workers vanguard no 756 - 13 april 2001

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 756 - 13 April 2001

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50No. 756 13 April 2001

u.s. Spy Plane Provocationi huaProvocation by U.S. spy plane, still on Hainan military base, is part of calculated escalation by American imperialism against Chinese deformed workers state.

APRIL 1 0 -Whatever happenedin the skies above China's Hainan Island last week-andBeijing's account is a lot moreplausible than Washington's-Delend China! increased spy flights againstChina and North Korea. U.S.plans for a "theater missile defense" system in Asia are aimed

the U.S. spy plane provocation was noaccident. It was part of a deliberate, calculated escalation of U.S. military pressure against the People's Republic ofChina, aimed at furthering the capitalists'goal of smashing the 1949 Chinese Revolution and reimposing the yoke of imperialist exploitation on China's workingmasses. As proletarian internationalists inthe heartland of world imperialism, theSpartacist League/U.S. declares its classsolidarity with the Chinese proletariatand the Chinese workers state, howeverbureaucratically deformed. We saluteWang Wei, the pilot who is presumeddead after defending his country againstimperialist espionage and provocation.With all the arrogance that comesof being the self-proclaimed "world'sonly superpower," U.S. imperialismthought it could dictate terms of submission to China. President Bush imperiously demanded the immediate return ofthe EP-3E plane and its crew, while thechauvinist American media smeared thedowned Chinese pilot as a "cowboy" whodidn't know what he was doing andgot what was coming. But unlike thesmall, defenseless countries over whichAmerica's rulers regularly ride roughshod, China does not fall into the category of a "rogue state"-because it hasnuclear weapons.When Beijing refused to simply kowtow to the diktat of "Xiao Bushi" (LittleBush) and his power-crazed foreign policy wonks, Washington changed its tune,expressing "regret" for the downing ofthe Chinese pilot and seeking to negotiate an end to the crisis. The U.S. hasacquiesced to the fact that the Chinesemilitary has been carefully examining theEP-3E, the most advanced spy plane inthe Navy's arsenal. This is an intelligencebonanza for China, which it should sharewith the Vietnamese, North Korean andCuban deformed workers states.Invoking "international law," Washington initially thundered that the EP-3E sitting on a Hainan runway was sovereign

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U.S. threat to supply Aegis guidedmissile destroyers to"Taiwan targetsChina's missile systems.U.S. territory off-limits to Chinese military personnel and proclaimed its inalienable "right" to carry out intrusive military/espionage missions right off China'scoastline. Puncturing this imperialisthypocrisy, Chinese ambassador Yang Jiechi said on the PBS-TV Lehrer NewsHour (4 April): " If America had witnessed such kinds of reconnaissanceflights up and down its coast, so close to

its airspace .. .ifyou lose your airman, andyou lose your aircraft, I think theresponse would be very different." "International law" notwithstanding, when theU.S. got hold of a Soviet MIG-25 in1976; it picked the plane apart and sent itback two months later in shipping crates.The backdrop to the spy plane provocation is a shift in U.S. policy toward"an era of direct confrontation withChina," as outlined in a policy review byBush defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. China has now been declared EnemyNo.1. Reporting on the Pentagon review,which has been virtually covered up inthe American press, the London Guar-dian (24 March) wrote of "Washington'sdecision to turn more of its guns and missiles towards China," now deemed to be"the principal threat to American globaldominance." In the last years of the Clinton administration, the U.S. began a significant shift of its military forces to theAsia-Pacific region.Immediately before the U.S. provocation over the South China Sea, a Pentagon team visited Taiwan to put together alist of weaponry for this U.S.-sponsoredcapitalist state, including advancedAegis-equipped destroyers which couldtake out Chinese missile systems. Taiwanhas been a dagger aimed at the People'sRepublic from the time Chiang Kaishek's Nationalist forces fled there in1949.The U.S. has over 100,000 militarypersonnel in the Asia-Pacific region,including 47,000 troops in Japan and37,000 in South Korea. The U.S. has

squarely against China's missilecapacity and target North Korea as well.Last year, the U.S. conducted more than50 joint military exercises with Japan,Australia, South Korea, the Philippinesand others, a number unequaled sincethe fall of the Soviet Union. The U.S.recently sealed a deal with Singapore foruse of a deep-draft navy pier, the secondsuch facility open to U.S. aircraft carriersin South-East Asia since the close of theAmerican naval base at Subic Bay in thePhilippines in 1992. The new pier islocated at the mouth of the strategicallyimportant Malacca Strait, through whichPersian Gulf oil shipments pass to Japan.A domestic reflection of increasedAmerican belligerence toward China wasthe racist frame-up of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee. As we wrote in "'Chinese Spy' Hysteria Whips Up Anti-AsianRacism" (WV No. 719, 17 September1999):

"Even if Lee had, with purpose or not,given military secrets to the People'sRepublic of China, this is no crime frointhe srandpo-int of the international working class .... Our unconditional militarydefense of China and the other remaining deformed workers states-Vietnam,Cuba and North Korea-against imperialism and internal counterrevolution necessarily includes defense of the right ofthese states to amass and test nuclearweapons and to obtain them by whatevermeans necessary."China last month announced anincrease of 18 percent in military expenditures for this year, although its militarybudget is still only a fraction of thePentagon's. China has purchased from

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CHICAGO-Over the past. severalmonths, meetings of the powerful Chicago Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU)Locals 241 and 308 have been the largestand most raucous in years. Workers whohave been chained to the job without acontract for well over a year are demanding answers from the bureaucrats whohave kept the membership completely inthe dark about contract talks. The uniontops nearly lost control of the Januarymeeting of Local 241 bus drivers andmechanics as workers pumped their fists,chanting "Strike! Strike!"For months, Chicago Transit Authority(CTA) bosses and the bourgeois presshave been running a smear campaign vilifying transit workers as reckless drivers,implying that they are responsible for thecutbacks in service to black and Latinoneighborhoods. Last fall, when. a blackmotorman was literally mobbed by enraged passengers after a faulty publicaddress system caused them to miss theirstops, the transit bosses responded by trying to fire him. In 1985, black Chicagobus driver David Johnson was framed upfor "reckless homicide" after his bus hadunavoidably hit a car that swerved in

front of him, tragically killing sevenwhite youths. Hundreds of Chicago transit workers responded by marching onpolice headquarters to demand that thecharges be dropped, and they were.Today the ATU misleaders have hogtied the union to a binding arbitrationscheme that makes it "illegal" to strike.Putting the union's fate in the hands ofarbitrators, claiming nothing can be donethat violates the dictates of the capitaliststate, the bureaucrats use the threat ofan arbitration ruling as a club to ramthrough whatever deal they can get fromthe CTA bosses. The union tops want themembership to vote up a partial contractwhich leaves key contract issues to be"resolved" in the future. After beingstonewalled by the bureaucrats throughmore than a year of bargaining, transitworkers rightly fear that some of theworst givebacks in decades and provisions which challenge the existence of theunion itself will be announced after thecontract is ratified.Binding arbitration has long been acrucial weapon in the union-bustingarsenal of the bosses, designed to stopstrikes from happening and to gut the

Revolutionary Internationalismand Defense of the Workers StatesThe U.S. spy plane provocation hastouched of f widespread outrage in the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workersstate, where many look back to Mao Zedongas a stronger guardian of national sovereignty than his successors in the Stalinistregime. Bu t as Bolshev ik leader Leon Trotskypointed out in polemicizing against the Sta-TROTSKY linist dogma of "socialism in one country," LENINdefense of he workers state against the classenemy must be part ofa program for international workers revolution. Proletarian rev-olution in the imperialist centers, not least the u.s., is crucial to the defense and extension of the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution.

Revolutionary patriotism can only have a class character. It begins as patriotism tothe party organization, to the trade union, and rises to state patriotism when the proletariat seizes power. Whenever the power is in the hands of the workers, patriotism is arevolutionary duty. But this patriotism must be an inseparable part of revolutionaryinternationalism. Marxism has always taught the workers that even their struggle forhigher wages and shorter hours cannot be successful unless waged as an internationalstruggle ... .The invincible conviction that the fundamental class aim, even more so than the partial objectives, cannot be realized by national means or within national boundaries, constitutes the very heart of revolutionary internationalism. If , however, the ultimate aimis realizable within national boundaries through the efforts of a national proletariat, thenthe backbone of internationalism has been broken. The theory of the possibility of realizing socialism in one country destroys the inner connection between the patriotism ofthe victorious proletariat and the defeatism of the proletariat of the bourgeois countries.The proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries is still traveling on the road to power.How and in what manner it marches towards it depends entirely upon whether it considers the task of building the socialist society a national or an international task.

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- Leon Trotsky, "Critique 9f the Draft Program of the Communist International"(1928), reprinted in The Third International After Lenin (1970)

EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Anna Woo dmanPRODUCTION 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 (begi nning with omi tting 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 correspond ence to: Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:vanguard@l iac.nel.Domestic 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 s igned articles or letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoInt.The closing date for news in this issue is April 10.

