.Yet desperate immigrants are only thefirs t target.Demagogic nationalistANC politicianshave sought to turn popular sympathyagainst the trade unions by portrayingthem as defending a privileged minorityof black workers. This is a lie! U nionisedblack workers-like black workers as awhole-typically use much of their payto help support unemployed relatives inboth the townships and the countryside. Itis the ANC and its partner, the reformistSACP, which defend the interests of thetruly privileged minority in South Africa:the white financiers, industrialists, mineowners and landlords.A class-struggle leadership in the tradecontinued on page II

work of he profit-driven capitalist system. In addressing the interrelationship betweenhuman labor and the natural environment from the standpoint ofhistorical materialism,more than a century ago Friedrich Engels stressed the need for proletarian revolution,which would lay the basis for an internationally planned socialist economy to replacethe anarchy of capitalist production.The animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by itspresence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final,essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour thatbrings about this distinction ....

S p a r t a C j s t ~ EventsIt required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to calculatethe more remote natural effects of our actions in the field of production, but it has beenstill more difficult in regard to the more remote social effects of these actions .... Themen who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laboured to create the steamengine had no idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than any otherwas to revolutionise social relations throughout the world. Especially in Europe, by concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority and dispossessing the huge majority, thisinstrument was destined at first to give social and political domination to the bourgeoisie, but later, to give rise to a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat

which can end only in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all classantagonisms.-But in this sphere too, by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing historical material; we are gradually learning to get a clear viewof the indirect, more remote social effects of our production activity, and so are affordedan opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well.This regulation, however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It requiresa complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneouslya revolution in our whole contemporary social order.

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-Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature,Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25 (1987)

! ~ ~ / ! ~ ' ! ! o r . . ~ ! ~ ! ~ r ! . ' ! . . EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Jacob ZornPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Jane PattersonEDITORIAL BOARD: Ray Bishop (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Helene Brosius, George Foster,Liz Gordon, Frank Hunter, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour, Alison SpencerThe Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (FourthInternationalist)Workers Vanguard (ISSN 02760746) publis hed biweekly, except skippi ng three alternate issues in June, July andAugust (begi nning with omitting the second issue in June) and with a 3week interval in December, by the SpartacistPublishing Co., 299 Broadway, Suite 318. New York. NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 7327862 (Editorial), (212) 7327861(Business). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. Email 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 articles or letters do not necessarify express the editorial viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is September 8.No. 696 11 September 1998

Sparfi:lcisfForums. Flint S t r i k ~ h l CrippleGMGeneral Strike Shakes Puerto' RicoClass Strug{ile in the ~ m e r i c C l . " E r n p i r e

BERKELEYSaturday, September 19, 7 p.m.2060 Valley Life SciencesUC BerkeleyFor more information: (510) 839-0851 or(415) 777-9367

LOS ANGELESSunday, September 13, 3 p.m.Hollywood United Methodist Church6817 Franklin Avenue(Highland Ave. exit off 101 Freeway)For more information: (213) 380-8239

SAN PEDROSaturday, September 12, 4 p.m.Peck Park Community Center560 North Western Avenue(at Crestwood)For more information: (213) 380-8239

BOSTONThe Fight fo r RevolutionaryMarxism Today

Speaker: Len Meyers,editor of Workers VanguardSaturday, September 26, 7 p.m.102 Sever HallHarvard University, Cambridge(take the Red Line to Harvard)For more information: (617) 666-9453

MADISONu.S. Imperial ism-Get YourBloody Hands Off the World!Tuesday, September 15, 7 p.m.Memorial UnionUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison(See "Today in the Union" for room)For more information: (312) 454-4930

NEW YORK CITYThe Class-Struggle Roadto Black Freedom

Thursday, September 24, 7 p.m.Loeb Student Center, Room 408New York University(566 La Guardia Place near W. 4th St.)For more information: (212) 267-1025

Spartacus Youth ClubClassesBERKELEY

The Capitalist State and theWar on Workers, Blacks andthe OppressedWednesday, September 16, 7 p.m.206 Dwinelle, UC BerkeleyFor more information, readings: (510) 8390851

NEW YORK CITYMarxi.sm: A Guide to Action

Tuesday, September 15, 7 p.m.Anti-Labor Attacks, Cop Terror, and the Capitalist State

Tuesday, September 29, 7 p.m.Loeb Student Center, Room 413New York UniversityFor more information, readings; (212) 267-1025

WORKERS VANGUARD


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Court Decision Acknowledges F.O.P. VendettaMumia Abu-Jamal blatant that even the Court of Appealsjudges recognized the prison authorities'investigation as political retaliation aimedat silencing him. These judges are farfrom sympathetic to the cause of prisoners' rights, particularly those of an outspoken black radical. That even theycould see the police forces of the EO.P.behind the punitive actions against Jamalby prison officials is a stunning, albeit

unintended, confirmation of the wholestate frame-up machine which had targeted Jamal from the time he was a 15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panther Party. This vendetta continued whenJamal was a widely known journalistwho eloquently exposed the racist realityof daily life in America, particularly thebrutal cop attacks on the MOVE organization. It culminated in his being falselyconvicted and sentenced to death in1982."

Wins ImportantLegal VictoryWe print below a press release issuedby the Partisan Defense Committee onAugust 28.On August 25, the Third Circuit Court

of Appeals found that the PennsylvaniaDepartment of Corrections had violatedthe First and Fourteenth Amendmentrights of black death row political prisoner Mumia Abl,l-Jamal. The court decision stemmed from a federal civil rightslawsuit filed by Jamal in 1995 chargingPennsylvania prison officials with punishing him for publishing his powerfulprison writings.Arguing that prison officials had subjected Jamal to irreparable harm throughan investigation -in which they inter-

Publication of Jamal's powerful deathrow commentaries in 1995 enragedcops and prison authorities intenton silencing him.cepted and opened his privileged legalcorrespondence with his defense lawyers, the court ruled that they be orderedto stop any further investigation of Jamaland desist in punitive actions againsthim. At the same time, in a blow againstthe ability of Jamal to fight for his lifeand his freedom, the Court of Appeals

Just Out!The International CommunistLeague makes available thepolemics of its opponentson the left

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ruling denies him access to attorneydesignated paralegals, whose visits began being blocked at the same time thatthe prison authorities were launchingtheir efforts to gag Jamal.The Department of Corrections arguedthat rules against inmates conducting"business" gave prison officials the rightto open Jamal's attorney mail and to subject him to disciplinary actions. Bluntlydismissing this argument as "nonsensical," the Court of Appeals ruling states:"We have difficulty seeing the need toinvestigate an act that Jamal openly confesses he is doing. Jamal's writing ispublished, and he freely admits his intentto continue. Continued investigation andenforcement of the rule invades the privacy of his legal mail and thus directlyinterferes with his ability to communicate with counsel."Pointing out that Jamal worked as ajournalist before his conviction, and thathis writings continued to be published inmore than 40 publications after he wasimprisoned on death row, the decisionnotes that the prison authorities' investigation of Jamal's writings and broadcastsonly began in 1994, following interviewsof Jamal by National Public Radio(NPR). The ruling argues that prisonauthorities "did not claim to be burdenedby his actions until the Fraternal Order ofPolice [FO.P.] outcry in 1994," and thatthey did so "because of the content ofJamal's writing, not because he was beingpaid for it."Following the publication of Jamal'sbook, Live from Death Row, in 1995,prison authorities denied Jamal access tothe press or other media from Februarythrough September of that year. Duringthis period, a death warrant was signedagainst Jamal. Prison officials were intercepting, opening and reading Jamal's corr ~ s p o n d e n c e with his defense attorneys,copying these letters and sending them tothe assistant general c.ounsel of theDepartment of Corrections. The Court ofAppeals ruling notes that even though theprison officials' attorney concluded thatthese letters were not relevant to theinvestigation, he nonetheless sent them tothe Office of General Counsel, "the officecharged with advising the Governor of

