Two Views On Bolivia: A Debate

View 1: World solidarity needed for Bolivian people, government

by Barry Weisleder and John Riddell / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

Barry Weisleder is a leader of Socialist Action (Canada). John Riddell is an editor of Socialist Voice, an on-line publication published in Toronto.

TORONTO—“General jubilation” greeted the Bolivian government’s move to take control of the country’s hydrocarbon resources on May 1, according to the Cuban daily newspaper Granma. “An impressive multitude [that] gathered to celebrate May Day” in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, “exploded with joy and cheers” when these measures were announced. This joy was shared by opponents of imperialism everywhere.

The corporate media reacted with dismay and anger. “Bolivia’s Folly,” proclaimed the Globe and Mail, the most authoritative voice of Canada’s capitalist rulers. Bolivian president Evo Morales is “acting on his shopworn socialist notion,” the Globe warned. “It’s the first step down a dangerous road that will further alienate Bolivia’s business community … scare off foreign investment … and make it harder for the country to solve its deep-rooted structural problems.”

Why such alarm? Bolivia’s measures were not in themselves socialist. The government’s bid to exert popular control over petroleum reserves merely parallels the jurisdiction Canada’s government has defended since its creation in 1867. Bolivia’s demand that oil companies renegotiate extraction contracts on terms more favorable to the country’s people follows the example of Venezuela and other Third World oil producers.

But for the imperialists, the context is alarming. The Bolivian government’s measures carry out the will of a powerful mass movement that has in recent years repeatedly challenged the country’s capitalist rulers.

Evo Morales is himself a product of this movement. His overwhelming election victory in December 2005 represented that movement’s success in striving to establish a popular government. And the petroleum takeover was not negotiated with the oil giants but presented as a fait accompli to a mass rally in La Paz.

The Wall Street Journal angrily branded this an example of “another Latin craze: the abrogation of contracts.”

Other moves have followed. On May 15, the Bolivian government ordered private pension funds to hand over $700 million in oil company shares they had administered since the privatizations of the 1990s. The finance minister of Spain, where many of these funds are based, denounced this seizure “without compensation” as “unacceptable.”

Bolivia’s example is compelling. On May 16, Ecuador, also repeatedly shaken in recent years by indigenous-based mass movements, took over operations of U.S.-based oil giant Occidental Petroleum, a move that will bring the Andean country $100 million a year in extra revenue.

Washington immediately retaliated by breaking off “free trade” talks with Quito. In Chicago on May 21, U.S. President Bush warned against the “erosion of democracy” in Bolivia and Venezuela. He darkly linked “prosperity and peace” to “respect for property rights.”



The ‘ALBA’ alternative

Bolivia does not stand alone. On April 29, its president signed a far-reaching Peoples’ Trade Agreement together with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba, at a meeting of the three presidents in Havana.

Bolivia also joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), the Venezuelan government’s plan to unite the peoples of Latin America around “the egalitarian principles of justice and equality,” to which Cuba subscribed in 2004.

The terms of the three-country agreement were sweeping, providing for massive Cuban assistance to upgrade health standards and launch a literacy program, $130 million in direct Venezuelan financing, Venezuelan support for Bolivia’s petroleum industry, 10,000 scholarships in Venezuela and Cuba for Bolivian students, and many other measures.

There is more. In February, the United States succeeded in imposing on Columbia a “free trade” agreement that robbed Bolivia of the market for 60% of its vital soybean exports. Cuba and Venezuela responded by undertaking to purchase the entire available crop at favorable prices.

The Wall Street Journal now angrily terms Bolivia “a virtual Venezuelan colony flush with Cuban agents.”

Washington has so far focused its retaliation on Venezuela, carrying out threatening military exercises close to the Venezuelan coastline. On May 16 the U.S. State Department announced the politically significant gesture of an arms embargo against Venezuela in reprisal for that country’s relations with Cuba and Iran and its failure to “cooperate with the United States in fighting terrorism.”



Need for solidarity.

Bolivia now faces the likelihood of a U.S.-sponsored campaign to destabilize and overthrow its government, similar to the military coup and other dirty tricks attempted against Venezuela in the last half-decade.

Progressive forces of every hue in Bolivia now have strong reason to rally behind their government in a united front against threats from imperialism and the Bolivian oligarchy, while continuing to press for radical measures to benefit the poor majority. And in the United States and Canada, the key task is to build a strong solidarity movement in defense of Bolivia and its two embattled allies.

During the first months of the Morales presidency, the Bolivian government acted slowly and cautiously, measuring its moves in an objective situation that is in many ways unfavorable. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America. It is landlocked, far from its allies.

The army and police, which have a long tradition of acting to defend imperialist interests, are still intact. The state apparatus is largely hostile. And the government is only now forging unity with the mass movements that brought it to power.

Moreover, neighboring South American countries, especially Brazil and Argentina, play a crucial role in Bolivia’s economy, trade, and international communications. Brazil’s Petrobras is the largest investor in Bolivian petroleum and the biggest loser in its assertion of state control over the industry.

At the same time, the governments of Brazil and Argentina are in conflict with imperialism; they helped bring down the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. One of the Morales government’s major achievements has been to avoid a breach with these two countries, a process in which Venezuela’s support has been vital.

As Grenada’s Maurice Bishop once observed, “The revolution is not like making instant coffee.” For further radical measures to succeed, the Morales government must maneuver to secure the most favorable relationship of forces inside and outside Bolivia.



National liberation

Moreover, the Bolivian upsurge is not in the first instance a movement for socialism. It is a struggle for democracy and sovereignty on the part of a nation brutally oppressed by imperialism. The dominant characteristic of this struggle has been the efforts of Bolivia’s long-marginalized indigenous majority to achieve full citizenship and to refound the nation on the basis of respect for indigenous people’s culture and economy.

Marxism has long recognized the progressive character of such anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements, even if, like Cuba’s July 26 Movement, they do not inscribe socialism on their banners.

Most of Bolivia’s toilers are not waged employees but are independent producers, farmers, cooperative miners, artisans, traders, and peddlers. The government of Evo Morales aims to increase the viability of these family-based economic units. Such measures may include the provision of credits, infrastructure, social services, and marketing assistance.

Such a program responds to the historic struggle of indigenous peoples in Bolivia to maintain and strengthen their particular ayllu, the aboriginal socio-economic structures in which land is not a commodity.



Workers’ and farmers’ government

The policy of state aid to independent producers forms part of the Marxist program. It has been long practiced by the workers’ and farmers’ government of Cuba. In Bolivia, this goal is sometimes called “Andean capitalism,” a term that can be misunderstood outside its specific context. In fact, effective support for small-scale family and community enterprise is only possible when workers, farmers, and other independent producers take full control of the government apparatus and use it to rein in the power of the giant capitalist corporations.

Bolivia today may be taking initial steps toward constituting such a workers’ and farmers’ government. Bolivian President Evo Morales said April 5, “You can’t transform things from the [presidential] palace. I feel like a prisoner of neo-liberal laws.” To escape this prison, his government is organizing an assembly to write a new constitution.

“We captured the government,” Morales said. “With the Constituent Assembly we want to capture political power.” (Elections to the assembly, which is to redraft the country’s constitution, are to be held in July.)

Morales is on the right track here. Winning the presidency gives Bolivia’s popular movements at best only a small fragment of political power, a toehold. Bolivian working people need full control of the governmental apparatus and the armed forces. Only a government of working people, reflecting the will of the indigenous majority of the nation, can carry through the “profound democratic and anti-colonial revolution” recommended by Bolivia’s vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera.

Solidarity from within the imperialist countries will help win for the Bolivian people the time and freedom of action needed to press this process forward.



Chavez’s challenge

There is another vital aspect to the challenge of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba. The leaders of these three countries are challenging us to join in a worldwide movement for social justice. They are awakening new interest in the idea of socialism, including among working people in Canada and the United States.

Hugo Chavez made such an appeal following the May 10-12 European Union-Latin American summit. At the Vienna summit Chavez and Morales squared off against the presidential figureheads of imperialist Europe, acting as a tightly coordinated team sporting two flags, but fighting for a common cause.

Addressing a solidarity rally of 5000 in Vienna, Chavez quoted the words of Rosa Luxemburg, “The choice before humanity is socialism or barbarism.” Chavez continued, “When Rosa Luxemburg made this statement, she was speaking of a relatively distant future. But now the situation of the world is so bad that the threat to the human race is not in the future, but now.”

Chavez recalled his youth, the time of the May 1968 upsurge in France, the Beatles, and the movement against the war in Vietnam. “We looked to the future and we thought that by the year 2000, the world would be a different place, a better place. But the years have passed and instead of improving, things have gotten worse.

“What has happened? …. Imperialism and capitalism have stolen my future. And now that I am in my fifties, I am convinced that people of my generation must spend every day, every hour, every minute of our lives fighting for a better world—a world free from poverty, inequality, and injustice.

“That world is called socialism! I believe that only the youth have the necessary enthusiasm, the passion, the fire, to make the revolution. Let us unite to save the world. Together we can succeed!”

To socialists around the world, Chavez’s now oft-repeated appeal is the realization of a long-deferred dream. The bold nations of ALBA are placing the struggle for socialism back on the agenda for the world’s peoples. Our response should be wholehearted and vigorous solidarity.



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View 2: A response to Comrades Riddell and Weisleder —Which road for the Bolivian Revolution?

by Gerry Foley and Jeff Mackler / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

Gerry Foley is the International Editor of Socialist Action newspaper, and Jeff Mackler is the National Secretary of Socialist Action (U.S.).



SAN FRANCISCO—

Socialist Action (U.S.) recognizes the need to vigorously defend the Bolivian people against U.S. imperialist pressures and intervention. This is nothing new for us.

We are well aware of the history of imperialist intervention in Latin America in the past in which even the most moderate bourgeois reformist governments have been violently overthrown by the reactionary local ruling classes and their armies, supported by the imperialists.

Moreover, the Trotskyist movement, of which we are part, has a proud tradition of defending all reforms that weaken the hold of imperialism and advance the cause of the oppressed and exploited.

Leon Trotsky himself, when he lived in Mexico, was favorable to the nationalization of the Mexican oil industry by President Lazaro Cardenas. But Trotsky explained that it was not a socialist measure and that such steps toward economic independence from imperialism could ultimately be defended only through revolutionary struggle by the masses.

Trotsky likewise refused to give political support to the bourgeois Cardenas government. Two years after the oil nationalization, Cardenas supported the election of Avila Camacho as his successor, who began the liquidation of the reforms of the earlier Mexican revolutionary period.

The long experience of defeats of reform efforts in Latin America has shown that the local bourgeois reaction and imperialist intervention can only be challenged definitively if the workers and the poor masses are mobilized for a socialist transformation of the economy wherein the ruling capitalist institutions are destroyed and replaced with new mass institutions of workers' rule.

The army and the bourgeois state structures are central to capitalist power. They were smashed by the revolutionary action of the Cuban masses with the defeat of the Batista dictatorship in 1958. This is the starting point in understanding the survival of the Cuban revolution, as the Cuban publicist Celia Hart has so eloquently and repeatedly explained.

This is why the maintenance, extension, and consolidation of anti-imperialist reform in Bolivia depends essentially on the advance of the mass movement within the country. Moreover, the most effective and immediate solidarity with the Bolivian masses will be that offered by the working classes of the neighboring countries, if they are inspired by the example of the victories of their Bolivian brothers and sisters won through the exercise of their own independent power.

