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	Workers Vanguard No. 859	25 November 2005

For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Class-Struggle Road to Black Liberation

New Orleans: Racist Atrocity

Iraq: Murderous Occupation

NOVEMBER 22—The abandonment of masses of overwhelmingly black and poor people by America’s capitalist rulers in the face of Hurricane Katrina is a crime that must be seared into the memory of working people. Months after the catastrophe, New Orleans remains a rotting shell. Bodies are still being found almost daily. Nearly half the devastated city is without power, without medical care and with most of its population unable to return to their homes.

Barely a day after a moratorium on evictions by Louisiana’s governor expired on October 25, record numbers of eviction notices were being served. Some 10,000 people now face homelessness as landlords raise rents by as much as 100 percent. With Dickensian cruelty, FEMA has announced that after the Thanksgiving holiday, it will evict as many as 53,000 families from the motel rooms they’ve been forced to call home. Thousands more will be evicted following Christmas and New Year’s. Earlier this month, FEMA, in an unprecedented move, stopped payment to flood insurance policyholders, outrageously claiming that it had run out of money. This is an outright lie. Of the utterly inadequate $62.3 billion Washington appropriated for relief after hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, “more than half—$37.5 billion—is sitting in FEMA’s account, waiting for a purpose” (Time, 28 November).

When the State of Louisiana requested $250 billion in funds, this was contemptuously dismissed in the media as the “Louisiana Looters’ Bill.” In contrast, Congressmen had no problem voting themselves another pay raise as they recessed for Thanksgiving.

It is the capitalist looters who are making out big. Northrop Grumman is in line for $2 billion in FEMA funds to rebuild its shipyards, where most of the Navy’s surface ships are built. And defense contractor Titan, a company that has its hands in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, has already received contracts worth over half a million dollars. Meanwhile, nationwide the bourgeoisie continues to intensify its attacks on the working class: on the heels of auto parts supplier Delphi’s savage assault on its workers’ wages and pensions through bankruptcy maneuvers, GM just announced its plan to cut 30,000 jobs over the next three years.

At the same time, popular support for the Bush administration continues to fall over government corruption scandals, the economy and, mainly, the debacle of the bloody Iraq occupation. On November 17, Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime hawk, called to “redeploy U.S. troops” out of Iraq within six months, although when Republicans forced a House vote on the question, Murtha and all but three Democrats voted against immediate troop withdrawal. The Democrats’ concern is that through its incompetence and savagery in Iraq, the Bush administration is undermining the reactionary “war on terror” and U.S. imperialism’s long-term strategic interests. Expressing this frustration, liberal columnist Frank Rich complained that “the percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll” (New York Times, 20 November).

The Democratic Party is a capitalist party dedicated to the fundamental interests of U.S. imperialism. As we wrote in “Big Lies and Imperialist War” (WV No. 856, 14 October):

“Growing opposition in the U.S. population to the Iraq occupation, revulsion over the government’s role in the death and destruction of black people and the poor after Hurricane Katrina, anger at the attacks on fundamental democratic rights—the situation speaks to the burning need to build a workers party that would organize class struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers…. Only when the multiracial proletariat seizes power from the blood-drenched, arrogant capitalist rulers can we begin to speak of a world rid of imperialist wars and occupations and offering material security and social justice for all.”

We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by Spartacist League spokesman Erica Jones at an October 20 New York City forum.

* * *

We saw it as necessary to have a forum on the fight for black liberation and the fight for a workers America at this time because events such as the racist atrocity in New Orleans have further exposed the irrationality and anarchy of capitalism, its lies and its unsustainability. The tragedy of New Orleans isn’t exactly “all natural,” as the capitalist rulers and their media would have you believe. The raw, naked truth is that securing the safety of the black and poor living in New Orleans was not considered profitable. The facilities on the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans constitute the U.S.’s largest port, and the Louisiana coast produces one-third of the country’s seafood, one-fifth of its oil and one-quarter of its natural gas. But the capitalist system as it relates to building and securing infrastructure is not rational.

