The following is a reprint of a Workers Vanguard article titled "South Chicago: Snapshots of Latino and Black Life," followed by a letter it prompted from the Internationalist Group and a response printed in Workers Vanguard.
Letter from Internationalist Group
Workers Vanguard Replies
South Chicago: Snapshots of Latino and Black Life
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 786, 6 September 2002.
The following contribution, dated July 3, was submitted by Comrade Seneca of our Chicago branch.
Shame, shame, shame.
I don’t wanna go to Mexico no more, more, more.
There’s a big, fat policeman at my door, door, door.
He made me pay a dollar,
He made me go to jail,
I don’t wanna go to Mexico no more, more, more.
This was the clapping game the neighbor’s young girls were singing in my kitchen just the other day. Incidentally, the father of these two immigrant girls came home about a month ago after serving six years in jail as a “convicted drug trafficker” (i.e., peddling a few grams of cocaine). He may be facing deportation soon, which will most likely mean yet another perilous trip across the river to come right back to where he was deported from. For the Mexican immigrant children of South Chicago—a neighborhood located on Chicago’s Southeast Side in the shadow of the old South Works steel plant—words like “la migra” and “social security numbers” have a place in their everyday vocabulary.
For Latino working-class immigrants, the fight for immigrant rights is central to the fight for labor rights. And this is a life or death question in many ways. Occasional news investigations offer a glimpse into the very real danger of the Mexican border crossing which many make after each time they get deported; and they do make it because, for many Mexicans, “home” offers them little or no means for survival. Immigrants without a social security number in Chicago cannot open an account with the electric or gas companies, and this means suffering sub-zero temperatures without heat in their homes. There were two cases in Chicago of immigrant children who needed organ transplants and could not get them because they were undocumented and the families couldn’t pay cash for the transplant procedure. This is to say nothing of life-threatening dangers of state repression for non-citizens, and particularly “illegal aliens,” on the part of cops, border patrol agents and vigilantes. Undocumented immigrant workers are very attuned to the fact that the American bourgeois injustice system does not offer them a legal leg to stand on in any fight.
These points I mention just to provide a backdrop to the reality we are dealing with when we talk about the question of Latino immigrants in America. This is important to consider when dealing with the question of class struggle in America and specifically the wedge that the racist white ruling class seeks to drive between the black and Latino immigrant working class. And, together with the help of black and Latino petty-bourgeois misleaders, the bourgeoisie has been to a large extent successful in driving this wedge.
South Chicago has historically been, and continues to be, an entry port for working-class Hispanic immigrants. It is also one of the neighborhoods where the displaced black ghetto masses have moved, increasingly more so since the demolition of housing projects. While they live side by side, the two communities interact as little as possible. Many Mexicans say they are afraid of blacks, and they attribute criminality and violence in the neighborhood to black people.
Resentment is often expressed by Mexican immigrant women about the mistreatment and humiliation that they are subjected to by some of the black and even Chicano staff in the area’s public clinic. Many complain of being greeted with comments like, “You’re back again?!” and “Speak English! You’re in America!” and being sent home from the Emergency Room with nothing but a bottle of aspirin to show for it. This reflects a conversation I had with a comrade from the Bay Area. His sister is a nurse in a school and she said to him that, as bad as the black children are treated, the Mexican children are treated even worse.
One also perceives a strong sense of resentment around the question of public aid (i.e., food stamps, vouchers, workman’s comp, etc.). Many Mexican immigrants I have spoken with perceive America’s “safety net” for workers and the poor, or rather what is left of it, as some sort of treasure chest that allows black Americans and Puerto Ricans to live so much better off than their immigrant counterparts. Rather than seeking to organize to fight for the same entitlements for immigrants, often this perception translates into a sour-grapes attitude of “well, we immigrants want to work, we don’t want any handouts.”
In the workplace, many Mexicans hold a perception that blacks have a bad work ethic. Upon probing them to define what they mean, I have found that their conception of a “bad” work ethic amounts to wanting to have better wages, a shorter and less intensive workday, and better and safer conditions at the workplace! Mexican workers could stand a whole lot to gain by adopting the very “work ethic” that many now despise! Once I overheard a supervisor (who, incidentally, is a black Latina woman from Belize) say to her Mexican employee that she prefers to hire Latinos because blacks “don’t like to work.” And this employee, beaming with pride, just ate up every word she said. I later found out that 16-hour nonstop shifts are frequent occurrences for him.