In the imperialist countries, effective solidarity with anti-imperialist measures in dominated countries does not require an uncritical attitude to reformist or bourgeois nationalist regimes—quite the contrary.

It is with respect to this question that Comrades Weisleder and Riddell part company with us. Their approach is summed up in a paragraph under the headline "Workers‘ and farmers’ government."

They assert, "The policy of state aid to independent producers forms part of the Marxist program. It has been long practiced by the workers’ and farmers’ government of Cuba. In Bolivia, this goal is sometimes called 'Andean capitalism,' a term that can be misunderstood outside its specific context. In fact, effective support for small-scale family and community enterprise is only possible when workers, farmers, and other independent producers take full control of the government apparatus and use it to rein in the power of the giant capitalist corporations."

Riddell and Weisleder conclude: “Bolivia today may be taking initial steps toward constituting such a workers’ and farmers’ government.”

The term "workers’ and farmers’ government" has been used in three ways in the Trotskyist movement, none of which correspond to the use that Weisleder and Riddell make of it. A workers’ and farmers’ government can be the first phase of a revolution before the ownership of the basic industries has been transformed. It can be the result of a revolution that destroys the institutions of the state without being led by a party with a program of socialist revolution. Or it can be a synonym for a workers’ state, a state that has abolished capitalism and is beginning to build socialism.

All of these variants presuppose the destruction of the bourgeois state institutions. A prime example is the 1949 Chinese Revolution, where in the first phase, the Stalinist-led Communist Party defeated the Chiang Kai-shek-led Kwomintang government and army, but pledged to preserve capitalist property relations. What emerged was a highly contradictory state based on a new government that essentially excluded the capitalist class and significantly defended the interests of China's peasant masses.

With the U.S. intervention at the start of the Korean War, the Stalinist-led Chinese CP, which had originally sought a rapprochement with Chinese capital, formally nationalized all capitalist property and created a workers’ state.

The 1963 Algerian Revolution, in which an anti-imperialist armed organization, the National Liberation Front (FLN), came to power after a long and deep-going military and political struggle, also constituted a workers’ and farmers’ government, wherein the previous instruments of class rule were shattered by the revolutionary action of the worker and peasant masses.

The first phase of the Cuban Revolution, after the triumph of the rebel army and the dissolution of the initial and short-lived bourgeois government of Manuel Urrutia, was similarly a workers’ and farmers’ government. Realizing that even the modest democratic program of the July 26 Movement, centering on a thoroughgoing land reform, could not be achieved within the framework of capitalism, the Fidel Castro-led government responded to a series of imperialist provocations and armed invasion by abolishing capitalist property and establishing a workers’ state.

In all three instances, the workers’ and farmers’ government was a highly unstable and temporary formation resulting from the revolutionary destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus and its repressive forces, the army and police. This phase was largely unplanned and a reflection of the initial lack of clarity of the revolutionary leadership.

In the case of China, the Maoist-Stalinist leadership consciously resisted a social transformation while maintaining its political and military control of the country. In the case of Algeria, the anti-imperialist workers and farmers government of Ahmed Ben Bella was overthrown by a military coup backed by the bourgeois Arab states. In Cuba, the revolutionary leadership team headed by Castro consciously moved to establish a workers’ state.

The choice before the revolutionary governments became evident; either move forward to abolish capitalist property relations, distribute the land, and begin the process of fundamental social reform or resist all of the above and re-establish the state on the basis of the old system of private ownership and the exploitation and oppression of the masses who had fought for the revolution.

In the case of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the class nature of the state was immediately transformed with the Bolshevik victory. The new state power resided in elected councils of workers and peasants, or “soviets,” established throughout the new Soviet Republic. The old bourgeois state was smashed and replaced with the world's most democratic system of workers' rule.

Here, the use of the term “workers’and farmers’ government,” as used by Lenin and Trotsky, was synonymous with a workers’ state.

The Morales government and party clearly have been bourgeois formations from the beginning and remain so. The government includes conservatives, even figures who played major roles in the privatizations carried out by the previous neoliberal governments.

Evo Morales’ party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), is a bourgeois electoral machine. In this respect, Comrades Weisleder and Riddell seem to be misinformed. Morales and his party are not products of the gigantic mass movements in Bolivia in 2003 and 2005. They played very little role in them.

Morales even lent a certain support to the bourgeois Carlos Mesa government, which was overthrown by the 2005 upsurge. The victory of Morales and the MAS in the December 2005 elections was a product of the mass movements only in the sense that the former were able to profit from the radicalization that these movements impelled because the social organizations that led them, the Los Altos formations and the Bolivian Workers Confederation (COB), were unable to offer an alternative in the elections.

Comrades Weisleder and Riddell do recognize that the bourgeois state and army remain intact. They also recognize that there is nothing socialist in the Morales government's measures. (In fact, the so-called oil nationalization was even hailed by the right-wing French president, Jacques Chirac.)

In offering an agrarian reform, moreover, the Morales government is promising not to nationalize any land belonging to the big landowners, who own 90 percent of the productive land. The only land under consideration for distribution is idle state-owned land.

The Morales government's welcoming Cuban doctors is certainly discomforting to the U.S. imperialists, but Cuba has sent doctors to a number of poor countries without that leading to any break of these countries from imperialist domination. So, where is there even a shadow or an intimation of steps toward the destruction of the bourgeois state, leading to the formation of a "workers’ and farmers’ government"?

It may be that Weisleder and Riddell hope that the Constituent Assembly, which will be elected this month and convene in August, will produce such steps. But the framework of its election so far seems to be a bourgeois electoralist one. Representatives will be elected by large districts. Organizations of toilers and indigenous and poor communities will not be represented as such.

Morales' vice president, Alvaro Linera, the inventor of the term "Andean capitalism," which Comrades Weisleder and Riddell argue is misleading (presumably believing that it does not mean what it says), is promising that the Constituent Assembly will leave the bulk of the Bolivian constitution unchanged.

And if Morales and the MAS intend to transform the nature of the state or establish a workers’ and farmers’ government in Bolivia through the Constituent Assembly, why have they set the rules of its elections in the traditional bourgeois electoralist framework?

Of course, there may be surprises when the Constituent Assembly is finally elected and when it begins to make decisions. The political climate in Bolivia following two near insurrections in the last four years is quite volatile. In fact, when Morales failed to nationalize oil and gas immediately after his election, his approval rating in the polls dropped precipitously, threatening his control of the Constituent Assembly elections.

This was a more immediate threat to his government than any threat to Bolivia's soybean exports. In fact, the demand for soybeans on the international market is very strong. That in part explains why less land has been distributed to the peasants under the Lula government in Brazil than under its neoliberal predecessor. The Brazilian agrarian reform, like the Bolivian one, is restricted to distributing unused land. And with the increased demand for soy beans, the landlords now want to use all the available land.

At this time there is absolutely no indication that Morales intends to take any "steps toward a workers and farmers government." If, of course, he or the MAS or the Constituent Assembly propose any steps to begin to dismantle the bourgeois state, Socialist Action (U.S.) will certainly defend them. But we will continue to analyze the process of radicalization critically, looking at both its advances and limitations.

The central question remains: Is Morales pursuing a revolutionary strategy? If he is, there is no way he can conceal it. By the same token, efforts to attribute revolutionary intentions to leaderships or governments that do not merit them have a very bad history. They can amount to an apology for reformism, and can serve to mis-educate and disorient revolutionary cadre, both inside Bolivia and internationally.

Riddell and Weisleder state, "And the government is only now forging unity with the mass movements that brought it to power." To be accurate, Morales and his party did not participate in the struggles led by the mass organizations that began to challenge bourgeois power, and now that Morales and the MAS have governmental power, they are trying to take them over!

In regard to the Cuban government's favorable response to Morales' victory and his nationalist turn, it is clear that this event has offered the besieged Cuban Revolution more breathing space—and we rejoice with the Cuban leaders for that. But the Cubans also understand that while they must take full advantage of every new opening, only new socialist revolutions will relieve their isolation and the inevitable pressures they face at home. That is qualitatively more important than any immediate diplomatic gain or the scoring of political points on the international level.

Weisleder and Riddell correctly quote Maurice Bishop's well-worn maxim, "The revolution is not a cup of instant coffee." But necessary "maneuvers" aside, neither can a revolution succeed without satisfying the basic needs of the masses and without their active participation as history's agents.

Riddell and Weisleder diverge with us further when they assert that “the Bolivian upsurge is not in the first instance a movement for socialism. It is a struggle for democracy and sovereignty on the part of a nation brutally oppressed by imperialism.

“The dominant characteristic of this struggle has been the efforts of Bolivia's long-marginalized indigenous majority to achieve full citizenship and to refound the nation on the basis of respect for indigenous people's culture and economy.”

To the contrary, the Bolivian masses rose to challenge their bourgeois government's selling water rights to imperialist corporations and again to demand the nationalization of the natural gas resources of the country. They formed workers’ assemblies and recalled the revolutionary experience of Bolivia's heroic trade-union movement led by the tin miners, heavily influenced by Trotskyism, when the working class vanguard reached a stage of near insurrection in the 1950s.

Riddell and Weisleder come dangerously close to counterposing to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution the so-called two-stage theory of revolutionary development, wherein the backwardness of Bolivia is posited as precluding a path of socialist development. We prefer the course of the Cubans, who quickly came to understand that their revolution would either proceed to the abolition of capitalist property or there would be no revolution at all.

Theft at the Pump

by Andrew Pollack / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

Consumers angered at steep price hikes since last year's hurricanes and the resulting well and refinery damage—including prices at the pump of over $3 a gallon—were shocked when Big Oil's latest profit reports came out. In January, Exxon Mobil reported the highest profit ever made by any U.S. company: $36 billion in 2005, up 43 percent from the year before.

These profits were used to pay $144,000 every day to its CEO, Lee Raymond—and then to fund his $400 million retirement package. A week earlier, other major oil companies reported profit hikes of 20, 50, or even greater percents over the previous year.

The timing of these reports were doubly embarrassing for the companies and their Washington allies, coming just after Venezuela had announced yet another extension of its program to aid low-income households in the U.S., in this case providing cheap heating oil to 25,000 Philadelphia-area residents. A former Exxon Mobil executive said, "This helps Chavez portray America as fundamentally weak. We are supposed to be the world's only superpower, and we're taking charity from a very poor country."

This spring, The New York Times reported that no royalties will be paid on about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas extracted from federal territory because of a law supposedly intended to spur exploration and drilling—a law later amended by Bill Clinton to extend the largesse even further.

The Times also exposed billions more in foregone royalties through fraudulent reporting of oil and natural gas revenue, thanks to “an often byzantine set of regulations largely shaped by the energy industry itself.”

One Interior Department official said that "these companies had knowingly been cheating on oil for years, if not decades. To ignore the likelihood that the same thing is happening on the gas side is absurd." Yet the department dramatically cut the number of auditors responsible for energy companies, forced out the most aggressive and rewarded the liars for “creativity”!

But this is no surprise from an administration headed by former oil and energy execs, which in its first days brought top energy CEOs (including Enron’s Ken Lay) to the White House to tell Dick Cheney's energy task force what to do. (This same task force also pored over pre-invasion maps of Iraq’s oil sites.)

Oil industry executives said they were too busy to show up to Senate Judiciary Committee hearings provoked by the price hikes and profit reports (the same execs had previously lied to Congress about their participation in Cheney's energy task force).

