2 5 ~

No. 515 ~ X - 5 2 3 30 November 1990

AP
Soviet economy in shambles:
Troops harvest veg'etables
to avert famine. '
Reuters
USSR torn by separatists:
Soviet troops confront
Moldavian nationalists.

Iner 0

eelSlon
has spread from the Caucasus to the
Turkic-speaking region of Central Asia
and now to Moldavia.
But for the first time in six decades,
the revolutionary internationalist program
of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolsheviks has
again been publicly raised in the Soviet
Union. On November 7, the red banner
with the hammer and sickle and "4" of
Trotsky's Fourth International was un-
furled in Leningrad's Palace Square,
scene of the storming of the Winter
Palace which signified the final conquest
of workers power in 1917. In Moscow
and. Leningrad, demonstrators snapped
up nearly 1,400 copies of the Russian-
language Spartacist Bulletin No. I (the
introduction to which is reprinted in the
new English-language Spartacist No. 45-
46, Winter 1990-91). Thousands more
copies of the Spdrtacist Bulletin, as well .
as other Russian-language literature of
the International Communist League, are
now circulating in the Soviet Union.
In Leningrad, comrades of the ICL-
working with a group of young militants
who consider themselves Trotskyists, are
studying Trotsky's works and considering
the programs of ostensible Trotskyist
currents internationally-constituted a
contingent in the Leningrad Revolution
Day march. They distributed a leaflet
(reprinted on page 11), which concluded
with the call "For an all-Union Trotskyist
party!" to the "Red columns" that includ-
ed Communist Party members and Red
Army soldiers. They marched and ral-
lied with placards signed "Spartacist/
International Communist League (Fourth
Internationalist)." Their slogans pointed
the way for a return to the road of Lenin
and Trotsky: "Hail the Celebration of the
, OCtober Revolution! Defend the Gains of
the October Revolution! Down With the
Restoration of Capitalism! For Power to
Soviets of the Working People!"
"Democratic" Forces of
Bloody Counterrevolution
Initially, the pro- Yeltsin city councils
of Moscow and Leningrad- sought to
cancel and sabotage any demonstrations
on Revolution Day. During the weeks
continued on page JJ
the Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin, pro-
vocatively challenges the authority of the
Kremlin. Yeltsin insists on carrying out
.a SOD-day "shock treatment" aimed at the
full restoration of a capitalist market
economy, an aim shared by Gorbachev,
who differs only on the timetable. Gor-
bachev has now acquiesced to demands
to set up a new Federal Council and
dumped Prime Minister Ryzhkov for
dragging his feet in the forced march
toward the market. In turn, Gorbachev
has effectively been granted the right (if
not the power) to rule by emergency
decree.
Five years of Gorbachev's market-
oriented perestroika (restructuring) have
produced bureaucratized anarchy and
fueled nationalist and communalist fratri-
cide. Practically every constituent re-
public, autonomous region and national
group has declared itself "sovereign and
independent." Communalist bloodletting
For a Trotskyist Party!
. Spartacist
Leningrad, 7 November 1990, anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The red
banner of Trotskyism is raised in Palace Square.
Square with a scrawny, dead chicken
held aloft. Stringent rationing has been
introduced, the likes of which have not
been seen since World War II.
The city councils of Moscow and
Leningrad are dominated by forces which
openly proclaim their aim of restoring
capitalism, while the demagogic head of
MOSCOW/LENINGRAD-The rifle
shots in front of Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev during the November 7 cele-
bration in Moscow's Red Square symbol-
ized the explosive situation confronting
the Soviet Union today. Around the
country, Revolution Day became a ba-
rometer of the deep political polarization
throughout Soviet society. Tens of thou-
sands of Soviet citizens turned out to
defy openly counterrevolutionary mobili-
zations and honor the 73rd anniversary
of the Bolshevik Revolution. Were it not
for the insistence of the Red Army lead-
ership, it is very likely that there would
have been no commemoration of the
Revolution this year at all. Decades
of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule have
brought the Soviet Union to a flash point.
The very existence of the homeland of
the October Revolution is at stake.
The dramatic crumbling of the Stalin-
ist bureaucracy under Gorbachev has
brought with it a rapidly escalating dan-
ger of capitalist counterrevolution and
national disintegration. The economy is
in a shambles, as the bureaucratic plan-
ning mechanism is ripped away with
nothing to replace it. Store shelves in the
industrial centers and major cities are
absolutely empty. The chaos of the mar-
ket has led to widespread speculation,
hoarding, breakdown of the. transport
system and a virtual grain strike. Despite
the biggest harvest in years, talk of im-
pending winter famine abounds and sol-
diers have been sent into the fields to dig
potatoes. One old-age pensioner mocked
the leadership by parading through Red
These modest gifts and holiday mes-
sages of solidarity are a concrete remind-
er to these brothers and sisters that they
are not forgotten, and that we are dedi-
cated in every season to waging the fight
for a powerful movement of legal and
social defense .in support of their battles
against the racist frame-up system. We
proudly stand with these 19 prisoners-
send them your greetings and messages
to the addresses listed-their fight is our
fight:
Mumia Abu-Jamal (AM 8335, Draw-
er R, Huntingdon, PA 16652), death row
. political prisoner. Former Black Panther
Party spokesman, prominent supporter of
the Philadelphia MOVE organization, and
president of the Philadelphia Chapter of
the Association of Black Journalists,
Jamal was framed in 1982 on charges
of killing a Philly cop. For information
on the PDC campaign to save Jamal,
see Class-Struggle Defense Notes No. 14,
November 1990.
Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) (B40319,
Dorm4-C, Bed 207-L, P.O. Box 1902 B,
Tehachapi, CA 93581), former Los An-
geles Panther leader, has spent 20 years
behind bars, framed under the FBI's
notorious COINTELPRO. FBI dis-
appeared their wiretap logs which prove
Geronimo was 400 miles away from the
murder for which he was framed.
Ramona Johnson Africa (#7564, P.O.
Box 180, Muncy, PA 17756), the sole
adult survivor of the hideous 13 May
1985 bombing of MOVE, is serving a
seven-year sentence. We send stipends to
12 other MOVE members; They are scat-
tered in prisons across the country
because they remain determined to de-
fend their alternative naturalist lifestyles
against racist cop terror. Also at Muncy
prison are Consuewella Dotson Africa
continued on page 7
"""'"'worldw'id'e'campaign
10 Save Mumia AbU-Jamal
Page 9
Pclrtiiln !tie
on..nittee

NUMBER14 $1.00
November 1990
With your contribution
of $5 or more, receive
a subscription to
Class-Struggle Defense
Notes. For a single
copy of issue No. 14,
send $1 to: Partisan
Defense Committee,
P.O. Box 99,
Canal Street Station,
New York, NY 10013.
Partisan Defense
were the hopes of millions that he would
speak out against. American racism.
Those hopes were dashed-Mandela left
without uttering a public word 'on the
political prisoners or the desperate situa-
tionof blacks in the U.S.
But fop' many the PDC campaign to
save the life of death row political pris-
oner Mumia Abu-Jamal", as well as the
struggles of other class-war prisoners,
provided a focus of struggle against rac-
ist oppression here in the belly of the
beast. As Mandela spoke before tens of
thousands at New York's Yankee Stadi-
um and the Oakland Coliseum, PDC
banners in the stands proclaimed, "Save
Mumia Abu-Jamal." At the Coliseum
three banners by the International Cam-
paign to Free Geronimo Pratt called for
"Freedom for Geronimo" and all political
prisoners.
This is the fifth year of the PDC's
prisoner stipend program. We send
monthly stipends of $25 to 19 class-war
prisoners-not charity, but a concrete act
of solidarity from those outside with
those inside prison walls,in recognition
of their contributions to the struggles of
the oppressed. In doing this we carry on
the tradition of the early International
Labor Defense (lLD), whose founder
James P. Cannon wrote in 1927:
"The men in prison are still part of the
living class movement. The Christmas
Fund drive of the International Labor
Defense is a means of informing them
that the workers of America have not
forgotten their duty toward the men to
whom we are all linked by bonds of
solidarity." ',..
Like the ILD before us, who.raised extra
funds at Christmas for the imprisoned
worker-militants and their families, the
PDC calls on all our friends and support-
ers to again give generously to this
year's Holiday Appeal.
ratus of repression. More cops, more jails
and more executions is the time-tested
answer of the bosses' government to
those, who' fight against war, racism,
union-busting and poverty. For those
imprisoned for standing up to the racist
status quo, the temperature in their prison
hells constantly grows hotter-i-Mumia
Abu-Jamal's appeals have been thrown
out; Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), Hugo
Pinell and the MOVE men are vindic-
tively transferred to'desolate prison out-
posts fur from family, friends and sup-
porters; and MOVE women at Muncy
prison are denied access to publications
including Workers Vanguard and Class-
Struggle Defense Notes.
This past year has seen an increased
interest in the question of political pris-
oners. Nelson Mandela's release after 27
years focused worldwide attention on
imprisoned militants. Traveling with
Mandela across the U.S. last summer
For a Trotskyist Party
in the Soviet Union
Today, as Stalin's heirs in the Kremlin sell
out to imperialism down the line,defense
of the gains of the October Revolution has
become more urgent than ever. The key is
forging a Trotskyist party to lead the workers
political revolution which alone can save
the Soviet state and restore the Bolshevik
internationalist program of world socialist
TROTSKY revolution. During World War 1I American LENIN
Trotskyist merchant seamen sailing on the
Murmansk run braved Stalinist repression and German U'boatsto distribute Trotsky's
"Letter to the Workers of the USSR," from which the following excerpt is taken.
Greetings to the Soviet workers, collective farmers, soldiers of the Red Army and
sailors of the Red Navy!. ..
The October Revolution was accomplished for the sake of the toilers and not for
the sake of new parasites. But due to the lag of the world revolution, due to the fatigue
and, to a large measure, the backwardness of the Russian workers and especially the
Russian peasants, there raised itself over the Soviet Republic and against its peoples
a new oppressive and parasitic caste, whose leader is Stalin....
If Soviet economic life had been conducted in the interests of the people; if the
bureaucracy had not devoured and vainly wasted the major portion of the national
income; if the bureaucracy had not trampled underfoot the vital interests of the
population, then the USSR would have been a great magnetic pole of attraction for
the toilers of the world and the inviolability of the Soviet Union would have been
assured. But the infamous oppressive regime of Stalin has deprived the USSR of its
attractive power. ...
The goal of the Fourth International is to extend the October Revolution to the whole
world and at the same time to regenerate the USSR by purging it of the parasitic
bureaucracy. This can be achieved only in one way: by the workers, peasants, Red
Army soldiers, and Red Navy sailors rising against the new caste of oppressors and"
parasites. To prepare this uprising, a new party is needed-a bold and honest
revolutionary organization of the advanced workers. The Fourth International sets as
its task the building of such a party in the USSR.
- Leon Trotsky, "Letter to the Workers of the USSR" (April 1940)
This holiday season Bush & Co., along
with their Democratic Party elves, have
many gifts to offer: from billions in
handouts to the S&L bandits, to the fed-
eral budget designed to line the pockets
of the rich while soaking the poor. For"
the rest-more immiserization for work-
ers, blacks, Hispanics, the old and the
sick. For the class-war prisoners-those
men and women locked in this system's
jails for opposition to class, racial and
social oppression-the holiday season
marks the end of another 365 days away
from their families and their comrades,
away from the living social struggles
which first brought down the state's
repressive fist upon them.
The imperialist oil grab in the Persian
Gulf threatens the world with a war that
promises the death of countless thou-
sands of poor and working people. Fear-
ing long overdue social explosions, the
government seeks to strengthen its appa-
arti!iau 'Defeu8e
o......ittee
!-..iiiiiiiiijjjiiiiiiiiii
Holiday Appeal for the
Class-War Prisoners
Come to a Fundraising Party!
Music Dancing Food

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Workers Vanguard (USPS098,770) published biweekly, except 2nd Issue August and with 3-week interval December,
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No. 515 30 November 1990
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2 WORKERS VANGUARD
Turkey in tbe Desert-Bush Beats Drumsticks for War
u.s. Soldiers: "This Isn't Our War!"
HOWYOlJR

/
toIAJMORA/,
I'M6Ue55/NG.
c.:
has now committed over half of total
U.S. combat strength worldwide,includ-
ing three-quarters of its Marine combat
forces, "two-thirds of the Army's. most
potent heavy tank units" and "more-than
half of the Navy's aircraft carrier battle
groups" (Washington Post, 11 Novem-
ber). The force is so large that, to the
dismay of the desert-weary troops al-
.ready deployed, the Pentagon canceled
plans for rotation because "there are
not enough active-duty forces to replace
them."
But even with the latest reinforce-
ments, Iraq's battle-hardened army will
still have more men on the ground and
continued on page 7
I WOND&f<. IAJHAT
7He0iJ2MAN'S (j()/NG

ABOUT7VlJAy...