The “work ethic” question is closely tied into the “Amnesty Campaign,” which is a nationwide campaign to legalize undocumented immigrants through public marches and lobbying politicians. In the precarious circumstances they live in, undocumented Latino immigrants tend to take comfort in the illusion that, if they just prove to the bourgeois rulers that they are essential to American capitalist society—by doing grueling work for pitiful wages in dangerous conditions and paying taxes faithfully while asking nothing in return in the way of benefits—then the capitalist rulers will somehow be convinced to grant them full citizenship rights.
On the other side of the issue, many black workers feel resentment toward Latinos. Many see yet another immigrant group which, in a generation or two, manages to climb the ladder and “pass over” them, so to speak, while they remain at the bottom. It is important to recognize that there is a lot of truth in this statement; being a white Hispanic and a U.S. citizen opens up a lot of possibilities that their immigrant parents, as well as blacks and black Latinos, just do not have. It can also lead to a false sense of security and a certain hostility toward “illegal” immigrants. I would like to make a side note here of the considerable antagonisms I have seen between Latino citizens “with papers” and the undocumented immigrants. Where I live, the term “Chicano” or “Chicana” has become a derisive term that Mexican immigrants use in reference to privileged, petty-bourgeois Mexican Americans who refuse to speak Spanish and use their position of power to humiliate immigrants or otherwise not solidarize with them in any way.
I know a young boy whose father is Puerto Rican and mother is Mexican American. He is dark-skinned with European features, and he can speak a little Spanish, which he learned at the insistence of his grandmother. He has two cousins on either side of the family; one is a blond-haired white boy and the other is black. All three are “Latino” since all six of their parents are “Latino.” But you would be a fool to think their experiences in America will be the same just because they are all “Latino.” My point is, within two or three generations, as the language falls away, “Latinos” in America are essentially assimilated into one of two categories: black or not black.
The central issue here is the vital interest of black and immigrant workers to unite in common struggle. It is necessary to combat the false consciousness that the black and Latino petty-bourgeois misleadership peddle: that the other worker is the enemy; that blacks will never fight for immigrant rights; that immigrants are nothing but scabs who want to steal black workers’ jobs.
Combatting such false consciousness is the task of a revolutionary workers party; this is what I sought to explain to incredulous Mexican immigrant workers in South Chicago who couldn’t understand why black longshoremen in Oakland would give up their Saturdays (when they can make $1,000 in one day if they drive down to the L.A. ports) to come out to a labor-centered mobilization in defense of immigrants! It is not a moral issue; it is a question of survival and of labor defense, I told them. Our February 9 Oakland mobilization against the Maritime Security Act and in defense of immigrant rights has indeed made an impact on workers I have spoken with.
Racial tensions between black people and Hispanics is a nationwide issue, and this must be understood and fought against as we seek to forge a multiracial vanguard party. The fight against black oppression, which is a cornerstone of American capitalism, must be posed pointblank with any and all potential Latino contacts as part of the fight to raise the consciousness of the Latino working class to understand that black liberation is integrally linked to their own liberation.
Cynics
and Demagogues
An IG Provocation
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 789, 18 October 2002.
29 September 2002
To the Editor, Workers Vanguard
Over the past weeks supporters of the Internationalist Group and of the Spartacist League have had heated exchanges over a shameful article published in Workers Vanguard No. 786 (6 September) under the title “South Chicago: Snapshots of Latino and Black Life.” While bemoaning the very real divisions in the working class, this article echoes and promotes the ideology that the bourgeoisie uses to set different sectors of the working people against each other.
The article states that many Mexican immigrants, “rather than seeking to organize to fight for the same entitlements” as black Americans and Puerto Ricans, say “well, we immigrants want to work, we don’t want any handouts.” It goes on:
“In the workplace, many Mexicans hold a perception that blacks have a bad work ethic. Upon probing them to define what they mean, I have found that their conception of a ‘bad’ work ethic amounts to wanting to have better wages, a shorter and less intensive workday, and better and safer conditions at the workplace!”
What is this garbage about how “many Mexicans” supposedly don’t want better wages and conditions? This is no isolated phrase, but a central theme of the WV article. It proceeds to lecture: “Mexican workers could stand a whole lot to gain by adopting the very ‘work ethic’ that many now despise!” As if it’s a question of a “work ethic” rather than the brutal realities of capitalist exploitation! The article then presents an anecdote about a supervisor who reportedly stated “that she prefers to hire Latinos because blacks ‘don’t like to work’” while her Mexican employee, “beaming with pride, just ate up every word she said.” Over and over, WV keeps repeating the same claims, this time coming straight from a boss’s mouth. What it is doing is retailing the very lies and stereotypes that the bosses use to divide the exploited and oppressed.