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COC ProductionsPennsylvania on, among other things,signing death warrants."In June 1995, Pennsylvania governorTom Ridge s i ~ n e d the execution warrantagainst Jamal just as defense attorneyswere filing a petition to overturn his 1982conviction on frame-up charges of killingPhiladelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner.During Jamal's appeal hearing that summer, Judge Sabo and the prosecutionrepeatedly accused Jamal of deliberatelywaiting until the death warrant wassigned before filing his appeal papers.This claim was exposed as a fabrication ina previous ruling on Jamal's civil suit bydistrict court judge Donetta Ambrose.Ambrose acknowledged that the prisonauthorities' actions led to a delay in filingthese papers because of "the unwillingness of counsel and of Plaintiff [Jamal] tocommunicate freely by mail after havingbeen informed that legal mail had beenopened by prison officials."Pittsburgh attorney Jere Krakoff, whotogether with Tim O'Brien represented'Jamal in his civil suit, spoke to the importance of the court's recognition of the violation of Jamal's First Amendment rightsas a writer. As Krakoff noted: "It's anextraordinarily important principle notonly for Jamal but for all prisoners andfor all society at large to hear fromJamal." As Richard Genova of the Partisan Defense Committee, which has beenactive in Jamal's defense for the pastdecade, said: ."At a time when the state is -strippingprisoners of virtually any and all constitutional rights, the political vendettawaged by the state against Jamal is so

JUST OUT!Contents include: Mumia Abu-Jamal'sLife of Struggle Court Hearings:New Evidence of Frame-Up From Death Row,This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal"La Amistad andAmerican Law" The Frame-Up ofMumia Abu-Jamal For Non-Sectarian,Class-Struggle Defense! Death Row SpeedupTargets Minorities Ph illy Cops' Reign of Terror Desperation, Segregationand the "Ebonies"Controversy Down With "English Only"Racism! Coleman Young:From CIO Union Organizerto Overseer for Auto Bosses

In 1994, NPR caved in to the FO.P.'sfrenzied campaign against Jamal andrefused to air Jamal' s commentaries. Today again, the FO.P. and its supportersare revving up their campaign for Jamal'sdeath, publishing a full-page ad in theNew York Times (14 June) demanding thathe be killed. The cops and prison authorities want to silence Jamal in order tomake it easier to kill him. An articulateand compassionate black man who eloquently describes the horrors of this barbaric system of injustice, Jamal 's writingsand broadcasts give the lie to the racistpropaganda justifying executions with theclaim that those sentenced to death arepsychopathic murderers. As Gene Herson, labor coordinator of the PartisanDefense Committee, argued:"While we welcome the Court ofAppeals decision, we warn that it shouldnot blind Jamal's supporters as to thenature of the courts as part of the wholestate machinery of repression and death.As Mumia continues to struggle andspeak out from death row on behalf ofthe oppressed, it is urgent that the powerof the multiracial labor movement bcactively mobilized in the fight to freethis innocent man and abolish the racistdeath penalty."

Jamal's appeal of his conviction isnow before the Pennsylvania SupremeCourt. Funds are urgently needed forJamal's legal defense. Get your unionor organization to make a contributionnow to the Bill of Rights Foundation(earmarked "Mumia Abu-Jamal LegalDefense") and mail to: Committee toSave Mumia Abu-Jamal, 163 Amsterdam Ave., No. 115, New York, NY10023-5001. For more informationabout Jamal's case and about thepoe, call (212) 406-4252 or e-mail [email protected]

$1 (48 pages) Black History is sent to all Workers Vanguard subscribersOrder from: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, Ny'10116

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The Racist Frame-Up Machine That Sent Jamal to Death RowPhilly COPS' Reign of Terror

The following is reprinted from thenew issue of Black History and the ClassS t r u g g l ~ (No. 15, August 1998).

This August 8 marked the 20th anniversary of the massive police assault onthe black MOVE commune in Philadelphia's Powelton Village neighborhood.Following a 15-month siege-which included the erection of an eight-foot-highfence sealing off a four-block area-at 6a.m. on that August 1978 morning over600 cops surrounded the MOVE compound. After bringing in a bulldozer to ripdown a stockade fence around the houseand using a crane as a battering ram tobreak down boarded windows, the copsused smoke bombs and water cannons todrive MOVE members and their childrenout of the house.After a single gunshot was heard, thecops lacerated the house with thousandsof rounds of ammunition. One of theirown, James Ramp, long a central figurein the Philadelphia Police Department's"Stakeout" squad, was killed in the policecrossfire. Whe'n the barrage of bulletsstopped, MOVE member Delbert Africacrawled out of a basement window. Suffering from a bullet wound, shirtless, hishands above his head, Delbert Africa wasattacked by heavily armed cops whorepeatedly kicked and stomped on himwhile he lay helpless on the ground.In August 1981, nine MOVE memberswere sentenced to prison terms of 30to 100 years on false charges of killingRamp. Four months later, prominent blackPhilly journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, whohad raised his eloquent voice in defense ofMOVE, was arrested and framed up onfalse charges of killing another Philadelphia policeman, Daniel Faulkner. Thefollowing July, Mumia was sentenced todeath. Then on 13 May 1985, the Phillycops-working together with the FBIand the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco andFirearms--came to finish the job they hadstarted in 1978, dropping a bomb onMOVE's Osage Avenue home. Elevenblack people-including five childrenwere killed and an entire black neighborhood reduced to smoldering rubble.Central to everyone of these deadlyracist assaults were the Philadelphia Police Department's notorious "red squad"- t he Civil Affairs (CA) unit-and theStakeout unit, an urban death squad ofpolice sharpshooters. CA inspector GeorgeFencl issued the first warning in the.August 1978 attack on the MOVE house,his voice booming over a cop bullhorn:"You have exactly two minutes in whichto come out." Two to three dozen specially trained and heavily armed Stakeoutcops who were positioned close to theMOVE home were then mobilized forthe kill.Seven years later, it was also Stakeoutcops who drove MOVE members backinto the inferno of their burning OsageAvenue home under a hail of gunfire.Among these cops were some of the selfdescribed "veterans of '78," includingthose who had viciously beaten DelbertAfrica. As Charles Bowser, a black former deputy mayor who headed the city'swhitewash commission on the MOVEbombing, concluded in his book, Let theBunker Burn: "The facts were that someof the police had come to Osage Avenueto kill-to kill by bullets or to kill byfire, but to kill nevertheless."On 9 December 1981, the first cops toarrive at the scene where Mumia AbuJamal lay critically wounded by a bulletfrom Faulkner's gun were Stakeout squadmembers Robert Shoemaker and JamesForbes. The highest-ranking officer onthe scene was Inspector Alfonse Gior-4

dano, a former Stakeout commander. Apolice report later that night shows thatFencl was also called into the investigation. These cops knew exactly whoMumia was; they had been trying to gethim for years.The Racist Cop VendettaAgainst Jamal

Jamal had been in the crosshairs ofthe CA-formed in the mid-1960s as theCivil Defense (CD) squad-and Stakeoutunits since the age of 14, when he wasbrutally beaten and arrested by the cops

for daring to protest a f968 election campaign appearance in Philly by George"Segregation Forever" Wallace. At age15, when Mumia became co-founder andMinister of Information of the ~ P h i l a d e l -phi a chapter of the Black Panther Party(BPP), he was placed under daily surveillance by Fencl's CD unit, which closelycollaborated with the FBI's "CounterIntelligence Program" (COINTELPRO).Indeed, the Philly CD squad served as amodel for the deadly COINTELPROoperation which resulted in the murder of38 Panthers around the country and theframe-up of hundreds more. In the 800pages of FBI documents obtained byJamal in 1995, report after report list as

their source unidentified officers from theCD unit.The Stakeout squad, an elite unitlargely made up of former military men,was put together by then-deputy policecommissioner-later police commissioner and mayor-Frank Rizzo inresponse to the eruption of the city'sblack ghetto in 1964. It was formed aspart of the drive by bourgeois stateauthorities to crush any expression ofopposition-particularly by blacks-tovicious racism and police brutality.Philly's Stakeout squad was the model for

cJ!Wide World

Above: Capping15-month siege,Stakeout unit andother Philly copslaunched murderousassault on PoweltonVillage MOVE house,August 1978. In May1985, Stakeout copsalso played centralrole in FBI/policefirebombing ofOsage AvenueMOVE home whichkilled eleven people,including fivechildren, anddestroyed entireblack neighborhood.