bombed, and the product-test polls indi-
cated that only the "nuclear threat" was
a winner. So U.S. "intelligence" sources
promptly readjusted their estimate of the
time remaining before Hussein gets some
nukes from ten years to... two months,
conveniently within the time frame of
Bush's war.
It's clear Bush & Co. are intent on a
very bloody war no matter what. Bush
There have been lots of complaints
that the administration had failed to
"sell" war on Iraq to the American pub-
lic. So in Madison Avenue style, they're
rewriting their pitch like they do ads for
Tide. The previous appeals-defending
oil, jobs or "our way of life"-all
aptly put it, "the four leaders of Con-
gress trailed along." But the polls have
definitely tilted against Bush's war.
The Iatest New York Times/CBS News
poll shows 51 percent of Americans
against his sending an additional 200,000
troops to the Gulf; among blacks it was
70 percent opposed. So Bush conjured up .
yet another rationale-stopping Iraq's
dictator from getting nuclear weapons.
we doing here! Why are we over here?
We aren't supposed to be here-this isn't
our war!"
For the most part, the media duti-
fully focused on Bush's prepackaged
war propaganda messages as he walked
among the troops and, as the Times
DOONESBURY
This year Thanksgiving was turned
into a sound bite for war as the U.S.
commander in chief landed in Saudi
Arabia to talk turkey with the troops in
the desert..The New York Times (23 No-
vember) noted with relief that "there
were none of the embarrassing offers of
hot drinking water that marred an earlier
visit by Secretary of State James A.
Baker 3d." They omitted the fact that
Bush mingled with only a preselected
handful of soldiers who were specially
briefed to mouth enthusiasm for the
"mission" which still lacks a popular
rationale.
Before he arrived Bush bragged, "I
have never felt more secure in going any
place than I do in going to see our troops
over there." Perhaps this was because
the troops who chowed down with him
"had to take out their bullets and remove
the bolts from their M-16 rifles before
he arrived" (Newsday, 23 November).
No kidding. And just to be on the safe
side, live-fire artillery exercises were
canceled so that Bush's helicopter would
"be able to fly all over the desert with-
out danger of being shot down by one
of his own troops," explained one artil-
lery officer to the Washington Post (23
November).
Even the New York Times (23 Novern-
ber), which usually finds such news unfit
to print, wrote that a passing truck of
soldiers shouted to reporters, "I want to
go home! This isn't our war! What are
Iron Lady" Thatcher Abdicates
LONDON, November 27-After more
than eleven bitter years, during which
she viciously ground the faces of workers
and minorities into the ground, the "Iron
Lady" of British politics is finally gone.
On November 22, Margaret Thatcher
resigned as leader of the ruling Conser-
vative Party and therefore as prime min-
ister. The new Tory leader, Chancellor of
the Exchequer John Major, a previous
nobody, was elected today, in anticipa-
tion of a general election some time next
year. So now the prospect is one of a
"reformed" Tory government or a Labour
government under right-wing scabherder
Neil Kinnock.
Discontent with the' Thatcher gov-
ernment was massive. Trade unionists,
minorities and the poor have always
despised her. The middle classes are
reeling under skyrocketing inflation and
mortgage rates, top ruling echelons are
worried by her attempts to sabotage
"European integration," and everyone
hates the soak-the-poor poll tax. In
Scotland, used as a guinea pig for the
tax and sharply hit by the Thatcherite
devastation of industry, the Tory' party
is almost irrelevant, running a poor
third behind Labour and the bourgeois-
nationalist Scottish National Party.
Thatcher's longevity in office was in
large measure due to the grovelling loy-
alty of Neil Kinnock's Labour Party and
the Labourite Trades Union Congress
(TUC) leaders. Twice since, she took
office in 1979, Thatcher and her govern-
ment were in some danger of being top-
pled through sharp.classstruggle: first,
during the bitter three-month-long steel
strike of 1980, then four years later as
the militant miners union waged a heroic
year-long battle against mass layoffs and
union-busting which galvanised workers
and minorities throughout the country.
So isolated and widely hated was
Thatcher in the course of the-miners
strike that the IRA achieved a peak in
popularity among the British population
when it planted a bomb at the 1984
Tory party conference that nearly blew
away the Iron Lady and her entire
government. Yet the Labour/TUC leaders
sabotaged every class-struggle challenge
to Thatcher's rule, coldbloodedly knifing
the miners.
in the end, Thatcher's downfall was
engineered by those who seek to restore
an effective bourgeois authority. She was
ousted by the vmenin the gray suits"
(big business and the City of London
financial moguls). The executive commit-
tee of the British bourgeoisie decided
that her services were no longer required
as they seek to politically rearm in the
face of depression and impending war. A
bitter Conservative power struggle has
been out in the open since Sir Geoffrey
Howe, until recently the sole Cabinet
member left from her original 1979Cabi-
net, resigned as foreign secretary over
Thatcher's opposition to "European eco-
nomic integration;' and then launched a
sharp attack in a parliamentary speech.
After former Cabinet minister Michael
Heseltine's challenge for party leader
received 152 votes to Thatcher's 204,
forcing a second ballot, her Cabinet let
her know that her time was, up. Shortly
before her resignation, the Tory Sunday
Times (18 November) bade "A reluctant
goodbye," as its editorial was titled, to
the Thatcher regime: "It .now presides
over an economy mired in stagflation.
The poll tax-the conception of which.
was a mistake, its birth a mess and its
infancy an expensive embarrassment-e-
has proved to be the most unpopular tax
in modem British history. All the per-
fumes in the government's boudoir can-
not make it smell sweet."
For many dissident Tory MPs, naked
was motive enough to back
-the.intemal- revoltCmshingby-election .
Cambio 16
GratUitously vicious PM Margaret
Thatcher became liability, so Tory
,moneymen dumped her.
defeats in Eastbourne, Bradford and
Bootle, as well as umpteen public opin-
ion polls, made it abundantly clear that
Thatcher was an electoral liability. Not
surprisingly, Thatcher & Co. sought to
whip up a "Falklands factor." "Thatcher
Plays' the Gulf Card: 'War Leader'
Warns Off Heseltine,' headlined the
[London] Guardian (8 November).
But-it largely came to nought. Kinnock
has screamed louder than the Tories for
war in the Gulf. Former defence minister
Heseltine, no slouch himself when it
comes to beating- the imperialist war
drums, has close ties with the officer
corps and presided over the proliferation
of NATO nuclear weapons as defence
minister in the early 1980s. Richard
Cheney, U.S. defense secretary, vouched
for him: "I happen to be a fan of Mag-
gie Thatcher's .... But Mr; Heseltine's
policies towards the Gulf have basic-
ally been the same" ([London] Times,
19 November).
Above all, what triggered massive
revolt against the government, from the
Tory shires of southern England to the
working class and plebeian poor of the
large cities, was the gratuitously cruel
poll tax. In March, 200,000 protested
against the poll tax in London, repelling
a police rampage. Ever attuned to the
wishes of the Labour Party leadership,
which denounced and sought to stifle any
struggle against the poll tax, the legalistic
Militant Tendency leadership of the anti-
poll-tax federation initially offered to
finger protesters to the cops. Again last
month hundreds of protesters were beaten
up and dozens arrested by rioting cops
who attacked a picket of Brixton Prison,
where four anti-poll-tax activists are
serving sentences.
Fake-left groups such as Tony Cliff's
Socialist Workers Party or Workers Pow-
er fill their press with militant sounding
anti-Thatcher rhetoric. With Heseltine on
the scene, the SWP said, "Take Advan-
tage of Tory Splits-Get Them All Out"
(Socialist Worker, 17 November). Work-
ers Power crowed that "Tory woes are
good news for the workers" and worried
that "a swing to the Liberals... would
damage Labour's victory chances." The
Labour entrists of Militant and Socialist
Organiser drone away with identical pro-
Kinnock "Kick them all out!" appeals.
But anti- Thatcherism does not equate to
anti-capitalism. As we wrote last March,
at the height of the anti-poll-tax protests:
"The poll tax is likely to be ephemeral,
with the strong probability that its chief
. architect and advocate .will shortly go
down the tubes. While there are large
numbers of people who despise both Kin-
nock and his henchmen for enforcing this
onerous tax, on a national level public
opinion polls show the Labour Party has
a huge lead over the Tories. But that
continued on page 10
3G NOVEMBER' 1990 3
IS
ALLY \JITH