With all its talk about the so-called “‘work ethic’ question,” WV willfully obscures the fact that it is the capitalists who force undocumented immigrants into low-paying, dangerous and dirty jobs. Just look at this:
“In the precarious circumstances they live in, undocumented Latino immigrants tend to take comfort in the illusion that, if they just prove to the bourgeois rulers that they are essential to American capitalist society—by doing grueling work for pitiful wages in dangerous conditions and paying taxes faithfully while asking nothing in return in the way of benefits—then the capitalist rulers will somehow be convinced to grant them full citizenship rights.”
So according to WV, Latino immigrants do “grueling work” and ask “nothing in return” in order to win favor from the bosses.
What a grotesque lie! The chauvinist image you present unmistakably reflects the outlook of the labor aristocrats, who accuse immigrants of undermining the pay and conditions of U.S.-born workers.
Moreover, from the ongoing union organizing campaign of New York City greengrocer workers to the militant janitors’ unionization campaign—which tied up the streets of Los Angeles as immigrant unionists resisted wave after wave of brutal police attacks—the class struggle gives the lie to the picture you present. (In case the L.A. janitors’ battles have slipped your mind, they are portrayed in Ken Loach’s recent film Bread and Roses.)
As an immigrant worker pointed out at a recent Internationalist Group forum in New York, it is vital to win this new and often militant layer of the proletariat to the understanding that the fight for black liberation through socialist revolution is central to every aspect of the class struggle in the U.S., a country built on slavery. This latest WV article cuts directly against this crucial task.
When confronted with the revolting WV article, some SLers try to brazen things out by pretending it doesn’t say what it says, while others claim nothing you say could possibly be chauvinist because the Spartacist League has protested anti-immigrant laws. Many resort to what is now your main form of “argument”: change the subject, quick.
It is incredible that a newspaper claiming to put forward the outlook and program of communism could print such a piece. The fact that you do speaks volumes about how far Workers Vanguard has come since the decades when it upheld the politics of Lenin and Trotsky. From vehemently refusing to call for the defeat of the U.S. and NATO imperialists in their war on Afghanistan (while smearing the IG as pandering to “anti-Americanism” for upholding this Leninist position) to renouncing the demand for unconditional independence for Puerto Rico and all colonies, the common thread is an adaptation to social-chauvinism. In a particularly crass and blatant way, this latest WV article shows that the SL is capitulating to the pressures of “its own” ruling class.
Abram Negrete
for the Internationalist Group
The intent of demagogy is to conceal and deceive. In playing the race card, the most shameful of demagogy, the Internationalist Group’s (IG) provocative, cynical and lying letter clearly demonstrates the IG’s headlong dive into “people of color” nationalism, giving an alibi to anti-black prejudices among Latino workers.
Evident to anyone who cares to read the article for any reasons other than to defame the SL, the WV “South Chicago” article has a threefold thrust: 1) Anti-black racism among layers of workers in the U.S. is real, it exists, it’s a fact; moreover, it is the primary weapon of the bourgeoisie to divide the working class. 2) Latino immigrant workers are not somehow miraculously immune to racist attitudes prevalent in America, simply by virtue of being Latinos. 3) Anti-black racism among immigrant Latinos is a contradiction that goes completely against their own historical interests as oppressed and exploited workers, in the same way that anti-immigrant chauvinism runs completely counter to the historical interests of black people.
The theme of the disputed article is captured in the following excerpt:
“The central issue here is the vital interest of black and immigrant workers to unite in common struggle. It is necessary to combat the false consciousness that the black and Latino petty-bourgeois misleadership peddle: that the other worker is the enemy; that blacks will never fight for immigrant rights; that immigrants are nothing but scabs who want to steal black workers’ jobs. Combatting such false consciousness is the task of a revolutionary workers party.”
Does this sound like “an adaptation to social-chauvinism,” as the raging demagogue Negrete charges? Does the SL’s struggle to combat racist and anti-immigrant false consciousness constitute “capitulating to the pressures of ‘its own’ ruling class”? Since when has it been the “ideology that the bourgeoisie uses” to affirm that the vital interest of black and immigrant workers is to unite in common struggle?
Negrete’s ravings are part and parcel of his and IG leader Jan Norden’s accommodation to Latino nationalism. As we wrote following their defection from the International Communist League: “In the place of the Leninist party needed to bring revolutionary consciousness to the proletariat, Norden increasingly came to objectify certain political formations and layers—particularly in the former DDR and Latin America—as somehow inherently susceptible to revolutionary politics” (“A Shamefaced Defection from Trotskyism,” WV No. 648, 5 July 1996).
