Break with the Democrats, the Other Party of War and Racism––For a Workers Party That Fights for Socialist Revolution!

U.S. Out of Iraq! UN Stay Out!

Israel Out of the Occupied Territories!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 822, 19 March 2004.

The article printed below is adapted from a Spartacist forum given by Workers Vanguard managing editor Rosemary Palenque in Boston on February 21.

It is now almost a year since the U.S. imperialists began their invasion of Iraq—a war that was opposed by working people around the world who rallied in their millions against this brutal, one-sided slaughter. While the U.S. war to unseat Saddam Hussein's regime was over relatively quickly, the war against the peoples of Iraq takes the form of a bloody colonial occupation today. But not all has gone as planned for the U.S. imperialist rulers—their occupation of Iraq has faced unabated opposition, with more American forces killed during the occupation than during the war. There are no exact figures for how many Iraqis have perished at the hands of the U.S. imperialists, given that the U.S. considers Iraqi lives too worthless to count, but there is no doubt that the number outstrips U.S. losses by orders of magnitude.

We in the Spartacist League call for all U.S. troops out of Iraq and the Near East now! We take a side with the peoples of Iraq against the imperialist occupiers. In a statement issued by the Spartacist League Political Bureau as the war began last spring, we stated: "It is in the class interest of the international proletariat to clearly take a side in defense of Iraq without giving any political support to the bloody Saddam Hussein regime." What we declared then remains true today: "Every victory for the U.S. imperialists can only encourage further military adventures. In turn, every humiliation, every setback, every defeat they suffer will serve to assist the struggles of working people and the oppressed around the globe" (WV No. 800, 28 March 2003).

This was in sharp contrast to the organizers of the antiwar protests, who refused to stand for the defense of Iraq in the lead-up to the war. This is because their strategy was (and still is) to build a movement based on the broadest possible "unity," that is, a movement that reached out to primarily Democratic Party politicians who did not oppose the aims of the war, but the methods by which it was carried out.

Many participants in the antiwar coalitions and protests were rightly frustrated at their inability to put any dent in the U.S. war drive against Iraq, and there have been debates subsequently on how to more effectively oppose the occupation. However, what is currently on offer from the liberal organizers of coalitions such as United for Peace and Justice and International ANSWER is a continuation of the politics of the antiwar movement. This could be best encapsulated by the main slogan of the protests against the Republican National Convention later this year: "The World Says No to Bush!" Just as the war couldn't be stopped through mass displays of moral outrage and indignation, the horrors of U.S. imperialism trampling the globe won't be stopped by voting Bush out of office.

It is a welcome development that the Bush administration is in some real trouble over the exposures of its fabricated pretexts for the Iraq war and occupation, as more and more working people are realizing that it is they and their children who are being made to pay for an imperialist adventure sold to them on a mountain of lies. The war was touted as a war for the liberation of Iraq, and indeed the world, from the regime of Saddam Hussein. This nationalist butcher was a longtime client and main ally of the U.S. in the Near East until he fell out of favor by making a grab for Kuwait in 1990. At that point he became an all-purpose bogeyman for both Bush administrations as well as Clinton's. Hussein was supported by the U.S. imperialists when they knew he was massacring tens of thousands of Kurds and killing and imprisoning thousands of leftists, trade unionists and religious opponents.

Two U.S.-led wars and over a decade of UN sanctions, which killed over one and a half million people, have devastated Iraq's economy and infrastructure. Today most people in post-war Iraq have no electricity, potable water, basic medical care or jobs—unemployment is estimated at 70 percent. If life weren't already terrifying enough under such conditions, in occupied Iraq the rules of engagement are that U.S. troops can "use overwhelming force on any entity considered hostile, even if it does not represent an immediate threat and is near civilians." This was the rationale given by Lieutenant-General Sanchez, commander of allied forces in Iraq, last September for why U.S. soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division who killed eight Iraqi police officers in one incident, and shot a sleeping family of six in another, would not face penalties. There are over 10,000 detained by the occupation forces in Iraq today. As a lawyer with the Human Rights Organization of Iraq told the New York Times (7 March): "Iraq has turned into one big Guantánamo."