. hoto Young partacus
Spartacist contingent (left) marching in October 20 NYC antiwar protest. Sign in Spanish demands: "Break the Blockade of Iraqi" Spartacus Youth Clubs mobilized
students to join labor/black mobilization that stopped KKK from rallying in Philly, November 1988.
SpartacusYouth. Clubs:
What We Stand For
Bush and the Democrats are plunging
headlong into war in the Persian Gulf.
America's rulers have seized the sup-
posed end of the Cold War as their op-
portunity for hot war. They've grabbed
the oil and want to regain supremacy as
top cops of the world. And they want you
as the cannon fodder for their profits and
their global imperialist ambitions which
threaten humanity with a nuclear third
world war. Working-class youth, particu-
larly blacks and Latinos, are being sent
to die in the Saudi sands. To stop imperi-
alist war we have to fight the capitalist
system that breeds it.
War is not an accident of foreign pol-
icy, it is the direct consequence of the
capitalist economic system. World Wars
I and II grew out of the competition for
control of markets for exploitation and
resulted in the deaths of millions of
working people for the profits of their
masters. Today, our greedy rulers have
destroyed the industrial base of this
country while lining their own pockets
with the paper wealth of junk bonds.
The U.S. wants to make up for its fail-
ing economy with brute military force,
squeezing its imperialist rivals Germany
and Japan by controlling the oil spigot,
and sticking it to the Soviet Union. Elect-
ing a new leadership of the same ruling
class is no answer-the Democrats are
the party of Hiroshima, the Korean War,
the carpet bombing of Vietnam, and the
original sponsors of the bloody Salvado-
ran death squad regime.
Working people and minorities who've
been ground down by a decade of union-
busting, givebacks, and racist attacks,
and youth who face a "future" of death
in a chemwar suit have no interest in
fighting a war for U.S. imperialism.
What can you do about it? Student pro-
test can register discontent, but isolated
from economic production, students lack
the social weight necessary to change the
world. And youth are not a class-some
will enter the ranks of the proletariat _
while others will become bourgeois rul-
ers, technicians and ideologues. It's the
4
racially integrated working class, which
produces the wealth of society, that has
the power to replace this whole system
of exploitation and war. The road to
realizing that power is revolutionary class
struggle led by a Leninist vanguard party
-a tribune of the' people-to fight on
behalf of all of the oppressed for a so-
cialist future of equality, material plenty
and peace.
A key aspect, without which success
is impossible, is to link labor and youth
to a socialist perspective: the struggle
for a society in which capital has been
expropriated from private ownership
and those who produce society's wealth
rule. The' Spartacus Youth Clubs are
the student and youth affiliates of the
Spartacist League/U..S., a section of the
International Communist League. We
. base our program on the politics of
Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and take as
our example the Bolshevik Party's suc-
cessful leadership of the working class
to power in the Russian Revolution of
1917. We stand for:
Anti-imperialism abroad means class
struggle a/home! The Spartacus Youth
Clubs fight for class struggle here and in
the Near East to drive the U.S. out of the
Persian Gulf and. bring the working
masses to power. Unlike reformists and
fake socialists whose opposition to U.S.
war moves consists of pressuring the
Democrats (who support the war buildup)
or even endorsing the United Nations
sanctions and blockade, we take a side
for the defeat of U.S. imperialism and
the military defense of Iraq. Saddam
Hussein is indeed a butcher of his own
people and should be brought down by
the Iraqi workers and national minorities.
Such a perspective would be brought
immeasurably closer by a military defeat
of the American imperialists who now
seek to depose their former ally through
bloody subjugation of the' Arab peoples.
The :organized working class must
be mobilized against the war machine:
For labor political strikes against the
impending war! One solid strike by
longshoremen against transport of muni-
tions to the Gulf would pack more punch
than a hundred peace crawls in Wash-
ington. What stands in the way of this
kind of proletarian opposition is a union
"leadership" that would rather roll over
than oppose the government. We say:
Break the blockade of Iraq! Defeat U.S.
imperialism!
A workers party to fight for !J social-
ist revolution. Today America has a one-
party system-the property party of
"Republicrats," which is also the war
party. The working class is saddled with
pro-capitalist union tops (what Daniel De
Leon called the "labor lieutenants of
capital") who preach the "unity" of inter-
ests of the exploited with their exploiters
and have accepted the desperate con-
ditions and defeats suffered by blacks
and all workers in the past decade with-
out a fight. They keep labor chained to
the Democrats. We need a revolutionary
workers party to organize and lead the
struggles of working people in defense
of their own interests and for their own
class rule.
The Spartacus Youth Clubs fight to
ally students with the power of the work-
ing class. We are the youth auxiliary to
class struggle and revolutionary opposi-
tion in the labor movement. From cam-
pus workers? strikes to the battle at the
New York Daily News we've brought
students out to help build picket lines
that mean don't-cross. We say: Break
with the Democrats and Republicans-
Build a Workers Party!
For labor/black defense against racist
attacks. The Spartacus Youth Clubs have
consistently fought against the upsurge
of racist atrocities on campus. Racial
oppression permeates capitalist society
and its every institution: the job market,
schools, housing, the military, the "jus-
tice" system. Black people are subjugated
as a race-color caste: last hired, first
fired and segregated at the bottom of the
economy. Today, an enormous number
of black youth can't even get jobs or
education-they've been thrown on the
scrap heap as an expendable "surplus"
population this government has no use
for. Despite the promises of equality held
out since the Civil War against chattel
slavery and the civil rights movement
against Jim Crow, there can be no eman-
cipation within' a system that's based on
class exploitation and racial oppression!
Aclass-struggle perspective in Ameri-
ca requires the fusion of the fight for
black liberation with proletarian revolu-
tion. There is no separate road to black
equality-where working people have
been divided, the result has always been
defeat for minorities and for labor. The
black power that can turn this country
around is the power of black workers-
as leaders of a multiracial revolutionary
vanguard party to defend the integrated
unions and mobilize labor in defense of
the ghetto masses. From Atlanta to Phil-
ly, Chicago and elsewhere, the Spartacus
Youth Clubs have helped build massive
labor/black mobilizations that stopped
Klan and Nazi race-hate terrorists in their
tracks. Finish the Civil War! Black lib-
eration through socialist revolution!
Free, quality education for alL Educa-
tion should be a right, not a privilege.
The American ruling classdoesn't need
or want educated working-class or minor-
ity youth. They want scared, obedient,
and ignorant youth who won't grind
the gears of their war machine or their
profit system. To redress the race and
class bias of education in this society,
the Spartacus Youth Clubs fight for
open admissions, no tuition and a living
stipend for all students. The elite pri-
vate universities should be nationalized.
Against illusions in the university admin-
istrations, we fight for student/teacher/
worker control of the universities.
Women's liberation through socialist
revolution. Abortion rights are under
attack by politicians and the Supreme
Court while "right to life" terrorists
bomb abortion clinics. Young women are
literally being forced to bear children
or seek back-alley abortions because of
continued on page 6
WORKERS VANGUARD
Student Protests
Rock France
Our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste
de France (LTF) have fought for an
alliance of students with the social power
of the multi-ethnic working class and
against illusions in the police. On No-
vember IS, the LTF issued a leaflet
denouncing the bourgeoisie's. sinister
equation that "youth + beurs + blacks =
'violence." and demanded "the imme-
diate release of all the victims of the
police provocation and repression!"
Young Spartacus is pleased to reprint
here a translation of a leaflet distributed
by our French comrades on November 12
to the huge student demonstrations in
Paris, Lyon and Rouen.
the pro-social-democratic police "union"
serving as self-imposed marshals for the
demonstration. Scores of plainclothes
cops and dozens of fascist provocateurs
in the midst of the students' ranks
opened the, way for provocations re-
sulting in the smashing of shop win-
dows. When students tried to flee this
set-up and continue their march, they
were blocked from crossing the Seine
and tear gassed. A few dozen youth
were picked up at random, tried in Star
Chamber-like conditions and railroaded
into prison-the severity of their sen-
tences being in direct relation to their
skin color.
Iurpin/Syqrna
French students say, "We want it all and we want it now!" For a May '68 that
goes all the way!
the economic status of their parents-the
superexploited workers strategically
placed at the core of the industrial prole-
tariat of France-because there are no
jobs to be had. A recent study showed
that only one out of five students could
find work after leaving school, and 60 to
70 percent of those landed only low-paid,
intermittent employment.
The student protests have exposed the
liberal bourgeois lie that academic
success is the shoo-in to a secure future.
But the fake-left is peddling an even
more dangerous lie, that the capitalist
ruling class can be pressured into re-
adjusting its priorities for human needs
instead of profits. A so-called "far-left"
group, Lutte Ouvriere (affiliated with the
subreformist Spark group in the U.S.)
even has a demand which can be sum-
marized as "More money for more cops,"
who should be "closer to the population."
Tell it to the beurs or their parents
who are terrorized every day by these
enforcers of racist, capitalist "law and
order."
Illusions in "socialist" Mitterrand-
fostered by the fake-lefts-led to a dan-
. gerous police trap in the streets of Paris
on' November 12. Some 200,000 stu-
dents marched from the -Bastille-s-with
In the beginning of October, youth in
Vaulx-en-Velin (a working-class suburb/
ghetto of Lyon, populated by mainly
North African immigrants) exploded in
rage after one of them was killed by the
police.
Soon after, high school students across
France poured into the streets in massive
demonstrations protesting their lousy
education and bleak future, echoing the
cry of anger of the Vaulx-en-Velin youth
-symbol of immigrants, beurs (French-
born children of North African immi-
grants) and other youth confined in
ghetto-like suburbs.
It was a mobilization of multi-ethnic
youth who, in French society, are the ,
layer least corrupted by poisonous ra-
cism. Their demands boiled down to "We
want it all-we want it now!"
French president Mitterrand and his
bourgeois masters were afraid of a repeat
of May that the working
class might rush into the breach opened
by rebellious youth and, this time, settle
accounts with this vicious regime of
terror and austerity. They were scared of
the student revolt because of its anti-
racist character.
The protests involved thousands of
beurs. They can't even hope to achieve
"We Want It AII-
We Want It Now!"
Yes, and This Is How
A tempestuous wind of student revolt
from the working-class and immigrant
suburbs is blowing across Mitterrand's
France-a rotting society ofracist terror,
unemployment, propaganda on the sup-
posed "death of Communism," and the
ominous rise of the fascists.
High school students: you want a
quality education. You must fight to
abolish all forms of the selection sys-
tem-the high school diploma [bacca-
laureat], the obstacle course of grades
and exams, the flunk-outs from the
academic system of those with poor
grades-which perpetuates the special
oppression of working-class, minority
youth and women. All youth must have
the right to attend the classes they want.
For open admissions to universities and
a living stipend for all!
But the purpose of an education sys-
tem under decaying capitalism is not to
provide quality education for all, but to
meet the needs of a system based on
production for profit, and to train use-
ful servants capable of creating wealth
without disrupting the peace and idle-
ness of the bourgeoisie. There's just one
solution: revolution!
You are penned in the ghetto suburbs
under the watchful eye of the cops, the
armed fist of the state. High school stu-
dents marching in Paris chanted: "We are
all from Vaulx-en-Velin." Others chant-
ed, "No to segregation." These youth
show the way forward. Cops out of the
immigrant neighborhoods! Cops, guards,
priests out of the high schools and uni-
versities! Oust your leaders who invited
the cops to your demonstration; .the
"democratic cops" of the FASP [a social-
democratic police "union"] are no less
your enemies! Full citizenship rights for
immigrant workers and their families!
Porlabor/immigrant/Jewish mobilizations
to smash the fascists!
During the student movement of 1986
against the Devaquet "reforms," it was
the enormous social power of the trade
unions which brought down the Chirac
government when, after the assassination
of Malik Oussekine, the unions an-
nounced their intention to support the
students' struggle with strike action. At
a minimum, what is necessary today is
a general strike throughout the national
education system. High school students
want a decent future and a decent life.
For that you need a secure and well-paid
continued on page 6
Racist Curfew Against At/onto Youth
ATLANTA-With a show of "get tough
on crime" bullying, on November 19
black Democratic mayor Maynard H.
Jackson slapped a curfew on this city's
youth. The law is a battering ram in
the "war on drugs," which is mainly
a war on black people. "We will make
it more difficult for children to use
drugs by limiting unsupervised time," the
mayor says (Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
9 November).
Curfews and police crackdowns are
nothing new in "the city too busy to
hate." When the KKK rallied at the grave
of Martin Luther King Jr., residents of
nearby housing projects were made pris-
oners in their own homes and forbidden
to go in or out. This law is part of a
drive to "clean up" the city for the Super
Bowl in 1994 and the summer Olympic
Games in 1996. When big bucks come to
town, "dangerous" black youth are to be
made invisible.
The next step in the mayor's anti-
crime blitz is an ordinance aimed at the
homeless that will make it illegal to pan-
handle or congregate in public parking
lots or vacant buildings. So, a govern-
ment that can't feed the hungry or house
the homeless has finally found a "solu-
tion" -criminalize poverty and mug the
youth! Meanwhile the legions of Atlan-
ta's homeless will grow as Techwood
Homes, the oldest public housing in the
U.S., will be razed to make way for an
Olympic Village-no provisions have
been made yet to house those the city
will dump into the streets.
This curfew law allows police-state
powers to racist cops who are empow-
ered to stop anyone under 17 years of
age unaccompanied by an' adult after
11:00 p.m. on weeknights or midnights
on weekends.vYouthhave to prove that
they're coming from school or work to
avoid detention by the police. It's agro-
tesque example of the state aeting in loco
parentis; deputy police chiefW.J. Taylor
warns, "Most officers are perceptive
enough to determine if a kid is lying."
Sure, and most city kids are wise enough
to know the cops can be just plain "loco"
enough to blow you away.
On top of targeting the kid, parents of
"repeat offenders" can be fined up to
$1,000 or jailed for up to 60 days at a
judge's whim. It doesn't take a civil
libertarian to see that the First Amend-
ment might as well be written on toilet
paper since the rights of youth are being
flushed away. Robin McVoy, 16, cap-
tured the essence of the law: "It sucks.
If you're not causing trouble, what's
the problem with being outside? It's
the same thing as censorship." Even
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked,
"What's next in Atlanta? Borrow South
Africa'spass laws? ... Take the big step
and declare martial law?"
For all practical purposes the city is
already a South African-style bantustan,
where a layer of black bootlickers keep
the majority o'f black people locked in
grinding poverty and the social pathology
of drugs and crime, and locked out of
the economic wealth controlled by the
big bosses at Coca-Cola. Inside Atlanta's
1-285 perimeter, blacks are terrified by
the violent drug trade, left out of the
city's mythical "New South" bustle and
greatly demoralized by entrenched pover-
.ty,joblessness and hopelessness. Outside
the perimeter in mainly white Gwinnett,
residents rail about the "threat" of be-
coming "a Belgian Congo" if masstran-
sit is extended to their suburbs. This cli-
mate is ripe for the very real threat from
growing fascist Klan and Nazi scum.
From black overseer Mayor Jackson to
community-control pusher Jabari Simama
and city councilwoman Davetta Johnson
who introduced the curfew, this repres-
sive law is backed by black Democrats
who claim to be responding to the shoot-
ings of youth in drug-related violence.
These misleaders help foster the illusions
in the drug witchhunt and "making the
cops work for you" that run deep in
the black community. Atthe Atlanta Uni-
versity Center, black students wrongly
called for more cops on campus for
"protection" from the surrounding black
ghetto, after a student was slain by mug-
ging teens. Their demand shows the
class-biased notion that collegiate blacks .
are somehow "better" than their econom-
ically deprived brothers and sisters. But
cops on the prowl for youth after hours
won't ask for a college ID before locking
them up-or worse. In racist, capital-
ist America, skin color is the defining
"pass."
The answer of this rotting system to
the social pathology of ghetto oppression
is to criminalize youth, make wholesale
roundups, build more prisons and keep
black people locked out for good. For
Marxists, stop-and-detain curfews and
laws that criminalize drugs are reaction-
ary extensions of police power aimed at
regimenting the population and victimiz-
ing the victims. When they tum 18, these
same youths who are herded off to jail
after 11:00 p.m. could be "allowed" to
die for the racist, white ruling class in
the sands of Saudi Arabia-at any hour!
The Spartacus Youth Club 'demands:
Down with the racist curfew!.
30 NOVEMBER 1990 5
Black Soldier Singled Out lor Prosecution
Defend Ronald Jean-Baptiste!
Black troops herded off to the Saudi
sands to defend "our way of life" are
discovering that the military is no
haven from the "American way" of rae-
ist discrimination. The troops in the
Gulf, disproportionately. black and La-
tino (some 44 percent of all women
deployed are black!), know they have
no interest in getting their butts blown
off for 'il government that's never given
them any opportunities at home. Re-
servists who entered the military be-
cause there are no jobs, or in hope of
learning a skill, or to get financial
assistance for college, are now trying to
get out. Several dozen reservists have
refused to ship out, but the government
has singled out one black soldier among
them for prosecution and a possible
court-martial.
Ronald Jean-Baptiste, a Haitian re-
servist in the Air Force's 34th Medical
Service Squadron who was called up
for active duty in October, recruited his
buddies to donate to a Red Cross blood
drive, only to have his own blood re-
jected because he's Haitian. (The entire
Haitian population has been outrageous-
ly stigmatized as a "diseased" people
whose blood is banned from the na-
tion's blood supply by order of the
Food and Drug Administration.) That
this government deemed his blood
good enough to spill in the, Persian
Gulf for the profits, of Big Oil, but
not good enough for the blood supply
where it might enter the veins of a
white person, made Jean-Baptiste ques-
tion the whole purpose of the military
mobilization:
"I'm taking a position. Haitian people
can't continue to take this crap.... Who
gives us the right to say, 'I'm the police
of the world.' Israel, they're committing
all kinds of massacres. Why doesn't
Bush do something about that? How
about South Africa?"
If court-rnartialed by the military,
this courageous man could be locked up
in the brig and carry a "dishonorable
discharge" around for life. We say:
Hands off Ronald Jean-Baptiste! It's
the government that ought to be on trial
for killing the youth of this country and
the systematic discrimination and op-
pression of black people. Down with
the Haitian blood ban!
Record numbers of reservists are
applying for "conscientious objector"
(C.O.) status to get out of the war. At
the New School in New York City, a
"Hands Off Sam" movement has grown
around Sam Lwin, a Marine reservist of
Burmese descent who explains, "They
say they can teach you a skill, and give
you adventure, but it's really all about
killing.... They tried to completely
dehumanize us in order to start all over
and turn us into 'real men" (Newsday,
22 November). The level of discontent
and political opposition within the
military is a big problem for the Penta-
gon. As Sam Lwin's lawyer said, if the
military denies C.O. status to Lwin and
others, "they will spread disaffection
wherever they go."
But ultimately the war machine can't
be stopped through individual acts of
resistance. 'Fake-leftists like Workers
World Party promote this myth, chant-
ing, "Hell no, we won't go-we won't
fight for Texaco," recalling the idiotic
New Leftist query,"Suppose they gave
a war and nobody came?" What bunk.
Until the ruling class is expropriated it
will get its army by hook or by crook.
In the event of a draft army, black and
working-class youth simply don't have
the option of taking off to Canada. As
opposed to individual acts of draft
resistance, which during the Vietnam
War simply cut off middle-class radi-
cals from the working-class and minor-
ity draftees, we Marxists went in with
our class to organize the seething dis-
content within the armed forces into
class opposition to the government.
Unlike during the Vietnam War, to-