For the IG, the mask has increasingly become the face. While they thunder against our polemics against backward consciousness among Latino workers, they have no objections to the article’s observation and efforts to combat backward, anti-immigrant attitudes among the black population. Combatting false consciousness among black longshoremen, immigrant port truckers and Latino day laborers was central to our efforts to build the Oakland February 9 mobilization in defense of immigrant rights against the “war on terror” witchhunt. In spite of its tossed-off statements about the centrality of the struggle for black freedom, the IG diminishes the fight to advance the consciousness of black workers, mirroring in its own way attitudes toward blacks among the Latino milieu where the IG plies its trade.
The IG calls the article in WV “revolting” for daring to express the ugly truths about racism in America. But it is the reality that is revolting. The American bourgeoisie has long fomented ethnic and racial hostilities to keep the working class divided and weak. As was noted in the 1890s in a letter from Friedrich Engels to a colleague in the U.S.: “Your bourgeoisie knows much better even than the Austrian Government how to play off one nationality against the other: Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish, and each one against the other, so that differences in the living standard of the workers exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard-of elsewhere.”
With the mass migration of blacks from the South to the Northern cities, particularly beginning in the early 20th century, the earlier nativist hostilities against immigrant workers were supplanted by anti-black racism. The color bar became a fundamental dividing line in American capitalist society, a key prop for obscuring the irreconcilable class divide between labor and capital. Every move to the right in the U.S. is always accompanied by the launching of racist assaults, overwhelmingly directed against the black population. The racial oppression of black people, which has its origins in black chattel slavery, is the bedrock of American capitalism.
Branded by the color of their skin, much of the black population has remained at the bottom of society—though strategically integrated into the political economy—while more light-skinned immigrants have historically been able to advance up the economic ladder. As we noted in “Capitalist Rulers Wage War on Blacks, Immigrants” (WV No. 653, 11 October 1996):
“The bosses will do anything to divide foreign-born workers from their class brothers and sisters here. In the 19th century, railroad baron Jay Gould once boasted: ‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.’ In racist America, many immigrants learn to adapt to the anti-black racism spread by the white ruling class, to the racist filth that the black masses remain at the bottom of this capitalist society because of their alleged lack of adherence to the ‘work ethic,’ or because they lack ‘positive attitudes’ or ‘proper genes’.”
You cannot change this hideous reality if you deny its existence. But this is all immaterial to the demagogic IG, which prefers to denounce not the conditions of this society, but rather the Marxist revolutionaries who tell the blunt truth about these realities.
The IG declaims that our “South Chicago” article “speaks volumes about how far Workers Vanguard has come since the decades when it upheld the politics of Lenin and Trotsky.” The fact is, however, that our fight for black liberation and our open struggle against false consciousness among the working class have always been central to our work in forging a multiracial revolutionary vanguard party.
In 1987, when current IG leader Jan Norden was the editor of WV, we published an article that cited our 1983 national conference document, “Struggle Against Reagan Reaction.” This document clearly stated:
“The Hispanic populations in America are widely diverse, encompassing both educated petty-bourgeois layers with the possibility for ‘making it’ in America and masses of desperate ex-peasants who in many areas of the country live worse than the black masses and see the unions as vehicles for black/white job-trusting and accomplices to the racist deportations.
“Contrary to prevailing opinion in Latin nationalist milieus, Hispanics are on the whole not below blacks on a scale of social oppression but above, and can get out while blacks are locked in as a race-color caste at the bottom of American society. Structurally this is a black-white country, making the black question strategic to the American revolution.”
The article itself went on to note:
“While many Hispanics are as poor or poorer than blacks, this by no means determines that ‘black and Latino unity’ is the preordained outcome, as Third World nationalists...imagine. Far from it. Lately, racist bourgeois politicians have tried to appeal to Hispanics as a swing group against blacks, as in the hotly contested Chicago elections....
“Within the logic of capitalism, the smaller the pie, the more brutal the struggle for a piece of it. And as decaying capitalism’s pie shrinks rapidly, the struggle for survival is fiercest among those for whom society makes it hardest to survive.”
— “Labor: Smash Racist Immigration Law!” WV No. 427, 1 May 1987
The fact that we speak openly about the need to combat retrograde consciousness among workers and the oppressed has always infuriated our reformist and centrist opponents who accommodate to these backward attitudes. These outfits denigrate the need to build a Leninist vanguard party, instead putting forward the notion that the oppressed are inherently revolutionary. It is not the Spartacist League but renegades Norden and Negrete who are now walking on the other side of the political street together with the centrists and reformists.