The U.S. government, from Clinton’s time to the current Bush administration, knew about the dangers facing New Orleans. They knew that the levees surrounding New Orleans were not built to withstand anything beyond a Level 3 hurricane, that the levees were in poor repair, that the wetlands which provided a barrier to the ocean were rapidly receding. Yet before hurricane season, funding for flood control was drastically slashed as more and more money was provided for the war in Iraq.

The capitalist class and the parties that uphold its rule—Democrats and Republicans—also knew that if a hurricane the size of Katrina hit New Orleans, given the social structure of America, the rich would be protected as they always are—on higher ground. Yet bourgeois politicians such as Clinton, who ran to Bush’s side immediately after the hurricane hit, want you to believe that the government is doing all that can be done and that racism has nothing to do with the relief efforts. And in regard to the destruction of the ports and oil refineries, who do you think is profiting off rebuilding them? You guessed it, the Halliburtons, the Bechtels, etc.

The death and destitution were preventable. Just compare how hurricane situations are handled by the Cuban deformed workers state, where the capitalist class was expropriated and where collectivized property and a planned economy exist. Its government can actually provide for the safety and security of its citizens, even in the face of the longstanding U.S. economic embargo. The Cuban government has repeatedly safely evacuated up to two million people from oncoming hurricanes.

Why didn’t the U.S. government prepare to evacuate its poor and black citizens of New Orleans in a similar way? Perhaps a shred of New Orleans history may offer a clue. In 1927, there was a flood of the Mississippi River that threatened to destroy the land and property of the wealthy aristocrats who dwelt in southern Louisiana. To divert the damage that the flood might have caused to their property, they devised and implemented a plan to dynamite the levees surrounding the black and poor neighborhoods to take pressure off the levees surrounding their own. As a result, thousands of black and poor Louisiana residents were left homeless. And those black people who worked on the plantations in the region were not allowed to leave because the plantation owners rightly feared that they would never come back to work in slavery-like conditions. So they were herded on top of the levees under the guns of National Guardsmen, and only those families who had members helping repair the levees were allowed access to the food provided by the Red Cross. The rest were left to fend for themselves.

Does this sound familiar? The only interest that this capitalist government serves is the defense of private property and the profit system as a whole. The U.S. capitalist class has a lengthy history of exploiting labor and oppressing minorities. It is futile to appeal to its “conscience” or “morality.” Its actions are guided by its class interest, which is to maximize profits. They’re not even bothering to count the bodies of many who died during the Hurricane Katrina flood. Almost two months later, there are still over 500 people “missing” from New Orleans Parish Prison, where prisoners had been left to drown in their cells.

For Class War Against Capitalist Rulers!

This reminds me of Iraq, where the U.S. imperialists and their allies aren’t even bothering to count the bodies of Iraqis they bombed and murdered under the pretext of the “war on terror,” “weapons of mass destruction” and “Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.” Lies, lies and more lies. Even the lies used to bolster patriotic support for the bloody imperialist war in Iraq remind me of the racist atrocity in New Orleans. Not even a day after the levees broke, the bourgeois media was in a frenzy, telling tall tales of looting, robbery, murder and mayhem in New Orleans. In the face of starvation, the media wrote that blacks “stole” food and white people “found” it.

To be sure that this is racist America that we’re talking about, dusted off was the lying slavery-era cry of the black man as sexual predator. Thus there was the scare over alleged rapes. “Hold on to your skirts, Southern belles, we’re sending in armed federal guards with shoot-to-kill orders” was the message and method of justification for turning New Orleans into a federally occupied military zone. It wasn’t to help people. They’d also have you believe they’re helping the Iraqi peoples by bringing “democracy” and “liberation.” Even the torture scandals of Abu Ghraib hit close to home. The U.S. houses nearly two million mostly black and Latino men, women and even youth in prison hellholes. It is the prisons of America that provided the training ground for torture like that we hear about in Abu Ghraib in Iraq and in Guantánamo.