day's military has no draft-but the
burden of service continues to be borne
by people with far less money and
darker skins than the rulers whose
interests they're sent to die for. A
perceptive .article on class and war
(New York Times, 13 November) asks,
"Would President Bush be slower to
send the troops if among them were
the sons and daughters of members
of Congress, top newspaper editors
and the foreign policy establishment?"
Hands off Jean-Baptiste! For class
struggly-- against the criminal war aims
of this' government.
they suppress, slander and attempt to seal
off (even through the use of police force)
genuine leftists from activities they initi-
ate, and even hide their own wretched
politics, all in pursuit of maintaining
a "safe" political homogeneity for the
Democratic Party leaders they pander to.
Other groups like the Workers League
and the Socialist Workers Party ban other
groups' members from, their "public"
meetings and bookstores. Political lies
are but surrogates for political violence.
In our local offices we carry the press
of the most interesting sections of the
entire radical movement and reprint their
best critiques of our organization in our
own "Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Sparta-
cist League" pamphlet series. Unlike
those who have chased after whatever
movement.however reactionary, seemed
popular at the moment (from Khomeini 's
"Islamic revolution" to Polish Solidar-
nose), we've told the truth and are proud
of our record. The work, history and
views of our political tendency are avail-
able for public view in carefully indexed
and bound volumes of our press.
If you want to do something about
the racism and oppression endemic to
this system, if you want to eliminate
the threat of nuclear annihilation,
then it's high time to join the struggle
for a socialist America. The way to
start is by joining a Spartacus Youth
Club. The Spartacus Youth Clubs are
schools of revolutionary action and
education. Join us!. '
the two national student coalitions, will',
betray you to preserve their ratherprivi-
leged relationship with the Mitterrand
goveniment-a government of warmon-
gers and unemployment. They're either
preaching "reconciliation" with the cops
(e.g., SOS-Racisme, Lutte Ouvriere) or
trying to sell you the lie that this govern-
ment can be persuaded to defend your
interests.
The ruling classcan barely disguise its
worry over a protest movement that is
growing and has aroused expectations
which only a victorious proletarian revo-
lution-like the 1917 Revolution led by
Lenin and Trotsky-can fulfill. Yes,
what's needed today is a May 1968 that
goes all the way! Join the Ligue Trots-
kyste, French section of the International
Communist League (Fourth International-
ist). We have a world to win.
-Ligue Trotskyste-de France
11 November 1990
France...
(continued from page 5) ~
job. Now, especially as thousands of
layoffs are announced in auto, a tradi-
tional workers' stronghold, high school
students must take up the demands: Not
one layoff and not one factory closing!
Down. with temporary work without ben-
efits! Equal pay for equal work!
War minister Chevenement, who
makes no distinction between school and
the army, says these youths in revolt lack
a sense of patriotism. He will be ready
to send these youths to die in the Persian
Gulf for the interests of an imperialism
that has bled white the same peoples that
many of these youths come from. The
fight for a better future also requires -
defending Iraq against imperialist aggres-
sion. Break the blockade of Iraq!
Mitterrand's lackeys, who are leading
believe the clash of opinion and test in
action of the various farces claiming to
be socialists is a crucial element in rais-
ing the consciousness of working people
and less experienced youth. Thus when
we initiate a united-front activity, rally
speakers reflect the differing views rep-
resented among the participants. Where
we differ with views expressed by others,
we openly state our criticisms-we re-
ject the prevailing practice of political
censorship!
Contrast this with the actions of groups
like the Workers World Party. Our forth-
right presentation of our political views
places such cowards in a bad light. So
* * *
WvPhoto
New York City, 5 July 1989: Spartacus Youth Clubs fight for free abortion on
demand and an end to "squeal rules" that target youth.
Angola, gave in to a capitalist takeover
of East Germany and now threatens the
Soviet Union itself with a plan to restore
the capitalist market. This would be a
huge setback for the world working class.
Today workers in Eastern Europe are
discovering that the "miracle of the
marketplace" means unemployment and
destitution 'for, them., Basic social and
economic rights (such as employment,
.housing, education and health care) were
the benefits of the overturn of capitalism
and a society based on'a planned, collec-
tivized economy. We Trotskyists defend
the Soviet Union from domestic counter-
revolution and imperialist attack. Oust
the bureaucrats-workers councils to
power!
Our comrades in the Spartakist Work-
ers Party of Germany have fought down
the line against a capitalist Fourth Reich
and for the revolutionary unity of the
German, Polish and Soviet workingelass.
Our comrades in the newly founded
Spartacist Group of Poland were won
to the program of Trotskyism in battle
against Solidarnosc' drive for capital-
ist counterrevolution. On November 7 of
this, year, Spartacist slogans ana our
red flag emblazoned with the communist
hammer and sickle and "4" of Trotsky's
Fourth International were carried in
Leningrad's Palace Square, birthplace of
the October Revolution.
With the prolonged breakdown of the
socialist and labor movement, many
purported socialist organizations turned
inward, becoming peculiar and sectarian.
~ The Spartacus Youth Clubs resolutely
fight this perversion of Marxism. We
Spartacus .
Youth Clubs...
(continued from page 4)
"squeal rules" on the books in 33 states
which require parental or state consent
for minors to obtain abortions or birth
control. The Spartacus Youth Clubs fight
against all "age of consent" laws and for
free abortion on demand.
The nuclear family is the main source
of women's special oppression under
capitalism. As a social institution, the
family separates women from the, work-
force, keeping them cloistered at home,
and serves as a key means for the inheri-
, tance of property and instilling authority.
To reinforce "family values" and mold
a generation of docile, obedient youth,
the government is even censoring "dan-
gerous" rock 'n' roll lyrics! At the same
time, the government is ripping apart
the families of poor women with the
"workfare" law which requires welfare
recipients to take any subhuman.job al-
lotted to them or risk having their chil-
dren taken away. ..
These attacks on women go hand in
hand with the state-sponsored gay-
bashing-the refusal of the government
to adequately fund research or care for
people with AIDS. Unlike feminists who
draw a sex line instead of a class line
and unite with bourgeois politicians' at
the expense of poor and minority women,
we Marxists fight for the working class
to champion the rights of women and
homosexuals.
Defend the Soviet Union! For the revo-
lutionary internationalism of Lenin and
Trotsky! The capitalists are gloating over
the "death of Communism," but what is
dying before our eyes is Stalinism-the
antithesis of everything genuine Commu-
nists stand for. More than 50 years ago,
Leon Trotsky described the Soviet Union
as a "degenerated workers state"-a
contradictory society based on the funda-
mental gains of the 1917 proletarian
revolution yet governed by a bureaucracy
that threatened the very existence of
those conquests by the working class.
Under the lying watchword of "socialism
in one country," Stalin betrayed the
revolutionary internationalist goals of the
Russian Revolution in vain pursuit of
"peaceful coexistence" with imperialism. '
The Gorbachev regime deserted Af-
ghanistan, pushed the Cubans out of
6 WORKERS VANGUARD
WVPhoto
Hundreds of striking Daily News drivers, pressmen and Guild members hold
Thanksgiving midnight march In the streets around Brooklyn printing plant.
At 1:00 a.m., Thanksgiving night,
there were 50 or so striking drivers mill-
ing around outside Freddy's Bar in Fort
Greene, Brooklyn around the comer from
the Daily News printing plant. Thinly
manned police lines, smaller than usual
on the holiday, separated pickets from
the Pacific Street plant housing the
scab-run presses (and the Atlantic Ave-
nue parking lot housing scab trucks and
cars). Then over 500 strikers came
marching in from Dean Street in military
formation. .
Chantsof t'Union Union!" and "Scabs
go honl"e in body were undoubt-
edly heard by the strikebreakers inside
the Daily News plant, printing what is
traditionally the largest paper of the year,
filled with ads for the holiday weekend
sales. The union battalion was told it was
being assembled to see to it that the
News didn't go out. Strikers came for
scab-busting, but instead they were pa-
raded around nearly deserted Brooklyn
streets. As they circled, some of the
strikers called out the, obvious, "Why not
storm the plant?"
A striking driver told Workers Van-
guard the next day that the officials were
blowing off steam: "The picket last night
was really kind of unproductive. It was
just a show of manpower." The strikers
"still in a w.ay respect the boss man's
property," he said. But he pointed to the
power of a plant occupation:
"Just go for it. Go for broke. You've got
nothing to lose. If we did storm the plant,
close it up, stop his production, you'd be
on the inside. You'd be an effective
force, and the scabs on the outside."
Exactly.
The Daily News strike is a-month old.
The unions are ina strong position. Rov-
ing pickets of drivers and pressmen have
effectively kept the scabloid off the
newsstands. Big-time advertisers like
Macy's and A&S department stores have
given up on the News' lying circulation
figures and canceled their ads. The Trib-
une Company even had to yank their
spokesscab Lisa Robinson off the air.
When she declared "New Yorkers are
creatures of habit," it was the last straw.
How would she know?
The newspaper unions have got News
publisher Hoge and Tribune Co. union-
buster in chief Brumback by the balls.
Now is the time to squeeze. No strike
wins by fighting the bosses to a draw.
Allied Printing Trades Council adviser
poe Notes...
(continued from page 2)
(#6434), Debbie Sims Africa' (#6307),
Janet Holloway Africa Janine
Phillips Africa (#6309), MerleAustin
Africa (#6306) and Susan Leon Africa
(#6325). Carlos Africa (AM7400) is at
the State Correctional Facility, Drawer
K, Dallas, PA 18612, and Charles Sims
Africa (#41793-066), U.S.P., 3901 Klein
Blvd., Lompoc, CA 93436. Edward
Goodman Africa (AM 4974) is at P.O.
Box 200, Camp Hill, PA 1700I. Michael
Davis Africa (AM 4973) is at Drawer R,
Huntingdon, PA 16652. William Phillips
Africa (41685-066) is at P.O. Box 1000,
Spartacist League
Public.Offices
- MARXISTLITERATURE-
Bay Area
Thurs.: 5:30-8:00 p.rn., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m.
1634 Telegraph, 3rd Floor (near 17th Street)
Oakland, California Phone: (415)839-0851
Chicago
Tues.:5:00-9:00p.m., Sat.: 11:00a.m.-2:oop.m.
161 W. Harrison St., 10th Floor
Chicago, Illinois Phone: (312)663-0715
New York City
Tues.: 6:30-9'00 p.m., Sat.: 1:00-5:00 p.m.
41 Warren 51. (one block below
Chambers St. near Church St.)
New York, NY Phone: (212)267-1025
30 NOVEMBER 1990
Ted Kheel is trying to broker a deal with
an outside buyer. But this would mean
forking over hundreds of jobs and tens
of millions in givebacks. Screw give-
backs! The Daily News was for years a
cash cow for the Tribune Company.
What is urgently needed is a decisive
blow by the unions: occupy the printing
plants, backed up by mass pickets of
thousands. of working people from all
over New York, so the scab rag. never
gets printed. City workers; millions of
black and Hispanic poor facing cutbacks
will rally to the unions' side; Tum
around the scabherders' cynical use of
the black homeless to hawk the News
by giving them a real Workers News to
sell!
Against the cynical use of black and
Hispanic workers as scabs to break the
strike, a black striker told WV: "the Daily
News cared about minorities, per-
iod. Until all of a sudden minorities had
Leavenworth, KS 66048, and Delbert
Orr Africa (AM 4985, Drawer K,
Dallas, PA 18612).
Hugo (SHU C12211, P.O. Box
7500, Crescent City, cA 95531-7500) is
one of the San Quentin Six, courageous
anti-racist prison rights activists. He is
serving a life term. W.M.E. we Langa
(David Rice) (27718 P.O. Box 2500,
Nebraska State Penitentiary, Lincoln, NE
68502) and Ed Poindexter (Lino Lake
Facility, 7525 4th Avenue, Lino Lake,
MN 55017) are former leaders of the
Omaha Nebraska Committee to Combat
Fascism and Black Panther Party sup-
porters, and are in the 20th year of life
sentences. Targets of COINTELPRO,
Mondo and Poindexter were framed for
the 1970 killing of a cop in a bomb
explosion.
The PDC's stipend program nowex-
tends to Eddie McClelland (A 154, B
Wing, H Block 4, Maze Prison Long
Kesh, Lisburn Co. Antrim, Northern
Ireland), an. imprisoned supporter of
the Irish Republican Socialisl Party.
McClelland was sentenced to three life
terms in Britain's star chamber Diplock
courts on frame-up charges of killing
three members of the British occupation
Royal Ulster Constabulary, though Brit-
ish authorities conceded McClelland
wasn't even present when the shootings
occurred.
This year we are once again holding
fund-raisers .in New York, Chicago,
Atlanta and the Bay Area. Last year we
raised over $9,000 for the class-war
become a commodity, a tool to break the
unions." From the outset, we have called
for union-run minority recruitment and'
training programs to provide jobs and
integrate all the press unions.
After sending out his "ninja" thugs to
patrol the streets and try to terrorize
newsstands into carrying the scab News,
Hoge and his security chief Richard
Koehler (Koch's former city corrections
boss) have taken a new tack: eleven
striking drivers and pressmen have been
hit with civil suits in an effort to intimi-
date them. Scores of ninjas equipped
with video cameras have been sent out
in chase cars behind scab trucks in an
attempt to provoke strikers into defend-
ing themselves.
But even the haughty New York Times
published an expose of the recruitment
of scab thugs from around Southern army
bases to set up strikers. A strikebreaker
from Kentucky, one of many holed up in
prisoners and their families. These funds
give the PDC a solid financial basis for
sending monthly stipends, and meeting
requests for books, magazines, special
items of clothing, as well as holiday gifts
for the prisoners and their families. You
can read more about these class-war
prisoners, updates on their cases, and a
biographical letter from Eddie McClel-
land in Class-Struggle Defense Notes
No. 14. Join our fight to free the class-
war prisoners. Send your contributions
to: Partisan Defense Committee, P.O.
Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York,
NY 10013.
Bush...
(continued from page 3)
more tanks than the entire U.S.-led coali-
tion. Even U.S. experts are predicting
10,000-30,000 American dead and, given
the Pentagon's propensity for profligate
bombing, hundreds of thousands of Ira-
qis. The Spartacist League stands for
defense ofIraq and defeat ofWashington's
criminal war, whose real aim is to restore
U.S. imperialist domination of the world.
For labor/political strikes against the
war! Break the blockade of Iraq! U.S.
out of the Near East!
Bush has been able to amass this im-
perialist force only because the Gorba-
chevite "reformers" in the Soviet Union
have surrendered the field. The Kremlin
abandoned beleaguered Afghanistan and
let East Germany be returned to the
Jersey motels, who was trying to escape
from New York but didn't have the cash
for a (scab) bus ticket home, complained:
"we were bait. .. cheese for the rats."
Meanwhile, black Democratic mayor
David Dinkins' cops have roughed up
strikers and their supporters in front of
the Daily News building on 42nd Street.
A reporter for the strikers' newspaper,
Real News, w1l's arrested for trying to take
down badge numbers. Even the ACLU,
no friend of organized labor, said, "The
NYPD has turned into a private security
force for the Daily News." New York
unions must demand: Drop the charges
- against all strikers!
The strike is stagnating. Tommy Van
Arsdale and the do-nothing CLC hold
42nd Street rallies so Lane Kirkland and
the rest of the AFL-CIO brass can grand-
stand in baseball caps and windbreakers.
The strike is being runby pro-Dinkins
labor bureaucrats like 1199' s Dennis
Rivera, who would rather have his mern-
bers manning a phone bank for the Dem-
ocrats than a picket line in Brooklyn.
And meanwhile the presses are rolling in
Brooklyn, Garden City and Kearny.
What's needed is a class-struggle
leadership that will bring the strikers'
allies into the streets against the popular
front of Democratic Party politicians,
Wall Street bankers and.labor bureaucrats
who are running NYC into the ground.
It took reds to build the racially integrat-
ed industrial unions in the 1930s, using
the militant tactics like hot-cargoing and
sit-down strikes that are badly needed
today. And it will take a class-struggle
workers party fighting for all the op-
pressed to bust the union-busters for
good.
The striking driver interviewed by WV
pointed to what this battle means for
NYC labor:
"The strike really brought our situation
at the Daily News to the attention of a lot
of New Yorkers. Because the majority of
the workforce in New York is unionized,
all the city workers are unionized. So
now there's this threat. If they get away
with it at the Daily News, Lord knows
what's going to happen. It's going to be
blitzkrieg for the unions. That's why so
much attention is being paid at the strike:
if they can do it in New York they can
do it anywhere.
"We want to bring the Daily News man-
agement to its knees, in tears. That's the
kind of hardball game they wanted to
play with us, you got to keep it up and
bring it to them.".
rapacious German bourgeoisie, which led
to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. So
now Bush feels free to strip U.S. forces
from West Europe and concentrate them
in Saudi Arabia some 700 miles from the
Soviet Union.
This week Bush is busy rounding up
the Security Council votes for a UN
stamp of approval for war. He even
met with the Syrian president (previ-
ously considered a terrorist), declaring:
"Mr. Assad is lined up with us with a
commitment to force." The Times ex-
pressed some worry over Soviet "hesi-
tancy" on "commitment to force," but a
"nyet" from Moscow is hardly taken very
seriously anymore. Recent experience
has shown that Gorbachev's "no" is
followed the next day by a "maybe" and
the day after by a capitulatory "yes,"
especially if he gets a whiff of IMF
credits.
It's been a while since Khrushchev
banged his shoe at the UN-not that he
was any less fundamentally committed to
"peaceful coexistence. "We haven't for-
gotten how Khrushchev blinked in the
face of Kennedy's threats in the Cuban
missile crisis. Lenin's famous dictum that
capitalism breeds war may be considered
dead dogma by some burned-out Stalin-
ists in the Soviet bloc, but now it stares
them in the face. U.S. imperialism on the
loose is a threat to humanity, and the
Soviet Union first of all. Bush may think
he can order up a war like Kaiser Wil-
helm, but remember that World War I
lost him his throne.. .
7
- ;
German Trotskyists' Election Program
For Workers Resistance
""Against the Fourth Reich!
being scapegoated for unemployment,
massively fired, attacked by fascist bands
and driven out of the country. In the
West, Social Democrats take the lead
in deporting Roma and Sinti (gypsies),
victims of Nazi genocide. This is a dead-
ly threat to all workers. It's necessary to
fight all forms of racism and chauvinism
against Vietnamese, Mozambican, Po-
lish and other foreign workers in the
East, and against Turkish, Kurdish and
other- immigrant workers in the West.
Greater German reunification has enor-
mously emboldened the neo-Nazi scum.
Homosexuals and leftist demonstrators
are attacked by skinheads. Jewish ceme-
teries are regularly desecrated, and now
Bonn closes its borders to Jewish ref-
ugees from the USSR. The Spartakists
say:
No deportations! Let the Roma
and Sinti stay! Full citizenship rights
for all immigrant workers and their
families! Down with the ban on Jewish
immigration!
For workers defense squads to
protect foreign worker housing and
immigrant neighborhoods! For worker/
immigrant mobilizations to crush the
fascists!
Oppose all discrimination against
homosexuals!
The currency union on July I marked
the formal capitalist takeover of the
collectivized, planned economy of the
former bureaucratically deformed DDR
workers state.' The bourgeoisie is now
engaged in what the Bundesbank calls
"creative destruction." All they are "cre-
ating" is mass unemployment. Millions
are thrown out of their jobs or put on
short workweek in this ruthless assault
on ,living standards. The SPD seeks to
subordinate the workers struggle to the
bosses through the plant council system,
used to break the FDGB unions and
"For Workers
Resistance
Against the
Fourth Reich!":
SpAD election
poster (center).
"Spartakist
Fighting
Program" was
published in
German, Turkish,
Portuguese and
Polish.
the takeover by capital. Companies and
municipalities close down their kinder-
gartens. A majority of the new jobless
are women. In West Berlin the SPD/AL
(Alternative List) coalition with the col-
lusion of the union tops smashed the
strike of childcare employees. The bour-
geoisie has given abortion rights in the
ex-DDR only a temporary stay.of execu-
tion. Greens and feminists rally behind
CDUer Siissmuth' s "improved" version
of the anti-abortion Paragraph 218, in-
cluding forced "counseling." The Sparta-
kists say:
Stop the closure of childcare facil-
ities, including plant kindergartens!
Free, state-financed 24-hoor quality
childcare for all, East' and West!
Abolish Paragraphs 218 and 219
without replacement! Free abortion
on demand, as part of comprehensive
quality health care for all!
In the ex-DDR, foreign workers are
Class-struggle election
campaign of Spartakist
Workers Party of Ger-
many. Above, from left:
SpAD candidate Reinhard
HartWig speaks at Halle
anti-Nazi demo (center);
Toralf Endruweit,
candidate in Berlin.
Left: Jana Strauchfuss
campaigning at women's
rights demo in Berlin.
Right: Renate Dahlhaus
in protest against
ban on immigration of
Soviet Jews.
_w__-.owc6w
._._- .,.... .... __. _ ..... _,."OO; _ .. __.. _;
... _l1.II".loeo-.,.;.M -..._ ....... job-u
..._
._.... __-_...,....,...
i ... _'QWIt .............