No. 756 13 Apri l 2001

very purpose of unions. The trade-unionbureaucrats' embrace of this class collaboration, which ties labor to the exploiters,goes hand in hand with their longstanding allegiance to the Democratic Party.The labor bureaucracy and black Democratic Party politicians have served tochannel the anger of the working classand the ghetto into cynical electoral politics which have secured the rule of theDemocrats in Chicago for over half a century. They have made Chicago "the citythat works" for Boss Daley's racist Democratic ' machine, and that means nostrikes to upset the apple cart.The contradictions of race and classthat define capitalist America are playedout in the raw in Chicago, the metropolisat the center of the industrial Midwestknown as "Segregation City." The overwhelmingly black and Latino ATU localshave the social power to bring the city toa grinding halt, a power which can belinked to the anger of the increasinglyimpoverished and brutalized ghettos andbarrios. A hard core of Chicago transitworkers played a central role in stoppingthe Klan from rallying in Gary, Indianaon January 20 as part of the laborlblackmobilization initiated by the PartisanDefense Committee. While the numbersthat came out were diminished by threatsof mass arrest by the city'sDemocraticParty administration, the Klan didn'tdare show, and the city backed off fromits arrest threats in the face of protests bylabor officials nationally. We prevailedbecause we fought on the basis of mobilizing the power of labor independentlyof and in opposition to the cops, courtsand aU t h e ~ r t i e s and a g e n c i ~ s of. thecapitalist class enemy, Here was a concrete, albeit modest, demonstration ofwhat labor can do if it doesn't play bythe bosses' rules.Government, Cops and CourtsOut of the Unions!

Would-be "opposition" cliques likeLocal 308's dubious "Union Watchdog"have seized on the rank-and-file discontent for their own purposes of ugly internecine feuding backed by the threat ofstate intervention. It is a testament tohow discredited the local leadership is inthe eyes of the membership that the"Union Watchdog," which makes appealsto racist sentiment against the local'sblack president, Jerry Williams, has beenable to get a hearing. While makingdemeaning references to Williams' grammar, the "Watchdog" finks have turnedunion material over to the attorney general and advocate dragging the unioninto the capitalist courts., The FBI has launched an "investigation" of alleged corruption by Local 308

officials. In Local 241, an anonymousphone call brought the cops rushing intoa union meeting this February. An sidesin this bureaucratic mudslinging areequally committed to subordinating thelabor movement to the' bosses and theirstate. In Local 241, one bureaucrat is'challenging the fact that many contractissues are unresolved. But his bot tom lineis to send the contract back to the bargaining table or to arbitration.Far from being "neutral," the capitaliststate represents the organized machineryof violence and repression against theworking class and oppressed on behalfof those who live off the exploitation oflabor. The state has repeatedly intervenedin the labor movement, not to upholdunion democracy but to take over andcrush the unions. It was the JusticeDepartment that first installed Ron Careyto run the Teamsters union in 1991, thenlaunched their own vendetta against himfollowing the successful 1997 Teamstersstrike against UPS. It was the FBI thatlaunched the deadly war on black radicalsin the late 1960s, leading to the assassination of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by a Chicago policedeath squad. The same Chicago cops whobreak up picket lines use racist terror toenforce the status quo in "SegregationCity," from the vicious beating andattempted frame-up of black CTA driverCassandra Seay in 1987 to the 1999 coldblooded killings of black motorists Robert Russ and LaTanya Haggerty. Labormust clean its own house: Government,cops and courts out of the unions!Labor/Black Power Is the Key

To ward off strike sentiment, the ATUtops claim that the union's last strike in1979 was a "disaster" that cost the ATUits cost-of-living allowance (COLA),which had made Chicago transit workersthe highest paid in the country in the'70s. The reality is that the four-daywalkout prevented Mayor Jane Byrne'sdrive to eliminate COLA. ATU contractscontinued to include a cost-of-livingraise until 1983, when the Illinois legislature passed House Bill (HB) 1805, a lawinfamous among veteran Chicago transitworkers because it outlawed the COLA,looted their pension fund and imposedthe part-time system.The "friend of labor" who pushedthrough this union-busting law wasChicago's first black mayor, DemocratHarold Washington, who twisted armsand called in his markers to get the billpassed in Springfield. It's hard to imaginea closer tie than the one labor had with the"progressive" Harold Washington. Butwhen Washington tried to justify his antiunion attacks at a Local 241 meeting in

With support from transit workers and other trade unionists, January 20 antiKlan mobilization in Gary, Indiana backed Democratic mayor off of threat ofmass arrests.WORKERS VANGUARD


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Ha.waii: Victory to Teachers, Faculty Strikes!" .

Pickets Shut Down Schools StatewideAPRIL lO-Hawaii's nearly 13,000public schoolteachers and 3,100 stateuniversity faculty members went outon strike on April 5, the first time inU.S. history that an entire state's publiceducation system-all the way fromkindergartens to high schools to universities-has been shut down. The HawaiiState Teachers Association (HSTA),which represents public schoolteachers,and the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly (UHPA), the facultyunion at the ten University of Hawaii(UH) campuses, both went on strikewithin hours of each other after Democratic Party governor Ben Cayetanocalled off negotiations.The memberships of both unionswho have been working without a contract for over a year-had voted overwhelmingly to strike, "and picket lineswent up immediately at schools andUH campuses. The HSTA picket lineshave been'especially large and militant,with many students and parents participating. Moving to take advantage of thestrike's popularity, lieutenant governorMazie Hirono, who plans to run forgovernor next year, broke ranks withher boss Cayetano and joined severalpicket lines. But workers should haveno illusions in capitalist parties, Democrat or Republican; both are enemies ofworking-class struggle.The teachers and UH faculty are

January 1984, he was hooted off the stageby angry black bus drivers and forced toflee by the back door! Washington'sattack on ATU members was part of anational campaign of racist austerity thatheavily relied on black Democratic mayors to impose cutbacks while keeping theurban centers from exploding in protest.As black New York City mayor DavidDinkins promised the racist rulers whenhe took office, "They'll take it from me."Washington's election was seen by theblack population of Chicago as a chanceto finally be able to get some of theirshare of housing, jobs and schoolsthrough the Democratic Party patronagemachine. Today, the conditions faced bythe increasing numbers of black and Hispanic youth hired as part-time transitworkers are bitter testimony to the betrayal of these aspirations. Brought inunder the conditions of Washington'santi-union HB 1805, these workers face afuture of 20-hour workweeks on starvation wages with no seniority and minimalbenefits. They are even prevented fromtaking a second job because they are "oncall" all the time.Full-time transit workers can't makeends meet without working heavy overtime. One giveback contract after anotherhas shifted health care costs onto unionmembers while cutting hundreds of jobsand forcing those remaining to pick upthe extra workload. The transit unionsare already divided between rail and busworkers as well as along craft lines. Nowthe CTA bosses are wielding the club ofhiring more part-time workers againstthe union while eliminating seniority injob picks. Against the bosses' divideand-rule strategy of pitting one section ofthe transit workforce against another,there needs to be one industrial union ofall transit workers which fights for fulltime jobs with full benefits and seniorityrights for the entire membership.Transit workers take the heat for acompany that is widely seen, particularlyby the black and minority poor, as inefficient and callous. But the overwhelmingly black union membership provides aliving link between the social power of

13 APRIL 2001

directly up against the capitalist state inHawaii, where the schools are understate control. Cayetano has a long history of vicious attacks on all the publicemployees unions. When the state'sextremely high cost of living is factoredin, Hawaii teacher salaries are the lowest in the country. The HSTA asked fora 22 percent raise over four years, butwere insultingly offered less than 14percent, with no retroactive pay forthe time worked wi thout a" contract.Cayetano outraged UHPA members byinitially proposing to cut off their healthbenefits over the summer, then offeringonly a 9 percent raise, plus 2 percentunion-busting "merit pay," over twoyears and no raises at all for the 300non-tenure track lecturers. Attempting to break the public schoolteachersstrike, Cayetano vindictively issued anexecutive order cutting off the HSTA'shealth benefits; even the UH administration rejected as illegal his attempt to dothe same to the university faculty .A Department of Education spokesman conceded, "The schools will remain closed ... And that's not reallysurprising, when we seethe strength ofthe numbers reporting to the picketlines" (Honolulu Advertiser, 7 April).Less than 1 percent of HSTA membershave crossed the lines, and so far nearlyall classes have been canceled at UH,despite the administration's threats of

APElementary school teachers picket, April 6, as strike shuts down Hawaii'spublic school system."disciplinary action" against graduateassistants (GAs) who refuse to crosspicket lines. Students and all GAs: Jointhe UHPA strikers in shutting down thecampuses!HSTA executive director Joan Hustednoted that "labor unions have been stopping at the picket lines and unloading their loads at the gate" (HonoluluAdvertiser, 6 April), while Teamstersbus drivers have changed their routes toavoid crossing picket lines. All Hawaii's

trade unions must not only honor theUHPA and HSTA picket lines, refusingto make any deliveries, but unions suchas the municipal workers, Teamstersand especially the ILWU dock workersand sugar refinery workers should carryout real solidarity, reinforcing picketlines and using their great power to helpmake sure the schools and campusesstay shut down until all the strikers'demands are met. Victory to the Hawaiiteacher and faculty strikes!

with the Democrats and forge a workersparty. That entails a struggle againstall wings of the labor bureaucracy-afight to oust capital's labor lieutenantswho help maintain capitalist "order" andclass peace. An insightful, disciplinedrevolutionary party with a committedbase of black trade u n i o n i s t s ~ m o b i l i z -ing organized labor, appealing to andseeking to lead the ghetto masses-couldgalvanize laborlblack Chicago and thecountry.

L.A. transit workers shout down back-to-work ploy during month-long strikelast year. City rulers brought in Jesse Jackson to help end strike.