The New York Times now reports that there was no evidence for the scare stories about New Orleans. The real criminals are the government and its army and police, a few of whom were recently investigated for stealing Cadillacs. And just a week ago, a retired elementary school teacher, Robert Davis, who is 64 years old and black, was brutally beaten by cops in the French Quarter for merely asking about the curfew time. The real thugs and looters are the U.S. imperialists and their allies who are exercising military might and plundering the world.

There is a war going on here at home as well. And as the racist New Orleans atrocity shows, it’s a war against black people, poor people and working people. Now more than ever, it is clear that the workers and oppressed minorities in the U.S. must side with the Iraqi peoples who face imperialist onslaught, just as we must side with the victims of the U.S. rulers here in the belly of the beast. We must demand that the U.S. troops get out of Iraq now! Insofar as the forces on the ground in Iraq aim their blows against the occupiers, we call for their military defense against U.S. imperialism, without giving one iota of political support to the insurgents and while opposing communal violence and religious fundamentalism.

At home it is necessary to wage class war to fight against the racist capitalist rulers and to fight for workers revolution to defeat U.S. imperialism. After the hurricane disaster, we called for trade unions to mobilize for the rescue effort and to demand a massive rebuilding effort. Powerful unions such as the TWU transit workers and the ILA longshoremen should be mobilizing black, white, Latino and immigrant workers to organize unions in Louisiana, to fight for union jobs at good union wages, for public works and health care, emergency clothing and safety equipment. Such a fight would strike a blow against the capitalist bosses and the government’s attempts to pay below-prevailing wages on federally funded construction projects. It is necessary to fight for abolishing the capitalist system in its entirety.

Marxism and Black Liberation

Throughout the history of class society, there has been slave and slave master, lord and serf, and today there is the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) and the working class (the proletariat). In today’s society, the bourgeoisie owns all of the means of production—the factories, the mills, the shops, the plants—along with the modes of transportation and all of the material resources needed to keep production running. The proletariat has its labor power, which it must sell to survive. The bourgeoisie exploits this labor power to create profit.

The state appeared when society first divided into classes. The ruling class needs a special apparatus of coercion and of subjugating the will of others by force. Thus in today’s society, the working class is kept under control by the state, which at its core is made up of the cops, the military, the courts and prisons, all of which exist to uphold the bourgeoisie’s private property system and keep the workers and the rest of the have-nots in place. Supplemented ideologically by the churches, educational institutions and media, the state is used by the ruling class to suppress anger over such conditions as the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor.

In the U.S., key to mobilizing the working class to smash this system of repression is the perspective of revolutionary integrationism. The Spartacist League’s program of revolutionary integrationism was developed by Richard Fraser when he was a member of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In his 1953 lectures titled “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (reprinted in Prometheus Research Series No. 3, “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser”), Fraser wrote:

“The racial division of society was born with capitalism and will die only with the death of this last system of exploitation. Before capitalism there was no race concept. There was no skin color exploitation, there was no race prejudice, there was no idea of superiority and inferiority based upon physical characteristics.

“It was the advent of Negro chattel slavery in the western hemisphere which first divided society into races.…

“Having become the imperialist leader of the capitalist world, the U.S. exports race prejudice as naturally as it does death and destruction to the colonial world.”

In the years since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, the fundamental conditions of life for the majority of black people, particularly in the key areas of employment, housing, wages and education, have worsened. Fifty percent of black men are unemployed in New York City. There are 9,000 homeless black children in the Chicago public school system, and many children walk out of the metal detectors at their school entrances into the metal detectors at the entrance of their local and state prisons. In cities like Detroit, black ghettos look like war zones with dilapidated houses, abandoned businesses and armed police patrolling the streets looking to kill with impunity. For the past 20 years, the “war on drugs” has hit black people with a brutal vengeance—a war of police repression and imprisonment aimed at the black and minority population that has sent almost a generation of black men to prison. America is as racist today as it ever was.

In the U.S., black workers have historically made up a disproportionate percentage of the bourgeoisie’s reserve army of labor, sought after in times of economic boom and war but the first to be laid off when times are bad. American black workers face pervasive racial oppression both on and off the job. And, more and more, the black population has become an excess, surplus population for the ruling class. William Bennett’s comment that “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down” reflects the bourgeoisie’s impulse toward genocide of the black population.

