For Class Struggle Against U.S. Imperialist Rulers!
Down With Both Capitalist Parties—For a Workers Party!

Racist Fundamentalists Take White House, Again

U.S. Hands Off Falluja!
U.S. Out of Iraq Now!

Correction Appended

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 836, 12 November 2004.

"I earned capital in the campaign—political capital—and now I intend to spend it" was the chilling message from George W. Bush following his election victory on November 2. The relatively high turnout for the elections was supposed to be good for the Democrats, but the "family values," "born-again" religious types also mobilized heavily for the oddly demented Bush administration, helped along by the continued attempts to disenfranchise black voters and no-paper-trail computers. Whipping up "war on terror" fear and religious and sexual hysteria was key, as referendums to ban gay marriage in eleven states, which all passed, helped to bring out the forces of deep reaction. The Republican consolidation of the White House and both houses of Congress is bad news for working people, blacks, women, gays and immigrants—all in the gun sights of the social reactionaries in power. One of the propositions that passed in Arizona denies government benefits to non-citizens. The Bush cabal now feels it has a mandate to intensify its war on working people at home and abroad.

And the first targets are the peoples of Iraq. As we go to press, over 10,000 U.S. troops, backed by Iraqi soldiers, are invading Falluja to crush any vestige of resistance in the Sunni city. Press reports indicate that most of the city's 250,000 residents have fled in fear of their lives. One of the first targets taken by the American occupiers was Falluja's main hospital, a calculated move to mute any news about civilian casualties in anticipation of the bloody massacres U.S. imperialism is about to carry out. The New York Times (8 November) noted: "The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties." A recent report from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore concluded that between March 2003 and September 2004, some 100,000 civilians had died in Iraq.

The very same ruling class that is raping the peoples of Iraq is also looting, fleecing and attacking the rights of workers and the oppressed at home. Working people in the U.S. must take a side against U.S. imperialism's occupation of Iraq and demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the country. Every blow inflicted upon the occupation forces is in the interest of working people and the oppressed throughout the world, not least in the U.S. Defend the peoples of Iraq against U.S. attack! Hands off Falluja! U.S. out of Iraq now!

While Bush's victory is bad news, a Kerry victory would not have been good news. Kerry promised to continue the Iraq occupation, to increase the American military by 40,000 new recruits, and to get "tougher" with North Korea. The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are a ruling-class party dedicated to upholding the interests of the American capitalists, interests directly counterposed to those of the working class. U.S. elections, a limited form of bourgeois democracy in any case, serve as a deception whereby the bourgeoisie cloaks its class dictatorship with a veneer of popular approval. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin put it in The State and Revolution: "To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism." Working people need a workers party to fight for the overturning of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie altogether and its replacement with a proletarian dictatorship, which would mean the disenfranchisement of a tiny band of vicious exploiters and the genuine empowerment of the working people of America.

Labor Bureaucracy Demobilizes Working Class

There is a lot of hand-wringing over the election results, particularly in the urban areas of the so-called "blue states" where people watched in horror as one state after another went "red" for Bush. Liberal ideologues, European pundits and pro-Democrat leftist types now blame the supposed ignorance and backwardness of the American populace for Bush's victory. But responsibility for the lack of militant class struggle and, therefore, the backward consciousness of many workers in the U.S., rests with the very apostles of "reform." The current generation of the labor lieutenants of capital, that is, the top bureaucrats of the trade-union movement, and the reformist left that tails them, are responsible for the demoralization and demobilization of the American working class through the agency of the Democratic Party.

The trade-union tops have by and large abandoned effective methods of class struggle. When pressed by the workers to strike, they have enforced the restraints of bourgeois legislation, like the Taft-Hartley Act, designed to vitiate the workers' ability to shut down production and beat back the scabs. If forced to strike, these types have either quickly thrown in the towel or signed such egregious giveback contracts as to call into question the value of ever walking a picket line.

Had the unions devoted one-tenth of the resources and manpower that their pro-capitalist misleaders mobilized for Democrat Kerry to the strike by the United Food and Commercial Workers last spring, or to fight to organize Wal-Mart, or in support of the locked-out hotel workers in San Francisco, things could be very different. Instead of sending workers across the country to Washington, D.C. for the Million Worker March, which was a thinly veiled rally against Bush (i.e., for the Democrats), what if the left-talking bureaucrats in the ILWU longshore union had mobilized their members to walk a few miles from their union hall to help locked-out hotel workers in San Francisco shut down the hotels and actually win their strike?