The hearings discussed whether a windfall profits tax was necessary. Ironically in a country in which the sacred rights of property are holy, Big Oil’s sins have been so frequent and flagrant that the heresy of such a tax can pass the lips of even the most devout believer, Republican or Democrat. Although the actual passage of such a tax is rare, one was passed as recently as 1980—but it coincided with Jimmy Carter's deregulation of oil and gas prices, a gift to these same companies.

Congress also told the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price hikes. Not surprisingly, the FTC concluded that most of the price hikes were due to market forces related to hurricane damage rather than price-fixing. And anyway, the market had worked: “Price spikes after Katrina resulted in more fuel getting to market.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Peggy Lautenschlager testified before the committee that “upward volatility of natural gas prices over the past several years cannot be simply explained by traditional supply and demand.” Consumption is virtually unchanged from 10 years ago, contrary to media reports that routinely refer to “soaring demand.”

Lautenschlager denounced the role of financial markets for natural gas, which lead to wild, irrational price swings even when supply and demand are stable. (These are the kinds of markets that recently-convicted Lay and co-conspirator Jeff Skilling specialized in creating, markets used to purposely cause rolling blackouts in California.)

Lautenschlager also described the interwining of oil and gas firms: “Four companies (three of which are major oil companies) control about 50 percent of the natural gas market, and the concentration of ownership continues to increase.”

These firms are in turn intertwined with electric utilities, and are becoming more so. An example is the pending creation of the country's largest utility, merging New Jersey's Public Service Enterprise Group with Illinois’ Exelon. The merged company would cover 18 million electric and gas customers and is expected to raise rates even beyond its drastic hikes of last winter.

Exxon Mobil et al. have tried to defend themselves with a media blitz as well as stepped-up lobbying, spending $28.8 million in 2005, up 44 percent from 2004. In addition to hiring former Republican legislative aides, they've reached across the aisle: Exxon Mobil hired as a lobbyist David Leiter, former chief of staff to 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry and chief of renewable energy in the Clinton administration.



Impact on workers

Soaring gasoline costs have meant cutbacks for both essential and leisure travel. This is especially so because of the longer commutes to work than in the past, given the dispersal of the working class from urban centers to suburbs. And rising energy costs come on top of growing indebtedness, mortgage pressures, higher health-care premiums (or lack of insurance), etc.

The New York Times profiled middle-class Long Island residents who sought help from the federal home energy assistance program. All those interviewed had been turned away for having incomes exceeding federal limits of $41,616 for a family of four, or $28,296 for a family of two. Lawmakers estimated that about $5 billion would have been necessary to meet the needs of those applying for aid last winter. Contrast this to the far greater profits reported by Big Oil.

An economist in the U.S. Energy Information Administration said energy prices in real dollars are the highest they’ve been since 1981 and pointed to pre-hurricane trends—since 2002-3, home heating fuel prices have increased 50 percent and natural gas 100 percent.

Other researchers tell of people struggling with heating bills who are going without food or medical care, missing mortgage payments, and doing without heat or hot water. A social worker told The Times, "people come to our food pantry because they're paying for their utilities and their oil."

New York City recently started imposing new fees on public housing residents to help make up for soaring fuel costs. This came soon after Venezuela’s CITGO announced it would help some of the same city’s poor in the Bronx and Harlem.

Energy profits have hit not only workers’ pocketbooks but also their jobs, wages, and benefits. Between 1990 and 2005, as the number of major energy companies shrank, so too did the job rolls, the number in oil and natural gas extraction dropping from 189,000 to 128,700. They're also frequently being replaced with nonunion workers who get lower pay and usually no benefits, and are often housed several to a room in hotels near refineries.

"Those enormous profits have come at the expense of our jobs," Don Gosney of Plumbers & Steamfitters Local 342 told the San Francisco Chronicle. "What's a reasonable profit? We're not talking about retirees with a couple shares, we're talking about institutions and individuals with millions of shares. I'd like to think in this country that government represents all of us, but I'm not so sure anymore."

This is the kind of sentiment, by the way, that led the main union in the energy industry—the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, now part of the Steelworkers—to take the lead in forming the Labor Party.

Not surprisingly, manufacturers are using energy costs as another excuse to move production offshore—which would mean more laid-off workers with less income to spend. This further fuels the drop in consumption that some fear may finally kick off the recession long expected to happen when the real estate bubble bursts.

U.S. natural gas prices are among the highest in the world. Yet, in general, prices for natural gas are cheapest in the countries that produce the most—and most of U.S. natural gas is produced domestically. But even among some non-producing countries prices are far cheaper. In parts of Europe gas sells for about half the U.S. price.

Oil-producing countries—again, except for the U.S.—also generally charge their own consumers far less at the pump. Gasoline in Venezuela is 12 cents a gallon. In fact, it was mass revolts against price hikes that led to the first steps taken by Chavez’ Bolivarian Movement in its eventual rise to power. Once in office, it was the program of energy subsidies and use of oil and gas revenue for a vast array of social programs that have made the government so popular.



Washington’s “solutions”

The predictably irrelevant response of Congress and the White House has been a mish-mash of bills calling for increases in fuel-economy, development of alternative fuels and cars, reducing taxes at the pump, and mild tax hikes for Big Oil (after years of mammoth tax breaks supposedly for use in new investment but rarely used for such).

Consideration is being given to expanding the areas in which offshore drilling can occur. The House also voted to revoke some of the lease giveaways described above. Nothing has been passed yet, but you can be sure no bill will pass with any measures strong enough to alienate any potential campaign contributors.

Even Big Oil’s best friends in Congress are putting up a show. Joe Barton, Republican chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and former employee of Atlantic Richfield, is second only to Tom Delay as recipient of energy company funds. Yet he felt compelled to call hearings and issue stern letters to BP, which now owns Atlantic Richfield, and Exxon Mobil, chastising them for their policies and prices.

But Barton’s real fire was saved for those actually doing something about the crisis: he accused CITGO of antitrust violations by donating cheap heating oil, and demanded to see their records. (Barton earlier demanded to see the records of government scientists who dared to say global warming was real.)

Populist Ralph Nader, long active on energy issues, resurrected the tired-old "break 'em up" antitrust panacea, first tried to no effect against Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust. This "solution" ignores the ability of corporations to refashion themselves endlessly in the face of antitrust action and regulatory changes, always emerging bigger and stronger, and often with the same core of big shareholders.

It also ignores the inevitable trend of concentration and centralization in a capitalist economy, which forces companies to swallow smaller competitors or go under—a trend that will only be ended not by another spurious "breakup" but by their expropriation and subjection to workers' control.

Nader correctly denounces the closure of refineries, which become an excuse to jack up prices, and exposes the price-fixing abilities of vertically integrated corporations. But the idea that a more competitive industry would solve these problems—or even that it could long stay competitive—is a pipe dream. And rather than call for the abolition of speculative energy-trading markets, Nader calls on Bush to raise their margin requirements.

He does make one good suggestion, calling on truckers to encircle Congress and the White House with their rigs. Certainly the West Coast troqueros who've been organizing for their rights on the job and against high fuel prices—and who shut down L.A. ports on May 1—could lead other truckers and workers from other industries in such actions.



Latin America

Washington's inaction stands in stark contrast to what's happening south of the border.

On May Day, Evo Morales sent soldiers and engineers to occupy foreign oil company sites in Bolivia, and issued a decree requiring them to accept minority partnerships with the state. Morales declared this was a natural reaction to five centuries of foreign pillaging, and that “now Bolivia belongs to its own people, particularly its indigenous peoples.”

He exposed how foreign oil firms had benefited from unconstitutional, secretly negotiated contracts, and gave them six months to renegotiate contracts or pull out. In the meantime, Bolivia will keep 82% of revenues, virtually reversing the former corporate/state shares.

Venezuela also recently drastically raised income taxes and royalties on foreign oil companies, and took majority control of 32 oil fields. And since Chavez's movement took power, the prime battleground between the revolution and counterrevolution has been over who will control the state energy company, PDVSA: the government and the company's workers, or bureaucrats in alliance with domestic and foreign capital.

So far, the answer has been the former (although workers are still fighting against recalcitrant bureaucrats for more control), which is why the country has been able to use energy revenues for jobs, services, and development.

Bolivia has joined Venezuela and Cuba in the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA), a non-market cooperation treaty. Through this and other agreements, the three countries have begun exchanging energy and other commodities and products, for badly needed health, education, and other services on the basis of solidarity rather than profit. Contrast this with Washington's repeated use of military force to maintain control over other countries' energy resources!

Without an invitation, much less any thanks, from Bush or Congress—in fact, in the face of repeated lies about a lack of democracy in Venezuela—the latter has extended this solidaristic use of energy resources to poor neighborhoods in the U.S. Venezuela's government-owned and U.S.-based CITGO last year began distributing discounted heating oil to poor U.S. communities in seven states.

At the South Bronx launch, Democratic Congressman Jose Serrano said, “If this is scoring [political] points, ... I invite every major American corporation to come and score points.” Of course they won't, and his party won't force them to. Only a mass movement and independent political action can exercise such compulsion.

The example set by Bolivia and Venezuela is inspiring others in Latin America. In mid-May the government of Ecuador, under pressure from indigenous, student, and other groups, cancelled the contract of Occidental Petroleum and seized its assets. The movement is now demanding nationalization of the rest of the industry.


What can working people do?

We can't count on politicians of either party to do anything serious against the energy companies. The recent convictions of Lay and Skilling is certainly heartwarming. But under this system neither illegal market manipulation nor legal oligopoly control can be ended.

It's worth remembering that in Venezuela it was the workers at PDVSA who were key to stopping management's sabotage during the coup attempt in 2003. So too workers in the U.S. energy industries, workers in industries depending on their products, and financially hard-pressed workers in our neighborhoods are the key to confronting energy industry capitalists.

Ultimately, the only solution is nationalization under workers’ control of the energy industry. The first steps in popularizing such a program can include demands to open the account books of the energy companies and their big shareholders.

Committees of workers and community activists—starting with energy workers and the communities who've seen the CITGO alternative, and gradually broadening out to other workplaces and working-class neighborhoods—can demand access to those books, and on the basis of what they see can propose rational prices and develop plans to reorganize energy production and consumption. This newfound information will also help such committees decide what taxes and royalties should be imposed on these companies and on their executives' income and stolen wealth.

Only such a democratic process can solve even more complex questions, such as how to conserve energy use and restrict pollution to turn back global warming, without unnecessarily restricting workers' living standards. A massive, national public transit system is one obvious first step.



Nationalize the Energy Industries Under Worker and Community Control!

Mumia: One Legal Decision Away From Execution – Or a New Trial & Freedom

by Jeff Mackler / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the world’s most well-known political prisoner, has been on Pennsylvania’s death row for 25 years. An award-winning journalist and advocate for the rights of the oppressed everywhere, his fight for a new trial and freedom has won the support of millions across the globe.

Mumia’s legal team, headed by Robert R. Bryan, is preparing critical briefs for the final stages of the court battle to win Mumia’s freedom. The stakes are high. Mumia’s very life is being sought by Pennsylvania prosecutors, who have petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to void a lower court order and reinstate the death penalty.

Mumia was a victim of an infamous 1982 Philadelphia frame-up trial replete with prosecution-intimidated and lying “eyewitnesses,” falsified and manufactured “evidence,” exclusion of all evidence of innocence, and the racist exclusion of Black jurors. He was convicted in a trial presided over by “hanging judge” Albert Sabo—who has sent more people, the vast majority Black, to their death than any other sitting U.S. judge—of the murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

If prosecution efforts are successful and Mumia’s appeals are denied, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, Philadelphia district attorney at the time of Mumia’s trial, has pledged to sign a third warrant for execution. Barring the unlikely intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, after 90 days, Mumia would likely be executed by lethal injection.