SWAT teams later formed in cities acrossthe United States. Rizzo himself becamean icon of racist "law and order" amongcops nationwide, particularly for hisattacks against the Black Panther Party.The Stakeout unit was prominent inthe 1970 raids of three BPP offices. WithFencl's CD unit in the lead, 45 heavilyarmed Stakeout cops stripped the Panthers' Wallace Street office bare, evenripping the plumbing from the walls.Outside, Panther members were lined upagainst the wall and ordered to strip. Inhis book Protectors of Privilege (University of California Press [1990]), FrankDonner notes, "The fact that the raiderswere specially chosen for their marks-

manship and wore bullet-proof vests, andRizzo's taunting of a number of Panthersas 'yellow' because they dropped theirguns in response to a police order ratherthan engage in battle all suggest that theraids were planned as a pretext to provoke a shoot-out." In other words, theraids were a setup for a kill.As we noted in "Mumia Abu-Jamal:The COINTELPRO Files" (WV No. 624,2 June 1995):"Mumia Abu-Jamal survived the rulers'onslaught against the Black Panther Partyin the late '60s and early '70s. He was notassassinated in his sleep in the dead ofnight like Chicago Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. He was not then railroaded into a prison hellhole like LosAngeles Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga(Pratt) who has spent the last 25 years ofhis life buried alive for a crime that thegovernment knows he did not commitbecause they had wiretaps proving his

innocence. But the feds and the Phillycops did not call off their vendetta againstJamal with the demise of the PantherParty. They continued to hate him for hiseloquent and impassioned defense ofblack rights, and particularly because heremained defiant and unbowed in the faceof state repression and racist oppression."Jamal's defense of MOVE in 1978further whetted the cops' appetite to gethim. The Stakeout police surrounding thePow elton Village house saw Jamal ashe entered and left the compound to conduct radio interviews. They seethed withhatred for his sympathetic coverage ofMOVE. Ramp was elevated to the pantheon of police heroes-to this day, thePhilly police department rifle sharpshooting team gives out an annual "JamesRamp award." At a press conference following the 1978 cop attack, Rizzo ominously looked straight at Jamal as heblamed Ramp's death on the "new breedof journalism." Rizzo warned: "You'regoing to have to be held responsible andaccountable for what you do." He seizedon the killing of Ramp to scream for restoration of the death penalty: "Put themin the electric chair, and I'll pull theswitch."Jamal's sympathetic courtroom reportsof the trial of the nine MOVE memberscharged with Ramp's killing enraged thepolice. He also covered the 1981 trial ofthree of the Stakeout cops who torturedDelbert, which resulted in the judge'sacquittal of the cops on all charges. Atthat trial, a key witness for the defensewas none other than CA head GeorgeFencl. Perhaps most galling to the cops,Mumia was there to cover the celebration when MOVE founder and leaderJohn Africa was acquitted of federal conspiracy and weapons charges in July1981.Only months later, the Stakeout copswho found Jamal bleeding at the cornerof 13th and Locust Streets with' a coplying fatally wounded a few feet awayfinally saw the opportunity to frame himup. Giordano, described by Donner as"one of Rizzo's favorite officers," orderedthat Jamal, who was near death, be takento the Police Administrative Building forinterrogation, finally relenting and allowing him to be taken to the hospital. Giordano was later the first to manufacture theclaim that Mumia had confessed to kiIIingFaulkner. In July 1982, Mumia was sentenced to death in a "trial" that in everyrespect was a travesty of justice. Eversince then, the Philadelphia FraternalOrder of Police (F.O.P.) has been screaming for the state's executioners to "pullthe switch."Philadelphia Police State

The sinister web of police surveillance,terror and frame-up that succeeded inentrapping Jamal is no aberration. RatherWORKERS VANGUARD


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it demonstrates the very nature of thecapitalist state, its cops and courts,which exist as the bourgeoisie's machinery for the repression of the workingclass and oppressed. As the gap betweenthe haves and have-nots increasinglywidens, the rulers clamp down evenfurther against the exercise of the mostbasic democratic rights by the population, lest the spark of social protest ignitea conflagration. To keep the lid on anever seething cauldron of discontent,more cops are poured onto the streets andtheir powers to act as a law unto themselves are increased. While the Philadelphia cops are hardly unique, they havelong stood as perhaps the starkest expression Clf the rampant police bonapartismthat is increasingly the trend throughoutthe U.S.The city in which Mumia Abu-Jamalwas "tried" and sentenced to die has aparticularly pronounced racist historygoing back to well before the Civil War.In 1862, black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass wrote: "There is not perhaps anywhere to be found a city inwhich prejudice against color is morerampant than in Philadelphia." It was themost pro-South-and segregated-citynorth of the Mason-Dixon line, reflectingthe interests of Philadelphia's rulingclass, which was heavily involved in cotton and the textile industry, in the maintenance of slavery.Irish immigrants in Philadelphia wereoriginally referred to as "white Negroes"and correspondingly .consigned to thelowest orders. The divide which pittednative Protestant workers against Catholic immigrants, who were brought in tosupply cheap labor for the mills andfoundries, came to be supplanted byracial hatred pitting white against black.As described in Noel Ignatiev's book,How the Irish Became White, the Democratic Party served as the agency forassimilation of the Irish into "white"society, albeit at the bottom end. Democratic Party politicians promoted virulentracism against blacks as the glue tocement the immigrant laboring masses tothe interests of the ruling elite.With the mass migration of blacks tothe North during World War I came forcible segregation into ghettos, enforced byracist thugs both in police uniforms andKlan robes. In the 1920s, Pennsylvaniahad the fourth-largest Klan concentrationin the country; the Philadelphia areaalone had 30,000 Klansmen. When thefederal government ordered the hiring ofeight black workers at the PhiladelphiaTransit Company during World War II,this was met by a racist "work stoppage"organized by the transit bosses. WhenDemocratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the army in to enforce wartime no-strike laws, some Southern'soldiers took the o p p o r t ~ n i t y to try toimpose Jim Crow segregation on citybuses, provoking mass resistance fromoutraged black riders.Philadelphia remains one of the mostintensely racist cities in the UnitedStates. During the 1950s and ' 60s, thecity was rigidly racially segregated, withthe partial exception of the Powelton Village area in West Philly near the University of Pennsylvania. No less than in acity somewhere in the Deep South, ablack person could get in trouble veryfast with either the racist cops or a gangof local racists simply for being in thewrong neighborhood or on the streets atthe wrong hour. With its 40 percent blackpopulation, Philadelphia has the largestconcentration of black people in the verywhite state of Pennsylvania.In this city-grotesquely referred to asthe "City of Brotherly Love"-race ispolitics. Whether Democratic or Republican, capitalist politicians make a namefor themselves on the racially polarizedterrain of "Filthy-delphia." This essentialfact of life explains the rise to power of afascistic racist pig like Frank Rizzo andthe fanatical preoccupation by the city'spolice department and prosecutors withthe Black Panthers, MOVE and MumiaAbu-Jamal. In Philly, the name of the11 SEPTEMBER 1998

Frank Rizzo's racistreign of terror.Above: 1970 cop raidof Philadelphia BlackPanther offices.Right: Following 1978assault on MOVE,then-mayor Rizzolashed out at"new breed" ofjournalists likeJamal (near right)for sympatheticcoverage of MOVE.

game is and always has been to keepblack people "in their place" and inthe ghettos. For the city's white capitalist establishment, racial paranoia is asintense as it was for former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, whose operational credo for the deadly COINTELPROoperations against the Black Pantherswas that they constituted the "greatestthreat to the internal security of the U.S."In this sense, the city of Philadelphiais a concentrated expression of the development of racist American capitalism,which is rooted in the segregation ofblacks at the bottom of society and inwhich the color bar serves to obscureand reinforce the irreconcilable classdivide between labor and capital. WhileIrish, Italians and Poles in Philadelphiaremained divided in separate neighborhoods, the hatred of all was directedagainst the black population. Out of thiscauldron of ethnic hostility imd racialhatred emerged a bonapartist police forcethat operated like a gang of white racistethnic thugs. This was personified byRizzo, who once boasted he would"make Attila the Hun look like a faggot."Ethnic and racial hostilities wereincreasingly exacerbated with the devastation of heavy industry beginning in the1970s, which reduced Philadelphia to ahuge urban wasteland. In this context,the racist bonapartism of the Philadelphia police became even more pronounced as the cops were deployed tokeep the lid on this pressure cooker ofdiscontent. Again black radicals were aparticular target. Following the decimation of the Black Panther Party byCOINTELPRO, including stoking themurderous factional feuds resulting fromthe Panthers' nationalist strategy, thePhilly cops embarked on a 20-year vendetta against MOVE. Jamal, whose rolein the BPP had already put him squarelyin the cops' sights, was a prominent target of this police vendetta.A Conspiracy of Terror