Going beyond simple contract concerns and actively championing the causeof black liberation and the defense ofthe rights of immigrants and all theoppressed, battalions from the ATU andother heavily minority industrial unionshave the potential to lead tens of thousands in powerful social struggle againstracist capitalism. By doing so, the working class will open up the possibility ofcreating a new power in society, a workers government that will expropriate thebosses and return the wealth of this country to those who produced it, under a centralized plan based on the needs of themany, not the. profits of the few. Oust thebureaucrats! Break with the Democrats!For a workers party that fights for a workers government!

labor and the masses of the inner city. Akey union demand representing the i n t e r ~ est of transit workers and the masses ofworking people and unemployed wouldbe to rip out the turnstiles-for free,quality mass transit from the Loop to thesuburbs!Break with the Democrats!Build a Workers Party!

The ATU tops falsify their own union'shistory in order to bolster their program ofsupport to the black Democrats whouphold Harold Washington as an icon ofthe "progress" .that can be achieved forthe working people and blacks under theirrule. Today, Jesse Jackson is the first andforemost of those who seek to quell theanger of the working class and ghettopoor by pushing the shell game that theDemocrats are the allies of labor andblacks. Last year, Jackson-who hasnever missed an opportunity to try todouse the flames of militant social struggle-was called into Los Angeles to enda militant and powerful transit strike.Leading prayers and preaching the virtuesof "reconciliation" with management,Jackson tried to refurbish the image oflocal Democratic Party politicians whohad led a strikebreaking charge againstthe transit workers. Last month in New

York City, Transport Workers Local 100president Roger Toussaint attempted tohead off anger in the ranks over attackson the union's health benefits fund byorganizing a rally for Democratic Partypoliticians, with Jackson as the centralfeatured speaker.The task of class-struggle militants inthe unions is to fight to win the mostadvanced elements to the need to break

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Young SparlacusTaliban: Bitter Fruit of U.S. Imperialism's Anti-Soviet WarWe print below a forum given recentlyin San Francisco, Vancouver and Chi-cago by comrade Kathy Ibsen, slightlyeditedfor publication.I t's Afghanistan in 1988: 15,000women serve as soldiers andcommanders in the army; thereare 245,000 women workers.Women are 40 percent of thedoctors and 60 percentof theteachers at the University ofKabul; 440,000 female studentsare enrolled in educationalinstitutions and 80,000 moreparticipate in literacy programs.The All-Afghanistan Women'sCouncil has 150,000 members.Western dress is'common in thecities and women enjoy somereal measure of freedom fromthe veil and subjugation, forthe first time in Afghanistan'shistory.What made this possible? Itwas the Soviet Union sending100,000 troops, mainly fromSoviet Central Asia, into Afghanistan, which bordered theUSSR, in December 1979 inorder to stem a mujahedininsurgency against the. leftnationalist, pro-Soviet government. Our party, uniquely onthe left, forthrightly declared,"Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of

Afghanistan: sun, they breathe 'the dust that swirlsunderneath the burqa's 30 yards ofopaque muslin, which will again lead, asthen, to a high level of tuberculosis.There is nothing progressive or "antiimperialist" about being shrouded in theveil. Nor is it, as some liberals wouldmaintain, a quain't culturalattribute. You wouldn't thinkyou would have to be a communist to see that wrapping awoman in a veil and secludingher in the home is a hideousoppression crying out to bewiped from the face of theearth! The veil is a physicalsymbol of the submission ofwomen to men and the imposedaffirmation of their inferiorstatus. The bride price and theveil are concrete manifestationsof the material oppression ofwomen. In Afghanistan today,women are property economically, socially and legally. Theyoccupy a subordinate statusrooted in the oppressive institution of the family.

. . .Women beg on streets of Kabul. Since 1996 capture of city by Taliban, women have beenrequired to cover even their eyes.October Revolution to Afghanpeoples!" This expressed ourrecognition that, despite itsdegeneration under a Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union remained aworkers state and continued to embodyhistoric gains of the October 1917 Russian workers revolution, not least forwomen and the historically Islamic peoples of Soviet Central Asia. Within weeksof the Soviet troops going in, the international Spartacist tendency (now the International Communist League) held demonstrations internationally calling fordefense of the USSR and victory to theRed Army.

As part of the total seclusionof women, known as purdah,the windows of their homeshave been painted black so theycan't be seen. They must wearsilent shoes, so they aren'theard. They must speak quietlyand are not supposed to ,laugh.Women are prohibited fromattending school and have been

When the Soviet forces completedtheir pullout from Afghanistan in early1989, paving the way for a bloody onslaught against Afghan workers, womenand leftists, we bitterly denounced thisbetrayal. In an attempt to placate U.S.imperialism, the Kremlin Stalinistshanded over hundreds of thousands ofAfghans to tortured, flayed alive,beheaded and dismembered as "infidels"by the CIA-funded mullahs, tribal khansand feudal landlords. In solidarity withthe Afghan masses, who were waging abitter struggle for survival in the wake ofthe Soviet withdrawal, we formally proposed to the Afghan government, in a letter dated 7 February 1989, the following:"To organize an international brigade tofight to the death" to defend "the right ofwomen to read, freedom from the veil,freedom from the tyranny of the mullahsand the landlords, the introduction ofmedical care and the right of all to aneducation."Though this offer was declined, at therequest of the government, the PartisanDefense Committee (the class-strugglelegal and social, defense organizationassociated with the SLlU.S.) and thePDC' s fraternal organizations around theworld raised over $44,000 in two months.The money went to aid the civilian victims of the all-out mujahedin offensivethat year against lalalabad, the Afghan4

WomenEnslaved by'slamicReaction

city closest to the CIA's guerrilla basesin Pakistan. The attack was soundlydefeated for 11 time. At our literature tableat the back are photos and articles fromour ICL correspondent in Afghanistan atthe time.In 1996, after four years of the horrificrule of a shifting "coalition" of warringfactions of the reactionary Islamic muja-hedin, who had already brought Kabul tothe point of famine and devastation, thecapital of Afghanistan fell to the Taliban,a fundamentalist Islamic militia. One ofthe Taliban's first acts was to grab theformer president and Soviet ally, Najibullah. He was castrated and then hangedfrom a lamppost in downtown Kabul forthree days. The Taliban killers proceededto wreak bloody vengeance against anyremaining. vestige of social progress,

adding the finishing touches to the program of social reaction implemented bythe U.S.-sponsored, CIA-funded muja-hedin cutthroats who took power in1992. Anti-Communism was the bondbetween U.5. imperialism and the mullahs in Afghanistan.Enslavement of Women

Today, under the Taliban's savage andbackward regime, women are not allowedout of their homes unless escorted by amale relative. They must wear a head totoe covering, called the burqa. A dense,mesh-covered, three-inch square openingaround the eyes provides the only meansto see. In 1979, prior to the Soviet intervention, we said that "the sun nevershines on Afghan women." This is literally true-veiled women don't see the

forced to leave their jobs sincethe Taliban issued edicts forbiddingwomen to work outside the home. This isa matter of life and death for the 30,000widows in Kabul and elsewhere in thecountry, who are the sole providers fortheir families. Medical services are essentially unavailable to women, since only asmall number of women medical workersare allowed to practice and male doctorsare prohibited from touching women.This has led, and will continue to lead tocountless lInnecessary deaths.The teenage thugs in the Taliban's"Department for the Promotion of Virtueand the Prevention of Vice" roam thestreets me.ting out regular, brutal beatings-using broken-off car antennas andmetal cables-for such offenses as baringan ankle or wrist. .Depression is widespread and the suicide rate among womenhas increased significantly. Thoughwomen are the main recipients of theTaliban's savagery, they are not the onlyones. In Kabul's soccer stadium, thousands of men cheer as thieves' hands andfeet are surgically amputated, as womenare flogged or stoned to death. The mostgrotesquely bizarre method of executionis used against homosexuals sentencedto death by the Taliban. First they arepartially buried in the ground and thena brick wall is pushed over them by abulldozer.For three years running, drought hasdestroyed the possibility of even subsisting off the land. More than 700,000 people (4 percent of the population) are desperately fleeing to the cities in search offood and shelter. Even by UN figures,more than 1 million people are at risk ofstarving to death this year. The Taliban isalso destroying every statue in the country, using a combination of U.S.-providedhand-held missiles and stone hammers.Foremost among the treasures beingdestroyed are two 1,000-year-old Buddhastatues carved into the stone cliffs in

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Bamiyan, on the Silk Road from China tothe Middle East. Numerous articles in thebourgeois press decry the destruction ofthe statues but barely mention the devastation of the country and its women.Defense of the Soviet Unionand Cold War II

So what happened in Afghanistan thathas resulted in unspeakably hellish conditions for women? Why did almost everyleftist and feminist group oppose theSoviet intervention which alone raisedthe possibility of social liberation in thiswretchedly backward country? Uniquelyin modern history, the rights of womenwere a central issue in the civil war whichraged in Afghanistan from the late 1970sto the early 1990s. Some of the blood ofevery unveiled woman butchered by theAfghan fundamentalists is on the handsof every leftist and feminist organizationinternationally that lined up behind U.S.imperialism's anti-Soviet dirty war inAfghanistan. They did their small part tocontribute to the horror which is todaybeing inflicted upon Afghan women.

Northern NeighborsLiteracy classes, held as result of Soviet intervention. Members of Afghanwomen's militia at rally in Kabul just before Soviet pullout in 1989 (right);women were in forefront of battle to defend their social emancipation.