"'-"II. CUIIlllllllltIItorII de lull IIIcl................1tl

Por resistincia operarla
contra 0 Quarto Reich!
of policing the working class, built on
the ruins of the FDGB (former East
German trade-union federation), is shaky.
Meanwhile, the bosses want to make
West German workers pick up the bill
for the Deutsche Bank's pillaging of East
Europe, using the "costs of reunification"
and the pressure of the ex-DDR "low-
wage land" to beat down union demands.
The key to victory in the defensive strug-
gles of the working people is to join the
power of West-German workers with the
readiness to fight of their East German
colleagues who have their backs to the
wall. For the fighting unity of working
people, East and West, 'women and men,
German and immigrant, with the leader-
ship of an authentic Leninist-Trotskyist
party.
Spartakists' Fighting Program
Women workers in the ex-DDR have
taken some of the heaviest blows from
Spartakist Photos
oFlifMassenstreiksgo,genM-.enllas:sungen-FiHBetrieblllbesetzungen
undArbeilefkOnlrolI
Erkampf! und verteidigl di8 RecI1lll dar frauen! Wag mit 218 unci 219!
Volle SlilillSbUrgefreet>'e IUrImmiglillJtert! Ver1eidigl Roma. CinIi. Juden'
StopptdieNazisdul'chAfbeilermollil&Bruog!
Gegen antikQmmunisti$Ctle H8llnjagdl
verhinderlAnglif!eaulsowje1ischeSaldB'en!
Nieder der NATO Und dem Imperialismus'
Fur einfOleSftatedeutschlal'ldineinemsozialislillchen Europa!
.F(j,deo Kommunismus von Lenin und TroIzki!
Arbeiterwiderstand
gegendas Vierte Reich!
---WIHLT---
SPARTAKIST
............... __..... __U11U
IPUT......
DORDOIlCO REICH" 1AR$1 lfel DIRERI,II,,;IRI
WIHLT SPARTAKIST!
1cIIIIIt ........ m zq...............1
Fiir Arbelterwiderstand
gegen das Vierte Reich!
We print below a translation of the
election program ofthe Spartakist Workers
Party of Germany.
For mass strikes against mass
layoffs-For plant occupations
and workers control!
Fight to win and preserve
women's rights!
Defend immigrant workers,
Roma and Sinti!
Oppose the anti-communist
witchhunt!
Stop attacks on Soviet soldiers!
Down with NATO and Greater
German militarism!
For a Red Germany of workers
councils in a socialist Europe!
The Spartakist, Workers Party of
Germany (SpAD) is running in the De-
cember 2 Bundestag elections on our
program for workers resistance to the
catastrophic consequences of Anschluss
(annexation) of the former DDR (German
Democratic Republic-East Germany).
We Trotskyists are the party of intransi-
gent opposition to the Fourth Reich of
German imperialism. As a section of the
International Communist League (Fourth
Internationalist), we seek to build a
world party of socialist revolution.
Many of you know the Spartakist
Workers Party as the ones who fought
against capitalist reunification, with no
ifs, ands or buts. When millions voted
last March for the "quick mark" because
they thought it would bring prosperity,
when others talked of "improving" the
terms of the sellout, of slowing it down,
we told the bitter truth: that the takeover
of the DDR by imperialist West Germany
would mean mass unemployment, attacks
on women and foreign workers, growth
of fascist forces and growth of Greater
German imperialism. The SpAD pre-
dicted it. And now that people are
beginning to wake up from the D-mark
intoxication, it is all the more urgent
to join in building the class-struggle
election campaign of the Spartakists.
In strikes and demonstrations, the East
German workers have begun to fight
back. The bourgeoisie fears a "hot au-
tumn": despite celebrations of champagne
and firecrackers at the Brandenburg Gate,
its state apparatus is not yet in place east
of the Elbe, and the Social Democratic
(SPD and DOB union federation) system
8 WORKERS VANGUARD
For Fighting Working-Class
Unity in Action
The Spartakist Workers Party of Ger-
many is a small party, but faces big
tasks. As part of our communist program,
we have sought out opportunities to use
the Leninist tactic of the united front, to
bring together forces in common struggle
without confusing political banners. Thus
we initiated the united-front anti-fascist
mobilization after the desecration of the
Treptow monument to the Red Army
fighters who fell in the battle to smash
Nazism. Our call was taken up as well by
the SED/PDS, and some 250,000 people
rallied on January 3 in the largest anti-
fascist demonstration ever in Germany.
But the SPD tops and Cold Warriors in
the West were enraged by this powerful
pro-Soviet countermobilization against
Bonn's reunification drive, and the SED/
PDS caved in to them,
The drive toward counterrevolution in
the DDR unleashed a rising wave of
fascist/skinhead racist terror attacks on
immigrant workers and escalating anti--
Semitism. Now Hans Modrow has his
"Deutschland, einig"vaterland" (Germany,
united fatherland) and Nazis are literally
gunning for Gysi. In times of "prosper-
ity," the fascist shock troops of capital
are kept in reserve, staging periodic
provocations and readying to unleash
bloody terror in times of crisis. But in
the former- DDR, economic crisis is
looming now. And in the absente of a
widely recognized purposive communist
opposition, the fascists could capital-
ize on frustrations by attacking foreign
workers and leftists. "Dialogue" with
these killers as the PDS wants is suicidal
idiocy. What's needed are mass worker/
immigrant mobilizations which can stop
the fascists now, while they are still
continued on page 12
the anti-Stasi, ariti-PDS witchhunt? Or
those who believed the lies ofKohl and
the Social Democrats, who said that the
D-mark would bring salvation? The
Spartakists say straight-out that the for-
mation of a united imperialist Germany
is a great defeat. But we say too that
working people can and must resist its
consequences. While reformists wrangle
over seats in the modem Reichstag, the
SpAD uses this election campaign as a
platform to call for Bolshevik politics
and hard class struggle.
After 45 years of Stalinist mismanage-
ment, the SED/PDS just handed over
everything to the capitalists. Gysi crawls
behind Lafontaine and the witchhunters
of the S P D ~ and much of the "far left"
crawl behind Gysi. The Greens are split
over the witchhunt of the PDS, with the
majority spouting eco-anti-Communism
while many ex-Fundis (and not a few
Realos) [the "fundamentalist" and "real-
ist" wings of the Greens] go over to
Gysi's brand of "left" social democracy.
So fixated is the PDS/Linke Liste on
ingratiating itself to this German nation-
alist petty-bourgeois milieu that the
working class has utterly ceased to exist
for it. They yearn to be junior partners in
a coalition with the capitalist rulers-the
loyal "opposition" to the bourgeoisie of
Auschwitz and Babi Yar! This is the
popular front they learned in the Stalinist
school. No vote to the Green and PDS
handmaidens of capital!
Der Spiegel Photos
Capitalist father-
land victimizes
women. Above:
striking East
German textile
workers in May.
Free childcare
made it possible
for 94 percent of
East German
women to hold
jobs; capitalist
reunification has
meant closing of
day-care centers,
mass firing of
women.
head off proletarian revolution. To carry
out this policy of "peaceful coexistence"
with imperialism, Stalin and his hench-
men (like the thug Ulbricht) had to mur-
der the Trotskyists, who warned that the
bureaucracy was preparing the way for
counterrevolution. Today, as Gorbachev
and Gysi openly embrace the restoration
of capitalism, they still slander Trotsky-
ism, for it embodies the genuine Bol-
shevik program of socialist revolution
worldwide which they and their grand-
daddy Stalin betrayed.
The decrepit DDR economy was not
the result of too much planned economy,
as everyone from Kohl to Gysi claims,
but too little-above all internationally.
Leuna workers produced hundreds of
products from Soviet-supplied oil, but
deliveries were slashed as the Kremlin
bureaucrats sought to take advantage of
high oil prices on the world market.
So [former East German Stalinist lead-
ers] Honecker and Mittag ordered DDR
power plants to bum lignite, polluting the
atmosphere and lungs. Facing an imperi-
alist boycott on advanced technology,
Robotron workers produced perfectly
capable computers-but now the Soviet
Union buys IBM and so the East Ger-
man computer industry lies in shambles.
In opposing capitalist reunification, we
Trotskyists did not appeal to narrow
DDR nationalism but raised a program
for socialist reunification and socialist
international economic planning.
In response, the bankrupt leftovers of
SED-Stalinism accused us of blowing
"red soap bubbles." But who was "unre-
alistic," we who called for uniting Ger-
man, Polish and Soviet workers against
counterrevolution, or those like Gysi-
Modrow who capitulated before the Bonn
onslaught while blowing "black-red-geld
soap bubbles"? What of the "citizens'
movements" who dreamed of a "third
way," were wiped out in the March 18
DDR vote and are now spearheading
Der Spiegel Spariilkist
Left: Mozambican worker in Eisenach auto plant. Right: Mozambican workers join Spartakists in demanding full
citizenship rights for foreign/immigrant workers at 1990 May Day march in Berlin.
they ask for. Now Yeltsin and Gorbachev
threaten to force the Soviet peoples to
undergo the misery of the market.
Unconditional military defense
of the degenerated/deformed workers
states against imperialist attack and
internal counterrevolution!
For proletarian political revolution
to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies
before they sell out everything to the
imperialists!
For the revolutionary unity of
German, Polish and Soviet workers!
For a Red Germany of workers
councils in a socialist Europe!
The Road of Lenin and Trotsky
Today the historic proletarian gains of
the October Revolution, the very exis-
tence of the Soviet Union, are in danger.
From Central Asia to East Europe, the
prospect of civil war is posed. Gorba-
chev's caving in to a reunited imperialist
Germany puts NATO troops on the Oder-
Neisse border. And as the failure of
his perestroika market reforms produces
economic chaos, there is a stampede to
restore capitalism. The market is pre-
sented as a magic remedy, but look at the
first results: in Poland, full shop win-
dows and empty stomachs; in the Soviet
Union, a record harvest rotting in the
fields and food shortages in the cities.
The answer to sixand a half decades of
Stalinist bureaucratic mismanagement of
the economy is not the brutal destruction
wreaked by the capitalist market but a
planned economy under workers council
democracy.
This was the program of Leon Trotsky
and the Left Opposition, which fought
Stalin and the parasitic Soviet bureauc-
racy as it usurped power and proclaimed
a conservative, nationalist policy at home
of "building socialism in one country."
The Stalinists' counterpart to this abroad
was the "popular front," tying the work-
ing class to the bourgeoisie in order to
<Fe purge reds. DGB unions make a deal
. with the bosses limiting wage raises in .:
the ex-DDR to productivity increases.
Not class collaboration but a fight for
workers control, to rip the factories from
the hands of the bureaucrats become
bosses, can smash the plans of the capi-
talists and their Treuhand lackeys.
For mass strikes and factory occu-
pations against mass layoffs and plant
shutdowns! For elected strike commit-
tees! Oust the bureaucrats and make
the trade unions into fighting organi-
zations of class struggle.
01 Equal p a ~ for equal work, East
and West, women and men, youth and
foreign workers! For a sliding scale
of wages! (automatic raises according
to increases in the price of consumer
goods). For a sliding scale of hours!
(divide the available work among all
available hands). For a massive pro-
gram of public works, at full union
wages!
For the expropriation of the capi-
talist banks and industry by a work-
ers government! For a genuine socialist
planned economy under the control of
workers councils, recallable at any
time!
Already on October 3, the Bonn au-
thorities began their anti-communist
witchhunt. "Examinations" of judges and
teachers, "blacklisting" of former SED
and present PDS {Party of Democratic
Socialism) members, arrests of "spy-
masters" are the order of the day. Mean-
while, the BKA (West German FBI) has
- taken over the Stasi headquarters. And
former members of the RAF (Red Army
Faction) have already been handed over
to the West German political police for
jailing.
Stop the repression against the
PDS, FDJ (Free German Youth) and
FDGB! For united action against the
party expropriation law! Down with
blacklisting! Hands off Markus Wolf!
Release the members of the RAF!
Abolish the "anti-terrorist" Paragraph
129a!
It is an atrocity that Soviet soldiers
and officers and their families are in-
sulted and discriminated against and have
now become the targets of deadly armed
attacks by German nationalists. The Red
Army and the Soviet peoples liberated
Germany and East Europe from the
scourge of fascism at the cost of 28
million Soviet dead. For decades, the
Soviet Army men stood at their posts on
the front line against NATO imperialism.
For united-front actions, centered
on the working class, to defend and
honor our Soviet Army comrades and
their families!
Greater Germany means "drive to
the East," to Kaliningrad and beyond.
They are gearing up the Bundeswehr
for worldwide deployment. And a mere
constitutional clause or "2+4 treaty" will
not stop the bourgeoisie of Auschwitz,
which has aided apartheid South Africa
in developing the A-bomb, from itself
deploying nuclear weapons. Even a "re-
duced" Bundeswehr will soon be larger
than the total of Soviet and U.S. forces
in West and Central Europe. The impe-
rialists crow that they "won the Cold
War," yet we are a great deal closer to
World War III, with its threat of a nu-
clear holocaust-the flash point today is
the Persian Gulf. The only disarmament
that can avert or end war is the disarm-
ing of the bourgeoisie through workers
revolution.
Down with NATO! Not one man,
not one woman, not one pfennig for
the Bundeswehr!
Imperialist military forces out of
the Persian Gulf! Bundesmarine out of
the Mediterranean! No Bundeswehr
Tornado fighter jets to Turkey!
Break the blockade! The USSR
must end its weapons embargo against
Iraq!
When Kohl & Co. talk of a united
Germany in a united Europe, they're
talking about restoring capitalist exploita-
tion to the Urals and beyond. From Af-
ghanistan to East Germany, Gorbachev
has been giving the imperialists whatever
30 NOVEMBER 1990 9
Police Wagt War on BerJinSguatters, Rail Workers Strike
Germany: Hot Autumn of Class Struggle
Censors Try to Disappear Auschwitz.
Hirnsel ribQne
BerlinSPDgovernment sent 3,000 cops withtanks to evict squatters In East
Berlin, provoking pitched battles. Vicious assaultconfirmed Spartaklst warning
that Social were "bloodhounds for the Deutsche Bank."
NOVEMBER 27-For months the Ger-
man bourgeoisie feared a "hot autumn"
of social unrest as the social conse-
quences of the annexation of the former
East Germany (DDR) by capitalist West
Germany became clear. The illusions of
the East German population of instant
prosperity through a "strong mark"
would disappear and the bitter reality of
mass unemployment and poverty could
provoke outbursts of fury. And the appa-
ratus of state repression was not yet
in place. Our comrades of the Sparta-
kist Workers Party of Germany (SpAD)
have mounted a Klassenkampf-Wahlkampj
(class-struggle election campaign) for the
December 2 Bundestag (parliament) elec-
tions under the watchword, "For Workers
Resistance Against the Fourth Reich!':
Now the "hot autumn" has arrived,
with a vengeance. Trying to head off
protest with a blatant show of force, the
Social Democratic (SPD) government of
Berlin mayor Walter Momper launched
a massive police assault against apart-
ment houses in the former East Berlin
occupied by squatters. An initial attack
by riot police on November 12 was
resisted by building occupiers heaving
Molotov cocktails and paving stones,
resulting ina stand-off. The squatters got
hold of an excavator and dug up the
street to erect barricades. SPD police
chief Erich Patzold, in turn, brought in
over 3,000 cops in phalanxes, together
with armored cars, tanks and helicopters.
This occupation army then beat up and
cleared out the squatters.
Describing the street battles, Neues
Deutschland (15 November) headlined,
"West Police Test Civil War in East
Berlin." The cops' blitzkrieg tactics
sparked anger among the populace of the
former DDR, who had never seen any-
thing like it. They may have thought they
had lived in a police state, but the Volks-
polizei was seldom even armed! The
squatters also enjoyed popular support
in East Berlin, where there are 21,000
empty apartments (most now owned by
West landlords) while 45,000 people are
looking for housing; and in West Berlin,
where rents are skyrocketing. At a No-
vember 17 protest the SpAD marched
with a banner declaring: "Stop Police
Terror With Workers Mobilization!".
The massive deployment of police has
not had the effect of intimidating workers
protests. Barely a week and a half later,
250,000 workers of the Deutsche Reichs-
bahn, the former East German state rail-
ways, went out on strike. Their minimal
demands were simply for raising wages
to 60. percent of the levels in the West
German Bundesbahn and job security
against threatened mass layoffs. This is
the first labor struggle since capitalist
reunification was formally sealed on
October 3, and it put the entire German
bourgeoisie on pins and needles.
On Sunday, November 25 more than
Thatcher...
(continued from page 3)
.could rapidly change if the Conservatives
dump Thatcher before the general elec-
tion.... In fact, there wouldn't be much
difference between a Tory government
headed by Heseltine, and a Kinnock La-
bour government."
- Workers Hammer,
MarchiApril. 1990
This was clearly something the British
electorate recognised as well. Immediate-
ly after Thatcher's resignation, Labour's
16-point lead in the opinion polls
vanished, with Heseltine and the other
two Tory contenders, Cabinet ministers
Douglas Hurd and John Major, vaulting
ahead of Kinnock. As the New York
10
97 percent of the railroad workers voted
to strike, and instead of waiting until
the Monday deadline, they immediately
began to shut down many lines. The next
day, long-distance passenger and freight
trains were stopped, more than 300 in all.
In the Baltic port of Rostock, harbor
workers reportedly stopped work in soli-
darity, but continued loading potatoes in
ships bound for Leningrad. On the Polish
border at Frankfurt/Oder, as well, strikers
agreed to load trains hauling emergency
food supplies to the Soviet Union.
The SpAD quickly put out a leaflet
headlined, "No Layoffs! Equal Pay for
Equal Work, East and West, Now!
Reichsbahn and Bundesbahn Workers:
All-Out Strike Now!" It called for elect-
ed strike committees to lead the struggle
to victory, and for shutting down urban
transport in Berlin. And theSpAD noted
that a solid show of strength by the half
million railroad workers would have an
enormous effect on workers throughout
the country.
This is the most important strike in
Germany since 1984, and it gave workers
in the East a taste of their social power
for the first time since the 1953 workers
uprising against the Stalinist regime. In
response, the Bonn government of Chris-
tian Democratic (CDU) chancellor Hel-
mut Kohl said it would bring in the
army as strikebreakers, using Bundes-
wehr trucks to move "Christmas" pack-
ages. This is a threat to the entire labor
movement. But instead of mobilizing the
power of the largest railway union in the
world, the union tops have now lifted the
strike on passenger trains.
In the DDR elections last March, the
Trotskyist SpAD, which called for prole-
tarian political revolution to oust the
Times (25 November) observed, "Labor's
policies sound not much different from
those of the Conservatives." The weak
British economy, ravaged by decades of
capitalist neglect and devastation, offers
no easy options to the bosses. Industry
has been cut to the bone, rail and trans-
port starved of investment, and industrial
murder has become commonplace, from
the North Sea to the London Under-
ground.For the working masses the
choice between the boot of the Tories or
the knife of Labour is no choice at all.
Kinnock showed his colours during
the miners strike, when he supported
Thatcher's demand for a scab ballot
while denouncing the miners fordefend-
ing their picket lines against strikebreak-
ers. Had class struggle toppled the
Stalinist bureaucracies of the deformed
workers states, was the only party which
categorically opposed capitalist reunifica-
tion. In contrast, the PDS (Party of Dem-
ocratic Socialism, successor to the Stalin-
istSED which ruled East Germany for
tour decades) and various left groups
bowed before the imperialist onslaught,
only seeking to slow it down and im-
prove the terms for selling out the social
achievements of the DDR which were
built with the toil of the working people.
Today, these fake-lefts continue their
policy of capitulation. PDS leader Gregor
Gysi went along with a night-and-fog
raid by Patzold's.cops against the PDS,
then fingered his own treasurers to the
capitalist police for. their attempts to
In a radio election spot, the Spar-
takist Workers Party of Germany
declared that "Gorbachev and the PDS
[successor to the former East German
Stalinist ruling partylgave away the
DDR to the bourgeoisie of Ausch-
witz." This statement was not to the
liking of the bosses at Berliner Rund-
funk, in former East Berlin, who
claimed it was "libelous." These ex-
Stalinists were so solicitous of the
German ruling class against insult that
they appointed themselves political
censors and refused to air our election
spot. Instead they broadcast a version
in which the word "Auschwitz" was
replaced by a beep tone!
Renate Dahlhaus, an SpAD candi-
date in Berlin for Bundestag deputy,
issued a November 20 statement de-
Thatcher government during the strike it
would have created a pre-revolutionary
situation, posing point blank the question
of which class shall rule. So, Kinnock,
Willis and the Labour "lefts" worked
overtime to knife the miners.
Since then, Kinnock has amply demon-
strated that he is an enemy of working
people and the oppressed. It is starkly
clear that to wage a class fight against
unemployment, union-busting, wage-
slashing and warmongering a political
break must be made from the Labour
traitors, right and "left." Our task is to
forge a revolutionary party through split-
tingLabour's working-class base from its
pro-capitalist leadership and regrouping
those for-ces outside and to the left of the
Labour Party under the banner of authen-
protect party money from expropriation!
As for the Reichsbahn workers, the PDS
calls for the same kind of "rational-
ization" measures that slashed 100,000
jobs on the Bundesbahn. In West Berlin,
the "Alternative List" (Greens) broke
their coalition with Walter Momper after
the police assault on the squatters. But
this was after the city government's
breaking of the day-care (KiTa) strike
last winter, and their votes are still
keeping Momper & Co. in office.
Opposed to these parliamentary cre-
tins, the SpAD put forward a "Fighting
Program" for its "Class-Struggle Election
Campaign" (see page 8). Having fought
counterrevolution down the line when the
rest of the left crawled before Kohl &
Co., the SpAD now seeks to provide
direction for the defensive battles in the
aftermath of the takeover of the DDR by
imperialist West Germany.
The Spartakists have systematically
fought the rightist witchhunting attacks,
principally against the PDS and also the
Greens. This has gained the SpAD some
notoriety. The social-democratic/liberal
news magazine Der Spiegel (19 Novem-
ber) noted that at a Gysi appearance -
in Hamburg, the Spartakists demanded
"immediate release" of the PDS treas-
urers and termed Gysi a "belly-crawling
capitulator." In addition "Spiegel-TV"
covered a plant-gate distribution at.the
East Berlin KWO factory, where our
comrades emphasized the importance of
defending immigrant workers. (The
SpAD election program was translated
into Turkish, Polish and Portuguese.)
. As the class struggle heats up in the
Fourth Reich of German imperialism, the
Trotskyists of the Spartakist Workers
Party seek to use the "Reichstag" elec-
tion campaign as the Bolsheviks did with
the tsar's Duma, as a platform for revo-
lutionary politics .
c1aring: "The Berliner Rundfunk is
attempting to cover up the heinous
legacy of the Third Reich and the
Holocaust with the primitive methods
of Richard Nixon's Watergate. This is
not only an attack on freedom of
speech and press, on the democratic
rights of our party. It is an attack on
all those who seek to fight the cata-
strophic effects of a Fourth Reich."
The statement listed a number of
prominent West German politicians
who began their careers in the Third
Reich, including Fritz Karl Ries, the
political mentor of Chancellor Helmut
Kohl..
On November 26, an administrative
court in Berlin ruled that the radio
station was required tobroadcast the
SpAD election statement in full.
tic communism.
It is too bad that Margaret Thatcher
was only kicked out of No. 10 by her
Tory cronies. The sacked miners, home-
less youth, impoverished pensioners,
families of the Argentine sailors of the
Belgrano which she maliciously ordered
blown away during the 1982 Falklands/
Malvinas War, the oppressed Catholic
minority in Northern Ireland and victims
of racist cop rampage-s-to name but a
few-are certainly celebrating her de-
parture, but they are no closer to re-
dressing the devastating injury she and
her ruling-class cohorts have inflicted on
them. Real justice will come with prole-
tarian revolution, which will sweep into
the dustbin of history the, bourgeoisie
along with the parasitic Labour fakers .
WORKERS VANGUARD
Return to the Road of Lenin
and Trotsky!
Only united struggle by the multi-
national Soviet working class can defeat
the forces of bloody capitalist counter-
revolution. Sections of the Soviet work-
ing class, 'especially the miners, have
been militant in defending their eco-
nomic interests against the ravages of
perestroika. Politically, however, Soviet
workers remain, under the sway of vari-
ous contending factions within the petty-
bourgeois bureaucracy and intelligentsia.
Late last month, 900 delegates from
coal mines across the USSR met in the
Donbass region ofthe eastern Ukraine to
debate forming an independent, USSR-
wide union. While the tone of the confer-
ence. was one of defiance, there was
continued on page 12
out of literature, they held an impromptu
rally in front of the Aleksandrovsky
Column in the middle of Palace Square.
Several hundred people listened to Trot-
skyist speeches calling for the workers to
retake political power on the program of
revolutionary internationalism. Vecherny
Leningrad quoted from an interview with
an ICL spokesman, calling for a return
to "the original Leninist and Trotskyist
theory" and "above all, not conceding to
the restoration of capitalism." One wom-
an, seeing the Fourth Internationalist
insignia on our banner, exclaimed with
tears in her eyes, "It's so wonderful to
see you again." Another came over to
our literature stall and joined the rally,
asking that the sign she was carrying be
placed alongside the ICL slogans. It read:
"Stop Capitalist Restoration! They're
Trying to Make Our Homeland Into a
Colony!"
Indeed they are. The rulers of Wall
Street, Frankfurt and Tokyo aim not only
to buy up the productive resources of the
Soviet Union but also to dismember the
USSR and turn the remnants into semi-
colonies. Gorbachev has made cleat his
intent to sell off to Western and Japanese
capitalists the collectivized factories,
mines and other resources created by the
blood and sweat of the Soviet workers
over decades. One group of Western
industrialists is reportedly planning an
ambitious project to construct a new
superhighway from Odessa to Leningrad
via Kiev and Moscow, in which' they
intend to use returning troops from East
Europe as cheap labor.
Meanwhile the forces of backwardness
and obscurantism unleashed by perestroi-
ka grow ever more grotesque. Pro-tsarist
reactionaries and the Russian Orthodox
church are now planning to erect a
memorial cathedral in Sverdlovsk on the
site where Tsar Nicholas II and his fam-
ily were executed by the Bolsheviks!
Fruits of
perestroika:
Moscow shoppers
find food stores
empty as lurch
toward capitalist
market economy
produces chaos.
Hail the Celebration of the October Revolution!
Defend the Gains of the October Revolution!
Down With the Restoration of Capitalism!
For Power to Soviets of the Working People!
Create an anti-Stalinist Leninist-Trotskyist party from workers and those
sections of the army who have the fewest privileges and the most
responsibilities!
For genuine equality on the basis of abundance!
All power to the Soviets of the working people! Oust the parasites,
exploiters and their ideologues from the Soviets!
"Socialism in one country" is a defeatist myth! For proletarian revolutionary
internationalism!
For military defense of the USSR against the imperialist vise tightening
around it! Against the dismemberment of the USSR!
For democratic-centralist planning through Soviets of the workers and their
allies-peasants, the working intelligentsia and those of the military who
voluntarily renounce their privileges! Stalin's heirs are selling out our
Motherland.
For workers mobilizations against chauvinism, Pamyat and anti-Semitism!
For democratic reorganization of the Soviet Union and the right of every
nation with an anti-counterrevolutionary leadership to whatever self-
determination it considers necessary.
For government of the Lenin-Sverdlov type on the basis of workers
democracy!
For the formation of an all-Union Trotskyist party!
INTERNATIONALCOMMUNIST LEAGUE (IV Internationalist)
and sometimes receptive to the pres-
ence and participation of Trotskyists, The
intervention of the ICL was :felt and
noted. A major Leningrad daily, Vecherny
Leningrad (9 November), reported, "at
the Aleksandrovsky Column the red
banner of the Fourth Internationalist
League of Trotskyists was unfurled.
There was a brisk trade in Trotskyist
literature published abroad." In addition
to sales of the Spartacist Bulletin, several
thousand copies were distributed of a
Russian-language offprint of "Soviet
Workers: Smash Yeltsin/Gorbachev 500-
Day Plan!" (WVNo. 510,21 September).
After the comrades in Leningrad sold
unemployment, rampant _inflation and
descent into nationalist carnage.
The bureaucracy's decades-longstran-
glehold over the Soviet working class
is being broken. With the exception of
a handful of hard-bitten Stalinists, dem-
onstrators in the Red columns in both
.Moscow and Leningrad were quite open
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the entire general staff during the Stalin
purges of the late 1930s.
However, the defense and socialist
regeneration of the USSR cannot be
achieved simply on the basis of Soviet
patriotism, which, moreover, in the
mouths of the Stalinists has time and
again been tinged with and served as a
cover for Great Russian chauvinism. It
is necessary to recapture the proletarian
internationalism which. animated the
Bolshevik Revolution and Trotsky's Red
Army. The Soviet working class must
become the main force against capitalist
counterrevolution, which would bring
down on the heads of the toilers massive
men who do not want to see their coun-
try exploited and colonized by Western
imperialism. Indeed, many soldiers and
militiamen bought our Russian-language
bulletin when they saw the article "In
Defense of Marshal Tukhachevsky,' the
head of the Red Army who was slan-
dered and murdered along with virtually
Translation of ICL leaflet in Russian (above)
produced and circulated In Leningrad for
November 7 anniversary demonstration.
ASS . , partacist
Powerful 1'989Soviet miners strike shook USSR. Russian-language Spartacist Bulletin got enthusiastic reception with
hundreds purchased by coal miners at October congress in Donetsk.
Soviet Union...-
(continued from page 1)
leading up to November 7, Moscow was
rife with rumors, circulated by pro-
capitalist forces, of a "conservative" mil-
itary coup, supposedly to be carried out
under cover of preparations for the
November 7 parade. Defense Minister
Dmitri Yazov vehemently denounced
these rumors as a slander and lashed
back at the "so-called democrats": "This
is very useful to somebody. Not only to
shake up the army, to slander it. But the
most important, to prepare some kind
of 'coup d'etat' ... " (New York Times,
1 October).
Gorbachev overruled the Yeltsinites,
but tried to limit the occasion to military
parades. The Moscow media broadcast
appeals for people to stay home. But in
the face of counterrevolutionary mobili-
zations, CPSU leaders at the last moment
appealed on TV for the population to
show their support for October. In Mos-
cow, 100,000 marched in the official
celebration, where one banner demanded,
"Anti-Communist Gorbachev-Out of
the CPSU." Others carried signs reading,
"Hands off Lenin!" and "No to a Market
of Labor!" At the same time, a demon-
stration by 10,000 right-wingers (heavily
covered by the Western media) heard a
Russian Orthodox priest lead a prayer
vigil for the "victims of Communism."
Yeltsin, after briefly sharing the review-
ing stand with Gorbachev atop Lenin's
mausoleum, went straight to the anti-
Communist counterdemonstration on the
other side of the Kremlin, where he was
greeted with wild acclaim.
In Leningrad, after the Red columns
marched down the Nevsky Prospect into
Palace Square, there was a second march
of the so-called "Democratic columns,"
whose main slogan was "November 7
is a day of national tragedy." The char-
acter of these "democratic forces" was
fully revealed by the fact that at their
head marched contingents of the fascist
Pamyat and other ultrarightist outfits,
followed by the Popular Front and Dem-
ocratic Union. In Kiev, nationalistic
Ukrainian students tried to obstruct the
Red Army parade. In Vilnius, Lithuania
paratroopers had to clear right-wing stu-
dents out of the way. In Georgia, the
commemoration of Revolution Day was
restricted to a military base near Tbilisi.
In many cities there was no commemo-
ration of the Revolution at all.
Many military cadre are rightly out-
raged by the widespread denigration of
Soviet patriotism; increasing draft dodg-
ing and desertions, especially in the non-
Russian republics; the open surfacing of
Nazi collaborators in the Baltic republics;
the sabotage and vilification of the mili-
tary intervention in Afghanistan against
the CIA-armed Islamic mujahedin.-But
perhaps more than anything else, they are
outraged by Gorbachev's unilateral re-
treat before NATO and the Fourth Reich
of German imperialism, as demobilized
officers and soldiers return to face the
threat of unemployment and tent cities.
A Trotskyist party in the Soviet Union
could recruit into its ranks Red Army
30 NOVeMBER 1990
Communist League, in contrast, call for
the military defense oflraq against impe-
rialist attack, while simultaneously call-
ing on the working people of Iraq and
the rest of the Near East to sweep away
their bloody rulers. In the DDR, we
Spartakists have solidarized with Soviet
troops, while the "left" German nation-
alists of the PDS and VL raise the
anti-Soviet Jlogan of "withdrawal of all
foreign troops" so that the Bundeswehr
can be undisputed master in Greater
Germany.
In East Europe, which German imperi-
alism treats as its Hinterland, the "free
market economy" means the rebirth of
nationalist and fascist movements, po-
groms and a return to pre-World War II
poverty. Poland is groaning under the
capitalist austerity policies implemented
by Solidarnosc to payoff the Frankfurt
bankers. But Polish miners and railway
workers have begun to fight back. In the
USSR, perestroika has unleashed nation-
alist conflict from the Caucasus to the
Baltics. Counterrevolution is cloaked in
demands for independence, while sinis-
ter Russian nationalist forces such as
the anti-Semitic fascists of Pamyat are
also at work. Yet since the 1989 miners
strike, when strike committees took on
the character of soviets, the spectre of a
new working-class explosion, that could
cut -across nationalist lines, is a night-
mare for the pro-capitalist forces.
Despite a yearning for soviet democ-
racy and equality, there is great confu-
sion among the Soviet working people.
A Leninist-Trotskyist party must be built
to defend the Stalinist-betrayed heritage
of Red October. It was the lack of such
a party in Germany that allowed capital-
ist reunification to rush through unim-
peded. It is such ,a party that must be
built today to lead the struggles -of the
working people against the new German
imperialist Reich, and to join with the
workers from - South Korea to South
Africa in sweeping away the imperialist
system of exploitation, racism and war.
This program of proletarian internation-
alism is the banner of the Spartakist
Workers Party of Germany, section of
the International Communist League,
fighting to reforge the Fourth Internation-
al, world party of socialist revolutionljs
new Greater Germany, fascists are ma-
rauding and cocking their pistols, from
Garlitz and Greifswald to Gottingen. If
the Republikaner have not substantially
grown, it is because Kohl & Lafontaine
are carrying out much of their program.
Triumphantly portraying the collapse
of Stalinist rule in East Europe as the
"death of Communism," the imperialists
take up Hitler's slogan ofa "New World
Order." Yet they seem intent on proving
that war and economic crisis are inherent
. in capitalism. Washington is in a frenzy
to resolve the contradiction between its
crumbling economic basis and its mili-
tary power by launching an invasion of
the Persian Gulf against Iraq. This is to
be financed by the Arab oil sheiks and its
former enemies of World War II. Ger-
many and Japan, however, maneuver to
avoid antagonizing oil suppliers, while
using the occasion to loosen the restraints
of their U.S.-written constitutions on
using military force abroad.
The Green eco-imperialists and black-
red-gold "left" social democrats of the
PDS join the chorus of warmongers,
asking only for the fig leaf of the UN to
cover-their defense of the oil monopolies,
Gulf monarchies and U.S.-led imperi-
alists. The SpAD and the International