However, black workers play a strategic role in the American economy and are represented in union jobs at a higher rate than white workers. For the struggle for black freedom to succeed requires struggle by the working class as a whole to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an egalitarian socialist society. Our program of revolutionary integrationism is premised upon mobilizing the working class to take up the fight for black liberation—a class-struggle fight to uproot the source of black oppression, which is capitalism.

But the struggle of black people in this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is also more than that struggle. Black people are an oppressed race-color caste. And while there are other racial and ethnic minorities, mainly immigrants, who also face oppression because of the inherently racist nature of U.S. capitalist society, the histories of non-white groups of people in this country are not all the same.

The liberal “people of color” rhetoric that you hear actually erases the distinct history of each racial minority group and liquidates the unique aspect of black oppression rooted in U.S. history—like slavery, like lynching and the Klan, like the degradation and humiliation of riding in the back of the bus, sitting in the back of a restaurant and not being allowed to travel or buy a home where you want. Dividing the working class along race lines is key to maintaining capitalist rule in the U.S. Conscious of the social power that the proletariat would attain through unified struggle, the American bourgeoisie applies “divide and conquer” strategies.

In racist capitalist America, the right to abortion is under attack, and the fastest-growing component of rising incarceration rates is young black and Latina women, who are also getting the HIV virus and AIDS at a higher rate than the rest of the population. Black women workers face triple oppression. They are oppressed as part of a race-color caste, oppressed as women and oppressed as workers. In the U.S. and all over the world, we fight for full equality for women and their complete integration into the workforce. We call for equal pay for equal work and for free, safe abortion on demand as part of a free, quality health care system. The struggles against exploitation, against women’s oppression, against racial oppression will advance together or fall back separately. The working class cannot be free unless it fights for black freedom, and you cannot have a workers revolution without black freedom at the center of your program. The question of black oppression in the United States is strategic to the revolutionary task of the working class.

We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution

We base our program on the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The October Revolution, led by the Bolshevik Party under V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, is the only successful workers revolution in history, where the working class overthrew the rule of its capitalist exploiters and took power. The October Revolution created a workers state based on workers councils, or soviets, and forged a Red Army that triumphed in war against counterrevolutionary forces backed up by world imperialism.

The early Soviet government expropriated the holdings of the capitalists and cancelled the debt owed to the imperialists. It proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health, housing and education, and took the first steps toward building a socialist society. The revolutionary government gave land to the peasants and self-determination to the many oppressed nations of the former tsarist empire. The regime separated church and state and, significantly, funded secular education and science, promoting a thoroughly materialist worldview. It eliminated all laws discriminating against national and ethnic minorities, women and gays. And it decreed that abortion be free and legal. What made the Russian Revolution successful was the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, which fought not only for the freedom of those oppressed by capitalist rule in Russia but for the emancipation of the international proletariat and for a world socialist order.

As revolutionary internationalists, the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky saw that for U.S. Communists, the fight for black liberation was a central priority. As early as 1920, a main point on the agenda of the Second Congress of the Communist International was the situation of black people in America. As James Cannon, an early Communist Party (CP) leader and later the founder of American Trotskyism, wrote in The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962), “The main discussions on the Negro question took place in Moscow.” It was based on these discussions and the influence and pressure of the Comintern that the American CP of the ’20s started to really do something to fight black oppression. The CP adopted the understanding of the black question as a special question of doubly exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the overall revolutionary program.

I hope this paints a clear picture as to why we proudly say, “We are the party of the Russian Revolution.” We militarily defended the Soviet Union and its collectivized property system and planned economy against the imperialists and internal counterrevolution, in spite of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin beginning in 1923-24. We fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and for the extension of the revolution worldwide.

Communism is far from dead. While the bourgeoisie has been busy perpetuating the lie about the “death of communism” since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, it is also actively dusting off its special police “red squads.” The government has also initiated some of the worst attacks on democratic rights in recent history, such as the USA Patriot Act and the detention of Jose Padilla, whose case represents the government asserting its “right” to disappear people, and the recent conviction of leftist attorney Lynne Stewart and new attacks on former Black Panther Party members. All of these attacks are ultimately aimed to suppress the working class.