To see what sparked the Soviet intervention in 1979, you have to go back tothe "April revolution" in 1978 when theSoviet-backed 'left-nationalist People'sDemocratic Party of Afghanistan-thePDPA-came to power. The PDPA's baseconsisted overwhelmingly of the educated petty bourgeoisie, schoolteachers,students and Soviet-trained army officers.Many of them were educated in theSoviet Union, where they saw theadvances of their ethnic cousins in SovietCentral Asia. With this direct comparativeexperience to show them how truly backward their own country was, many inthese petty-bourgeois strata began to pushfor significant modernization. When thePDPA came to power, the Western pressraised criesof a "Communist coup." Infact, this was a left-wing officers' coup,based mainly on the army.At the time, Afghanistan was one of themost primitive, tradition-bound countrieson earth. In 1978, only 35,000 peoplewere employed in manufacturing--outofa population of 17 to 20 million. Theirnumbers were dwarfed by the Islamicclergy. There were a quarter ofa millionmullahs, an enormous parasitic castesucking the blood from a desperatelypoor people. There was virtually noindustry-no railroad tracks, very fewhighways, primitive sanitation and widespread malnutrition. The average lifeexpectancy was 40 years, infant mortalitywas at least 25 percent and half of all children died before age five. The rate of illiteracy was more than 90 percent for menand 98 percent for women. Almost allwomen, save members of a tiny Westernized urban middle class, were imprisonedin the veil and sold like chattel under thebride price system. Most people lived in

nomadic tribes or as impoverished farmers in mud villages. There were a multitude of tribes over which no previousgovernment had ever completely established its authority. Life was scarcely different from many centuries earlier.While not repudiating Islam, the PDPAregime sought to give the country a secular, progressive image. One of the morepopular measures was to cancel the debtthat poor and landless peasants owed tothe powerful moneylenders. The landlords and tribal khans held the power oflife and death over the mass of peasants,controlling 42 percent of cultivable landand the associated irrigation systems.Though the PDPA government proposeda sweeping land reform program, theywere stopped in their tracks by landlordeconomic sabotage and terror combinedwith a mass reactionary insurgency.

But what drove the mullahs into afrenzy and to take up arms were the limited measures of equality for womenintroduced by the government-reducingthe traditional bride price to a nominalsum and introducing compulsory education for girls and voluntary literacy programs for adult women. Even the NewYork Times in February 1980 admitted:"It was the Kabul revolutionary Government's granting of new rights towomen that pushed 'Orthodox Moslemmen in the Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up theirguns." With social development somewhere between tribalism and feudalism, there was no internal social base forthe relatively minimal reforms pursuedby the PDPA, much less for proletarianrevolution.The institution of the family takes different forms according to the demands ofthe social system-a point that was perhaps most eloquently captured in a state-

Soviet tanks in Afghanistan. Uniquely onleft, SL callect for victory of Red Army,which fought on side of social progress,and defense of USSR.

13 APRIL 2001

ment by the utopian socialist Fourier,which Marx often liked to quote. That isthat the status of women in any givensociety reflects the general level ofhuman emancipation and human freedom. In areas such as Central Asia, therewas a strategic relationship between thebride price and polygamy, primitive agricultural production, sheep-herding, landand water rights.Women were their fathers' means of-exchange and their husbands' chattel; theright to control and inherit property restedon men. Most variants of local law gave aman access to land and water rights onlyifhe married; more than one wife meantmore land and water. On the other hand,marriage was so expensive (because ofthe bride price) that many poor men nevermarried at all-and others turned toabduction and rape to get a wife.- Tbere was a lot going on in the worldaru{,iri the region in 1Q78-79. The Soviet'higJ1 command watched as Iran slippedinto near-total chaos after the U.S.supported Shah was overthrown; as U.S.aircraft carriers lined up in the ArabianSea; as the Soviet-allied Kabul government was threatened by a reactionaryIslamic jihad (holy war). Seeing the U.S.at an impasse in Iran, the Kremlin bureaucrats seized the time to quell the uprisingby the Afghan. mullahs and khans,deployed thousands of Soviet troops intoAfghanistan, and in the process extendedtheir defense perimeter by several hundred miles around the eastern flank ofIran. The USSR was rightly worriedabout hostile Islamic fundamentalist gov

ernments on their border. As we wrotein Spartacist in the summer of 1980:"Afghanistan is a flash of lightning whichilluminates the real contours of the worldpolitical. landscape. It has exploded thelast illusions of detente to reveal theimplacable hostility of U.S. imperialismto the Soviet degenerated workers state."Lashing out against so-called "Sovietexpansionism," Democratic Party president and born-again Christian JimmyCarter launched Cold War II against theSoviet Union. Like Cold War I in the1950s, this anti-Soviet war drive wasaccompanied by a massive increase inmilitary spending, in this case a five-year,trillion-dollar program. At the same time,millions of U.S. dollars began flowing tothe reactionary Islamic fundamentalistsvia the CIA."The lengthy civil war was a decisiveevent in the history of the region. Whenopponents of the Soviet intervention criedcrocodile tears about the so-called"Afghan right to self-determination" andthe "trampled rights" of the Afghannation, we pointed out that in fact thereis no Afghan nation. We didn't discoverthis. As historian Louis Dupree observedin his book Afghanistan in 1980:"Afghanistan is an artificial country,created out of tribal kingdoms as a bufferstate by the British and Russians in the

.' --nineteenth century." There was no common language or nationality. Afghanistan

Reuterswas composed of many different nationalities, tribal and ethnic groupings andlanguages -Pushtuns, Tadzhiks, Uzbeks,Turkomans, Baluchis and others.In the 1920s, the British sought to foster Afghanistan as an anti-Soviet force inthe area after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. As colonialists, the British hadlong cultivated backward layers in theadministration of their empire, backed upby their army, of course. Leon Trotsky,in a speech to the Communist Universityof the Toilers of the East in Moscow inApril 1924, said:

"Afghanistan is at present the scene oftruly dramatic events: the Great Britainof Ramsay MacDonald is fighting thereagainst the left national-bourgeois wing,which aims aUhe Europeanization of anindependent Afghanistan. It endeavors toplace in power in that country the mostunenlightened and reactionary elements,imbued with the worst prejUdices of panlslamism, of the caliphate."If you substitute the U.S. for Britain inthis quote, this could have been writtenin 1979.The Russian Revolution inspired theonly attempt at significant social reformsin Afghanistan prior to 1978. The"national-bourgeois wing" referred to byTrotsky was led by Amir AmanullahKhan, who took the throne in 1919 andattempted to implement a broad range ofreforms like Kemal Atatiirk did in Turkey.The British continued to bolster thepower of the Islamic clergy and sanctioned the shariat courts that ruled onquestions of family, sex, inheritance andso on, as supports for their colonial rule.They supplied arms to the rebels andinfested the area with their agents andspies. In 1929, Khan was overthrown andtribal and clerical "traditionalism" wasrestored to its position of power. Had theRed Army of Lenin and Trotsky been in aposition to go into Afghanistan in 1921,Afghanistan could have been incorporated into Soviet Central Asia, whichwould have brought Afghanistan rapidlyinto the 20th century.As the leading imperialist power afterWorld War II, the U.S., following inBritain's footsteps, consciously manipulated and cynically reinforced religiousfundamentalism and pre-feudal reactionas an organized force for counterrevolution. Cold Warrior John Foster Dulleswrote in 1950: "The religions of the Eastare deeply rooted and have many preciousvalues. Their spiritual beliefs cannot bereconciled with Communist atheism andmaterialism. That creates a common bondbetween us."When the Soviet Red Army enteredKabul in 1979, U.S. imperialism was stillsmarting from its defeat by the heroicVietnamese four years earlier. While theU.S. was bogged down in that losing war,the USSR gained nuclear parity with theU.S. Seeking to bury the "Vietnam syndrome"-the mass perception amongworking people and youth that the U.S.government and military tops were a

continued Oi l page 65


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Afghanistan ...(continued from page 5)bunch of liars and baby-killers-JimmyCarter launched a hypocritical "humanrights" campaign against the SovietUnion. The U.S. iIlljosed a grain embargo so the people of the USSR couldsuffer for "human rights" and boycottedthe 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics.Part of this anti-Soviet war drive wasthe biggest military buildup in humanhistory, including a massive increase innuclear weaponry aimed at the SovietUnion. The goal: the destruction of theSoviet workers state itself. Afghanistan,where American-supplied weapons werebeing used to kill Red Army soldiers,was the hottest hot spot of Cold War II.

From the beginning of the war, themujahedin reserved its worst treatmentfor Soviet soldiers. The U.S. governmenthad confirmed reports that the mullahshad drugged and tortured 50 to 200Soviet soldiers, imprisoning them likeanimals in cages, where they lived livesof indescribable horror. Another account,by a reporter from the conservative FarEastern Economic Review in 1984, said:

The U.S. government's Afghan warwas totally bipartisan. In 1984, underRepublican president Ronald Reagan, theDemocratic Congress tripled Reagan'sproposed appropriations for the Afghanreactionaries. One House Democrat fromTexas said: "There were 58,000 [Amercan] dead in Vietnam and we owe theRussians one.:' By the time the Sovietsleft Afghanistan, the CIA's Afghan "freedom fighters" (as Reagan fondly calledthem) had received, by official estimates,more than $2 billion in military hardware,a figure reportedly matched by SaudiArabia and supplemented by other U.S.allies like Egypt. At the height of the U.S.