The 1978 beating of Delbert Africacaptured in slow motion on televisionnews cameras-had an impact on the

city which presaged the impact that theLAPD beating of black motorist RodneyKing would have across the countrysome l3 years later as a symbol of racistcop brutality. This atrocity by the Phillycops carne atop a wave of coldbloodedstreet executions by police and growingexposure of systematic frame-up methods employed particularly by the Homicide Division.An editorial in the PhiladelphiaInquirer (20 August 1978) noted that forblack elected officials and communityleaders, who had no sympathy for MOVE,the beating of Delbert Africa, "broughtto a head an accumulation of resentmentof police violence and frustration thatthe city administration and the PoliceDepartment have held no one accountable for it." The editorial expressedthe city rulers' concern "to prevent theresentments and frustrations which havebeen at work in the last week and morefrom growing into what could be dreadful and explosive proportions." In 1979,the feds moved in to try to quell thegrowing outrage and shore up the cops'authority, filing a civil rights suit againstthe city and the police department citing"widespread, arbitrary, and unreasonablephysical abuse."In response, the cops went on a rampage. Four hundred off-duty cops besieged the offices of the Inquirer after itran a series of chilling photographs of theattack on Delbert Africa. Two thousandcops jammed an EO.P. lodge to demandthe ouster of black cop Alphonso Deal a 24-year police veteran and head ofthe North Philadelphia chapter of theNAACP-when he called for dismissingthose cops responsible for the beating.When three Stakeout unit members wereindicted for the beating of Delbert Africa,500 cops marched on City Hall, and thehead of the EO.P. cried, "They shouldhave killed all of them."The EO.P. and an outfit called "Philadelphia Police Wives and Interested Citizens" went to the offices of the U.S.Attorney General to protest the suitagainst cop brutality. A leading representative of the cops' wives reported that her

group had been gathering evidence sincethe 1970s of a "conspiracy among revolutionaries and radicals to assassinatepolice." The federal suit was soon dismissed for "lack of jurisdiction."Following Mumia's frame-up, Faulkner's widow, Maureen, has likewise beencynically paraded around by the EO.P. toportray Jamal as a vicious and sadistickiller who had long been conspiring to"assassinate police." At Jamal 's 1982trial, prosecutor Joseph McGill pointed toMumia's earlier reference to a quote fromMao Zedong-"Political power growsout of the barrel of a gun"-to argue thatit "proved" Jamal's intention to kill a cop.Thus, McGill argued that Mumia be sentenced to death-on the basis of his political beliefs. The EO.P. and Philly D.A.'soffice continue to peddle the lie that theprosecution's case against Jamal wasoverwhelming. But an article on McGillin Philadelphia Magazine (May 1986)reports that "Jamal's conviction was considered a miracle in law enforcement circles." No doubt: it was a frame-up pureand simple!Fencl, Giordano and the other copswho had been itching to get rid of Jamalfor many years were involved in railroading him to death row. Marcus Cannon, an eyewitness on the scene the nightof the shooting of Faulkner, has reportedthat he saw two white men who appearedto be part of a street scene jump intoaction with guns drawn and rush towardthe site. This fits a description of the socalled "granny" squads of the Stakeoutunit, who dressed up as elderly, infirm orhomeless people in order to entrap andshake down "suspects" and were backedup by plainclothes cops in unmarkedcars. The Center City area of Philadelphia, the scene of the 1981 shootings ofJamal and Faulkner, was one of the primelocations covered by these "granny"squads.History is not a conspiracy, but thereare conspiracies in history. We are notsaying that the cops who were at thescene of l3th and Locust Streets thenight of 9 December 1981 knew Jamalwas going to be there. But they werethere and had the chance they had longawaited to catch Mumia in their racistframe-up machine. This was the culmination of a political vendetta, extendingback more than a decade, against a manwhose impassioned defense of the victims of Philly cop brutality had earnedhim a special animus among these thugsin blue and their masters in the city andfederal government.As we wrote in "Mumia Abu-Jamal:The COINTELPRO Files":"The fight to save Jamal and to abolishthe racist death penalty is part of thestruggle for black equality in America. It

will take a workers revolution to put thecapitalist state's machinery of death outof business once and for all and bring tojustice the hired thugs who have committed untold crimes against the workingclass and minorities in the name of 'lawand order.' Only then will the records ofthe government's secret police agenciesbe opened for all to see. Free MumiaAbu-Jamal! Abolish the Racist DeathPenalty!".

Spartacist LeaguePublic Offices-MARXIST LlTERATURE

Bay AreaThurs.: 5:30-8 p.m. and Sat.: 1-5 p.m.1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)Oakland, CA Phone: (510) 839-0851Saturday: 2-4 p.m.123 Townsend St. (near 2nd St.)Dial #826 for entrySan Francisco, CA Phone: (415) 777-9367ChicagoTues.: 5-9 p.m. and Sat.: 12-3 p.m.328 S. Jefferson St., Suite 904Chicago,IL Phone: (312) 454-4930New York CityMon.: 6-8:30 p.m. and Sat.: 1-5 p.m.(from Aug. 31 to Oct. 5)299 Broadway, Suite 318 (north of Chambers SI.)New York, NY Phone: (212) 267-1025

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Bco.-rKadicalism andBourgeois PoliticsWe conclude below an edit-

ed presentation by comradeJoseph Seymour of he SpartacistLeague Central Committee. PartOne was published in WV No.For International Socialist Planning,Not Capitalist Plunder!

ment officials, engineers, lawyers and the like.In the early '70s, the liberalbourgeoisie undertook a concerted effort to regain the loyalty of their wayward offspring.95 (28 August).Between the 1920s and 1950s, conservationist organizations consisted in themain of patrician mountaineers, as leftist

historian Kirkpatrick Sale aptly describedthem. They represented a minor current in

Part TWoAmerican bourgeois politics. The occasional conflicts between the Sierra Cluband lumber companies or between theAudubon Society and real estate developers were not the stuff of front-page newsor broad public interest. The emergenceof the environmental movement as amajor player in American bourgeois politics was a product of the political developments of the I 960s and 1970s.The majority of young leftist radicalsin the I 960s-white and black-considered that white workers benefited fromU.S. imperialist exploitation internationally and that this accounted for the prevalence of racist and chauvinist attitudesamong them. (For a comprehensive analysis of New Left radicalism and its courseof development, see our 1971 pamphlet,Youth, Class and Party.) The foremosttheoretical exponent of Maoism in theU.S. at this time, Paul Sweezy, maintained that the working class in the advanced capitalist countries had in its largemajority become a labor aristocracy.Hence, the relatively high standard ofliving in the U.S. was regarded as a fundamentally bad thing. It was seen asdirectly responsible for the impoverishment of what is now called the ThirdWorld and as the root cause oCracismand support for imperialist militarism. Atthe time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War,Greenpeace, for example, stated: "Ecologically, the war in the Persian Gulf is aconsequence of a fundamentally destructive way of life, centered on our addic-

Ba.ic Docru.r;;;,. 0/ he~ C U s l&utb League

-- >l ~ < u t d ~ _ n. ~ t i a n a J R_Ill. Y O ~ A z n y Relation.

Originally published in 1971 as the basicprogrammatic document of the youthgroup of the Spartacist League/U.S. Thisedition includes a 1974 introduction.

6

$.25 (24 pages)Make checks payable/mall to:Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO

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tion to oil"-"our" meaning the American people as a whole.The New Leftand Eco-Radicalism

This way of looking at the worldoriginated in the late 1960s when neoMalthusianism converged with certaincurrents of New Left radicalism. Inthe late '60s and early '70s, a journalcalled Ramparts served as an interface between the left wing of the liberal,university-based intelligentsia and whatwas called "the movement"-Maoists,anarchoid types, "revolutionary" blacknationalists. The September 1969 issue,

accounts for the fact that Ehrlich was atenured professor at one of the country'selite universities while the Panther leaders were being killed and imprisoned.New Left radicalism stood for the global redistribution of wealth from thehave to the have-not countries. Maoistsand radical black nationalists identifiedthemselves with social revolutions inbackward countries like China and Cuba, which expropriated the imperialistowned factories, mines, oil fields, plantations and other property.Neo-Malthusians like Ehrlich maintained that socialist revolution in backward countries could not prevent mass

In 1972, the Democratic Party ran a"peace" candidate for president, GeorgeMcGovern, who echoed some of thethemes of New Left radicalism. WhileMcGovern was overwhelmingly defeatedby the Republican Nixon, he succeededin convincing many young leftists thatthey had a place in the Democratic Party.Right after the U.S. pulled its troops outof Vietnam in 1973, Nixon and the Democratic Congress abolished the draft.Hostility to U.S. imperialism amongyoung, male intellectuals became far lessintense once they were no longer compelled to fight and possibly die for it. Atthe same time, the Supreme Court legal-