Bryan has until July 13 to challenge Pennsylvania’s brief seeking Mumia’s execution. His legal brief will simultaneously demand that the court grant Mumia a new trial based on the three major issues that presently constitute Mumia’s appeal:

a) The racist and illegal exclusion of 11 of 14 Black jurors by Pennsylvania state prosecutors during Mumia’s 1982 trial.

b) The constitutionally flawed trial summation of Pennsylvania state prosecutor Joseph McGill, who essentially told the jury that they need not concern themselves with critical standards like reasonable doubt because Mumia would have “appeal after appeal” if mistakes were made.

c) Judicial bias evidenced during Mumia’s 1995 Post Conviction Relief Act hearing conducted by the original 1982 trial judge, Albert Sabo. This is the Judge Sabo who, prior to entering the courtroom to judge the case in 1982, stated to another judge, in the presence of court reporter Terri Maurer Carter, “Yeah, and I’m going to help ‘em fry the nigger.”

Pennsylvania prosecutors will then reply to Bryan’s brief. This will be followed by a final response from the defense, after which the court will announce a three-judge panel to hear oral arguments. The entire process is expected to end with a decision within a year.

Bryan has expressed confidence that Mumia's appeal on one or more of the three central issues before the court will be successful and that the prosecutor’s effort to reverse the Federal District Court, reinstate the death penalty, and execute Mumia will fail. He warns, however, that nothing is certain in these matters. “In the present climate,” Bryan told Socialist Action, “a decision to reinstate and act on the death penalty cannot be excluded.”

If Mumia prevails with his appeal, there are several possible options the court can consider. These include either sending the case back to the previous court for further deliberation based on the upholding of Mumia’s central contentions, or granting a new trial—where all the evidence of innocence previously excluded from the 1981 trial will be for the first time presented before a new jury.

Mumia’s would-be executioners are well aware that the case is now on the fast track and that a victory for Mumia would represent a major blow to the racist and classist U.S. criminal “justice” system. In recent weeks they have gone to great lengths to poison the public debate.

Two Pennsylvania members of the U.S. Congress, Democrat Allyson Schwartz and Republican Michael Fitzpatrick, appeared at a Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) press conference on May 22 to announce their introduction of Congressional Resolution #407. The resolution demands that the city government of Saint Denis, a Paris suburb of mostly Arab and Black people, reverse a decision made several months ago to name a street Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal. The street leads to Europe’s largest sports arena, the Nelson Mandela Stadium.

The formal French ceremonies to name the street and commemorate Mumia’s fight for justice took place in late April. An international delegation was assembled, including U.S. civil rights activist and author Angela Davis, attorney Robert R. Bryan, and Pam Africa, the chief spokesperson for the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal (ICFFMAJ). Fitzpatrick’s bill demands that Mumia Abu-Jamal Street be renamed, and if Saint Denis refuses, the U.S. Congress be empowered to demand that the government of France intervene to change the name. The Philadelphia City Council will consider a similar resolution.

The well-attended FOP press conference evoked a blaze of hate in articles and editorials from the Philadelphia media, which had ignored a call to a May 18 press conference issued by the ICFFMAJ to announce the Saint Denis decision. The ICFFMAJ boldly responded by calling a noon press conference on May 25 in front of the Fraternal Order of Police headquarters, where Pam Africa presented a statement by the Saint Denis mayor explaining his city’s decision. Africa asked the media: “Where is the objectivity, the fairness that the media boasts so much about? Are you interested in obtaining information or only spewing hate?”

The end of Mumia’s long and grueling legal and political struggle is in sight. The next several months will decide his fate. He will either join us as a free man and leading participant in the struggle for human freedom or he will be executed. In large part, the decision resides in the collective capacity of Mumia’s supporters and all those who cherish justice and freedom to mobilize in unprecedented numbers.

June 9 has been set for 4 p.m. Federal Building protests in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and elsewhere to begin this mobilization. Call the ICFFMAJ, (215) 476-8812 in Philadelphia or the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal in San Francisco, (415) 255-1085, for information

Mass Mobilizations in Nepal

by Wayne S. Rossi / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

The people of Nepal won a major victory on April 24, when King Gyanendra was forced to bow to popular mobilization in the streets of Kathmandu and reinstate the civil government. The government had been dissolved in February 2005 on the pretext of fighting the Maoist rebellion that has taken over a substantial part of the countryside since 1996.

This victory was made tangible in May, as parliament stripped the king of most of his powers, including control of the Royal Nepalese Army. It has now begun peace talks with the Maoists and is preparing for a popularly elected constituent assembly.

Nepal's major parliamentary parties called for the mass movement in early April. Through intense cooperation with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), they began a general strike and protest movement that grew far beyond the cadres of either the parties or the Maoists. The strike in early April lasted a total of 19 days, with much of Nepalese society shutting down. Main roads were blockaded, and every major industry faced stoppages.

The public was supportive of the shutdown despite the hardships that accompanied it. The king, whose heavy-handed methods had prevailed over the previous 14 months, had no ability to put down the movement. A large number of civil servants (the government is the major employer in many areas) went on strike, and numerous government ministers went missing.

The move was possible because the Seven-Party Alliance entered negotiations and made a tentative alliance with the Maoists in autumn 2005. The agreement might include an end to the protracted People's War declared in 1996 by the CPN (Maoist).

Nepal is marked by desperate poverty. Outside of the central districts, there are often no sources of employment other than the civil service, which becomes the fodder for a variety of patronage schemes. A substantial part of the Nepalese workforce is either seasonally or continuously moving in a search for subsistence.

Land reform has been attempted in minor spurts, but has failed to keep up with a growing population. Foreign aid has been largely squandered by local elites. All this created an opening in which the Maoists, despite the contradictions of their basically Stalinist program, have been able to thrive.

When the current system of parliamentary democracy was established in 1990-1991, a wave of enthusiasm swept the country. However, the parties in parliament proved unable to provide any kind of economic well being for the vast majority of the Nepalese people, and the country's fortunes remained tied up with India and China.

After the Maoist rebellion broke out, the government did not take it seriously for several years, considering it a police action and allowing the guerrilla force to achieve a number of early victories. Violence escalated in 2000, and in 2001 the Maoists controlled several rural districts.

Talks began that year, but King Birendra was killed in a palace massacre by his own son, putting Gyanendra on the throne. All negotiations shut down shortly thereafter, and the king declared a state of emergency.

The war deepened, killing an estimated 12,500, but it has been interrupted by two unilateral ceasefires by the Maoists, one in October-December 2005 and one that is still ongoing.

The main parliamentary parties, the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), as well as the various smaller groups in the Seven-Party Alliance, up until this April consistently failed to make any moves that would put them on risky footing with the king.

Even though party leaders were frequently jailed during the recent state of emergency, efforts to oppose the king's absolute power were limited at best. Their past support for the monarchy and repression by the king have essentially cut the parties off in significant ways from the masses.

The CPN (Maoist) has remained a left critic during the mass movement, initially dismissing the king's restitution of parliament and calling for the creation of a republic, with a constituent assembly. This abandonment of revolutionary struggle reflects the Stalinist roots of the CPN (Maoist), which remains tied to much of the same old ideology of Mao's Chinese Communist Party.

Following Stalin's theory that the struggle for socialism can only be undertaken later, as part of a long-delayed “stage” of the revolution, the Maoists now turn to what they perceive as the bourgeois-democratic stage; they have even openly discussed the possibility of acting as a parliamentary party.

Armed only with their discredited stagist theory, the Maoists are not capable of leading the radicalized masses of Nepal to socialist revolution and the resolution of the national problems. The aim of their People's War has never been a social revolution but a political one, overthrowing the king but not changing the economic basis of the country.

There are two wild cards among the forces. The first is the king. There is no question that Gyanendra is ambitious, and he may be looking for ways to regain his lost authority. The second is the Nepalese people themselves. Normally reticent to take part in mass political action, Nepalis in and out of Kathmandu joined April's actions in tremendous numbers, and moved more quickly than the parties or the Maoists had expected. Indeed, some consider the king's surrender on April 24 to be the main reason he is still alive.

The masses deserve credit for a valiant stand against the king, but history shows that without a complete transformation of Nepalese society, it will not be enough to lift them out of poverty and capitalist underdevelopment.

George Breitman: An Incisive View of Malcolm X & Revolutionary Politics

by Joe Auciello / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

“Malcolm X and the Third American Revolution: The Writings of George Breitman,” ed. Anthony Marcus, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), 412 pp., $32

At the Socialist Activists and Educational Conference held in Oberlin, Ohio, in August 1970, George Breitman gave an important presentation, "The Current Radicalization Compared with Those of the Past." The opening paragraph of his speech introduced a phrase that would influence the orientation of the Trotskyist movement for the next 10 years.

As Breitman explained, "The present radicalization in the United States, which has not yet reached its peak, is as genuine and authentic a radicalization as any this country has experienced in the 20th century; in addition, it is the biggest, the deepest, the broadest" (“Towards An American Socialist Revolution: A Strategy for the 1970s,” ed. Jack Barnes, Pathfinder Press, p. 83).

The themes that Breitman announced in his talk were struck by other speakers at the conference, though sometimes more simplistically and schematically. What was unique, and typical, of Breitman was the warning he delivered in his very next paragraph: "You should be critical in your consideration of this proposition, because it corresponds to what you would like and because wishful thinking, although it sometimes has beneficial side effects, is generally damaging to the revolutionary movement. I think that this proposition will stand up under the most critical examination" (ibid).

This approach, which included an injunction to the audience to regard sceptically the very speech they were about to hear, is quintessentially Breitman. He spoke from a deep conviction in the power of reason and in the ability of his listeners to, in the words of Malcolm X, "see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself."

Linking the names of Malcolm X and George Breitman is not at all arbitrary. Many readers know Breitman as the editor of several volumes of Malcolm X’s speeches, including the first and perhaps most influential, "Malcolm X Speaks" (1965). He also wrote the first book-length analysis of Malcolm, "The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary" (1967).

A central idea of Breitman’s work is that African Americans will play a central role in the coming American revolution, and that the nationalist sentiments of the Black population are not an obstacle or diversion from the class struggle but an essential part of it. Within the U.S. left, this was a distinctly minority theory, but one solidly based on a study of history, especially the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks, who had developed and successfully applied Marxist theory on the national question to the revolutionary struggle in their own country.

In "The National Question and the Black Liberation Struggle in the United States" (1968), Breitman wrote, "The black liberation struggle in the United States has a two-sided character. … As the drive of an oppressed racial minority bent on self-determination, freedom, and human rights, it is first of all a popular movement with a nationalist and democratic mainspring.

"But it is much more than that. … It is the upheaval of superexploited workers crowded into city slums who are victims of intolerable conditions of life and labor in the richest and most advanced capitalism. They constitute the backbone of the industrial reserve army of U.S. monopoly capitalism.

"This combined character of their struggle, which is both national-democratic in its demands and proletarian-socialist in tendency, endows it with doubly explosive force. … The black rebels are so many time bombs planted in the vital centers of the capitalist colossus" ("Malcolm X and The Third American Revolution," p. 138. All future citations will be to this edition).

This orientation helped Marxists understand and, in some modest ways, advance the cause of Black liberation. Breitman’s key ideas retained their validity even after his death in 1986.