"One [Soviet] group was killed, skinnedand hung up in a butcher's shop. One captive found himself the centre of attractionin a game of buzkashi, that rough andtumble form of Afghan polo in which aheadless goat is usually the ball. The captive was used instead. Alive. He was literally torn to pieces." For those who havenever witnessed the game of buzkashi, I'drecommend the 1975 movie starring SeanConnery, The Man Who Would Be King,based on a story by Rudyard Kipling, thewell-known propounder of British colonial rule.Leftist Opponents ofRevolutionary Marxism

WV PhotoSL contingent in April 1989 abortion right s demo in D.C., where we launchedinternational campaign to aid embattled city of Jalalabad against mujahedincutthroats following Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.All organizations claiming to stand for

revolutionary Marxism were put to thetest over Afghanistan: For or against thedefense of the Soviet Union? For oragainst imperialist-sponsored counterrevolution? For or against the fight forwomen's liberation from the veil, isolation and illiteracy? For revolutionaryMarxists, there is nothing tricky orambiguous about the war. The Soviet

nearly 100 percent literacy rate; the average life expectancy was 70 years. 45 percent of legislators and 18 percent ofjudges were women (as compared to 3percent in the U.S.). There was one doctor for every 380 people, compared to onedoctor for every 20,000 in Afghanistan.A number of the left groups from thetime no longer exist, particularly the various Maoist groups who, along with

- - - - I I SocialistWoIfcer1.---------Troops out Afghanlstanl ..kist as socialists welcomed thedefeat of the U.S. in Vietnam, wewelcome the defeat of the Russiansin Afghanistan. It wi. give heart toall those inside the USSR and inEastern Europe who want to break

the rule of StaUn's heirs.

But Taliban's success comesfrom populardisellCluuUml!lIlwith'hI! leadeN who oppose it- thefo,.ces gua,.ding KGb,,, mel tedaWGY IDst week.TragIcally, theTaliban bas DOanswer to the terrible (:risis of he( : o u n ~ e r .

Cliffites of BritishSWP and U.S. ISOembracedimperialist antiSoviet crusade inAfghanistan,"welcomed" victoryof anti-womanIslamicfundamentalists.12 January 1980(British SWP)

proxy war against the USSR, the muja-hedin were receiving up to 65,000 tonsof war materiel annually. This was tobecome the biggest CIA operation in history! Various estimates indicate that anywhere from 25 to 75 percent of he CIA'smilitary aid was skimmed off by the rebelleaders and Pakistani officials and soldfor huge profits.To give you an idea of the ferocity ofthe CIA's "freedom fighters," accordingto Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIAInterventions Since World War II: "A'favorite tactic' of the Afghan freedomfighters was 'to torture victims [oftenRussians] by first cutting off their noses,ears, and genitals, then removing oneslice of skin after another,' producing'a slow, very painful death'." Flingingacid in the faces of unveiled women andflaying alive Communist schoolteachersfor teaching girls to read were also"favorite tactics."

doesMay 1988(U.S. ISO) , "5 October 1996(British SWP)

army and its left-nationalist allies werefighting a CIA-backed, anti-communist,anti-democratic melange of landlords, .moneylenders, tribal chiefs and mullahscommitted to mass illiteracy and thesubjugation of women. The gut-levelresponse of every radical leftist shouldhave been fullest solidarity with theSoviet Red Army. Not so.Only those leftists poisoned by antiCommunism and bourgeois nationalismcould deny that a social revolution suchas the transformation of Soviet CentralAsia after the Bolshevik Revolution,although imposed from without andbureaucratically deformed from the outset, would have an enormously liberatingeffect for the Afghan masses. The difference in social progress and economicdevelopment between Soviet Central Asiaand Afghanistan was measured not indecades but in centuries. For example,neighboring Soviet Uzbekistan had a

China, supported the mujahedin as partof an anti-Soviet alliance with U.S.imperialism originally consummated in1972. We warned then that China-adeformed workers state-would be thenext target on the imperialists' hit listafter the SoviefUnion. Since the destruction of the Soviet workers state throughcapitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92,the U.S. imperialists aim to reconquerand exploit China, the most populouscountry on earth. We fight for unconditional military defense of China againstimperialist attack and internal attempts atcounterrevolution.Socialist Action did not yet exist; itsm e m b ~ r s were still in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Initially, the SWP triedto pretend that the Russian question wasnot posed in Afghanistan, declaring inFebruary 1980: "So the issue is not,Soviet intervention, but a growing U.S.intervention-aimed at taking back the

" Spartacist/SYC Regional Educationals-Saturday, April 28

6

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - , . - - - - -- - - - - - - - - -- - - - - 12noon - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - -.Eyewitness Reporter from Quebec Anti-FTAA Protests

Beware the Fraud of "Human Rights" Imperialism!From Seattle to Quebec: Anti-Globalization Protests PushIllusions in Rapacious U.S. Imperialism

Eyewitness ReportDefend the Gains o f the. Cuban Revolution!Castro B u r ~ a u c r a c y Undermines Gains of Cuban Revolution-For Proletarian Political Revolution!For Socialist Revolution Throughout the Americas!r----- East Coast-6 p.m. West Coast-3:30 p.m. - - - - - .

For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism!Finish the Civil War! For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

gains won by the Afghan masses-thatfinally forced the Soviet Union torespond." It did n't take them long to figure out that their line would alienate thebourgeois liberal milieu with which these"respectable socialists" have sought toingratia te themsel ves since the Vietnamantiwar movement, as they and SocialistAction continue to do to this day. Theymade an about-face and called for Sovietwithdrawal. Even if it meant disagreeingwith Fidel Castro, these social democratscouldn't resist the pressure of the U.S.imperialists' anti-Soviet propaganda/military campaign.The Cliffites-the International Socialist Organization in the U.S. and the British Socialist Workers Party (who haverecently split)-both known for theiranti-Communism, eagerly joined theimperialist chorus calling for Soviettroops out and whitewashed the muja-hedin. The British Cliffites made a realcontribution to the imperialists' antiSoviet war drive by making commoncause with the right-wing Tories. In 1980,SWP leader Paul Foot, writing in his column in the bourgeois Daily Mirror,attacked the virulently anti-communistConservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from the right,decrying the possibility that British meatexports to the Soviet Union might begoing to Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan.When the Soviet bureaucracy said theywere pulling out in 1988, the ISO wrotein Socialist Worker (May 1988): "Just associalists welcomed the defeat of theU.S. in Vietnam, we welcome the defeatof the Russians in Afghanistan. It willgive heart to all those inside the USSRand in Eastern Europe who want to breakthe rule of Stalin's heirs." How disgusting to compare the U.S. genocidal war tosmash the Vietnamese social revolutionwith the USSR fighting on the side ofsocial progress! In lockstep with imperialism, the Cliffites openly called for capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR andEast Europe. Indeed, the essence of theCliffite tendency had always been to allywith their own imperialist rulers againstthe Soviet Union.When the Taliban came to power in1996, the ISO wrote: "But Taliban's success comes from popular disenchantmentwith the leaders who oppose i t-theforces guarding Kabul melted away lastweek. Tragically, the Taliban has noanswer to the terrible crisis of the country either." Would you say that Hitler had"no answer" for the crisis in Germanyeither, except for the destruction of allworkers organizations and the extermination.of the Jews? Today the Cliffites insistthat Islamic fundamentalism plays a progressive "anti-imperialist" role aroundthe world. The SWP proclaimed (Interna-tional Socialism, August 1994): "Islamists have now replaced socialists and theleft in terms of being in the frontlineagainst the state in many countries."WORKERS VANGUARD


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In Britain, during the uproar overAfghanistan in 1979, a grouping calledWorkers Power that had split from theCliffites made a step to the left. Theyformally adopted the Trotskyist positionthat the Soviet Union was a bureaucratically degenerated workers state-but onthe ground, faced with a virulent antiSoviet war drive, they denounced theSoviet intervention as "counterrevolutionary." (A decade later, ever-willing todenounce the USSR, they condemnedthe withdrawal of the Soviet troops as"counterrevolutionary.")Of all the groups that laid claim toTrotskyism at the time, the BolshevikFaction (BF) of Nahuel Moreno had themost grotesque position. In addition todemanding the immediate withdrawal ofthe Soviet troops, they called for extending Khomeini-brand Islamic counterrevolution into the Soviet Union itself. In thiscountry today, remnants of the BF areensconced in the reformist SocialistAlternative.The Bolshevik Tendency (BT), a motley group of embittered ex-members ofthe SL who found our Soviet defensismtoo hot to handle, fled during Cold WarII. After insisting that they agreed withour line on Afghanistan, they showedtheir true colors by capitulating to theanti-Soviet hysteria. Disappearing thecontradictory nature of the Stalinistbureaucracy, a leading member of the BTdeclared, "Trotskyists never hail Stalinisttraitors or their state .... The slogan 'HailRed Army' is not a Trotskyist slogan." Asa matter of fact, Trotskyists did hail theRed Army when they intervened on theside of progress-for example, in WorldWar II when the Red Army smashed German fascism, freed Jews from concentration camps and took Berlin.