Levick/Black StarPopulist signs at 1977 protest against nuclear energy reflected New Left origins of many eco-radicals.which also carried three statements fromexiled Black Panther leader EldridgeCleaver, contained a piece titled "EcoCatastrophe" by Paul Ehrlich, a professorof biology at Stanford. Here was Ehrlich's message:

"Western society is in the process ofcompleting the rape and murder of theplanet for economic gain. And, sadly,most of the rest of the world is eager forthe opportunity to emulate our behavior.But the underdeveloped peoples willbe denied that opportunity-the days ofplunder are drawing inexorably to aclose ..."For mankind has artificially loweredthe death rate of the human population,while in general birth rates have remained high. With the input side of thepopulation system in high gear and theoutput side slowed down, our fragileplanet has filled with p e o p l ~ at anincredible rate. It took several millionyears for the population to reach a totalof two billion people in 1930, while asecond two billion will have been addedby 1975! By that time some experts feelthat food shortages will have escalatedthe present level of world hunger andstarvation into famines of unbelievableproportions."I want to emphasize not only important similarities between this kind ofneo-Malthusianism and the main currents of New Left radicalism but also afundamental difference. This difference

famines and that a program aimed atrapid industrial growth would only accelerate the coming eco-catastrophe. Theseneo-Malthusians viewed the world e c o n ~ omy like a children's birthday party inwhich there was a very large bowl ofcookies. American, West European andJapanese children got to the party firstand ate up most of the cookies. I f he children from Latin America, Africa and Asiawho arrived later tried to eat as muchas the Americans and Europeans, theywould only run out of cookies sooner.During the 1970s, many New Left radicals embraced Green politics. Activistswho had defended the Black Panthersagainst government repression in the late'60s, ten years later were defendingbirds, fish and salamanders, supposedlythreatened by government constructionprojects. How and why did this development take place?The leftist radicalization of studentyouth in the late 1960s was disturbingfor the American bourgeoisie, especiallyits liberal wing. Every other dorm roomat elite universities like Harvard andBerkeley sported posters of Malcolm X,Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. Yet theresidents of these dorms were the social,and in many cases biological, heirs ofcorporate executives, top-level govern-

ized abortion, thereby removing the maingrievance that young women of the privileged classes held against the Americanbourgeois state. Under these conditions,"the movement" rapidly disintegrated.In this context, conservationist organizations played a role in reintegratingerstwhile New Left radicals into bourgeois politics. A 1971 manifesto by theSierra Club made the following appeal:"I f there are any young activist SDS hippie anarchist conspirators in the audience,I would urge you to go out and get yourcollege to institute departments of greenstudies at once, and while you're at it, putaway the books on traditional economics"(quoted in William Tucker, Progress andPrivilege: America in the Age of Environ-mentalism [1982]).Green radicalism appealed especiallyto the anarchoid, hippie counterculturewing of the New Left, which opposedMarxism-Leninism in principle. TheGreen movement advocated a radical restructuring of the economy and a corresponding change in social attitudes,while having nothing to do with theworking class which this type of NewLeftist 'had always disdained as a bunchof racist, flag-waving bigots. Moreover,the ecology movement was gaining realpolitical clout. Organizations like the

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Sierra Club and its offshQot Friends ofthe Earth could take on large corporations in court-and sometimes win. Mostimportant of all, Green radicals had anenormous sense of moral superiority, thatthey and they alone were concerned withthe future of life on earth.During the 1970s, environmentalismbecame an increasingly important component of liberal bourgeois politics-withone very significant exception. Blackleaders were skeptical or hostile to theenvironmentalist craze. In 1979, VernonJordan, then head of the Urban League,stated that environmentalists "will findin the black community absolute hostility to anything smacking of no-growthor limits-to-growth. Some people havebeen too cavalier in proposing policiesto preserve the physical environment forthemselves while other, poorer peoplepay the costs."While Jordan's remarks were selfserving, they were also very much ontarget. Environmentalism was a liberalform of what was then called the whitebacklash. White middle-class liberalsand radicals, who had earlier activelysupported the civil rights movement, hadnow turned away from the cause of theblack masses in order to pursue theirown interests, like maintaining a pleasantsuburban environment with lots of greenery, birds and trees.Capitalist Economic Austerity

There was another major factor behindthe development of a significant environmentalist movement in the 1970s: achange in economic conditions and acorresponding change in liberal economic ideology. From the 1930s to the1960s, the Democratic Party, especiallyits liberal wing, espoused Keynesianeconomics, promising full employmentand higher growth rates through a mix ofcertain fiscal and monetary policies. Theright wing of the Republican Party denounced Keynesianism as "creeping socialism." They argued that ever largerbudget deficits would impose a crushingburden of debt on future generations andwould undermine the financial stability

/1Basil Blackwell Inc.

11 SEPTEMBER 1998

Gun-toting gasstation attendantin Californiaduring 1979oil shortage.Bourgeoisieseized on crisiscreated byoil cartel topush austerityunder cover of"conservation. "

of the American state. The Democratswere generally viewed as the party ofeconomic growth, the Republicans as thedefenders of the status quo.But that changed in the late 1970s.The U.S. economy had begun to deteriorate in the late 1960s and real wagesstagnated. This situation was aggravatedwhen the Anglo-American oil cartel andits Saudi Arabian client state manipulated a fourfold increase in the worldmarket price of oil, falsely claiming thatthe world was running short of petroleum. A major global economic downturn in 1974-75 was widely blamed on

U.S. presidentCarter touringThree Mile Islandnuclear powerplant in 1979 afternear meltdown.Under capitalistsystem, safety issubordinatedto profits.

the oil CfISIS. The profits of Americancorporations fell sharply, as the downturn exposed their declining internationalcompetitiveness.The capitalists responded by seeking toincrease the rate of exploitation. Majorcompanies demanded and got givebackcontracts from the unions with reducedwages and benefits. The DemocraticCarter administration in the late 1970soversaw the worst deterioration in theeconomic conditions of the Americanworking class since the Great Depressionof the 1930s. To justify this: liberal

As Bolshevik leader LeonTrotsky (left) explained in hiswritings on science, Marxistsfavor technological progress toeradicate scarcity and humanmisery. Dnieper hydroelectri cstation built under Sovietplanned economy was part ofeffort to bring electricity tobackward, rural Russia.

Democrats told American working people that for decades they had been living beyond their means by consumingcheap but irreplaceable energy. In amajor speech shortly after becoming president in 1977, Carter called for "painful"sacrifices as he asserted: "Our energyproblems have the same cause as ourenvironmental problems-wasteful useof resources."Needless to say, this was not a popularprogram-except among environmentalist groups, which criticized Carter for notgoing far enough. The environmentaliststhus became agitators and propagandistsfor bourgeois economic austerity measures. And the Democrats now became thedefenders of the economic status quo.Now, the Republicans promised morerapid economic growth through a changein government policies, namely large cutsin taxes. The so-called "tax revolt,"closely linked to the white backlash, ledto the ascendancy of the Republicanright with Reagan's victory over Carterin 1980.The Reaganites initially adopted aflagrantly anti-environmentalist stance.They slashed the budget of the Environmental Proteetion Administration. JamesWatt, a Colorado lawyer who specializedin defending corporations against suits byenvironmentalist groups was appointed

secretary of the interior, in charge ofnational parks and forests. These policiesproduced a powerful backlash. Majorenvironmentalist organizations like theSierra Club, Audubon Society and NatureConservancy grew more rapidly .than everbefore. By the mid-1980s, they claimed atotal of five million members, concentrated in the upper echelons of Americansociety. The environmentalist movementgenerated huge sums of money for public relations, Washington lobbyists andlawsuits.By the mid- l 980s, the Reaganites beat

Novos!i

a retreat on the environmental front.When Watt was dumped as secretary ofthe interior, one environmental lobbyist remarked cynically: "We're sorry to see himgo, he was the best organizer we everhad" (quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, TheGreen Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992 [1993]).In its second term, the Reagan administration conciliated the environmentalistmovement, while Reagan' s vice presidentand successor, George Bush, adopted apro-environmentalist stance."Deep Ecology":A Reactionary Utopia

The emergence of the environmentalistmovement as a major player in American bourgeois politics, even within theRepublican Party, predictably generated aschism, as Green radicals accused majororganizations like the Sierra Club andNature Conservancy of selling out to thecorporations. The founder of Earth First!,Dave Foreman, who himself had been anenvironmental lobbyist in Washington,now asserted: "You should never supporta piece of legislation" (quoted in Sale,Green Revolution).In general, the Green radicals embraced the doctrine of "deep ecology"developed by a Norwegian, Arne Naess,in the 1970s and propagated in the U.S. by