While the U.S. rulers are now grabbing more of the oil wealth of the Near East, their main and ultimate target is the People’s Republic of China, by far the largest and strongest of the remaining states where capitalism has been overthrown. Capitalist restoration in China, a country of over a billion people, would mean death and starvation of enormous proportions. China and North Korea are among those states explicitly indicated as potential targets for a U.S. nuclear first strike.

This makes all the more clear our duty to fight for the unconditional military defense of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam against the imperialist powers. And that means defending their collectivized economies and the economic and political expropriation of the capitalist class. It also means defending the right of North Korea to develop nuclear weapons. As we did in the former USSR and the East European deformed workers states, we also call for proletarian political revolutions to get rid of the ruling nationalist bureaucracies, whose policies undermine and weaken those states, and install governments based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.

Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism

The SWP, formerly the Trotskyist party in the U.S., capitulated to both the liberal civil rights leaders and to black nationalism. They gave up on political combat against the black misleaders and on recruiting cadre from a generation of black youth who were radicalized by the civil rights movement. Many of these youth became involved with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Black Panther Party represented the best of a generation of radical black youth. In high school, when I first became politically engaged, I was immediately drawn toward learning more about and emulating the Panthers. But in regard to the contradictory and radical-nationalist Black Panthers, all you hear about nowadays is their free breakfast programs. It wasn’t their social work that attracted me to them. It was their militancy.

Little do you hear about the militancy of the Panthers. That aspect has been whitewashed by Hollywood and the liberals, who’d have you believe that the Panthers were the Black Panther Party for Social Welfare and not the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Little do you hear about their offer to send troops to Vietnam to assist in the fight against U.S. imperialism, about how they initially organized independently of the Democrats and Republicans, or about how they advocated armed self-defense against racist attacks. However, the Panthers rejected mobilizing the revolutionary power of the multiracial proletariat to fight black oppression.

Some of the key leaders and groups, such as the Black Panthers, that came out of the Black Power movement became self-avowed black nationalists. But black people are not oppressed as a nation. There is no economic basis for a separate, independent black economy. Black nationalism is utopian; it’s pseudo-nationalism. But even such a form of nationalism is divisive and interferes with the development of class consciousness.

The Panthers were, in fact, confined by a sectoralist perspective of blacks liberating blacks, Latinos liberating Latinos, Asians liberating Asians, etc., and lacked an internationalist class-struggle program. Black workers have an exceptional role to play in the revolutionary struggle to smash capitalist wage slavery. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and the most conscious layer of the proletariat, black workers are slated to be a key factor in the coming American revolution. By rejecting a working-class perspective, the Panther leaders cut themselves off from becoming leaders in the struggle for socialist revolution internationally.

The lack of a working-class orientation also made the Panthers more vulnerable to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, or Counter-Intelligence Program, which was originally set up in 1956 against the Communist Party but was revived particularly to murderously repress and disrupt the Panthers. Some 233 out of the 295 FBI COINTELPRO actions against black organizations were against the Panthers. At least 38 Panthers were murdered by agents of this racist capitalist state through the instrument of COINTELPRO.

Today numerous former Panthers remain locked up in prison dungeons. The remnants of COINTELPRO remain with the capitalist state’s attempt to execute former Panther and innocent death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia’s case is a signature political frame-up spanning both Bush administrations, the Clinton administration, back into the Reagan years. Today COINTELPRO has been repackaged. A clear example of this was the recent FBI killing in Puerto Rico of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the Puerto Rican independence fighter who was gunned down by agents of the capitalist state and then left for 12 hours to bleed to death.

Break with the Democrats!

As outrage over New Orleans and the bloody occupation of Iraq fuels popular opposition to the Bush administration, the Democratic Party hopes to further its electoral fortunes. At the reformist-led September 24 rally against the Iraq occupation in Washington, D.C., and at Louis Farrakhan’s October 15 D.C. “Millions More March,” Jesse Jackson proclaimed the need to take back the White House in 2008. And believe me, he didn’t have the Parliament/Funkadelic conception of painting the White House black.