In a sense Carter's "human rights"propaganda campaign worked, since mostof the self-described left and almost allliberals supported the U.S. against theSoviet Union. And in the case of Afghanistan, this meant support for U.S.-armed,CIA-supported Islamic fundamentalists.Al l these self-styled "socialists" contributed to bringing about the horror whichis today being inflicted on Afghanwomen!Marxism VS. Feminism

There is a wide historical gulf betweenMarxism and feminism. However, I dowant to address the differences becausevarious feminist organizations and campus women's groups now profess concern over the plight of Afghan women.The Marxist understanding of women'soppression as rooted materially inclass society is diametrically opposed tothe outlook of feminism, which is fundamentally a variant of bourgeois ideology, positing the main social divisionas one of sex and not class. Feministssee women's oppression as a set of badideas and policies stemming from malesupremacy, not as something integral toclass-divided society. Most feministssupported U.S. imperialism against theSoviet Union no matter what the consequences were for Afghan women.13 APRIL 2001

In 1996, at a time when the U.S.had declared an anti-Islamic holy waragainst terrorism, the Feminist MajorityFoundation started circulating a petitioncalling for sanctions against the Talibanto be imposed by the same U.S. imperialists that armed the Islamic reactionariesin the first place! In February at MadisonSquare Garden, a benefit performanceaiming to call attention to violenceagainst women was organized by playwright Eve Ensler around readings fromher Vagina Monologues. Featuring dozens of stars like Jane Fonda and OprahWinfrey, the show was sponsored byHearst Magazines and Liz Claiborne,among others, with ticket prices toppedout at $1,000 a seat.Winfrey performed "Under the Burqa,"which according to my daughter who sawit performed in San Francisco is a powerful description of the life of misery forveiled women. Thousands signed petitions for the Feminist Majority's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid inAfghanistan and wore "burqa swatches"as a symbol of remembrance for Afghan

1996: Taliban launchmissile near Kabul;reactionary Islamicfundamentalistcensors burn videosin front of cinema.

women and girls. One group speaking atthe event and sharing in the funds raisedwas the Revolutionary Association of theWomen of Afghanis tan' (RAWA) whichtoured the U.S. last summer. The CIAsupported "Voice of America" broadcastreports from their demonstrations andinterviews with RAWA members in Pakistan and the U.S.Founded in 1977, this well-connectedgroup is fiercely anti-communist, thougheven they admit that "the present conditions are even worse than those of theSoviet occupation period." RAWA alsocalls for UN intervention and hopes forthe return of the king who was overthrown in 1973. They advocate educationand employment for women, whileremaining in the Islamic fold. Thoughthey don't insist on women wearing theburqa, they do expect women to conformto an appropriately decorous form ofdress.Though Feminist Majority propagandalists the gains for women in Afghanistan prior to the rule of the Taliban, thereisn't one word about how this cameabout-which was through the extensionof social reforms by the Soviet-backedgovernment. In fact, some feministsgrossly claim that communism was actually responsible for women's oppressionin Afghanistan. For example, a Ms. mag-

Rabid ColdWarrior RonaldReagan toasted byGorbachev, whopursued policy ofall-around retreatbefore U.S.imperialism.

azine interview with Sima Wali, a selfdescribed Afghan "human rights activist"and anti:communist, proclaimed (May/June 1997):"When the Communists took over,Afghan women were jailed, they weresubjected to torture, especially the wo-men who had ties to the Afghan resistance that took root in Pakistan. This wasunheard of in Afghan history .... The Af-ghan Communists basically had a laissezfaire attitude toward Afghan women. Theschools were not closed, they did notinstitute the veil, and they did introducereforms. But they focused so much on thewar that they did not actively upgrade thestatus of women."

WaH fled to Pakistan as soon as the SovietArmy entered Kabul. The "Afghan resistance" she's referring to is the CIAbacked mullahs. In the same interview,WaH called on former Secretary of StateMadeleine Albright to "take on the issueas a woman." Our youth comrades at UCBerkeley did the right thing last springwhen they shouted down Albright as the"Butcher of the Balkans." Albright represents the capitalist class; she is not ourally in the fight for women's liberation.

But how dare these bourgeois feminists, who regularly sponsor FBI and military tables at NOW conferences, postureas allies of the women of Afghanistan!Their appointed goddess and founder ofMs. magazine, Gloria Steinem, knowingly took CIA money as director of the"Independent Research Service," whichactively recruited and paid hundreds ofyoung Americans to attend and harassleftists at the communist-leaning WorldYouth Festivals in Vienna in 1959 and inHelsinki in 1962. Steinem said of the CIAagents with whom she collaborated: "I

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found them liberal and farsighted andopen" (Washington Post, 18 February1967). Bourgeois feminists were perfectlyaware of the social changes that werebenefiting women in Afghanistan duringthe ten years of the Soviet intervention.When we kicked off our Jalalabad campaign on April 4, 1989 at the huge NOWsponsored abortion rights demo in_Wash-ington, D.C., NOW goons tried to shutdown all socialist literature tables andunleashed the park cops on militants, likeourselves, who declined to be segregated. from the main rally in NOW's demeaning penned-in "ghetto" for left groups.Despite these attempts to censor communists, we distributed more than 25,000leaflets for Jalalabad, as we marched withour banner proclaiming "No to the Veil!Defend Afghan Women! Support Jalalabad Victims of CIA Cutthroats!"There were exceptions. One bourgeoisfeminist, Mary Williams Walsh, who wasthe Wall Street Journal's principal correspondent covering Afghanistan and Pakistan, managed to slip some truth into hercolumn in January 1989. In spite of hersupport of the mujahedin, she suggestedthat women's liberation was involvedwhen she said:"The plight of Kabul's women is a poig-nant reminder that the West's vicariousvictory over communist expansion hereisn't without its ambiguities. In a back-ward country where the female peasantrystill toils like medieval serfs, Kabuliwomen have managed to hold on tomany 20th-century freedoms .... Insteadof staying at home behind purdah walls,they emerge each day and work inoffices, hospitals and schools."But in 1990, when Walsh attempted tobreak the story that Dan Rather and CBShad broadcast fake TV footage aboutAfghanistan, the Journal refused to publish her article. Soon vicious, slanderousrumors began circulating to undermineher credibility, including that she was"sleeping with communist generals" inAfghanistan. In a rare show of journalistic integrity, Walsh resigned.No Illusions in BloodyU.S. Imperial ism!

Besides showering the mujahedin withmillions of dollars of military equipment, the CIA's dis information machineat Langley, Virginia cranked out themost blatant lies about Afghanistan. Dutifully, the U.S. mass media snapped toattention, churning out governmentsponsored, imperialist war propaganda.Bloodthirsty tribesmen who skinnedCommunist teachers alive for the "crime"of teaching little girls to read and writewere passed off as "freedom fighters."Shots purportedly showing a Soviet je tbombing .an Afghan village turned out tobe of a Pakistani jet. And a shiny red "toybomb" supposedly planted by the evilSoviets to lure Afghan children to theirdeaths was created by the same freelance photographer who had earlier provided faked battle scenes that Dan Ratheraired. Ronald Reagan made numerousspeeches accusing the Soviets of spraying"yellow rain" over Afghanistan, Laos andCambodia, causing over ten thousanddeaths. Dutifully, reams of press copy

continued on page 8

CHICAGOAlternate Tuesdays, 7 p.m.April 17: Trotskyism vs. Stalinism:The Revolution BetrayedUniv. of Chicago, Cobb Hall, Room 106

Information and readings: (312) 563-0441NEW YORK CITY

Alternate Tuesdays, 7:30 p.m.April 17: We Are the Party of theRussian RevolutionColumbia University ,Hamilton Hall, Room 609Information and readings: (212) 267-1025

7


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Afghanistan ...(continued from page 7)were produced asserting that the USSRwas using chemical warfare-this waslater revealed to be pollen-laden beeexcrement which, of course, had causedno deaths!Like many other CIA clients, theAfghan rebels were financed as well bydrug trafficking. In 1995, the estimatedoutput provided one-third to one-half ofthe heroin used in the U.S. and threequarters of that used in Western Europe.Profits from heroin have provided one ofthe largest sources of income for the Taliban. Despite the thoroughly unsavoryimage of the Taliban, last October DanRather, up to his old tricks, ran a specialreport for CBS called "Inside Afghanistan," in which the Taliban "freedomfighters" are depicted as heroically tryingto rebuild their country. The report whitewashes the Taliban's vicious treatment ofwomen as necessary to "protect women"and offer them "peace and security."The Feminist Majority recentlyclaimed a victory when the U.S. imposedsanctions against the Taliban. In reality,the ongoing sanctions by the U.S. areaimed at pressuring the Taliban to handover Saudi fundamentalist Osama binLaden. Four of his alleged associates arecurrently on trial in a federal courtroomin Manhattan, where they face the deathpenalty or life imprisonment for analleged terrorist conspiracy over the lastten years, including the bombing of theU.S. embassi.es in Kenya and Tanzania in1998, Washington responded to theseacts by carrying out missile strikesagainst Afghanistan and devastating apharmaceutical factory in Sudan. It'snotable that the terrorism charges against .bin Laden only go back ten years. That'sbecause his "network" was armed,trained and financed by the CIA as partof the proxy war in Afghanistan againstthe Soviet Union.In an article entitled "Bin LadenComes Home to Roost," from theMSNBC Web site in 1998, bin Laden'sunclassified CIA biography states that heran a front organization known as Maktabal-Khidamar-the MAK-which funneled money, arms and fighters toAfghanistan. MAK was nurtured byPakistan's state security services, themain CIA conduit for the covert waragainst the USSR in Afghanistan. Thearticle quotes Republican Orrin Hatch,senior member of the Senate IntelligenceCommittee, saying that he would makethe same call today knowing what binLaden would do subsequently: "It wasworth it," he said. "Those were veryimportant, pivotal matters that played animportant role in the downfall of theSoviet Union."U.S. imperialism is the biggest terrorist in the world, from the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to themurderous campaigns carried out by theCIA's Nicaraguan contras and Cubangusanos, to the 1999 U.S.fUN war ofannihilation against the Serbian peoplewhich bombed that country back to theStone Age, to the terror bombing of Iraqand never-ending starvation blockadethat has led to at least 1.5 milliondeaths-to just name a few. Imperialismis not a "bad policy" that can be changedthrough mass pressure to be morehumane, as the liberals, feminists andreformists contend. It is an organic outgrowth of the profit system and the"highest stage of capitalism," as Lenindefined it. Calling on bloody U.S. imperialism, NATO or the UN to intervene for"human rights" is a dangerous trap thatbuilds illusions in this bloody imperialistsystem which enforces capitalist exploitation, mass poverty and national oppression the world over.Ever since the 1979 Soviet intervention, the Western media labeled the civilwar in Afghanistan "Russia's Vietnam," a8

characterization that is still used today.Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to powerin the USSR in 1985, took up this insidious lie for his regime's own reasons. AsMarxists, we judge what side we takebased on what advances the interests ofthe working class and the oppressed. InVietnam, the U.S. fought a genocidalwar to smash a social revolution and wassoundly defeated on the battlefield. Wesaid, "Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution-Defeat U.S. Imperialism!" TheSoviet Army in Afghanistan fought onthe side of social progress to stop thereactionary onslaught which imperilednot only the Afghan masses but the