Spartakist
250,000 come out In show of strength against Nazi defacing of Red Army
graves In Treptow Park, East Berlln,3 January 1990. Spartaklsts Initiated this
anti-fascist mobilizatlon,largest ever In German history.
the worldwide campaign to save the life
of black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal,
framed up and slated for execution by the
racist American rulers for his unremitting
defense of the oppressed. The SpAD has
massively distributed materials in Polish,
Vietnamese, Turkish, Spanish, Portu-
guese and Russian for immigrant workers
and Soviet soldiers. We have fought to
mobilize the workers of the KWO plant
to defend their Mozambican coworkers
from fascist attacks. We have opposed
anti-Polish chauvinism, holding a pro-
test picket last May against the Aldi
supermarket's outrageous discrimination
against Polish workers.
Most recently, in the face of the vile
ban on immigration by Soviet Jews or-
dered from Bonn, the Spartakists organ-
ized a protest before the (now former)
monument to the victims of fascism on
Unter den Linden, declaring: "Down with
the Ban on Jewish Immigration of the
Fourth Reich!" Some gave as a reason
for not participating that the Nazis were
not in power yet, so this can't be a
"Fourth Reich." But Nazis were not in
power in the Bismarckian/Wilhelmian
Second Reich, which along with the
other imperialist powers unleashed the
slaughter of World War I. And in the
German
Trotskyists...
(continued from page 9)
small and relatively isolated.
The party expropriation law, inspired
by the SPD, was part of the sinister
campaign to criminalize former and
present members of the-SED and PDS
and squelch resistance to capitalist An-
schluss. Now it is turned against the trade
unions, The SpAD refused to hand over
its party finances to the trustees of the
Deutsche Bank. Furthermore, we called
in an "Open Letter" on all left and
working-class organizations to defend the
right to organize and defy this attempt to
throttle the proletariat. But Gysi et a1.
wouldn't fight it. While other "leftist"
parties are financed by Bonn-sealing
their role as pressure groups on and
paid servants of the ruling class-we
'stand for the class independence of work-
ers organizations, refusing to take one
D-mark of state subsidies.
In the March 18 DDR elections, the
SpAD offered to call for a vote, in those
constituencies where we did not present
candidates, to any parties which stated,
in writing, their absolute opposition to
capitalist reunification. There were no
takers. Other so-called "leftists," from
the PDS to the Nelken, Vereinigte Linke
and KPD, crawled before the imperialist
Anschluss, at best seeking to slow it
down or improve the terms for the
sellout. Now the Linke Liste/PDS slate
declares that parts of it accept "the
social-state compromise'; in the Federal
Republic and makes this. the starting
point of its politics for the new Greater
German Reich. They openly support cap-
italism. We don't. We Trotskyists fight
for socialist revolution. And you?
For Revolutionary
Internationalism!
To exemplify our internationalist,
working-class program, the Spartakist
Workers Party featured a tour through
the DDR and Hamburg in June by Amer-
ican black Trotskyist Don Andrews.
Through the Kommittee fur Soziale Ver-
teidigung we have mobilized support for