J ' . q ~ : .a group of professors at Humboldt StateUniversity in Northern California. "Deepecology" takes environmentalist ideologyto its logical conclusion: denouncingwhat it terms "anthrocentric" thinking, itopposes civilization in the name of protecting the rest of nature from the inherently destructive tendencies of the humanspecies. In their 1985 tract Deep Ecology,Bill Devall and George Sessions state:"The intuition of biocentric equality isthat all things in the biosphere have anequal right to live and blossom and toreach their own individual forms ofunfolding and self-realization.""Deep ecology" and Green radicalismmore generally have a quasi-religiouscharacter, in that nature is regarded as ahigher and ultimately unknowable powerwhich man cannot control for his ownends without utterly destructive consequences. The root cause of the supposedenvironmental crisis is thus the intellectual arrogance of the human species.Thus the eco-radical Robert van denBosch states:"The basic problem is that our brain

enables us to evaluate, plan, and execute.Thus, while all other creatures are pro-grammed by nature and subject to herwhims, we have our own gray computerto motivate, for good or evil, our chemi-cal engine."- The Pl!stiscide Conspiracy (1978)"Deep ecology" argues for the dissolution of existing states and their replacement by self-sufficient "bioregions."There would be no cities, no internationaltrade or travel. According to Earth First!,modern industrial society must "give wayto a hunter-gatherer way of life, which isthe only economy c o m p a t i b l ~ with a

continued on page 127


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"Little England" Labourites EmbraceThe following article is reprintedfrom Workers Hammer No. 163 (July/August 1998), newspaper of the Sparta-cist League/Britain.In an article headlined "Russia's RacistDepths," British Socialist Party (SP)leader Peter Taaffe issued a call for "the

international labour movement... to assistthe left in Moscow and the rest of Russiato combat the virus of racism, nationalism and fascism" (Socialist, 15 May).Seeking to revive the flagging fortunes ofthe "Youth Against Racism in Europe"(YRE) groups set up by the SP (formerlyMilitant Labour) and other affiliates ofW O R K E R S I l A M M E R ~ the reformist Committee for a WorkersInternational (CWI), Taaffe appeals for"active assistance" to enable the YRE "toproduce material explaining to the youthof Russia the real aims and purposes ofthe fascist groups."

The Socialist article describes theominous rise in fascist terror in BorisYeltsin's Russia, including an attackTaaffe witnessed on one of his supportersin Moscow. But Taaffe'S appeal is a cyni-cal fraud through and through. Not onlydid the CWI enthusiastically supportthe 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolutionwhich ushered in the rising tide of racistterror, but Taaffe and his Russian sup-porters apologise for fascist killers intheir midst."Democratic" Counterrevolutionand "Red-Brown" Chauvinism

Capitalist restoration has subjected theworking masses of the former SovietUnion to an unparalleled decline in livingstandards. Mass unemployment, homelessness, malnutrition and disease aretoday rampant and growing. In the absence of organised working-class resistance, the fascists have seized on sucheconomic desperation. The growth ofmurderous fascist gangs has been fuelledas well by the Great Russian chauvinismpushed by the new capitalist rulers. Reports in the Western press of the neardeadly beating of a black American soldier and the bombing of a Moscowsynagogue in May only hint at the waveof fascist terror against dark-skinned people from the Caucasus, Jews and Africanand Asian students and visitors.After fascists threatened "to kill onenon-Aryan every day after Hitler's birthday on April 20," two Asian w o m ~ e n wereviciously beaten by a mob of skinheads ina Moscow shopping area. African students are attacked nearly every day,and skinhead gangs recently rampagedthrough dormitory rooms at MoscowState Veterinary Academy. On 7 May,a 25-year-old Azerbaijani trader wasstabbed to death in a Moscow market byskinheads in black uniforms. The copswho were on the scene colluded in thisracist murder. And when 1500 Azerismarched through Moscow to express theiroutrage over this killing, the cops dis-

8

Russian Fascists brown coalition" of Stalinist has-beens,monarchists and outright fascists in recent years. The same April-May 1992issue of Rabochaya Demokratiya whichamnestied the capitalist counterrevolutionalso featured a grovelling front-pageappeal to the "red-brown" Toiling Russiagroup. This article did not even mentionRussian chauvinism or anti-Semitism.per sed the procession and Mayor Luzhkov threatened to prosecute the protestorganisers. The role played by Yeltsin'scops should come as no surprise; sincethe capitalist counterrevolution, Caucasians and Central Asians have repeatedlybeen rounded up and expelled from Moscow and other Russian cities.Grotesquely, the fascist killers havealso been embraced by the self-styled"Left Vanguard," Levy Avangard, Russiangroup of the CWI. This was disgustinglyevident at a May Day forum in Moscowfeaturing Taaffe himself speaking on"The British Labour Party, One YearLater." Three members of the so-called"National Bolshevik Party" (NBP) wereseated in the room, dressed in their standard black leather and openly flauntingNazi-style armbands. When a comrade ofthe International Communist Leagueattending the meeting saw the fascists, heimmediately urged the organisers to expelthe NBP scum. The ICL spokesman thendeclared from the floor:"There are three members of the fascistNBP here with their Nazi regalia. Theorganisers of this meeting have said theyrefuse to remove them. This is a provocation and an obscenity, as a representative of the ICL I am leaving."As our comrade left-and the Nazisstayed-Taaffe shouted out, "Good!"Three others walked out in protest, including a young Azerbaijani woman whoknew only too well what the NBP fascistsstand for.The CWI's flirtation with the fascistscum did not begin at the May Dayforum. The Moscow anarchist journalNaperekor (January 1997) reported thatthe Russian Taaffeites' "Left Anti-FascistResistance" (LAS) has harboured NBPsupporters since its founding in October1996. Most recently, Levy Avangard(May 1998) issued an open appeal tothe fascists titled "How to Understandthe NBP." This sickening piece praisesNBP fuhrer Eduard Limonov for his"deserved fame" as a writer (!) andexpresses "pity" for the Nazi terroristsas "daydreaming" idealists and "phrasemongering windbags." Urging the fascists to "acknowledge reality," it concludes with the invitation, "Why are youstill not with us?"The Levy Avangard article spits on thegraves of the millions of Soviet workersand soldiers who died defeating HitleriteNazism and mocks all those who arebeing beaten, stabbed and bombed byfascists today! Do the Taaffeites wantthe NBP "daydreamers" to carry out moreactions like their August 1996 rallydenouncing Yeltsin's pact with Chechenindependence fighters as "treason" ortheir march through Moscow last November carrying swastika-like banners?Limonov himself is a racist killer whocrows about joining Serb chauvinists in"ethnic cleansing" operations against

;!;

::i3m

Moscow synagoguebombed by fascistsin May.

Bosnian Croats. Another NBP leaderlaments Hitler's "regrettable mistake" inattacking Soviet Russia instead of oiningwith it to attack the West (St. PetersburgTimes, 2-8 June 1997). Indeed, LevyAvangard (November 1997) has itselfacknowledged that, at least in one town,the "majority" of the NBP consists of"Nazi-skinheads" who "are responsiblefor numerous attacks on Arab and Negrostudents."In his recent Socialist article, Taaffewrites of "the economic and social wasteland which is capitalist Russ ia today." ButTaaffe and his supporters bear their shareof political responsibility for bringingabout this wasteland. In August 1991, theTaaffeites-whose paper was then calledRabochaya Demokratiya (Workers De-

In the December 1995 elections,Rabochaya Demokratiya gave backhanded support to the KPRF, an outrightbourgeois-nationalist party which is thecurrent embodiment of the "red-browncoalition," burying a nominal disclaimeragainst "political support" to Zyuganovbeneath reams of "fight the right" rhetoric and a headline which screamed,"Not One Vote for the Right!" The Russian Taaffeites subsequently changed thename of their paper to be more acceptablein this rabidly chauvinist milieu. The current issue of Levy Avangard does not somuch as mention Russia's imperialist

Sanin/SegodnyaMoscow protest by Azeris in May against a racist murder by skinheads.mocracy)-joined Russian Orthodoxpriests, would-be capitalists and otherreactionary rabble on Yeltsin's counterrevolutionary barricades. Rabochaya De-mokratiya (April-May 1992) sought towhitewash its active support to the forcesof capitalist restoration by absurdly deny-ing that "the liquidation of the USSRweakened the position of socialism in theworld."But as the ravages of capitalist restoration became evident and the Yeltsinite"democrats" increasingly despised, theCWI opportunists shifted gears. To hisBritish readers, Taaffe hypocriticallydeclaims how "sickening" it was to seethis year's May Day rally in Moscow,organised by Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation(KPRF), "sullied by the presence of fascists and racists, some of whom openlycarry anti-Semitic placards." But in Russia, Taaffe's outfit seeks a common language with these nationalists and has evermore aggressively tailed after the "red-

ambitions or the right of the Chechenpeople to self-determination- -or even therampant skinhead terror in Russia.Beware YRE "Anti-Racism"