For instance, when the Million Man March was held in 1995, many confused progressive and even socialist critics denounced it, and some even spoke of its leaders (from the Nation of Islam) as "fascists." Those Marxists who were schooled in the tradition of Breitman and the old Socialist Workers Party were far better equipped to understand the nature of this distorted expression of revolutionary Black nationalism.

When the first Gulf War exploded, revolutionary socialists were able to make common cause with the Nation of Islam in opposing Bush I’s imperialist war. This initiative had its roots in Breitman’s, and the SWP’s, appreciation of Black nationalism.

Breitman had been reporting on the African American struggle for freedom and equality since the 1940s. As a socialist writer and activist, his literary work also included coverage of the labor movement and more specialized studies of socialist, especially Trotskyist, history.

Accordingly, "Malcolm X and the Third American Revolution: The Writings of George Breitman" is actually divided into three sections: "Black Liberation," "Socialism," and "Life and Legacy." The first two sections include introductory essays by Malik Miah and Steve Bloom, writers who knew and worked with Breitman; the last is a lengthy biographical account and appreciation by Paul LeBlanc, a socialist scholar greatly influenced personally and politically by Breitman.

Several of Breitman’s more significant pieces, first published in the 1950s and 1960s, are included in this book. Though dated in some respects, they still repay careful study.

For instance, "Is It Wrong for Revolutionaries to Fight for Reforms?" was originally published in the heady days of 1969 when many young radicals fervently believed revolution was imminent. Based on this misguided hope, as well as the more accurate conviction that the political establishment was too rotten to reform itself into a government “of, by, and for the people,” youthful revolutionaries mistook any struggle for reform as a "sell-out," so that only the most far-reaching radical slogans were considered suitable to galvanize the masses.

This kind of thinking hardly describes the political climate of the present day. Currently, labor’s fight is joined, not over utopian slogans or even new reforms, as desirable as those would be, but over the struggle to maintain the reforms won in the past. Yet, on closer examination, even this article, seemingly out of date, has much to recommend it. What remains fresh is the method of thinking Breitman employed and the lessons he drew.

First, he based his thinking not on hopes but on facts. Even in 1969, when nationally coordinated antiwar protests drew hundreds of thousands into the streets, Breitman said, "The United States is not now in a revolutionary situation. This is unfortunate, but true; and it is from this truth that revolutionaries must proceed in the development of strategy and tactics" (pp. 230-231). He began with factual honesty, with truthfulness.

That sense of integrity also was evident in the more polemical speeches included in this book, where Breitman was careful to summarize accurately the position of his antagonist, particularly in the debate with Harold Cruse ("Marxism and the Negro Struggle"). Giving a fair and honest account of another’s position is more the attribute of a scholar than a politician, even a revolutionary one, but Breitman held himself to high standards of objectivity, a sign of deep respect for his audience.

Second, he resolved the false dichotomy that caught and confused many radicals of the 1960s generation. The choice then was neither dead-end reform nor make-believe revolution. "The essence of Marxist strategy," Breitman wrote, "of any revolutionary strategy in our time, is to combine the struggle for reforms with the struggle for revolution. This is the only way in which to build a revolutionary party" (p. 230).

Finally, Breitman outlined the how: "Revolutionaries fight for reforms, but they never stop teaching the masses the truth about the inadequacies of reforms so long as the ruling class is not displaced from power" (p. 232). Furthermore, Breitman explained, "revolutionaries encourage independent mass action and independent mass organization as the only way to win and keep reforms, to deepen consciousness and extend the conditions for continuing social change" (ibid).

The underlying reason for this strategy is also meaningful and timely: "Struggle is the school of the masses. All demands that move the masses into struggle and raise the level of their consciousness are worth raising, fighting for and incorporating into the over-all revolutionary strategy" (p. 237).

Breitman’s conclusions, if absorbed by this generation of activists, would provide an orientation that would strengthen the movement against the U.S.-led war in Iraq and would bring the force of mass discontent to bear against this government.

As a revolutionary socialist, Breitman also had to confront the dilemma of the Democratic Party, a capitalist party supported by unions, workers, and racial minorities. Yet, despite the time and money they give, Breitman points out, "they aren’t the ones who decide the real aims of the party" (p. 211). Instead, he explains, the Democratic Party "is dominated, as the Republican Party is dominated, by a minority of its members—by a small group of monopoly capitalists who also control the economy, the government, the means of communication, and the educational system" (ibid).

But even if Breitman is accurate in claiming that the Democrats are run by a section of the capitalist class, couldn’t the party be influenced and ultimately led by the progressive activists who constitute the majority of its members? Couldn’t the Democratic Party then become the voice of the people, a beacon of hope and struggle?

These familiar questions will be raised anew in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Most of the left will be urging support for the Democrats in order to "take back the White House." Breitman’s rejection of that perspective is still essential and timely: "supporting the Democratic Party is at best an exercise in futility for radicals, and one of the causes contributing to their decline" (p. 216).

The reason for this position is simple enough. As Breitman explained, supporting the Democrats means "you have to lie, you have to cover up for the fact that the Democratic Party stands for the cold war, more armaments, little or no help to the unemployed, racial oppression, restrictions on the Bill of Rights, retention of the Taft-Hartley Act, maintenance of the status quo generally" (ibid).

Change "cold war" to "Iraq War" and everything else in Breitman’s analysis—originally delivered as a speech in 1959—remains accurate even now. Because so many of the fundamental elements of class struggle are essentially similar to the time when Breitman wrote and spoke, his ideas maintain their relevance and worth to this day.

George Breitman’s writings deserve a wide audience. His method of thinking, clarity of presentation—and, most importantly, his ideas—are qualities that will not soon go out of date.

"Malcolm X and the Third American Revolution" can be purchased by ordering directly from the Amazon.com website.

Clashes by Rival Militias Bring Palestine to the Brink of Civil War

by Gerry Foley / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

For the last month or more, the two largest organizations in the Palestinian territories, Hamas and Fatah, have teetered on the brink of civil war.

Hamas bypassed the Palestinian Authority government headed by Fatah leader Mahmud Abbas to form a 3000-man special police force charged with restoring order in the Gaza strip. To head it, it appointed Jamal Abu Samhadaneh, a Hamas fighter high on the Zionist state’s wanted list. In response, Fatah formed a new militia force.

In a May 3 dispatch, Reuters quoted a spokesperson for the new militia, Al-Mua’tasem Billah, as follows: “The [Fatah] force will be assigned to protect Fatah's sons and Fatah's institutions against attacks, whether from Israel or from parties inside the [PA] home.”

On May 8, a major gun battle developed between Fatah and Hamas fighters. Three of those involved were killed. Ten were wounded. Hamas claimed that the confrontation was initiated when Fatah members tried to kidnap three of its people.

The following day, Hamas fighters attacked a funeral demonstration for a Fatah man who had been killed in the clash. Three were wounded. Dozens of Fatah and Hamas fighters rushed to the scene, and more shooting erupted. Eight persons were wounded, including five children.

A dispatch on the website of the Arab nationalist TV channel Al Jazeera reported May 9: “Both Fatah and Hamas called for an end to violence after the early morning clash.

“’We must show self-restraint, end all displays of arms, and employ only dialogue,’ Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas told a solidarity rally of about 1500 people outside his Gaza City office.”

Then, on May 17, shortly after Hamas deployed its new militia in Gaza, Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas ordered the PA security police, which is dominated by Fatah, to patrol the area to “maintain order.” The two forces were face to face and fears escalated of clashes between them.

On May 22, a serious clash occurred. The French newspaper of record, Le Monde, reported the same day: “A Jordanian was killed and seven other persons wounded … in confrontations between members of the security forces and armed men of the Islamic movement Hamas near the Palestinian parliament building in Gaza. Members of the special force under the authority of the Hamas-led ministry of the interior opened fire on a car carrying members of the Fatah dominated security force.”

The following day, May 23, the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz reported: “Fatah officials in the Gaza Strip are certain that Hamas is behind the two latest assassination attempts on senior members of the Palestinian Authority's security services. Fatah considers this an escalation in the violent struggle and deems itself obligated to respond in kind. This is the assessment of senior defense officials in Israel, in view of the events of the past few days in Gaza.”

On May 24, AP reported that the head of the PA security force in central Gaza had been killed by a car bomb. The dispatch continued: “In other violence, masked gunmen seized three Hamas militants outside a mosque and shot them. One of the men died at a hospital. Hundreds of gunmen loyal to Hamas marched through the streets of Gaza City in military-style formation, raising assault rifles and copies of the Quran.”

The May 24 Haaretz reported a demonstration of former Fatah members who had gone over to Hamas: “Some 1000 Palestinians wearing black-and-yellow Fatah shirts and wielding Korans and assault weapons marched in Gaza City on Wednesday in support of the Hamas-led government.

According to Palestinian sources, the armed men are former Fatah members organized by Hamas in an attempt to present the rival Fatah as a fractured movement.”

On May 25, Reuters reported that Israel had agreed to provide weapons to Abbas’ personal guard to protect him against assassination. But the dispatch added: “Western diplomats had told Reuters earlier this month that European donors had pledged funds to boost Abbas' security forces, while his aides said Egypt and Jordan had pledged arms and ammunition to help his presidential guard protect him.” This suggests that the imperialists and the neocolonial Arab states are offering military aid to Abbas to use in a war with Hamas.

The confrontation between Fatah and Hamas is also taking place on the political level. Abbas has said that as president of the PA he has the power to dissolve the Hamas government formed on the basis of the Islamic movement’s victory in the Palestinian legislative elections. Hamas is saying that if he does that, it will not recognize his decision and may even “go underground.”

Abbas has also called for a July 31 referendum to get support for negotiations with Israel, in an attempt to force Hamas to recognize the Zionist state. The Hamas government has dismissed the referendum as a waste of time and money. But Abbas has the advantage that he can base his order on a proposal worked out by Fatah and Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails, to which Islamic Jihad, another major player in the guerrilla war against Israel, has just adhered.

The referendum document calls for setting up a Palestinian state in the territories conquered by Israel in 1967. This has been interpreted by some commentators as a two-state solution, which would recognize Israel. It has also been interpreted as calling for an end to attacks within the pre-1967 borders of Israel, since it recommends focusing resistance on the occupied territories.

However, Abbas wants to use the referendum as a lever to force the Hamas government to explicitly recognize Israel.

The imperialist governments and Israel are using the fact that Hamas has refused to offer a definitive recognition of the Zionist state as an excuse for cutting off aid and denying the Palestinian government the revenues to which it is entitled. Employees of the PA, who bring in a fourth to a third of the wages in the Palestinian territories, have not been paid in two months.

The Hamas government is promising to pay the PA employees in the first few days of June. But it obviously is having trouble getting funds. Although some Arab states have promised financial aid, the West Bank is isolated by Israeli forces.

One indication of what Hamas is trying to do was the arrest of Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas leader, on May 19 at the Egyptian border of the Gaza strip. He was carrying 500,000 euros, which he said were intended for Palestinian relief. But the smuggling of hard cash, as this incident shows, is difficult and cannot be relied upon.

Later, the Hamas government said that it would only pay the salaries of the 40,000 employees who earn 1500 shekels [$330] a month or less and advance 1500 shekels to the 125,000 who earn more.

On June 1, Palestinian security police demanding their full pay staged an armed demonstration at the PA parliament building in Gaza, during which they fired shots at the building. Al Jazeera reported: “‘The 1500 shekels are not enough to pay debts, buy milk and diapers,’ said one banner stuck to the gate of parliament.”