WlNTl!JIIlfM.tt
Soviet Union...
"only the winning of power by the prole-
tariat, headed by the Bolshevik Party, can
put an end to the outrageous actions of
Kerensky and Co. and restore the work
of democratic food distribution, supply
and other organisations, which Kerensky
and his government are frustrating." A
month later, the Bolshevik-led workers'
seized power and swept away the totter-
ing old order.
Today once more the working peo-
ple are faced with famine and anar-
chy. The Soviet proletariat must regain
political power on the basis of democrat-
ically elected soviets if it is to save
the Soviet Union and prevent capitalist
counterrevolution. Genuine soviets have
nothing in common whh either the bu-
reaucratic shells under Stalin- or the
pseudo-parliamentary sham erected under
Gorbachev, butare instruments of prole-
tarian democracy, with delegates directly
elected and recallable by the working
class and its social allies-rank-and-file
collective farmers, oppressed minorities,
working women, Red Army soldiers and
those members of the intelligentsia who
overcome their corrupt appetites and
embrace the cause of the working class.
Genuine soviets will not be created at
will nor by bureaucratic fiat; rather they
arise through the mass struggles of the
working class,
The working class and its allies can
defeat the forces of counterrevolution and
take power into their own hands. For
that, it is necessary above all to forge a
new party modeled on the Bolshevik
Party of Lenin and Trotsky. The ICL
leaflet distributed in Leningrad outlines
the program for the Trotskyist party
needed to lead the Soviet workers politi-
cal revolution.
character' of the bourgeois/scab attack on
Scargill. After the UDM representative
was allowed to appeal from the podium
for the Soviet miners to demand that
monies contributed by them to the heroic
1984-85 British miners strikebe handed
over to the UDM, an ICL representative
addressed conference presidium mem-
bers, presenting them with a copy of
Workers Vanguard (No. 508, 10 August)
with the article, "Sinister Frame-Up of
British Miners Leader-Scargill Witch-
hunted." In the upshot, the conference
resolved not to pursue the UDM's appeal
to join in denouncing Scargill.
The conference participants bought
600 bulletins, some taking stacks of ten
back with them to their comrades in
remote mining areas. In numerous lively
discussions, -the ICL comrades insisted
that the establishment of a capitalist
market economy is not inevitable. More
than 65 years of bureaucratic rule have
succeeded in sapping the communist
consciousness of the Soviet proletariat,
burying it under a mountain of lies, the
most dangerous of which is that all-sided
lie called "socialism in one country."
Wfiat is posed in the USSR today is to
direct the defensive struggles of the
working people toward the formation of
soviets and restoring the internationalist
heritage of October.
During the turbulent months between
the February and October Revolutions in
1917, as the Bolshevik-led workers vied
for power with the weak capitalist Keren-
sky government, the capitalists sought to
force the workers into submission by
sabotaging the economy. With the coun-
try on the verge of famine and anarchy,
Lenin wrote "The Impending Catastrophe
and How to Combat It," insisting that
USA... ua.1.S0
CAHADA.. .-.Ccfnt1.1S
NTS, and from Britain the scab Union
of Democratic Miners and the virulent-
ly anti-communist Electricians
worked the corridors hard with the aim
of promoting a Solidarnosc-style counter-
revolutionary "union." These CIA types
particularly focused on enrolling the
Soviet miners into the vicious witchhunt
against militant British miners leader
Arthur Scargill.
At the conference, our comrades in-
tervened through sales and corridor
discussion to oppose the anti-Scargill
witchhunt, pointing.out the reactionary
Documents al.DlscUSSlon 01
the CoII.se-Of Stalinism
AUa'rJw.1A .h
Spartacist is
sent to all WV
subscribers.
Just Out!
Sp.artacist
(English Edition)
No. 45-46
Winter 1990-91
(64 pages)
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(continued from page 11)
neither the leadership nor program there
to mobilize this defiance against those
who would become their new capitalist
masters. Some delegates looked to syndi-
calism, many felt that a market economy
was inevitable and the question was how
to fight against its excesses- Mean-
while, a hard core of Cold War anti-
cornmunists-e-including representatives
from Freedom House, the Russian fascist
12 WORKERS VANGUARD
Left: Inkatha thugs
launched terror
campaign. Right:
Xhosas murder
"suspected Zulu."
For racially inte-
grated workers
defense guards to
halt bloody com"
munalist warfare
whipped up by
apartheid rulers!
Marxist Working-Class Biweekly of the Spartacist League
o $3/3 issues of
Women and Revolution
0$2/10 introductory issues
of Workers Vanguard
(includes English-language
Spartacist)
labor which is segregated off in men-
only hostels to work the mines and other
key industries.
There are curious patterns to the terror.
For instance, its timing, breaking out
precisely one day after the signing of the
Pretoria Minute on August 6. Another is
the seeming inability of the massive
South African intelligence apparatus to
find the perpetrators. Black miners lead-
er Cyril Ramaphosa, speaking at Howard
University on September 26, noted that
in two months of right-wing terror
throughout the Transvaal, the police
made exactly one arrest. And that was
when a township defense squad caught
an Inkatha terrorist in the act of burning
a house in Soweto and turned him over
to the cops.
Allister Sparks in the Washington Post
(22 September) described the military
precision of the single most blood-
curdling incident, the slaughter of com-
muters aboard a rush-hour train between
Johannesburg and Soweto on September
13. Masked attackers boarded the train at
a Jo'burg station but made no move until
after its next stop, when it became a
partial express passing through two other
stations, giving them ten minutes to carry
out their gory attack:
"They ran through coaches, shooting and
hacking at passengers, hurling dozens
through exit doors to fall in a tangle of
broken limbs down steep embankments.
"At Benrose station, another gang was
waiting on the platform. When the doors
opened and the panic-stricken passengers
spilled out, this second gang attacked,
shooting and slashing at more people
with long machetes. In all, 26 people
were killed and more than 100 injured.
"None of the attackers -said a word
throughout the carnage, leading to specu-
lation that they were not South Africans."
Sparks cited reports that some Inkatha
squads were trained alongside Mozambi-
can "Rename" mercenaries at camps
operated by the South African army. The
TV show South Africa Now raised similar
suggestions in a 3 October report on
"The Hidden Hand" behind the violence:
"A Renamo speciality has been attack-
ing transportation lines in Mozambique,
very much the modus operandi of simi-
lar .massacres on commuter trains out-
side Johannesburg." Among the "fingers"
of the "hidden hand" are the Koevet,
a counterinsurgency unit used by the
South Africans in Namibia; the Inkatha
continued on page .14
Fascist
shock troops
of Afrikaner
Resistance
Movement.
515
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to reduce this to "ancient tribal rivalries"
between Zulu and Xhosa, playing up
images of savagery, while liberals talk
politely of "inter-ethnic conflict" and
wring their hands about "black-on-black
violence." But this slaughter grows out
ofa terror campaign by Buthelezi's
Inkatha, whose gangs of thugs have mur-
dered more than 4,000 people in Natal
province during the last five years and
have now extended their operations to
the Vaal Reef, Seeking to scuttle, or at
least reshape ANC-government negoti-
ations, various elements of the apartheid
regime and its puppets have conspired to
touch off a tribal war, and have to some
extent succeeded.
The theory of age-old "inter-tribal
violence" is belied by the fact that the
terror in Natal has pitted Inkatha Zulu
impis (squads) against otherZulus who
support the pro-ANC United Democratic
Front. Furthermore, a recent book on the
Xhosa, The Dead Will Arise by Professor
. Jeff Peires, chairman of the history de-
partment of Transkei University, notes
that there was only one recorded clash
between the Zulus and the Xhosas-in
1827, and even that was a minor skir-
mish which ended with the latter pledg-
ing fealty to Zulu King Shaka. The very
real tribal tensions in South Africa today
are more the product of apartheid's
"divide-and-rule" schemes, carving the
black African population up into myriad
bantustans and deliberately using migrant
Apartheid ruler
De Klerk greets
Nelson Mandela,
August 7. ANC
promises to end
"armed struggle"
and leave gold
and diamond
mines in hands
of the Randlords.
bantustans-can only be solved when the
working class comes to power. Never
before has the combative black working
class been better organized. Yet the
Stalinists of the South African Commu-
nist Party, playing out their historic
role, try to contain this fight within the
bounds of a "national-democratic" capi-
talist state. The urgent task is forging a
Trotskyist party to lead the struggle for
workers revolution.
Behind the "Reef War"
While the ANC called off the "armed
struggle," right-wing forces took this as
a signal to launch a killing spree. The
hideous murders have thus far taken
more than 1,000 lives, and are sporadi-
cally continuing. The Western press tries
the key. question of Stalinism vs. Trot-
skyism. This is no abstract debate: the
issue is reform or revolution and the
.stekes are enormous. As Stalinist regimes
collapse all across East Europe under the
weight of their own contradictions and in
the face of the imperialist onslaught, we
have noted that the South African masses
don't believe in the "death of Commu-
nism." yet Stalinism in its death agony
has one last gasp-trying to hold on in
South Africa long enough to betray one
more revolution to the bourgeoisie.
South Africa today expresses the quin-
tessence of Trotsky's program of perma-
nent revolution in which the most basic
democratic demands-"one person, one
vote," land to the tiller, ending slave-like
oppression in the mining compounds and
South Africa...
(continued from page 16)
'the struggle'." They worry about the
Communist Party (SACP). But to show
their commitment to a "post-apartheid"
capitalist state, the ANC, SACP and their
allies in COSATU (Congress of South
African Trade Unions) have denounced
militant sit-down strikes, sacrificing
hundreds of unionists and pledging to
protect company profits (see accompany-
ing article on the Mercedes-Benz strike).
Last February, Mandela's first speech-
es after his release from Pollsmoor
prison reiterated ANC commitment to
"armed struggle" and the alliance with
the SACP. We noted, "The morning
after, there was consternation in corpo-
rate boardrooms when Mandela re-
affirmed the ANC's call for nationaliza-
tion of the mines. The Johannesburg gold
market sank to the floor" (WV No. 496,
23 February). The ANC has long ad-
vocated a "mixed economy" and some
form of negotiated settlement with the
white-supremacist regime. The famous
phrase in the 1955 "Freedom Charter,"
that "mineral wealth beneath the soil...
shall be transferred to the ownership
of the people as a whole," is. purposely
vague. The Jo'burg bankers and indus-
trialists want the ANC to spell out its
commitments.
In May, Mandela told a conferenceof
verligte capitalists organized by Anglo
American mining magnate Gavin Reily
"a secret": "the view that the only words
in the economic vocabulary that the ANC
knows are nationalisation and redistribu-
tion is mistaken." In September Mandela
told the Financial Mail that he has "never
advocated socialism at all" and that he
favors "the flourishing of capitalism
among Africans." And at the beginning
of October the ANC issued a revised
economic policy statement saying that
only state-owned industries, like .utility
companies, which the government is
trying to privatize, "will be subject to
immediate re-nationalization."
As the bosses decry "mayhem" and the
country lurches chaotically, the black
unions and anti-apartheid organizations
are thrown into crisis, with raging inter-
nal debates over "which way forward."
In the pages of the Weekly Mail, Work in
Progress, South African Labour Bulletin
and even the SACP's AfricanCommunist,
articles and readers' letters abound on
30 NOVEMBER 1990 13
TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA
Norfolk
Box 1972, Main PO
Norfolk, VA 23501'
Oakland
Box 32552
Oakland, CA 94604
(415) 839-0851
San Francisco
Box 5712
San Francisco, CA 94101
(415) 863-6963
Washington, D:C.
Box 75073
Washington, D.C. 20013
(202) 872-8240.
Vancouver
Box 2717;:Main PO
Vancouver, B.C.
V6B 3X2
(604) 255-0636
Montreal
C.P. Les Atriums, B.P. 32066
Montreal, Que. H2L 4Y5
union-based workers defense guards,
linking the factory to the townships,
and made up of class-conscious workers
including Zulus, Xhosas and members
of other tribal groupings, as well as
coloured, Asian and anti-racist white
workers, to suppress both the right-wing
terrorists and the fomenters of bloody
communalist war. In tsarist Russia the
Bolsheviks in the oil-producing of
Baku organized such workers military
formations to suppress mutual commu-
nalist slaughter among the Armenians
and Azerbaijanis, incited by the petty-
bourgeois nationalists of both peoples.
In South Africa today, workers defense
guards could develop into powerful
organs of proletarian dual power which
can derail tht\ANC/De Klerk/Relly plans
for a "post-apartheid" capitalist state.
Precisely because of the economic
development fostered by South African
capitalism, the various racial, ethnic and
tribal groups are intermingled as nowhere
else on the continent. Indians led by
Mohandas Gandhi played a key role in
the founding of the Congress movement.
The Afrikaans-speaking coloured popula-
tion in the Cape province has historically
been in the vanguard of struggle against
racial discrimination. And although the
white Ropulation as a whole is a privi-
leged- caste enjoying relative prosperity
paid for by the toil of black labor, many
whites also have been active in anti-
apartheid struggles, from the ANC to
. the black unions. But the ANC, with its
popular-front program aiming at a "post-
apartheid" capitalist state, cannot over-
come the racial/ethnic/tribal communal
animosities that are bred by the struggle
for survival in conditions of extreme
poverty.
These are the existing lines of division
along which a desperate competition for
the spoils of office is carried out. This
can only be transcended through socialist
revolution eliminating the fratricidal
competition for a few meager crumbs
from the capitalists' table and placing
the enormous wealth (presently in the
hands of rich corporations like Anglo
American) at the service of all the toil-
ers. Desperately needed is an authentical-
ly communist party built on the program
of permanent revolution and mobilizing
the power of the black proletariat, which
can unite and champion the rights of
all, the Xhosa and Zulu, Venda and
Sotho, migrant workers from Mozam-
bique and Botswana, the coloureds and
Asians, and those growing numbers of
whites who do not wish to spend their
lives in a doomed racist garrison state
awaiting a fiery Gotterdammerung in their
bunkers.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Detroit
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Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta.
Los Angeles, CA 90029
(213) 380-8239
Madison
Box 1492
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New York
Box 444, Canal St. Sta.
New York, NY 10013
(212) 267-1025