The aim of the latest YRE campaignlimited to "explaining" the purposes ofthe fascist terrorists-is thoroughly inkeeping with its liberal politics, informedby the CWI's reformist view that theracist cops are "workers in uniform" andits craven appeals to the capitalist stateto ban the fascists (see Spartacist Pamphlet, "Militant Labour's Touching Faithin the Capitalist State," August 1994).Indeed, Taaffe's call for "lobbies andpickets of Russian embassies ... protestingagainst the free rein that is given to fascist and neo-fascist groups" dovetailswell with the current designs of the"democratic" imperialists and their International Monetary Fund (IMF) vulturesto promote investment by "cleaning up"the image of Yeltsin's Russia. To thiscontinued on page 11

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Wall Street ...( continued from page 1)the $241 billion which Japanese stockslost in the last week of August alone.Russia was, so to speak, the straw thatbroke the back of the Wall Street boom.Beginning in the early '90s, the "babyboomer" generation increasingly investedtheir pension funds in the stock market asif it were an automatic money-makingmachine. This massive infusion of moneydrove up stock prices to astronomical levels having no relation to corporate profitability. For several months, U.S. centralbank head Alan Greenspan and the Econ-omist-house organ of international financiers-have warned that the Wall Stree tbubble was going to burst.Profits in the U.S. have been declining,and the situation facing "multinational"corporations and banks in most of the restof the capitalist world is far worse. Sincelast fall, financiers and bourgeois economists of all political persuasions havevoiced concern that the Asian economiccrisis could lead to a full-blown worlddepression on the scale of the 1930s.Financial markets are so volatile and nervous, political conditions in much ofthe world so unstable and conflict-riddenthat any major shock-say, a popularupheaval in Mexico or a war betweenIndia and P.akistan, or even an Iranianmilitary incursion into Afghanistancould have produced the kind of panic instock markets around the globe that weare now seeing.During his visit with fellow lame duckBoris Yeltsin in Moscow last week, U.S.president Clinton implored Russians tofollow "the fundamental imperatives ofthe global market." Those are hardlyencouraging words these days. SouthKorea, despite an International MonetaryFund (IMF) "bailout" package of closeto $60 billion and sharpening attacks onthe jobs and living standards of the working class, continues to sink deeper intodepression. China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state whose Stalinist rulers have been driving the country headlong toward capitalist restoration, hasalso been affected by the Southeast Asianeconomic crisis, itself triggered in goodpart by the flood of cheap exports fromChina's growing "free market" sector.Most importantly, Japan, industrialpowerhouse of Asia and the world'ssecond-largest economy, is in the throesof its worst economic and poiitical crisisin decades (see "Japan Economic CrisisShakes Imperialist Order," WV Nos. 693and 694, 3 July and 31 July). Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto resigned following a humiliating showing for his LiberalDemocratic Party in parliamentary elections in July, but his successor has been noless successful in putting together a package for "economic recovery." In the pastyear, Japan has experienced its first majorbank failures in half a century, sharp cutsin investment in productive capacity andrecord levels of unemployment. Paintinga picture of growing global economicchaos, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Blinder, wrotein a recent op-ed piece in the New YorkTimes (25 August):"Several Southeast Asian countries are inwhat can only be called a depression.China, it is said, may have to devalue itscurrency. Japan is sagging badly. Russialurches from one crisis to the next. Andparts of Latin America look shaky.""Death of Communism" MythGoes Splat

Post-Soviet Russia's role in the world,or even the world economy, cannot bemeasured simply in terms of industrialoutput, volume of foreign trade, debtexposure by Western and Japanese banks,etc. While Western, mainly German,banks stand to lose well over $100 billionas a result of the Russian financial meltdown, the impact of the economic collapse there is primarily political and ideological. Russia may be economicallybankrupt, but it still has a formidablenuclear arsenal, including thousands ofwarheads. As for the ideological impact,we noted in '''Death of Communism'11 SEPTEMBER 1998

Myth Goes Splat" (WVNo. 677, 31 October 1997) following last October's stockmarket crash that the imperialist rulersseized on the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union to proclaima "bright new world of unfettered capitalism." We continued:"There was even talk of 'the end of history,' in the fatuous words of State Department ideologue Francis Fukuyama, withthe contradictions generated by theanarchic capitalist mode of productionsuppressed or at least easily controllable.Corporate directors and the International Monetary Fund and World Bankenvisioned a return to the 'golden age' before the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution-few or no restrictions oninternational movement of capital, stable foreign-exchange rates, 'investorfriendly' governments and, above all, alimitless growth of profits."

Today, even Fukuyama admits to having second thoughts about his rosy visionof the "end of history," writing: "Thereare two things on the horizon that I thinkare really quite scary: that the Asian crisis could broaden into a global depression, in which case all bets are off abouteverything; and essentially that Russiacould fail in its attempt to Westernize andgo backward seriously" (New York Times,30 August).The burgeoning international economic crisis has also intensified the interimperialist rivalries which came into sharprelief following the destruction of the

Parties commanded the allegiance ofadvanced sectors of the proletariat. Withthe victory of capitalist counterrevolutionin the former Soviet Union and EastEurope, workers were sold the lie that"socialism has failed." As a result, todayeven many formerly pro-Soviet workersin the West no longer identify their struggles with the goal of achieving a socialistsociety. The International CommunistLeague seeks to instill in ' the proletariat the revolutionary-internationalist consciousness which animated the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.The continued existence of capitalistimperialism brings with it not only widespread immiseration for the world'sworking people but the danger of a newglobal depression and another cataclysmic world war. Socialist revolutions internationally-ushering in a classless,egalitarian society based on productionfor need, not for profit-is the onlyanswer to the anarchy and brutality of thecapitalist system. It is the task of the ICLto forge the proletarian leadership neededto lead humanity out of this abyss.Yeltsin and Wall Street:From Hero to GoatThere is a measure of historical ju sticein the fact that the financial collapse ofYeltsin's Russia triggered the worst fewweeks on Wall Street in over a decade. Itwas during a visit to the financial center

APRussian miners demanding back wages blockade Trans-Siberian railway.Capitalist counterrevolution has led to impoverishment of working people.Soviet Union. Washington's demands thatTokyo put its economic house in orderhave grown increasingly bellicose inrecent months. This comes after years oftrade disputes, as the U.S. has tried toblackmail Japan into slashing its exportlevels. And while the U.S. is loath tothrow more money at Russia, Germanynot only faces a default on some $30 billion in loans but as well a potential military threat should Russia descend intochaos. A vice president of Germany'shuge Commerzbank warned: "We cannotlet Russia, a superpower so near to Germany, fall deeper and deeper into crisis"(New York Times, 25 August).Today, the mood of bourgeois triumphalism has been replaced by panic ininternational financial markets and fear ofa major world depression. At the sametime, these conditions are impelling theworking masses into struggle. In recentmonths, the Yeltsin regime has been confronted by a series of workers strikesspearheaded by the miners who blockaded trains carrying vital supplies. InIndonesia, a popular upheaval last springled to the ouster of right-wing militarydictator Suharto by his own generals. InSouth Korea, the highly combative working class is resisting the savage austeritymeasures demanded by the IMI:. Thepowerful Japanese proletariat, facing theelimination of "lifetime employment," isbeing shaken out of its political complacency and conservatism. And the U.S.the core country of world capitalismwas hit this summer by the longest andmost effective auto strike in decades andby the powerful Teamster strike againstUPS last summer.Nonetheless, this increased combativity comes amid a historic retrogression in- class consciousness, particularly in WestEurope where mass reformist Communist

of world capitalism nine years ago thatYeltsin launched his career as the paramount leader of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. Yeltsin hadearlier played a key role under Sovietpresident Mikhail Gorbachev, who tookover the Kremlin in 1985 under thebanner of market-oriente