The current trade-union bureaucracy, however, is an obstacle to militant class struggle because it is tied to the capitalist system and subservient to its state apparatus. Its support for the Democratic Party is in direct counterposition to independent class struggle. It is necessary to fight for a class-struggle leadership in the union, a leadership which can fight not only for immediate, economic demands, but on broader social issues. Defense of immigrant rights against the government's "war on terror," defense of abortion rights, freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolishing the racist death penalty—these are some of the causes that a class-struggle union leadership would take up, putting the massive power of the working class on the side of all the oppressed.

Although the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party as a force for progress has seldom been clearer, do not expect the opponents of socialist revolution on the left to forsake their endless quest for a left reformer from the ranks of the Democrats. There is the seemingly born-yesterday Workers World Party, which proclaims, "Bush Win Sets Stage for Wide Fightback" (Workers World, 11 November). Workers World and its International ANSWER Coalition, along with the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the Revolutionary Communist Party and its Not In Our Name coalition, consciously built an Iraq antiwar movement designed to provide a platform for left-talking Democrats like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who preached that young activists and working people must vote Democrat.

It is precisely the move to vote Democrat—expressed this year through the "Anybody but Bush" sentiment—that has bolstered the fortunes of the Republican right. Such a move is consciously designed as a substitute for class and social struggle, advocating that workers and the oppressed place their confidence in capitalist politicians instead of relying on their own power and organizations. The role of black and "progressive" Democrats, like those who addressed antiwar rallies, is to head off any possibility of social struggle and to direct discontent toward the ballot box. The absence of class and social struggle—the kinds of struggles that can transcend racial, ethnic and religious divisions—provides the basis for the racist fundamentalists to gain ground.

Certainly there is plenty to fight against. Increased attacks on working people will surely follow the election, including attacks on wages, on Social Security, on medical care, on education, on the right to abortion and, quite simply, on the freedom to protest without the threat of jail time. But it is no less true that these attacks have been in process for three decades under the governance of both Republicans and Democrats. The truth—as explained by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—is that working people will only face increasing misery and oppression unless they rise in combat against the capitalist order and overturn it through socialist revolution.

The working class in the U.S. does indeed have very low political consciousness. At its birth with the wave of industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th century in Jim Crow America, the working class was ethnically and racially divided, a division then maintained by the Democratic Party and by the lily-white craft-based American Federation of Labor unions. The racial divisions that persist to this day have played an enormous role in retarding the political consciousness of the American proletariat, with most workers lacking even a sense of common class interests. But political consciousness notwithstanding, there have been gigantic class-struggle confrontations with the bosses in America as fierce as any on the globe.

It is the capitalist system of exploitation itself that creates and perpetuates conflicts between the workers, those socially organized to produce everything, and the capitalists, those who rake in profits by exploiting the labor of others. The basis for such meager social benefits as still exist in this society—Social Security, unemployment insurance, public education and employer-paid health insurance—was laid by the class struggles of the 1930s that led to the organization of workers, black and white, into country-wide industrial unions.

The Democratic Party has its name stamped on these reforms. But in reality, they were concessions made under battlefield conditions of enormous worker struggles. Contrary to what many working people who support Democrats would like, the Democratic Party, even if it wanted to, cannot by mere act of will create another period of New Deal-like reforms. There is simply no reason for this country's capitalist rulers—and the Democrats are simply the other party of the bosses—to concede anything without a struggle.

Black Oppression and "Moral Values"

The particular version of Christian fundamentalism now associated with the Bush White House developed over the past four decades as an ideological umbrella enabling white racist bigots to link together their hostility to affirmative action, welfare, legalized abortion, public acceptance of homosexuality and other expressions of social liberalization. And it first emerged in the mainstream of American politics not through the Republicans, but with the Democratic administration of "ethnic purity," "born-again" Christian Jimmy Carter. Carter launched a "moral" rearmament crusade to refurbish the image of America's imperialist rulers—who had fallen into some disrepute following the civil rights movement and the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam—while renewing U.S. imperialism's Cold War drive against the Soviet Union. More recently, it was the oh-so-personable Southern Baptist Bill Clinton who gutted welfare and completed Ronald Reagan's initiative to fill the prisons with black people as the "alternative" to the poverty and unemployment in the nation's ghettos.

The most recent aspirant to black leadership and the sole shining light for the Democrats during their electoral drubbing is Barack Obama, Senator-elect from Illinois. In the spirit of Booker T. Washington, Obama offers himself as living proof that the system works, invoking the patriotic battle cry: "We are all Americans." Yeah, and we are all featherless bipeds. But neither of these truisms negates the fact that the racial oppression of black people has intensified over the past decades. On this matter, Obama stands with those who claim continued black oppression is self-inflicted.