The Democratic Party is no friend of black people and labor. It was Clinton who enacted “the end of welfare as we know it,” leaving both black and white poor families without access to food and medical care. Clinton also presided over a huge increase in incarceration of black and Latino youth. While he pardoned his capitalist crooks and cronies on his way out of the office, he made doubly sure that innocent political prisoner and American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier was not to be freed. Clinton paved the way for Bush’s Iraq war through eight years of regular bombing attacks and through continuing the starvation embargo that led to the deaths of some 1.5 million Iraqis. He also helped pave the way for Bush’s “war on terror” at home with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

But it wasn’t just the Clinton-era Democratic Party that was racist and bloodthirsty. The Democratic Party oversaw the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It was the Congressional Black Caucus that in 1998 voted along with the rest of Congress to have Assata Shakur extradited from Cuba. It was black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, working with the federal government, who ordered that a bomb be dropped on the MOVE home in Philadelphia in 1985, killing eleven black women, men and children. And more recently, it was black Democratic mayor Jack Ford of Toledo, Ohio, who called black protesters against the Nazis a violent group of gangs and unleashed police terror to subdue them.

A fighting labor movement will not be forged through impotent appeals to the Democrats but through sharp struggles to break with such representatives of the capitalist class enemy. That means seeing that the Democrats are the alternate party of capitalist rule and thus every bit as much a part of the problem as the Republicans—even more so because there is an element of trickery in their posture as friends of labor and the oppressed. What we need is a revolutionary workers party that stands up for labor rights, black rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights and gay rights.

It is not just that union leaders tie workers to the Democrats. Tailing them are reformist so-called socialist groups like the Workers World Party and their ANSWER coalition and the International Socialist Organization. Each of them has at one time or another given support to Democratic or other capitalist politicians like the Greens. Even the ultrarevolutionary-sounding Progressive Labor Party has acknowledged in its paper that its supporters have campaigned for Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama.

The lifework of groups like the Workers World Party/ANSWER is protest politics within the framework of bourgeois “democracy.” Fundamentally, they believe that the capitalist system can be reformed. Opposed to revolutionary Marxism and a working-class perspective, such groups organize massive rallies to pressure whatever White House administration is in office to give money for food and education not war. If you’ve ever talked to some of these activists, they will near-unanimously tell you that we have to do something now, and the fight for socialist revolution is too far down the road. I guess by doing something now they mean pushing for certain capitalist politicians to get into office and then begging them for handouts. In many ways they, too, have bought into the “death of communism” phenomenon. Some, such as the ISO, cheered for counterrevolution in the USSR.

That brings me to what to do now. What has to be done now is to organize the working class independently of the capitalist class. This means breaking with the Democratic Party and fighting for a workers party that champions the cause of all the oppressed. In the U.S., it’s necessary to combat anti-black racism in all spheres, including among immigrants, in addition to combating the anti-immigrant chauvinism that exists among black people. We also have to intervene into working-class struggles with the slogan, “Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!” We have to organize the working class now to defend Mumia Abu-Jamal from execution by the capitalist state. The working class must be mobilized, on the basis of no illusions in the capitalist courts, to demand that the racist death penalty be abolished and that Mumia be freed now!

For revolutionaries, Marxism is a living science and a guide to action. Revolutionary situations occur rarely in history, and we must be theoretically and politically prepared. Our object is not simply to understand the world but to change it. But to be able to change it requires that we have a lever to effect revolution, to rip up this rotten social system that more and more threatens destruction, if not extinction, for humankind. That lever is a workers party of the Leninist type, organized in a democratic-centralist Fourth International. Such a party cannot be simply proclaimed but must be forged in struggle.

Without the leadership of a revolutionary party, the working class cannot wrest power from the bourgeoisie. Thus most importantly, if you want to get rid of capitalism, join the revolutionary internationalist Spartacist League or the Spartacus Youth Club, our youth auxiliary.