We honored the Soviet veterans of theAfghan war who justly viewed themselves as fighters for revolutionary internationalism. The Soviet bureaucracy'sattempt to trade Afghan blood for goodwill in Washington only whetted theappetites of the imperialists,intent uponthe counterrevolutionary destruction ofthe entire Soviet Union. Inside the USSR,this move strengthened pro-capitalistforces. The Red Army pullout wasdirectly linked to the final collapse of theUSSR itself, a historic defeat for theworking class and oppressed internationally. Gorbachev's foreign minister,Eduard Shevardnadze, later said: "The

E.P. Dutton & Co.

the final dissolution of Stalinist ruleunder the military and economic pressure of imperialist encirclement of theSoviet Union conformed very preciselyto his analysis. I would recommend, forthose who haven't read it, our pamphletStalinism-Gravedigger of the Revolution: How the Soviet Workers State WasStrangled.Withdrawal from Afghanistan 'was followed by counterrevolution in EastEurope: Solidarnosc-led capitalist counterrevolution in Poland in 1990, the capitalist reunification of Germany in 1990,Boris Yeltsin's 1991 pro-capitalist countercoup in Moscow. This, in turn, led to atotal cutoffof aid to Kabul, spelling doomfor the fragile Afghan economy and central government. In April of 1992, theKabul government, headed by Najibullah,fell to the feudalist reactionaries. Thewarring mullah factions then subjectedthe entire populace to a reign of terror andplunder.

First meeting of young women's political group in Tashkent, Central ASia,following Russian Revolution of 1917. Bolshevik victory was giant steptoward liberation of women throughout former tsarist empire.

The horrors being played out inAfghanistan today are the starkest expression of the choice which has been posed,with increasing sharpness and urgency,over the past century: socialism or barbarism. Young fighters against socialoppression must study and learn the lessons of past struggles and defeats, including the world-historic defeat representedby the destruction of the remaining gainsof the October Revolution, if they are togo forward to win new victories. We ofthe International Communist Leaguefight for new Octobers, both in the U.S.and around the world. And we here in theU.S., in the belly of the beast, have a special responsibility to smash U.S. imperialism through workers revolution.SSR itself. That's why we said, "Hailthe Red Army in Afghanistan."But the Soviet bureaucracy didn't fightto win. From the outset of the war theKremlin tops always held open the possibility of withdrawal as a bargaining chipin dealing with Western imperialism.Nonetheless, by 1984 the Soviet andPDPA forces had practically won the war.The CIA's "holy warriors" were shatteredand demoralized. And the government'smodest reforms, although scaled backfrom even the moderate program first '.offered by the PDPA, were winning support in the countryside.When Gorbachev came to power in1985, he faced economic stagnationaggravated by the intensified militarypressure from the U.S. that had accelerated under President Ronald Reagan.Gorbachev pushed a series of policychanges: "restructuring" (perestroika) ofthe Soviet economy, "openness" (glasnost) in Soviet society and "new thinking" in international affairs. This "newthinking" amounted to Soviet retreat on aglobal scale: the cutoff of arms to leftistguerrillas in El Salvador, aid cutbacks forthe Sandinistas in Nicaragua and onesided nuclear arms reductions by theUSSR. As part of this strategy of surrender in the hopes of striking a "peace" dealwith Reagan, Gorbachev's Politburodecided in November 1986 to abandonAfghanistan within two years.The withdrawal was completed on 15February 1989. The Washington Postreported, "At CIA headquarters in Langley, operations officers and analystsdrank champagne." The withdrawal ofthe Red Army was a cold-bloodedbetrayal of the Afghan and the Sovietpeoples. Gorbachev's treacherous pullout

of Afghanistan burnt out a whole generation of youth in the Soviet Union who didtheir internationalist duty serving inAfghanistan. One young Russian told ourcomrades in 1994 that he had fought inAfghanistan in 1986 when he was 18, "tofight for internationalism," but when hereturned home he was reviled and saidthat he was "called a rapist by the samepeople who sent [him] there." AnotherSoviet veteran said in March 1988: "Oursacrifices were not for nothing. We haveafter all brought there the achievementsof the civilized world."

decision to leave Afghanistan was thefirst and most difficult step. Everythingelse flowed from that" (Washington Post,16 November 1992).The Afghanistan intervention testifiedto the persistence-even after some sixdecades of Stalinist repression, lies and

sellouts-of the contradiction betweenthe collectivized foundations of the Soviet state and the parasitic bureaucracywhich rested on top. It was the last timethe bureaucracy ruling the Soviet degenerated workers state undertook a progressive act. Although undertaken purely fordefensive geopolitical reasons, it did goagainst the grai.n of the Stalinists' abject. pursuit of "peaceful coexistence" withimperialism.In the 1930s and heading into WorldWar II, Leon Trotsky analyzed the character of the Soviet degenerated workersstate and put forward the program of

proletarian political revolution, notingthat if the working class did not throwout the bureaucracy, the bureaucracywould strangle the workers state. Thoughit took longer than Trotsky anticipated,

We fight to forge Bolshevik partiesinternationally to lead the workersstanding at the head of all the oppressed-to power and to a society inwhich capitalist oppression and enslavement of women are relics of a barbaricpast. Women will be in the front ranks ofsuch a revolutionary movement, understanding that their interests cannot go forward without a working-class perspective, and the workers movement cannotgo forward without taking up the fight forwomen's liberation. I want to end with aquote from Trotsky in 1924 about theMuslim women of the Soviet East:"The Eastern woman, who is the mostparalyzed in life, in her habits, and increativity, the slave of slaves .. she, having at the demand of the new economicrelations taken off her cloak, will at oncefeel herself lacking any sort of religiousbuttress. She will have a passionate thirstto gain new ideas and new consciousness

which will permit her to appreciate hernew position in society. And there willbe no better communist in the East, nobett@r fighter for the ideas of the Revolution and for the ideas of communism,than the awakened woman wo rker. ".

. Web site: www.icl-fLorg E-mail address:[email protected] OfficeBox 1377 GPO, Los Angeles OaklandNew York, NY 10116(212) 732-7860BostonBox 390840, Central Sta.Cambridge, MA 02139(617) 666-9453ChicagoBox 6441, Main POChicago, IL 60680(31 2) 563-0441

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Box 29497Oakland, CA 94604(510) 839-0851Public Office:Sat. 1-5 p.m.1634 Telegraph, 3rd F loorSan FranciscoBox 77494San Francisco, CA 94107(415) 395-9520Public Office:Tues. 6-8 p.m.564 Market St., Suite 718

VancouverBox 7198, Station AToronto, ON M5W 1X8(416) 5934138Box 2717, Main P.O.Vancouver, BC V68 3X2(604) 687-0353

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Horowitz...(continued from page 12)

"-his own event in order to return to Israelto try and boost his electoral fortunes.We await the accusation that his lack ofsuccess in this endeavor was also theresponsibility of what Horowitz calls "theintolerable left."These incidents have been consciously lumped together in a false amalgamby the campus conservatives and AlAso they can posture as "defenders" offree speech. An article by Flynn in Horowitz's Front Page Magazine (14 March)whines, "As evidenced by last semester'sstudent-mob action to prevent BenjaminNetanyahu from speaking in the city ofBerkeley and the shouting down of a talkgiven by this writer and the subsequentbook-burning of a booklet that I hadauthored, censorship is quite common atBerkeley."There is a whole gamut of right-wingorganizations and foundations who wantto demonize the left as anti-free speechand drive black and minority students offthe campuses. Horowitz and his Centerfor the Study of Popular Culture, whichhas an annual budget of $3 million, areheavily funded by ultraright-wing groupslike the Olin, Scaife and Bradley foundations. According to The Nation (3 July2000), the Bradley Foundation alone hasgiven Horowitz more than $3.5 million since 1988. Among the BradleyFoundation's other funding projects is theAmerican Civil Rights Institute led byWard Connerly, the UC regent who alongwith Horowitz spearheaded California'sProposition 209 in 1996, eliminatingaffirmative action. Moreover, accordingto Z Magazine (April 200 I), the BradleyFoundation provided more than $1 mil-