Affirmative action in the universities has been largely strangled by the bosses' courts and further rendered moot by the skyrocketing costs of a college education with little regret from John Kerry or, before him, Al Gore. With the limited gains of the civil rights movement increasingly shredded, black people's right to vote was itself attacked up front in the last presidential election in Florida, and this time around by the challenges, widespread harassment, dirty tricks and endless lines at the polling places where those with little voted. In his 1 November New York Times column, for example, Bob Herbert described a flyer circulating in black neighborhoods in Milwaukee which asserted that people who had voted in prior elections, as well as people who had been found guilty of anything, including traffic violations, or who had any family members who had been found guilty of anything, could not vote. "If you violate any of these laws," the leaflet declared, "you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you"!

It is not surprising that the Deep South and other anti-union backwaters in the U.S. provided the shock troops of religious, racist reaction. It is disquieting, but also not surprising, that a not small portion of those hit hardest by joblessness—workers in West Virginia, Iowa and Ohio—cast their ballots for "moral values." For the time being, they have traded in their hopes for a better life on earth for Monopoly game deeds to mansions in heaven. The spectre of gay marriage, which would if legalized have zero impact on the lives of those not similarly disposed, undoubtedly moved many to vote up a morality they easily forgo when the possibilities for pleasure present themselves. We forthrightly defend the right to gay marriage as an elementary defense of democratic rights. It is important that most black people, many of whom are quite religious and do not look favorably on gay marriage or the right to abortion, do not vote for the religious right, as they are painfully aware that they will be the first targets of these reactionaries.

The Imperialist Order Cannot Be Reformed

Patriarchal prejudices, a not unimportant prop for the decadent capitalist order, recede during periods of class struggle, as do the divisions based on race, ethnicity and religion. The current period of religious and racist reaction is hardly unique in American history. In the first two decades of the 20th century workers and black people were grotesquely exploited and oppressed, while ranting revivalist preachers like Billy Sunday denounced divorce, whiskey and radicals. Strikes were drowned in blood. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, the forces of reaction mobilized to crush the trade-union movement and met the stirrings for black equality and integration with race riots and lynch law "justice." The Ku Klux Klan grew in quantum leaps while workers' wages, even in the white craft unions, were cut in half. Yet in that crucible of terror, heroic fighters for the working class and for black freedom were forged. Initially these assembled in the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World. In the wake of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, the best of these became core elements of the American Communist Party under the aegis of the Communist International, inspired by the Bolsheviks, who led the, to date, only successful proletarian revolution.

Within a decade, these Communist forces, schooled by Lenin and Trotsky's Communist International in the necessity of linking the class struggle in the U.S. to the fight for black freedom, went on to lead the massive class battles of the 1930s. The promise of these struggles was betrayed to Roosevelt's New Deal Democrats by the Communist Party, which followed the line of the Moscow Stalinists who had usurped political power from the workers in Russia by 1923-24 and gone on to consolidate their rule over the workers state. The line pushed by the Stalinists was to stifle labor struggle internationally while making deals with imperialist rulers in the narrow interests of Russian foreign diplomacy.

The America of today is both similar and quite different from the America of the 1920s: similar in the essential hostility of the capitalist rulers to working-class progress; very different in that the final defeat of the Bolshevik Revolution through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92 has rendered the hope for a socialist future a seemingly utopian dream in even the most militant sectors of the working class and in the minds of youth who oppose the crimes of the capitalist system.

But the class struggle, whose high tide thus far was the Russian Revolution, has not been and cannot be extinguished. It is not just a burning necessity; it is inevitable that the American working class will rise in resistance to the unceasing attacks on its well-being over the past 30 years. And then what? The workers can only transcend the conditions under which they are raised through periods of class struggle—and even then only if there is a perceived way forward, which it is the task of a revolutionary workers party to provide. It is in the process of class struggle that a new leadership in the workers movement can emerge, overturning the current betrayers. It is also in the crucible of struggle that the cadres will be assembled to forge the internationalist revolutionary party that can lead the overturn of America's blood-soaked capitalist-imperialist system and form a workers government. This would provide the crucial beginning to the creation of a world socialist order that will end for all time the exploitation and oppression of man by man.

In "Racist Fundamentalists Take White House, Again" (WV No. 836, 12 November), we incorrectly wrote that Arizona's Proposition 200 "denies government benefits to non-citizens." Prop. 200 denies some types of non-federally mandated benefits to non-citizens who cannot prove legal status, while also mandating punitive measures against state and local government workers who do not withhold benefits or report undocumented applicants. (Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 838, 10 December 2004.)