It is obvious that the financial squeeze on the Hamas government is driving the confrontation between Hamas and Fatah. That is undoubtedly what the Zionists and their imperialist sponsors want. The growing conflict among Palestinian factions is a boon for them.

The Palestinian national movement desperately needs unity. But it is unlikely to be able to achieve it within the framework of a two-state strategy aiming for the creation of a Palestinian mini-state alongside Israel, with a Palestinian bureaucracy. (In reality, despite some tougher talk, Hamas shares this two-state strategy.)

This strategy makes any group that accepts it vulnerable to blackmail by the Zionists and their big brothers. The only alternative is a revolutionary strategy of fighting for the democratic rights of Arab people in all of Palestine, and for a democratic secular Palestine in which Arabs and Jews can live together based on their common long-term interests.

Choose Your Poison

by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

“Thank You for Smoking.” Written and directed by Jason Reitman, from a novel by Christopher Buckley. Starring Aaron Eckhart, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall, and Katie Holmes.

These days, it’s all about spin, the technique used by spinmeisters, from the government to the guy or gal in infomercials, to get people to do things they don’t want to do and to buy stuff they don’t need.

In Jason Reitman’s satirical film, “Thank You for Smoking,” Nick Naylor (played by blond, lantern-jawed, All-American-looking Aaron Eckhart) spins for Big Tobacco. He is divorced, with an adolescent son, Joey (Cameron Bright), who is sometimes embarrassed by his dad, but nevertheless idolizes him and schemes to go everywhere with him.

The thing that Big Tobacco has going for it, so you might think its product hardly needs spinning, is that nicotine is addictive. Many court cases have been won against tobacco companies by cancer- ridden ex-smokers or families of those who have died from lung cancer directly related to smoking cigarettes.

Still, employees of the industry spin because they need constantly to hook more customers to replace those who’ve either quit or died. They especially target children (i.e., until recently, the cartoon character Joe Camel) and Third World populations.

In an early scene, Nick sits in a booth at a local pub with Polly and Bobby Jay. Polly (Maria Bello) belongs to a committee touting alcohol and Bobby (David Koechner) is a big-time firearms proponent. The three friends have nicknamed themselves “The MOD Squad: Merchants of Death.”

They drink wine and smoke while bad-mouthing bleeding-heart liberals and one-upping each other on how many deaths per day can be attributed to their respective products. Who wins hands down? Tobacco, of course, with 1200. On talk shows, however, defending tobacco against the charge that it kills, Nick says, “If people die, we lose customers.”

He presents an idea to his corporate bosses about putting smoking back into the movies as product-placement (although today, by the look of it, smoking has never left films) as it was in the 1940s through the Sixties, e.g., Bogie and Cary Grant, or Bette Davis (“A chimney!” extols Naylor).

Nick has become such a force that he attracts the attention of the owner of the company: Doak “The Captain” Boykin (Robert Duvall in full Southern Gent mode), who sends Naylor to Hollywood to pitch the idea. Later, he orders him to bribe, with a suitcase full of cash, a haggard, gray-haired, dying, ex-Marlboro Man, Lorne Lutch (wonderfully acted by Sam Elliot), into dropping any suits against the company. Lutch lives in little more than a shack in the boonies with his gun-toting daughter for protection.

A Vermont senator, perfectly named Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy), wants to pass a bill to put a skull and crossbones logo on each pack of ciggies. He and Naylor lock horns at a Senate hearing over tobacco and Vermont cheese. Finistirre is so intent on getting his way that he puts a hit on Naylor in a hilarious scene involving multiple nicotine patches. Here, Macy reveals a passion not seen since “Fargo.”

Later, Naylor deftly substitutes one cause for another, becoming an apologist for cellular phones (which are under investigation for links to cancer).

Throughout the film, his son, Joey, stands by him, looks up to him and serves as Naylor’s moral compass. Still, morals don’t compromise the irreverent barbs thrown throughout the film, on both sides of the question, which make “Smoking” such a smart, joyous ride.

In the end, Nick Naylor puts the lie to the rationalization, “I do it for the mortgage.” It’s all about freedom of choice.

Camp Class Struggle 2006

by Adam Ritscher / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

In a scene reminiscent of the type of events that the socialist movement held a century ago, a group of hardy young socialists came together on the weekend of May 21-22 for the 4th annual Camp Class Struggle.

Sponsored by Youth for Socialist Action, this year's camp was held on a farm in northern Wisconsin near the tiny hamlet of Highbridge. Amid wooded rolling hills, farm fields, and on the shore of a beautiful lake, comrades gathered for a variety of games, political presentations, and an overnight camp-out.

This year's camp featured a grueling four-hour match between the two YSA soccer teams, the Red Star Luddites and Skeleton Breath. It was hard to tell who won, though, since in commie soccer you don't keep score!

There was also a sock puppet presentation on the immigrant rights movement, a parable explaining the Marxist analysis of capitalist economics, a bonfire, and a scrumptious potluck featuring everything from vegan corndogs to homemade cheese cake.

The first Camp Class Struggle was held in 2003 at Brimson, Minn. Camp Class Struggle 2004 was held at the Mesaba Coop Park on the Iron Range. And last year's camp was held just north of Grand Marais, Minn. So far, all camps have been held at locations that have a long and rich socialist and labor movement history, keeping in the spirit of our goal to connect today's young activists with the lessons and traditions of the past.

Special thanks to everyone who helped make this year's camp a success!

‘A People’s History of Science’ Cuts Through Elitist View of Human Accomplishments

by Mary Scully / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

"A People’s History of Science" by Clifford D. Conner is an important book. For those interested in the history of science, it is an essential read. For those interested in social transformation but not science, it is a wonderful introduction to the political importance of science.

For those of you who, like me, went through high school and college feeling like you came in at the middle of the play, this book will clarify much of your experience.

Some of the most important political issues today are also scientific matters—global warming and all of the problems of the environment, evolution vs. creationism, stem cell research, genetic engineering. Medical science alone has a wide range of problems to be addressed, from the so-called war on cancer to the causes and treatment of AIDS.

But science education, at least in the U.S., is of poor quality, and scientific knowledge is popularly viewed as inaccessible—even inscrutable—to those without formal training. It is presented as an elitist pursuit requiring genius.

Of all the sciences, physics and mathematics have been particularly subject to mystification. Popular presentations of physics like the film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" boldly present a religious interpretation of physics relying on this pervasive and widespread ignorance of science. In fact. many physicists (notably but not only Fritjof Capra, in "The Tao of Physics") have written books directly tying physics to a metaphysical view of life.

During the l960s and l970s radical scholars coming out of the newly established Black and women’s studies departments began to challenge the orthodoxies and the Authorized Version of history. Their criticisms had more influence because of the tremendous weight of the social movements behind them. This book is of that genre of radical social critique but focusing on some of the most basic concepts of our view of science.

As Conner’s bibliography (which is a gold mine for those interested in the subject) shows, he is not the first or alone in challenging the orthodoxies of science—but his is one of the best-argued books. "A People’s History" centers on the canonical concepts in scientific knowledge that we have been raised on—particularly elitism and the cult of genius, philosophical idealism, the counterposition of theory and practice, and Eurocentrism.

It comprehensively, beginning with forager societies and moving to the present day, disputes the fictitious and alienating tradition we have been bred on. (We have all been taught the cult of genius, i.e., every scientific advance has been introduced by some luminary figure—Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Einstein—thinking great thoughts.)

A People’s History" examines the central (not peripheral) role of artisans in the acquisition of scientific knowledge and in developing the empirical method itself. Science is depicted not as the work of an individual superstar but as "a social activity by emphasizing the collective nature of the production of scientific knowledge."

The elitist caricature has intellectual implications that have been an impediment in scientific education and achievement for the past several hundred years. This is most evident in the exalting of theory over practice. "A People’s History" shows quite convincingly that the dichotomy between elite and popular knowledge is based on contempt for manual labor originating in class differentiation.

These distinctions, particularly destructive in mathematics, and so conducive to Platonist idealism, are at last finally being challenged.

Much of "A People’s History" focuses on the Eurocentrism of the history of science we have been taught and discusses the actual Afro-Asiatic origins of scientific knowledge. The touted classical curriculum has now degenerated into some elective Latin courses, but the general Eurocentric notion that the only body of science and literature worth knowing is that of European culture is as strong as when it was first propagated in the Renaissance.

Correcting the historical record by presenting the Afro-Asiatic roots of scientific knowledge has now generated a few decades of vitriolic debate. "A People’s History" does a good job of showing how the classical curriculum is really a fictitious tradition with a hidden agenda of not just ethnocentrism but white supremacy.

One of the parts I most liked about this book is the explication of Plato’s ideas. Ironically, although Aristotle and Plato are still held up as the greatest classical thinkers, there is no place outside of a few philosophy courses where one studies their writings or gets introduced to their ideas. We read that so-and-so was an Aristotelian, or so-and-so a Platonist but we aren’t offered a clue as to what that means.

We are certainly not taught the distinctions between philosophical idealism and materialism. The discussion here of Plato’s ideology—its elitism, antidemocratic nature, and metaphysical character—clarifies a central problem plaguing science and especially mathematics up to today.

Another of my favorite sections is the two chapters dealing with the Scientific Revolution. In these chapters the Zilsel Thesis is presented.

According to Edgar Zilsel, modern science arose in Europe as a result of collaboration between artisans and scholars. The experimental method that characterizes modern science originated not from individual geniuses but in the collective efforts of anonymous workers.

Modern science was born when academics adopted the methods of craftsmen, not when craftsmen followed the theories of abstract theorists.

So many of today’s political problems require scientific knowledge. Cafés Scientifiques originated in England several years back and have proliferated in U.S. cities. This is a salon concept, where those interested in scientific issues gather to educate themselves. Their continued growth indicates the interest and concern thoughtful people have about scientific issues.

"A People’s History" will not make you a physicist or a mathematician, but it is an essential guide in understanding the conceptual framework of these sciences. I loved this book and cannot recommend it highly enough.

A Chicana Activist Speaks Out on Immigrant Rights

by Mark Ostapiak / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

The May 1 demonstrations that rocked the nation with a political strike and economic boycott saw immigrant workers—largely Latino—bring back the true character of international workers day, begun by immigrants in the United States in 1886: relying on working-class mass action in the streets to affect political change.

While most accounts of the leadership in today’s immigrant-rights movement focus on the adult leadership, its youth leaders are largely overlooked.

A Youth for Socialist Action member recently caught up with one of the movement’s Chicana youth leaders, Tanya Vogel, from Tennyson High School in South Hayward, Calif., to discuss both her experience as an integral component in the organizing of 5000 demonstrators there—mostly working-class Latinos—and young peoples’ perspective of this new immigrant-rights movement.

Her account of the May 1 mobilization in South Hayward—a quiet Bay Area, working class suburb—reflected that of the movement in general. It was an organic process, sparked by the anti-immigrant bill, HR4437, of the grassroots among the immigrant community that have begun to cast off history’s heavy burden of being treated as second-class citizens.

Vogel and her teacher, Sandra Navarro, explained the significant organizing role of the Catholic churches, support by Latino small businesses, and inter-generational unity. Vogel said she was inspired by the enthusiastic outpouring of youth and their organizations from the area schools, who likely realized that what the movement would gain by their fighting for human rights outweighed the possible consequences of missing one day of class.

Additionally, many area teachers encouraged students to participate, while some participated themselves.