23 October 1999: Labor/black mobilization against KKK race-terrorists inNYC. Fight for black freedom in theu.s. is central to the struggle foremancipation of labor and all theoppressed.lion for the writing of the notoriouslyracist tract The Bell Curve, which arguedthat poverty among blacks was the resultof genetic inferiority. The book was cofunded by the Pioneer Society, a holdoverfrom the white-supremacist eugenicsmovement of the 1930s. The BradleyFoundation helps fund the Berkeley Conservative Foundation, which invitedHorowitz to speak at Berkeley, throughthe Leadership Institute, which receivesfunding from the union-busting Coorsconglomerate.This sinister cabal includes AlA andAIM, which are tied to the Moonieowned Washington Times and the WorldAnti-Communist League-now called the"World League for Freedom & Democracy"-an outfit that brings togetherfascists and rightists from all over theworld. AlA/AIM are associated withDinesh D'Souza, founder of the rightwing Dartmouth Review, whose mottowas "Genocide is never having to sayyou're sorry." Not only are these groups13 APRIL 2001

VICIOUS racists, they are also outrightliars. AlA/AIM libeled the SpartacistLeague, claiming we "urged ... the killingof police officers." We took this sordidoutfit to court in 1987 and forced a fullretraction of their deadly lies.For his part, Horowitz, whose parentswere members and later fellow travelersof the Communist Party, began his careeras a New Left activist in the BerkeleyFree Speech Movement and eventuallybecame editor of the leftist publicationRamparts. After a brief stint around theBlack Panther Party in the mid '70s, as itwas splitting up in vicious factionalismunder the pressure of the FBI's murderous COINTELPRO campaign, he resurfaced in December 1979 with a Nationarticle denouncing the heroic victory ofthe Vietnamese workers and peasantsagainst U.S. imperialism as "genocide."That was simply the opening shot of aviciously racist and anti-communist crusade. Lately, his sights have targetedeveryone from Nation coluninist EricAlterman to black liberal intellectualCornel West, as well as Noam Chomsky,Edward Said and liberal B e ~ k e l e y professor and China expert Orville Schell. Borrowing grotesque lies from D'Souza'sbook The End of Racism, Horowitz'smost recent book, Hating Whitey, essentially portrays black men as rapists ofwhite women. This is a direct echo ofthe Klan incitements to racist lynchingsin the name of "defending the honor ofwhite women."Marxism vs. Liberal Idealism

As Scott Sherman of The .Nation(3 July 2000) put it, Horowitz has become"the right's very own Ahab." And justwho is this guy's "great white whale"?Everyone from the "politically correct"crowd to Marxists to leftists to multiculturalists to liberals to those who defend black rights-basically anyone tothe -left ofWilliam Buckley, Jesse Helmsand Strom Thurmond.Anyone who has set foot-on an American campus lately knows they are hardlyhavens of Marxism or free speech. Withtoken gains of the civil rights movementlike affirmative action abolished, tuitionfees escalating exponentially, and theimperialist triumphalism over the supposed "death of communism," the elitecampuses have been turned into overwhelmingly.lily-white institutions whereracists and other retrogrades think theycan act with impunity. It's a telling sign ofthe times that a racist like Horowitz feelscomfortable stepping onto campuses likeBerkeley, which were once known fortheir radical history. But this climate w,asnot simply created with the inaugurationof the Bush administration. Rather, it isa reflection of eight years of DemocraticParty rule, which was marked by increasing attacks on the working class, blackpeople and immigrants.Grotesquely, the NAACP and theACLU, which has long made a name foritself defending the "rights" of fascists torecruit to genocide under the rubric of"free speech," have condemned the outraged stude'nts who confiscated newspapers at Brown and those who have calledon campus papers not to print Horowitz's

Heroic blacktroops in Civil Warplayed key role insmashing slavery anddefeating SouthernConfederacy. We say:Finish the Civil War!For Black LiberationThrough SocialistRevolution!

ad. Boston University's NAACP president said of Horowitz: ' 'I'm trying toencourage the NAACP to embrace whathe has to say, but not necessarily acceptit. He has the audacity to say what hefeels and, quite frankly, I appreciate it."On the other side of the coin, Horowitzand his right-wing cabal have had somesuccess in portraying themselves asthe defenders of "free speech." Theirway was paved by liberals and putativeleftists who have appealed to campusadministrations to enforce restrictive"speech codes" and for "sensitivity training" as the means to supposedly combat racism. sexism and anti-gay bigotry. The liberal left in this country hasin fact created a no-free-speech zone.That's what's behind "political correctness," that's what laws against "hatespeech" are for, and that's what the liberalleft has demanded for years.A whole "date. rape" hysteria was promoted on the campuses during the 1990sby feminists and other liberals in order tostrengthen the hands of the campus copswhile demanding that the administrationimpose stifling rules to regulate sexuality.After the brutal1998 murder ofMatthewShepard by anti-gay bigots, the liberalsintensified the call for "hate crimes" legislation, which again meant more copsand even greater powers of prosecutionfor the courts.Horowitz and his like are racist ideologues whose political ideas, themsdvesa product of decaying capitalism, mustbe combatted and refuted. Reducing thequestion of fighting oppression to amatter of circumscribing bad words orimages, the liberals are unable to take onHorowitz politically. Instead, they leadanti-racist students to one of two paths:sitting on your hands while this racistrants, as students did at Boston University, or calling on the administration andthe campus papers to refuse to printHorowitz's ad, and falling right into histrap. As emphasized in "Are You NowOr Have You Ever Been ... 'PC'?" (WVNo. 533, 30 August 1991):_"The problem with this strategy is it disarms the victims by fostering illusions inthe supposed 'neutrality' of the racistuniversity administrations and the cops.It gives enhanced power to those institutions to act against, for instance, leftistswho might rightly protest Colin Powellor [Norman] Schwarzkopf and call theseimperialist pigs 'imperialist pigs.' What'smore, this strategy doesn't work."

The organizers of "silent protests" byblack students at Berkeley told studentsto stay away from the united-front protestwe organized. It is a telling sign of thedespair to whith black youth have beendriven by the racist atmosphere on thecampuses and of the bankruptcy of theblack l iberal misleadership that suchthings could seriously be suggested.Beholden to bourgeois liberalism, mostof the left boycotted our Berkeley demonstration, demonstrating that they're abunch of paper tigers. The InternationalSocialist Organization (ISO) ferventlyraises the call to "fight the right," portraying the Democrats as an alternative to theRepublicans. Yet when the right rearedits head at Berkeley, these "fighters" werenowhere to be seen. In fact, the ISO

attempted to sabotage the demonstrationby using their leadership position in thecampus group Students for Justice in Palestine to block its endorsement, and thencalled a meeting of that group the samenight as the rally. Ever so craven, theISO's Socialist Worker (30 March) carriesa tiny article titled "Protest Racist Ad"which claims to solidarize with the campus protests but dishonestly hides its roleat Berkeley by neglecting to mention theSYC-initiated protest there. Now the ISOis calling an event to challenge Horowitzat Columbia University in New Yorkquite brave since the campus paper hasn'tprinted his ad and Horowitz isn't corningto Columbia. As for free speech, just tryto enter a public ISO meeting with a fewcopies ofWorkers Vanguard in your hand,and you'll see how, for these reformists,free speech means nothing.To its credit, the Progressive LaborParty (PL) came to the Berkeley protestand even put out a leaflet. PL also put outa leaflet in Boston titled "No Free Speechfor Racists!" But by amalgamating Horowitz with Klan and Nazi race-terrorists,PL confuses the whole question. The fascists are paramilitary action gangs whosepurpose is racial genocide and thedestruction of organized labor. This isnot a question of "free speech" but ofmobilizing the working class to smashthem as an elementary defense of itselfand of the oppressed. Horowitz is a racistideologue whose views need to be exposed and defeated as part of combattingbourgeois ideology. While their Bostonleaflet did attempt to refute Horowitz, PLfalls into the same trap as the liberals whosimply see it as a question of suppressingracist ideas rather than fighting againstthe material basis of racial oppression.Horowitz wants to turn back the clockto more reactionary times; the liberalsmerely want to maintain the status quoof racist American capitalism by tryingto prettify it through "politically correct"verbiage. As Marxists, our aim is tochange reality, not merely the perceptionof reality. We want to mobilize studentsbehind the social power of a workingclass united in the fight against theoppression of black people, women andminorities. As we explained in a letter toBerkeley's Daily Cal (3 April), "Ourprotest against Horowitz was part of oureffort to win youth to the cause of blackfreedom."We fight to build a youth organization to intervene on the campuses witha revolutionary program and to combatevery manifestation of racial oppressionand discrimination. The battles at handrequire the leadership of a multiracialworkers party that will act as a "tribuneof the people" in championing the causeof all the oppressed, fighting to achieveblack liberation through integration in asocialist society. It is by joining such astruggle that radical-minded students andyouth can help to unify the working classto overthrow this whole rotten system andopen the door to human freedom .

Free M ~ m l ~ A b ~ : J ~ ~ ~ I ! ' Abolish the Racist Dealh Penall"

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Defend China...( continued from page 1)Russia four Sovremenny guided missiledestroyers, four Kilo-class submarineswhich are reputed to be as quiet as themost modern U.S. subs, SU-21. fightersand advanced missiles. The purpose of. he EP-3E spy flight was to monitor theSovremenny destroyers and subs and totest Chinese air defenses.In a 1987 exercise, a U.S. guidedmissile cruiser sailed right into Sovietterritorial waters near a top-secret navalbase on the Kamchatka Peninsula in theSoviet Far East. Such "games," dubbed"Chicken of the Sea," were intendedto trigger defensive actions and communications to be observed and analyzed.In 1983, U.S. intelligence had the civilian Korean Air Lines Flight 007 fly overKamchatka while P-3 spy planes (theforerunner of the EP-3E

workers vanguard no 756 - 13 april 2001

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