Negrete’s demagogic diatribe is as dimwitted as it is false. He claims that “according to WV, Latino immigrants do ‘grueling work’ and ask ‘nothing in return’ in order to win favor from the bosses.” This is an absurd fabrication. The article is referring to an illusion peddled by the Latino petty-bourgeois misleaders. The passage in question states:
“The ‘work ethic’ question is closely tied in to the ‘Amnesty Campaign,’ which is a nationwide campaign to legalize undocumented immigrants through public marches and lobbying politicians. In the precarious circumstances they live in, undocumented Latino immigrants tend to take comfort in the illusion that, if they just prove to the bourgeois rulers that they are essential to American capitalist society—by doing grueling work for pitiful wages in dangerous conditions and paying taxes faithfully while asking nothing in return in the way of benefits—then the capitalist rulers will somehow be convinced to grant them full citizenship rights.”
The IG would much rather direct its fire at the Spartacist League than the Latino reformists and liberal Democrats who mislead and deceive the workers.
The struggles of Latino and other immigrant workers, many of whom come from countries with stronger traditions of labor militancy, have been vital for the labor movement in the U.S. But workers struggles and present labor disputes notwithstanding, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of immigrant workers, particularly undocumented workers, do perform grueling work and ask for little in return. But why do they do this? It is certainly not to “win favor from the bosses.” It is because they have no choice. All it takes to stop an undocumented worker from fighting for better working conditions or “acting up” in any other manner is a quick 1-800 call to the INS. And unlike the IG who seek to bury this material reality, undocumented workers are all too painfully aware of this.
As is plain to anyone who can read, Negrete’s letter is a deliberate smear job and a provocation. But in what interest? As we explained in a polemic on the recent French elections titled “IG: Simple-Minded Lies and Simple-Minded Liars” (WV No. 785, 9 August): “Lies and slanders are but the opening step to encouraging and justifying violence against political opponents in the workers movement. It was impossible for Stalin to defend his anti-revolutionary doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ from any Marxist vantage point. When lying was no longer sufficient to silence political opposition, Stalin brought down the fist of violence.” With its tiny handful of followers, the IG could hardly emulate Stalin. But what else could be the IG’s purpose in screaming that we are “anti-Latino chauvinists” at immigrant rights demonstrations, if not to incite violence against us? In fact, unable to politically answer criticisms raised by our comrades, the repulsive strutting demagogue and provocateur Negrete has taken to demonstrably pulling off his glasses, as if looking for a fight.
The IG’s slanders demonstrate its own political bankruptcy, witnessed in its inability to answer several of our recent polemics. (See: “IG Disappears Red Army Fight Against Islamic Reaction in Afghanistan,” WV No. 772, 11 January; “IG: Simple-Minded Lies and Simple-Minded Liars,” WV No. 785, 9 August; “IG on Venezuela: Opportunism Makes Strange Bedfellows,” WV No. 787, 20 September.) Instead, the IG reverts to demagoguery and outright falsifications. These, too, were the cynical methods of the Stalinists who, stung by Trotsky’s polemics, used to rant about Trotsky being an “agent of imperialism,” knowing damn well this was a lie. The purpose of this was the cultivation of a whole layer of cynical members immune to the politics of revolutionary Marxism. In replicating this methodology, IG leaders Norden and Negrete likewise seek to seal off their recruits and periphery from the revolutionary Marxist politics of the SL.
The IG’s capitulation to Third World nationalist consciousness reveals a lot about the party they seek to build. Their condemnation of us for combatting the anti-black sentiments of many Latino workers echoes the anti-Leninist bleatings of petty-bourgeois nationalists around the world (and the fake leftists who tail them) that you can’t criticize the oppressed. This is the language of anti-working-class liberals, of class traitors who preach and practice class collaboration, tying the workers to their class enemy.
It is ABC Marxism that the prevailing ideology in any society is that of the ruling class. The IG’s ludicrous belief that Latino workers are somehow immune to the influence and pressure of bourgeois society turns Marxism on its head. It puts the IG on a collision course with the fundamentals of Leninism—that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class from the outside through the instrumentality of the revolutionary party.
As Marxists committed to building such a vanguard party, the Spartacist League seeks to win over to a revolutionary program workers and youth who seek to engage in real revolutionary work among the workers. To these ends, we seek to recruit those who recognize and fight against the prejudices of petty-bourgeois nationalism and of American racist society. As we wrote in “South Chicago: Snapshots of Latino and Black Life” (WV No. 786, 6 September):
“Racial tensions between black people and Hispanics is a nationwide issue, and this must be understood and fought against as we seek to forge a multiracial vanguard party. The fight against black oppression, which is a cornerstone of American capitalism, must be posed pointblank with any and all potential Latino contacts as part of the fight to raise the consciousness of the Latino working class to understand that black liberation is integrally linked to their own liberation.”