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Wall Street ...(continued from page 9)the new capitalist exploiters, who for the. most part are drawn from the industrialmanagers of the former Soviet Union.Yeltsin bought the elections with the helpof $14 billion from his imperialist sponsors. As we wrote at the time, "Thanks tothe deep pockets of the InternationalMonetary Fund, Yeltsin was able to pieceoff those sectors of the new exploiters,who in the end united behind his candidacy" ("Washington Buys Russian Elections," WV No. 649, 2 August 1996). Butthe pockets of the IMF were not deepenough to prevent Russia's total financialcollapse two years later."Corporatist, Criminal-StyleCapitalism"

Russia has a huge, well-trained laborforce and a large, first-rate technical intelligentsia. But to exploit this manpowerefficiently would require a massive infusion of investment capital to reconstruct, retool and modernize the country'sindustrial plant. Instead, the industrialplants inherited from the Soviet erahave been driven into the ground. Thereis no more striking index of the primitive state of capitalism in Russia thanthat three-quarters of all transactionsare done by ' barter without money orcredit.In 1992-'93, the Yeltsin regime sold of fthe industrial enterprises, mines and oilfields developed under the Soviet plannedeconomy to a handful of Kremlin insiders for a small fraction of their actualworth. Reputedly, seven tycoons-whowere the core backers of Yeltsin s 1996election campaign-control over half ofthe Russian economy. Grigory Yavlinsky,an early advocate of capitalist restorationwho is now a leading liberal opponentof Yeltsin, pithily describes Russia'seconomy as "corporatist, criminal-stylecapitalism."In certain respects, post-Soviet Russiahas taken on the economic and politicalstructure of a Third World country. Exports consist almost entirely of oil, natural gas and precious metals. The oil barons are therefore the only people whohave large amounts of dollars and otherhard currencies, which they use to buygovernment officials from local city hallsto the Kremlin. Typical in this regard isKremlin power broker Boris Berezovsky,who runs the Sibneft oil company whichfinances his own bank. The premier political agent for Russia's oil barons is Viktor Chernomyrdin, who ran the Sovietnatural gas industry, which he transformed into a giant monopoly corporation, Gazprom, pocketing a fortune forhimself in the process.

The post-Soviet Russian econ{)my ismarked by the almost complete absenceof foreign investment In productive activities, not only in manufacturing but alsoin the lucrative extractive sector. In thisrespect Russia contrasts sharply with thesmaller East European countries of theformer Soviet bloc. American and German capitalists readily buy up, retool andconstruct plants in Poland, Hungary andthe Czech Republic-but not in Russia.Why not? Because they cannot exerciseeffective political control over Russia.The new capitalist entrepren'eurs andtheir political agents in Poland and Hungary are more than happy to be juniorvery junior-partners of Frankfurt andWall Street. They accept their lowly position in the "new world order." But Russia's tycoons, their political agents andtheir military men aspire to rule a greatimperialist power, dominating at least thenon-Russian regions of the former USSR,the so-called "near abroad." All ofYeltsin's major rivals-Communist Partyhead Zyuganov, ex-general AleksandrLebed, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkovplay up Russian national grievances andambitions and strike a posture hostile tothe West, especially the U.S.The interplay between this corporatistcapitalism, Western fears of Russia's -imperialist ambitions and the repercus-10

sions of the Asian economic crash havenow brought about total political andfinancial chaos. To begin with, Russia'snew capitalists don't pay taxes. Since1991, Yeltsin has cut social programs tothe bone and also substantially reducedmilitary spending. The real wages ofgovernment employees have fallen 40percent, as have old-age pensions. Still,last year the Yeltsin regime ran a budgetdeficit amounting to 6 percent of thecountry's total national output.Asian Crisis Topples Russia'sFinancial House of Cards

The Asian economic crash causedinternational moneymen to turn a jaundiced eye at other so-called "emergingmarkets," especially Russia. In SouthKorea and Indonesia, "crony capitalism"at least oversaw a real expansion in productive capacity. But crony capitalism inRussia resulted in a wholesale destruc-

addressing particularly obtuse students,"this is not a crisis. This is not a majordevelopment." Statements like this, asmuch as anything else, turned Russia'sfinancial mess into a major development,indeed.With no prospect of a large and immediate Western bailout, every holder ofRussian stocks and government bondswhether foreign or home-g rown -dump edthem forthwith and converted the rubleproceeds into dollars or other hard currencies. An eleventh-hour "rescue package" worked out with the IMF in late Julywas too little, too late and had too manystrings attached. Every dollar flowinginto Moscow from Washington instantaneously flowed back out again as the runon the ruble became a rout. Former WorldBank economist Charles Blitzer exclaimed: "Ro bbery is going on, that's theonly way to describe it. ... It seems Russia's oligarchs are engaging in big-time

_ Sygma Suau/TimeYeltsin launches counterreVOlutionary coup in front of Moscow White House,August 1991 (left). Same White House after military assault ordered byYeltsin in October 1993, following disbanding of parliament.tion of productive capacity. And TsarBoris looked very like a Slavic Suharto.In fact, the eruption of mass anti-Suhartoprotests in Indonesia in mid-May markedthe beginning of the collapse of Russia'sfinancial markets.Moscow government bonds could besold only at ever higher interest rates onever shorter terms. The Russian treasurywas redeeming up to $8 billion a monthat interest rates from 50 to 100-plus percent. And the only reason anyone wasbuying them at all was a belief that in acrunch the U.S. and Germany would payoff rather than see Yeltsin go down thetubes as strikes paralyzed the country andangry mobs ran through the streets ofMoscow and-St. Petersburg. Washingtonand Bonn, the moneymen reasoned,would not let Russia become an Indonesia with 10,000 nuclear warheads. Butcould the Western imperialist powers prevent it, and at what cost?The massive bailouts of South Korea,Indonesia, etc. have depleted the reservesof the IMP, World Bank and kindredinternational financial institutions. Japanis facing the daunting task of bailing outits own banks which are saddled with$600 billion in "non-performing" loans.Moreover, the Yeltsin regime is manifestly corrupt and inefficient. For every dollar provided by the IMP, 50 cents endedup in offshore bank accounts of Yeltsincronies and the other 50 cents was frittered away. Late last year, the IMF suspended a scheduled payment of $600 million until the Yeltsin regime brought itstax-collection act up to par. Respondingto this pressure, in March Yeltsin fired hisentire cabinet and replaced them with ateam of youthful "free marketeers."The IMF continued to dole out moneyto Moscow, but only as if it were rationing food and water in a lifeboat adrift onthe high seas. When Russia's financialmarkets started their sharp slide downward in late spring, IMF chief MichelCamdessus conspicuously turned hisback on Moscow. "Contrary to whatmarkets and cOI]1mentators are imagining," Camdessus lectured like a professor

capital flight" (New York Times, 26August).On August 17, the Yeltsin governmentin effect declared bankruptcy, devaluingthe ruble and suspending payments onforeign loans for at least three months.With everyone from Wall Street bankersto Siberian coal miners calling for hishead, Yeltsin moved to re-cement his tiesto Russia's new tycoons by reappointingChernomydrin, who had been dumpedfrom the job only months ago, as actingprime minister. Chernomydrin has triednegotiating for a "power-sharing" dealwith the Communist opposition in parliament and is ominously caJl'ing for aniron-fisted "economic dictatorship" toimpose order on the country.For the Communism ofLenin and Trotsky!

The Yeltsin regime is internally shaken, universally despised and discredited.The recent strikes by miners and otherworkers are a welcome sign of reawakened combativity on the part of Russia'sproletariat. But to overthrow the corporatist, criminal-style capitalism they face,a new vanguard of the multinationalworking class of Russia must be forgedbased on an understanding of the historicsignificance of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the subsequent Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet workersstate and the counterrevolution led byYeltsin in 1991-92.It was the October Revolution of 1917led by Lenin and Trotsky's BolshevikParty which, by expropriating the Russiancapitalists and landowners and kickingout the imperialists, laid the basis for aplanned, collectivized economy. But theBolshevik Party which led the revolution was destroyed by Stalin through apolitical counterrevolution in 1923-24, inwhich a nationalist bureaucratic casteseized the reins of power. Yet despite thegross mismanagement and massive parasitism of the Stalinist bureaucracy, theeconomic and cultural development of theSoviet Union brought substantial benefitsto its working people-not only Russians

but also Ukrainians, Georgians, Uzbeks,Tajiks, etc.Development toward a genuinelysocialist society could take place only inthe context of an internationally plannedsocialist economy brought into beingthrough workers revolutions in theadvanced capitalist countries of NorthAmerica, West Europe and Japan. But thenationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, in theguise of building "socialism in one country," was viscerally opposed to this perspective. By the 1980s, decades of corrupt and stifling Stalinist misrule hadpr

workers vanguard no 696 - 11 september 1998

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