According to Navarro, Cesar Chavez Middle School in South Hayward reported that attendance was down 80 percent on May 1. Student absenteeism was widespread elsewhere throughout the country that day.

Even the now familiar chant, “¡Sí, se puede!” (“Yes, we can!”), made famous by the farm workers struggle of the 1960s and ’70s, had a similar effect to that of other May 1 rallies throughout the country. “We had many chants,” said Vogel, “but that was the one where people united.”

Unity, Vogel said, is important to make the movement stronger. Regarding unity between Blacks and Latinos (“Black and Brown” unity), she stressed the primacy of Latino immigrants determining their own course in collective action. “If they don’t unite, they’re not going to unite with somebody else.”

Striking a chord with Vogel was the irony of today’s situation in which Latinos serve in the military fighting for “freedom” while they’re denied freedom by the U.S. government: “I am against war. I believe they are putting Latinos in danger.”

She went on to say, “I do believe that people are being oppressed here in America because of being immigrants. The Latinos that are going to the war have to say they’re American when they don’t really feel American.”

That sentiment is likely to have enforced the choice of many Latinos at the rally to hang onto their national identity by refusing to let go of their own national flags, of which in terms of overall numbers, the Mexican and Salvadoran banners ranked two and three, respectively, after the U.S. flag.

“We are holding the U.S. flag because we want to be in this country,” Vogel said, “but we can’t leave our roots behind.”

While many of the national leaders of the May 1 mobilizations urged the movement to reject a work and school walkout, Vogel took her place among the movement’s more radical layer that supported the economic boycott and political strike to express the power of working people.

“It is a good idea,” she said, referring to the strike, “because immigrants are the working class of the USA—they are the farmers, they are the people washing the dishes in the restaurants—so I believe that really does help when a person gets out of their job and doesn’t go to work. I see that as a way to really show the people that we are a main part of the USA.”

It’s unlikely that Vogel is alone when she says that as a result of the reactionary legislation just passed in the U.S. Senate (S2611)—with a guest worker program, a total of 870 miles of border fence and vehicle barriers, militarization of the border, provisions for English as the national language, often insurmountable obstacles for citizenship, and no amnesty or legalization in sight—there is potential for another protest march and rally in her community.

If that does happen, there’s little doubt that the youth will be in the forefront again. “We are the next the generation to try to fight for immigrant rights or against other things that are discriminatory to people of different colors and races,” she explained. “I think the thing is to fight for what you believe, and I think that’s what people are going to do in this case.”

The Basic Contradiction of U.S. Immigration Policy

by James Frickey / June 2006 issue Socialist Action

For the past 20 years, the U.S. has sought in earnest to remove its southern border as a barrier to foreign trade and investment, while continuously reinforcing it as a barrier to the free movement of workers.

Over the years, the Mexican peasantry has been uprooted, the rate of emigration has greatly increased, and the clandestine underclass of undocumented workers has swelled and finally burst into the open. Every step in U.S. policy has been pre-determined to draw larger numbers of low-skilled undocumented labor into the workforce.

Advanced capitalist economies demand workers who will toil under unpleasant conditions, at low wages, in jobs with great instability and little chance for advancement. And who is better suited than Mexican immigrants? Wages in Mexico are one-fifth those of the U.S., jobs are sparse, and Mexico, as its dictator Porfirio Diaz was fond of saying, “was so far from God, yet so close to the United States.”

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that as many as 12 million undocumented workers currently live in the U.S.—and 56 percent of them are Mexican. They arrive at a rate of 500,000 per year and fewer are returning home, aided in their decision by the heightened risk and cost of re-entry associated with increased border security.

Immigrant workers have become integral to the competitiveness and profitability of multiple U.S. industries. And the narcotic-like dependency of U.S. capitalism on low-wage undocumented labor has had the unintended consequence of consolidating the position of immigrant workers in the U.S. working class. They are integral to the U.S. construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service industries. A day without immigrants in any of these industries is a day without profit.

The U.S. ruling-class appears to hold all the cards; its politicians, journalists, labor statesmen, and nonprofit nurslings are lined up neatly in a row. A renewed Bracero Program is within its reach. But it may be dismayed to find that its 21st-century guest workers are nothing like the braceros, who at their peak were never more than several hundred thousand farm laborers and track-layers on the railroad.

Braceros were landless peasant farmers recruited from the Mexican hinterlands. The 21st-century guest workers are a class-conscious urban proletariat of 12 million. They did not wait for a Senate bill to “bring them out of the shadows” but stepped out themselves en masse on a scale of protest never before seen in U.S. history. Within their ranks is an unknown reserve of leadership capable of actuating the next heroic chapter in the U.S. workers’ movement. It is there that the immigration debate ultimately turns.

Congress Debates ‘Reform’ Bill on Immigrant Rights.

by James Frickey / June 2006 issue Socialist Action


Andrew Stern, president of the 1.7-million-member Service Employees International Union, once likened the leadership of a mass movement to the crew on a sailboat. What matters is the wind in the sails, he said, not the fight over who steers.

The wind behind the movement for immigrant rights had reached gale-force by May Day 2006. Millions of immigrant workers and students took to the streets and dealt the first direct blow to U.S. capital in recent memory. But the hand on the tiller—belonging to a coalition of unions, churches and nonprofit advocacy groups—has steered the boat into the shoals of bipartisan immigration “reform” and collaboration with capitalists in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Stern’s union of mostly immigrant workers finds itself in the perverse position of supporting a bill to turn back the clock on immigrant rights more than 40 years.He is joined in this questionable endeavor by the Laborers' International Union of North America and UNITE-HERE, both unions in industries that employ large numbers of undocumented workers.

The Senate bill, known as Hagel-Martinez, arose in the terrifying shadow of a House of Representatives bill that would have sealed the Mexican border and deported 12 million people. The House measure, the Sensenbrenner Bill, was an election-year appeal by provincial politicians to brewing nativist resentment of immigrants, fear of job loss and wage depression, and the argument that the local tax base in some places cannot support the current rate of undocumented immigration.

Hagel-Martinez has a lot in common with Sensenbrenner, but differs in two very important ways: first, it does not criminalize legal residents who interact with immigrants, such as churches, social workers, union organizers, etc; second, it preserves the supply of undocumented labor to U.S. employers.

A compromise between the Senate and House versions is in the works. The relationship of class forces overwhelmingly favors the Senate bill, which is a wish list of the construction, manufacturing, agricultural, and service industries. It has key political support from major unions and immigrant advocacy groups and is unlikely to undergo major alterations from nativist interest.

Witness the editorial in The New York Times one day after passage of the Senate bill, admonishing Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert for “czarist excess” of the past and foretelling certain doom if Republican hardliners upset the delicate bipartisan compromise. In similar fashion the Chicago Tribune, organ of the $6-billion-a-year Tribune Company declared: “The Senate bill represents our best chance yet to finally set things right.”

To U.S. workers, the Senate bill represents employers using immigrant labor to bludgeon their living standards, union rights, and civil liberties. The all-important flow of low-wage workers to U.S. employers would assume the form of a guest-worker program cruelly conceived to tie the legal status of immigrants to exclusive employment with a single company.

Job loss would thus become inextricably bound up with immediate deportation, and whole industries would be positioned to artificially depress the wage rates of immigrant workers—and non-immigrants as well, by implication.

“It would be little more than an opportunity for employers to turn hundreds of thousands of permanent jobs in the United States into temporary jobs filled by exploitable immigrants who are paid low wages and receive few if any benefits,” wrote AFL-CIO President John Sweeney in The Huffington Post.

And what of basic rights on the job? As it is, employers routinely flout wage-and-hour laws for undocumented workers. At least now the workers can pursue the matter in court without fear of deportation. What recourse will they have under the guest-worker program?

And how will their complaints about safety be received by an employer who functions as their legal caretaker? The Senate bill proposes that the process for filing complaints be modeled on the National Labor Relations Board—which is another way of saying the employers will be completely unencumbered. Workers who desert their assigned employer would have to endure a lawless underground labor market as fugitives ineligible for social services and stripped of the personal mobility that enables them to bargain for better wages.

Enforcement language in the Senate bill—adopting the tone and feel of a counter-insurgency program—grants full authority to the Department of Homeland Security. Border surveillance is particularly Orwellian with its “virtual” border fence, aerial drones, and tethered aerostat radar courtesy of the Defense Department. Border agents would increase by 11,000. Triple-layered border fences along 370 miles of border and an additional 500 miles of vehicle barriers will relegate most border-crossers to the most barren and deadly stretches of desert.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the enforcement arm of Homeland Secruity—known by its apt moniker ICE—is training and equipping teams of agents to carry out deportation in the interior. The roundups of Arab and Muslim-Americans in the wake of 9/11 accelerated the integration of ICE with state and local police, whose advanced stage has been on display in a rash of swift and sudden deportations since the May Day protests.

Halliburton Corporation has already received a contract to double the detention capacity in the border region. For good measure, a biometric identification card is to be developed for guest workers, and harsh penalties for document falsification are part of the Senate bill.

Such an ambitiously repressive plan would necessitate inflaming divisions in the working-class—which is likely to mean endless incitement of the native-born worker’s sense of self-entitlement—and stratify undocumented workers based on length of stay in the U.S.

The Senate bill creates three categories of undocumented workers: those in the U.S. for less than two years, who face immediate deportation; those here less than five years, who must leave the country but may apply to reenter through a currently unknown process; and those here more than five years, who may apply for guest-worker status.

Why would labor unions and advocates support such a barbaric policy toward immigrant workers? Considering that union attempts to organize guest workers in the 1940s and ’50s were unqualified failures, union support is particularly difficult to understand. Hagel-Martinez does protect the wage rate in union shops by requiring employers to pay guest workers according to the scale outlined in the collective bargaining agreement.

In the long-term, however, the guest-worker program is likely to undermine the wage and benefit standards of whole industries. The answer may lie in the standard practice of SEIU and UNITE-HERE to enlist politicians as brokers of “conduct agreements” with employers in which they pledge to remain neutral during union organizing drives in their workforce.

Given the widespread use of this practice, it is not unreasonable to assume that unions expect to be vouchsafed the “right” to sign up guest workers. Of course, whether this could actually happen—and if so, for how long—would depend on the goodwill of politicians and employers.

Nonprofit advocates are more straightforward in their reasons for supporting Hagel-Martinez. The Senate, under the pressure of a mass upsurge, has granted them the top of their legislative wish list, which includes the “pathway to citizenship” and the DREAM Act to extend in-state college tuition to the children of the undocumented.

The National Council of La Raza—the largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S.—expressed misgivings about certain aspects of the bill but nevertheless pronounced it “a major step forward in a debate that is vital to our community and to the nation.”

The pathway to citizenship, it must be noted, is more of a gauntlet that requires undocumented workers to have lived in the U.S. for five years, to pay thousands in application fees, to prove they’re studying English and “U.S. history,” and to prove they have never used false papers to find work. Of course, immigrants can choose to step off the “pathway” and proceed directly to citizenship if they serve at least two years in active-duty military service, according to Hagel-Martinez.

Many of the grassroots activist groups that called the historic protests of April and May are regrouping to oppose both Sensenbrenner and Hagel-Martinez. The May 1st Coalition in Los Angeles, the March 25 Coalition in Chicago, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition and many others have been very critical of the Senate bill.

Many of these forces are promoting the National Grassroots Immigrant Strategy Conference on July 28-30 in Washington, DC, which was called by members of the Los Angeles movement.