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migrant workers' hostels into surround-
ing largely Xhosa townships, killing at
random. Soon Xhosas were, launching
murderous attacks on the hostels. This is
attested to as well by the account of
ANCel' Mapheto, who while criticizing
attempts to portray the violence as "a
Xhosa-Zulu war" notes that often "all
people were Zulu-speaking were
seen as being responsible," and in one
area "sectors of the youth felt every
home with Zulu-speaking inhabitants had
to be burned or demolished." Mapheto
himself was surrounded by a lynch mob
of Xhosa youth who thought the ANCel's
were Zulus because their car had Natal
license plates. And at report-back meet-
ings, he says, people asked, "Give us
guns and we will kill the Zulus."
It's not surprising that there is concern
that a government of the ANC (many of
whose present leaders are Xhosa, includ-
ing Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu, Mbeki,
Hani) would favor their own tribal
grouping. For all its appeals for "non-
racialism," the ANC's only answer to
attempts to provoke tribal warfare has
been to appeal to the apartheid regime to
impose its racist "law and order," or
watch as the Xhosa youth get swept into
the communalist bloodletting. The history
of neo-colonial regimes in Africa, such
as Zimbabwe where the government of
Robert Mugabe based on the Shona has
wielded supremacy over the Ndebele led
by Joshua Nkomo, is replete with exam-
ples of domination. by one tribe over
another. That this has been the fate of
much of post-colonial black Africa is
tragic enough; in the industrial power-
house of the continent this need not and
must not happen.
What is needed is the formation of
ANC leaders:
Umkontowe Sizwe
commander Chris
Hanl (left),
International .
director Thabo
Mbekl.
s::
sr
c
co
6"
c:
::J
c-
oo
we were often booed ....
"During our visits to the townships, a
desperate for arms became deafening.
And at meenngs., unless a speaker said
something very specific on the question
of self defence and arms, his message fell
on deaf ears.
"Some ANC workers even became reluc-
tant to come face-to-face with comrades
from conflict-ridden areas. They had no
answer to the demand for arms .... Instead
people felt the ANC was displaying a
political paralysis and had fallen prey to
De Klerk's sweet talk."
-Work in Progress,
September 1990
The imperialist press reports that the.
young "comrades" in the Vaal town-
ships are saying, "Give us MK"-short
for Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the
Nation), the ANC's armed wing-and
"Give us Hani."
Unlike many ANC'ers who after return-
ing home have become the darlings of
the white liberal cocktail circuit, Chris
Hani, the MK chief of staff, has report-
edly set up operations along with 2,000
fighters in the Transkei, where he is
staying in the home of former chief
Kaiser Matanzima. Some of his support-
ers refer to this as "the first liberated
zone." The Siiddeutsche Zeitung (14 No-
vember) writes: "In his speeches, often
entirely in Xhosa, for which he likes to
show up in a camouflage jacket, he calls
on his soldiers to 'stay in the trenches'."
But behind the militant rhetoric, what
Hani is actually doing is setting up an
ethnic-regional local power in the Trans-
kei (where pro-apartheid elements just
attempted a coup against the pro-ANC
bantustan military rulers). Does Hani, the
hero of the "young lions" in the town-
ships, want to succeed Mandela at the
head of the ANC by building a Xhosa
tribal base in a dressed-up bantustan?
The danger of tribal war is real. In
order to undercut the ANC, which sells
its liberal program with appeals to "non-
racial unity" across ethnic lines, the
Inkatha squads surged 'out ofmainly Zulu
T t k
. t S rt . L WV Photo
ro S Yls. pa . eague in New York protest, June 1983,
demands internationalist labor solidarity, not imperialist sanctions.
with the police-imposed curfew, under-
cuts the feverish organizing campaign of
anti-apartheid forces.
But in response to the terror, the re-
sponse of the ANC... was to appeal to
the apartheid police! Andrew Mapheto,
regional ANC organizer in the PWV
(Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal Reef) re-
gion, wrote in a revealing account:
"Unfortunately, the more reports of po-
lice misconduct reached us, the more
we urged our people to work in con-
sultation with them. The result was that
Dhladhla/AFP
"Hidden hand" of state
behind the grisly slaughter aboard.
Johannesburg-Soweto commuter
train, September 13. -
South Africa...
(continued from page 13)
vigilantes; and the army's infamous
"Civil Cooperation Bureau." A recent
government "inquiry" into this assassina-
tion bureau found no evidence of death
squads, even though they had confessions
from white and black members describ-
ing the murders they had carried out! .'
The fascist "white right" has also
stepped up its activity lately, organiz-
ing for race war. The largest grouping,
the AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Move-
ment) of Eugene TerreBlanche, with its
swastika-like emblem, has been recruit-
ing for paramilitary "Boerekomrnandos."
Last spring, AWB-affiliated vigilantes in
Welkom, in the Orange Free State,
launched a murderous offensive against
blacks in the mines and a nearby town-
ship. In early July there was a series of
bomb attacks in Johannesburg against a
synagogue, an anti-apartheid Afrikaans
paper and a crowded black bus station,
which were claimed by a previously
unheard-of white-supremacist terror out-
fit. And the Weekly Mail (19 October)
reports that, "A spate of assassinations
and attempted murders of African Na-
tional Congress activists over the past
week has raised fears that apartheid death
squads are back in business."
In the background of the "Reef war"
there are different forces at work. Hard-
liners in the police and army-which
have stood by and watched as Inkatha
--gangsattack-seek to shore up the crum-
bling ramparts of apartheid by scuttling
negotiations. In addition to these die-
hards, the De Klerk "reformers" (includ-
ing the Broederbond secret society of
Afrikaner leaders which was the hard
core of the apartheid regime) want to
expand the "negotiations" to include their
kept dogs like Buthelezi. To dilute the
influence of the ANC/SACP they have
even extended invitations to the black
nationalists of the PAC (Pan-Africanist
Congress) and AZAPO (Azanian Peo-
ple's Organization), which are reportedly
in turmoil over the issue. The terror
campaign also works to create a-climate
of fear in the townships which, together .
14 WORKERS VANGUARD
South African Labour Bulletin Morice/South African Labour Bulletin
Left: East London auto workers demonstrate In support of plant occupation. Right: CP leaders Joe Siovo (center) and NUMSA's Moses Mayeklso were brought
In by Mercedes-Benz to squelch the strike.
Mercedes-Benz South Africa
which caused them so much embarrass-
ment, the NUMSA tops signed a grovel-
ing agreement pledging themselves to
the "common objectives of industrial
peace and stability," the "maintenance of
acceptable work and behavior standards"
and the "growth and viability of the
company." The fired workers were out of
the plant, and the union agreed to assign
a top organizer to East London to keep
the Mercedes workers in line. Instead of
militant workers control, which repre-
sented dual power in the factory, the
company and union intend to implement
West German style "co-determination."
For years, the ANC/SACP was calling
on the imperialists to impose economic
"sanctions" on the apartheid regime, and
on multinationals to shut down their
South African operations. We warned
against looking to international finance
capital as saviors, and that "divestment"
could sap the strength of the key force
for freedom, the black proletariat, whose
unions were strongest. in foreign-owned
plants like Mercedes. But now that the
ANC and SACP see themselves "sharing
power" they'll break strikes to keep the
multinationals sweet.
The. Mercedes strike showed in a mi-
crocosm what the ANC/SACP/COSATU
negotiations with De Klerk for a "demo-
cratic" South Africa are all about, South
Africa Labour Bulletin editor Karl von
Holdt summed it up: the anti-apartheid
forces are in effect "abandoning their call
for disinvestment," and "these organisa-
tions are accepting that capitalists have
an important and legitimate role to play
in South Africa. They are also accepting
that it is necessary to create conditions
that capitalists will find acceptable."
In South Africa today the returning
ANC leaders and nouveau riches in So-
weto are notable for their predilection for
Mercedes-Benz luxury automobiles. ls
a result, the nascent layer of well-. ..
blacks who want to make it into the be. s
class are popularly known as the tribe
of the "WaBenzi." As class divisions
sharpen, the WaBenzi join their capi-
talist masters in cracking down on the
Mercedes-Benz workers.
Although the East London strikers
were defeated, the black workers .f
South Africa are combative and resti
In the present situation, as reformi-
seek deals with the government
companies, strike struggles could spa, k.
a wave of worker insurgency through-
out the country. The issue of prolct...
ian revolution would be posed, what's
needed is a revolutionary party to.Ieo. i it
to victory.
Black auto'
workers at
Mercedes-Benz
have been in
the forefront of
class struggle
in South Africa.
23 stewards and was voted by a gen-
eral union meeting on August 16. Two
thousand of the factory's 3,500 workers
began the sleep-in, replacing the Mer-
cedes star with the red flag with the
hammer and sickle.
Already on August 21, NUMSA leader
Mayekiso spoke to the workers inside the
plant, trying to get them to leave with
promises that plant-level bargaining
could take up some of their demands; on
September 3, COSATU vice president
John Gomomo and ANC leader Raymond
Mhlaba (both SACP leaders) spoke with
the shop stewards. But the strike contin-
ued, although the numbers inside the
plant began to dwindle.
The company continued to hardline it,
refusing to grant any increase and an-
nouncing that 538 hard-core strikers were
fired. For support they went to ANC
international director Thabo Mbeki, who
went to the Communist Party. On Sep-
tember 20, Mayekiso and SACP general
secretary Joe Slovo spoke to thousands
of MBSA workers at a church meeting
hall in the huge Mdantsane township.
Mayekiso warned of the danger of
Mercedes pulling out of South Africa.
,Slovo backed the union tops, saying:"!t
is not a question of right and wrong, but
of power, of being able to continue strug-
gling and making advances." Yet it was
the stab in the back by the ANC/SACP/
COSATU leaders that sabotaged this
struggle. But still the strikers held out
until October 8. .
In order to.end the nine-week.struggle
SACP/COSATU served as their instru-
ments in disciplining the workers.
The strike was directed against the
National Bargaining Forum, set up the
year before by NUMSA and South Afri-
ca's auto manufacturers. In 1989, nation-
al bargaining had raised the minimum
for auto workers to R5.50 an hour. How-
ever, for the traditionally militant Mer-
cedes workers it brought nothing, as their
wages were already above this minimum.
For 1990 they demanded a R3-per-hour '
raise above the national minimum. This
was opposed by Mayekiso and the
, NVMSA tops.
The union leadership accused the Mer-
cedes militants of "factory. tribalism,"
abandoning "unity" with workers in other
companies. This is a classic ploy of
Stalinists and other reformists who call
on the workers to "sacrifice" for the
popular front. Salvador Allende's Unidad
Popular in Chile accused copper miners
of being "privileged" when they struck
to defend their cost-of-living escalator.'
Now South African workers are being
told to sacrifice even before the pop front
is in office.
Extensive post-strike coverage of the
struggle' at Mercedes-Benz by the South
Africa Labour Bulletin (November 1990)
reports that the movement began among
several shop stewards as they traveled to .
and from the SACP rally in Johannes-
burg. While apologists for the union tops
try- to blame it all on the "immature
militancy" of a small minority, in fact
the strike "'as supported by 18 out of the
Sit-Down Strikers Raise Red Flag,
CP Sells. Them Out
When the South African Communist
Party held its first public rally last July
29, African National Congress leader
Nelson Mandela arrived at the stadium
near Johannesburg in a bright red Merce-
des 500 SE armored limousine. The car
had been built for him specially by the
workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in
East London. The red, they had said in
presenting it to him, stood for the blood
spilled in the freedom struggle and the
"revolutionary alliance" of the ANC, the
SACP and the COSATU trade-union
federation.
Two weeks later, the workers at
Mercedes-Benz South Africa (MBSA).
occupied the plant in a "sleep-in" strike
and ran the ANC and SACP flags up the
company flagpoles. Yet the ANC/SACP/
, COSATU alliance recoiled in horror, for
the strike threw a giant wrench in their
plans for industrial' peace in a "post-
apartheid" South Africa. At the com-
pany's request, SACP leader Joe Slovo
and National Union of Metal Workers
(NUMSA) general secretary Moses Ma-
yekiso (also a top SACPer) flew to East
London to tell the strikers to go back to
work.
Strikebreaking on behalf of the "en-
lightened" apartheid bosses-the strike
against Mercedes-Benz sums up in a nut:
shell what the negotiations are all about.
It also threw South Africa's black union
movement into turmoil, dramatically ex-
posing the "revolutionary" pretensions of
its leaders. And because of this, it was
downplayed by pro-ANC media.
The Mercedes plant was one of the
most militant factories in all of South
Africa. In a marathon 1987 strike they
won the highest wages in the auto indus-
try. This gave the' workers confidence
and a sense of their strength. A spokes-
man for MBSA management said that
"we have had a factory with worker
control since 1987. Supervisors used to
clock in and then lock' themselves in
their offices for the whole day. They
didn't dare go out on the assembly
lines."
Another MBSA executive complained
that "a highly organised and politicised
workforce with very skilled union leader-
ship had in many respects taken control."
Some. workers even stood at assembly
lines with mock AK-47s or bazookas
strapped to their backs, as a "symbol
of defiance and rejection of the com-
pany which many workers believed was
merely an extension of the repressive
apartheid structures." Mercedes-Benz was
determined to smash this example .of
class-struggle militancy. And the ANC/
30 NOVEMBER 1990
WfJRNIRS "''''(J'RIJ
ANC, Communist Party. Seek to Rep-ackage Ap.artheid
outh Africa an
Permanent Revolution
couple of months ago." In March, when
cops massacred protesters in Sebokeng,
Mandela (temporarily) called off a meet-
ing with De Klerk, This time the ANC
leader met the minister of "law and
order" and called their talk "extremely
fruitful."
As a wave of shadowy terror swept
through the Transvaal, leaving over 500
dead in a two-week period in August,
Mandela "urged the government to use
the full force of its security apparatus to
end the violence" (Johannesburg Star,
12 September). "Mandela wants an iron
fist. We're going to give an iron fist,"
said Major General Gerrit Erasmus, po-
lice commissioner in the Witwatersrand.
"Operation Iron Fist" imposed virtual
martial law on 27 black townships, sur-
rounding them with razor wire and brutal
police occupation. With the lid clamped
on, De Klerk traveled to Washington
where he stood at the Reflecting Pool
with George Bush and obscenely
declared solidarity with Martin Luther
King's "dream."
In May the ANC and the Nationalist
government held "talks about talks" at
Groote Schuur. In August, Mandela
signed the "Pretoria Minute" with De
Klerk, agreeing to give up armed struggle
in exchange for release of political pris-
oners. It was a one-sided "peace": black
townships were drenched in blood in the
mysterious "Reef wars," as Inkatha ter-
rorists of KwaZulu bantustan satrap
Mangosuthu Buthelezi and their police
protectors roamed with impunity. As
for political prisoners, the government
claimed there were a grand total of
40-50, while the families of over 3,000
jailed anti-apartheid fighters have yet to
see their loved ones.
Meanwhile, to reassure the capitalist
rulers, the ANC backed off its long-held
position for ,nationalization of the gold
and diamond mines-the heart of South
Africa's economy. But this is not enough
for the capitalists. The Economist com-
plains, "miners attend union meetings in
military uniforms, armed with imitation
AK-47s .... Production is disrupted by
stayaways that have nothing to do with
wage claims and everything to do with
continued on page 13
an organizer 'of the militant South Afri-
, can Youth Congress in the Eastern Cape
province. As tear gas lingered over
Sebokeng township in the Vaal Reef in
September, where soldiers opened fire
on black youth, killing 36, one anti-
apartheid fighter sighed, "I tell you, this
is no life. It isn't what, we expected a
at a a OSATU
Combative unionists demonstrate for Workers Charter, October 1990. Black
proletariat must fight for its Ownclass power'!
masses in the factories, the townships
and the bantustans in forging organs of
dual power in the fight for a black-
centered workers government in South
Africa.
"People thought that Mandela's release
was synonymous with freedom. But that
has not occurred," said Lulamile Jojiyasi,
derous apartheid repression, and mount-
ing disaffection with the ANC leaders
accused of falling for De Klerk's hon-
eyed words. Where is freedom, they
demand, as the death tolls climb.
There can be no end to the system of
apartheid slavery short of socialist revo-
lution. Superexploitation of black labor
is the bedrock on which South African
capitalism has been built, and with it the
whole edifice of white supremacy. Any-
thing even approaching a minimum of
bourgeois democracy (such as "one per-
son, one vote") is incompatible with the
continued existence of that social system.
Fighting for the land which has- been
stolen from them, for the mines and
factories which produce enormous wealth
from their toil, South Africa's black
masses sense this basic fact. But as the
decisive hour approaches, the ANC lead-
ers and the South African Communist
Party are the greatest obstacles to black
freedom, chaining the oppressed popula-
tions to the apartheid masters in a "popu-
lar front" alliance with De Klerk and the
"verligte" (enlightened) capitalists. And
now virtually every leftist and anti-
apartheid organization seems to be falling
into line behind this betrayal. '
Desperately needed is a revolutionary
leadership which can lead the oppressed
PART ONE OF TWO
Nine months after therelease of Afri-
can National Congress leader Nelson
Mandela from apartheid prison, South
Africa is at a decisive turning point. The
imperialist media talk of "power sharing"
between the white minority regime head-
ed by Nationalist prime minister EW.. De
Klerk and the ANC as leader of the
oppressed black, coloured (mixed race)
and Indian populations which constitute
more than six-sevenths of the total. The
Economist (3 November) publishes a
special survey of South Africa titled,
"After Apartheid." But while the name
may change, what's being talked about
is reforming and sprucing up the racist
system. As constitutional commissions
deliberate, there is bitter anger in black
townships and factories against the mur-
/
--------SEE PAGE FIFTEEN ------..,.--
16 30 NOVEMBER 1990