Palestinian Politics in the Melting Pot

by Gerry Foley / June 2006 issue Socialist Action


With elections coming up in both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel, the political situation in both areas continues to show more and more signs of fluidity.

Israel, a fortress state backed by world imperialism, is the more stable. But even there, the projected winner of the elections, Kadima, the new party of outgoing premier Ariel Sharon, is not yet consolidated.

This party has come from nowhere to a commanding lead in the polls, but it is very much the personal creation of Sharon. And Sharon has just suffered a massive stroke, which at this writing (Jan. 5) he is not expected to survive—or at any rate to be able to continue to play a major role in politics.

The analysis in the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz is that the future of Sharon’s party is now doubtful, and the main beneficiary of his disappearance is likely to be Benyamin Netanyahu, the extreme right-wing leader of Likud, who is opposed to any concessions to the Palestinians. (He opposed the withdrawal of the Zionist colonies from the Gaza Strip.)

Kadima was formed out of the wreck of the traditional right-wing party, the Likud, with no new program other than an acceptance of the need to make some concessions to the Palestinians. In the Likud, the strength of the fanatical Zionists had become an obstacle to the policy of negotiations demanded by the United States as well as the section of the Israeli ruling class daunted by the cost of unending war with the Palestinians. With Sharon’s departure from Likud, right-winger Netanyahu took over party leadership.

On the Palestinian side, the conciliationist leadership represented by the PA president, Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), seems less and less able to offer what Israel is demanding in return for concessions that would allow a Palestinian government to function. In the municipal elections held so far in the electoral period, the main Islamist party, Hamas, has been scoring stunning victories at the expense of Abu Mazen’s Fatah. In the major West Bank city of Nablus, it got 75 percent of the vote.

In the run-up to the PA legislative election, Fatah itself split into two slates, one representing the younger and more militant activists, the other the old leadership headed by Abu Mazen. The split followed a series of armed demonstrations by the militants at the polls in the Fatah primary elections. In the primary elections, the big winner was Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life terms in an Israeli prison and is the hero of the younger militants.

On the eve of the PA election, the two slates merged under the pressure of a looming Hamas victory. As a single, cobbled-together slate, Fatah may be able to maintain a relative majority, even if hard pressed by a big upsurge for Hamas.

Armed actions against Israel are carried out by the military organizations of all the Palestinian parties, including Fatah. But Hamas talks a more intransigent line, formally opposing any modus vivendi with Israel and calling for its destruction as a Zionist state.

It also has won a reputation for charitable work, financed by contributions from Muslims in the oil states, and it is seen as less corrupt than Fatah, which has been living off foreign state subsidies to the Palestinian Authority (mainly from the European Union).

EU leaders have made threatening noises about cutting off the subsidy to the PA if Hamas takes it over or becomes a major force in it. In an interview published Dec. 27 on the web page of Al Jazeera, the Arab nationalist TV station, Hamas leader Nayef Rajoub said that the independence of the Palestinian Authority was more important than the EU’s money. He also said that he thought the EU should take a fairer approach to the Palestinian conflict and denounce Israel’s abuses more.

In fact, it is unlikely that the EU will cut the PA off as long as there is any possibility that it can serve as a means to blunt the Palestinian struggle and buy off its leaders. And even if it wins the legislative elections, Hamas is unlikely to change the basic character of the PA.

On the other hand, Rajoub was not clear about whether Hamas would participate in the PA government, although he said he thought it was most likely that it would not. Asked about Hamas’s aim of destroying Israel, he replied that Israel was trying to destroy Palestine. But the implication of that could be that both sides need to lower their sights, that is, negotiate, except that Hamas would be tougher than Fatah.

The fact is that Hamas has no political program that can mobilize the force necessary to destroy Israel as a Zionist state, so the most likely result of its rise is negotiation but with tougher language. And to the extent that it takes power within the present framework, it is not likely to perform much differently from Fatah.

Hamas is currently in a truce with Israel, but the ceasefire was scheduled to end at the end of 2005, and the Islamic organization says that it has no intention of renewing it. In fact, the Israeli military has not been observing a ceasefire. It has continued to assassinate Palestinian militant leaders and has declared a free-fire zone in Gaza in response to rocket launchings against Israel. So, the conflict is simply continuing.

The greatest danger on the Palestinian side is that the escalation of the rhetoric and gestures of the Palestinian groups and the growing tensions in the besieged community will lead to social breakdown and a proliferation of irresponsible armed gangs, as happened in Lebanon in the time of the civil war there. There are already signs of this.

It is more and more urgent for the Palestinian movement to find a political strategy for a successful struggle against Zionist repression and genocide. The only one that has been mooted is a fight for a united democratic Palestine in which Jews and Arabs could live on the basic of equality. And that would require the dismantling of the reactionary and corrupt capitalist structures that continue to dominate both peoples.

Bush Orders Spy Agency to Wiretap U.S.

by Joe Auciello / June 2006 issue Socialist Action


“If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just as long as I am the dictator,” President George W. Bush told reporters after the 2000 election. Apparently, he wasn’t joking. Following the 9/11 attacks, President Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap—without a warrant—American citizens who made phone calls or sent e-mails overseas.

The president claims that his role as commander-in-chief allows him to authorize these wiretaps without the permission of any court. He claims, further, that a congressional resolution passed shortly after 9/11, which allows the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against the attackers, provides him with the authority to eavesdrop on Americans who communicate with people overseas.

President Bush’s argument is an ill-disguised and illegal power-grab that diminishes the civil rights of Americans. Bush’s actions to mandate domestic spying violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a 1978 law passed by Congress after it had been revealed that President Richard Nixon had improperly ordered the FBI to spy on U.S. citizens, especially those who Nixon considered his political enemies.

The fig-leaf FISA legislation was approved by Congress to give the impression that Americans’ civil liberties and democratic rights were henceforth to be protected. FISA essentially transferred the authority to grant emergency warrants to spy on U.S citizens from the president or other federal agencies to 11 judges appointed by the Supreme Court.

President Bush broke this law, believing that even its minimal constraints were too much for a president who wants to make executive power absolute. Furthermore, in a Dec. 17 radio address from the White House, he announced his intention to continue with his policy of unauthorized domestic spying.

The actual application of the FISA law has been nearly completely favorable to the executive branch of government. The New York Times (Dec. 23) reports: “It is not altogether evident why the government has viewed the FISA court as an obstacle. The annual statistical summary provided by the court shows that the panel has overwhelmingly approved the warrants sought by the Justice Department. From 1995 to 2004, the court received 10,617 warrant applications, according to figures compiled by the Federation of American Scientists. It turned down only four.”

What Bush does claim with far more justification is that his policy was carried out with the knowledge and support of key members of Congress, leaders of the Democratic Party. According to The New York Times (Dec. 23), “At least seven Democratic lawmakers are known to have been briefed about the program since its inception in 2001,” including top Democrats in the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Before authorizing wiretapping and monitoring conversation, Bush notified Senate minority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, (D-Calif.). Following the public exposure and public outcry of the NSA’s actions, both Democrats have since tried to distance themselves from the president’s illegal policies.

Senator Reid, for instance, now calls for a congressional investigation into the president’s actions. Additionally, three Democratic senators have called for an end to the NSA operations pending a hearing in Congress.

The scope of this domestic spying program is not clear. White House officials have not provided information about the number of people being monitored, though initial reports of hundreds seems to fall far short of the actual number.

In addition to NSA spying, the “war on terror” has been used as the rationale for other federal and local agencies to spy on U.S. citizens. NBC News revealed that the Pentagon has been gathering intelligence on antiwar protesters, compiling a database of 1500 “suspicious incidents.”

Plainclothes police in New York City have been accused of impersonating antiwar protesters in order to monitor and secretly videotape the demonstrations, and, in at least one instance at the Republican National Convention, inciting a confrontation between protesters and police.

The FBI, in turn, according to documents released by the ACLU, is collecting information on groups and individuals ranging from animal rights and environmental activists to the Catholic Workers Movement, an antipoverty group that, according to the FBI, “advocates a communist distribution of resources.” Naturally enough, FBI spokesmen deny any wrongdoing and claim that their snooping is connected to investigations of suspected terrorists.

What is ignored in the government’s rationalizations is a fundamental principle of democracy: The government has no right to oversee and gather information on legal political activity,even if it is activity aimed against the current administration.

The Bush agenda, which treats civil liberties as a casualty of war, is hardly limited to illegal use of the National Security Agency and other federal agencies. This administration attempts to use the media as an extension of government.

The New York Times, which finally broke the story (Dec. 16), did not publish their report for a year, at the urging of the White House. Even then, according to The Times, administration officials were allowed prepublication review of the article, and cuts were made at official request.

The telecommunications industry has been cooperating with federal agencies and providing the government with massive amounts of communications data, allowing the NSA “to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications” (The New York Times, Dec. 24).

In addition, in a number of significant ways, government policies and practices have eroded civil rights at home and abroad. The USA Patriot Act, initially approved with near unanimity by Congress and recently extended while Congress deliberates certain revisions, increases the scope of legal eavesdropping and allows government agents to obtain bank and hospital records and other personal documents, including information from businesses and libraries about book purchases, book lending, and internet use. The law enables the attorney general to authorize wiretaps before a judge has issued a warrant, if federal agents later present evidence in court.

Further, the Bush government has tried to undermine the long-standing international agreements by claiming that “war on terrorism” prisoners held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are enemy combatants and are not allowed the rights given them under the Geneva Conventions.

Bush has also claimed that his authority as commander-in-chief allows him to order the arrest and imprisonment of U.S. citizens without trial if they are suspected of having links to terrorists.

The Bush administration has also argued that the United Nations Convention Against Torture does not apply to U.S. interrogators who operated outside of this country. Only in December 2005 was the president forced to accept a law specifying that the torture convention standards applied outside of the United States, as well.

In addition, the Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies operate secret detention facilities overseas. The House has requested information abut these facilities and how they are run.

Even the presiding judge of the FISA court is asking the Justice Department to explain in a classified briefing why it has ignored the federal law that requires that court’s permission before wiretapping can be permitted in the United States. This public request followed the news that one federal judge had resigned from the 11-member surveillance court after President Bush insisted that he had the right to bypass it.

These policies on the part of the president show a clear pattern of domestic and foreign abuse of civil and human rights. The current revelations about illegal spying on U.S. citizens by the NSA need to be seen in the wider context of an on-going government assault on the freedom of its citizens.

The illegal practices of the Bush administration are hardly new in recent American history: “Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association, and privacy.” This was the finding 30 years ago of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Sen. Frank Church, which investigated FBI and CIA practices of spying on U.S. citizens.

This Senate committee discovered that the federal government had assembled files on thousands of Americans who had broken no law but were “suspect” because they had protested the war in Vietnam or demonstrated for civil rights. Wiretaps had been placed on figures like Martin Luther King Jr. (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 while under federal surveillance) and Malcolm X; dissident groups had been infiltrated, disrupted, and provoked by agents provocateurs.

The Bush administration would return the United States back to the days when President Richard Nixon was able to say, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Nixon was wrong then, and Bush is wrong today.

The battle for democratic rights in the U.S. is an on-going struggle, a struggle too important to be left to the politicians of either party. Despite outbursts of bold rhetoric, especially by some prominent Democrats, Congress has no stomach for the fight and will act only when it is forced to do so.

The kind of popular protest and public outcry that won victories for democratic rights in the past is needed again today. Americans not only have the right to know the truth about the Bush administration’s spy campaign, they have the right and the power to stop it.