Following the criminal Madrid bombings of March 11, the shock and revulsion felt by millions in Spain turned to fury against the right-wing Aznar government as it became clear that the bombings were not the work of the Basque-nationalist ETA, as Aznar & Co. lyingly insisted. Reportedly, Islamic fundamentalists claimed responsibility for the attack as bloody retribution for Spain's participation in the Iraq war, which was opposed by 90 percent of the Spanish population. In a surprise upset, the social-democratic PSOE won the election, and the incoming Prime Minister Zapatero threatens to pull Spanish troops from Iraq if the United Nations does not go in. Meanwhile, Zapatero vows to pursue the "war on terror" with a vengeance, targeting the Arab immigrant population in Spain as well as the Basques. Zapatero seeks to deflect massive opposition to the Iraq war by swapping the blue helmets of the UN for the stars and stripes of U.S. imperialism.

In the U.S., many liberals like Ralph Nader and Democratic Party presidential primary candidates Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton advocate UN troops as a preferable alternative to the current occupation forces. Contrary to claims that the UN weapons inspection teams helped to stave off the war, they actually set a defenseless Iraq up for slaughter. The UN is nothing more than a den of imperialist thieves and their victims; it has served since its inception as a democratic fig leaf for imperialist slaughter, from the Korean War of the early 1950s that killed over three million people to the first Gulf War. We say: No to UN intervention! Down with the colonial occupation of Iraq!

Imperialists Carve Up the Near East

In an article titled "Hold Bush to His Lie" (Nation, 23 February) popular anti-globalization author Naomi Klein wrote, "All of Washington's reasons for going to war have evaporated; the only excuse left is Bush's deep desire to bring democracy to the Iraqi people. Of course, this is as much a lie as the rest—but it's a lie we can use. We can harness Bush's political weakness on Iraq to demand that the democracy lie become a reality, that Iraq be truly sovereign." A stable bourgeois democracy in Iraq is a pure fiction, as revealed by the reactionary forces that have emerged under the occupation, from fundamentalists demanding a constitution based on Islamic law—against which many women in Iraq have protested—to monarchists and "democrats" who've long been on the CIA payroll.

More fundamentally, Iraq is not a nation but an entity carved out of the three major populations in the area by the British imperialists following World War I. These include the Kurdish north, the Sunni Arab center and the majority Shi'ite south (and various others), with each region further riven by clan and tribal rivalries. Under capitalism, "democracy" can only mean the domination of the Shi'ite majority over the Kurdish and Sunni Arab minorities. In such a society, the exercise of secular rule under capitalism is only possible under something like Hussein's Ba'athist dictatorship, which the Bush administration aspires to replicate—democratic rhetoric aside—cleansed of its Ba'athist elements and pliable to U.S. dictates.

Every blow aimed at the U.S. colonial occupiers, as well as their local army and police puppets, is in the interest not only of working people in Iraq, but in the Near East and throughout the whole world. We oppose any repression against those who take up arms against the occupation. At the same time, the communalist attacks against Shi'ites and Kurds (and others) are entirely criminal from the standpoint of the international proletariat and must be condemned. We do not lend one iota of political support to the remnants of the Ba'athist regime or the Islamic fundamentalist forces seeking to impose their own reactionary agendas on Iraqi women, workers, ethnic and religious minorities. Marxists seek to mobilize proletarian resistance against the occupation of Iraq using proletarian means of struggle (strikes, hot-cargoing military goods, etc.) in the service of a revolutionary perspective against U.S. imperialism, not only in Iraq but internationally.

The Near East is a patchwork of nationalities and religious and ethnic groupings, with states whose boundaries were artificially drawn by the imperialists to suit their colonial appetites, including control of vital oil reserves. The struggle against imperialist domination and the oppressive rule of the sheiks, kings, colonels, ayatollahs, nationalist and Zionist rulers cannot be resolved under capitalism. There will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no emancipation of women or an end to the exploitation of working people in the Near East short of thoroughgoing socialist revolutions that open the road to the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East, as part of the struggle for international socialist revolution.

Among the opponents of the war and occupation many see a huge gap between the U.S. imperialists' rhetoric about freedom and democracy and what these same rulers do at home and around the world to working people and the oppressed. A graphic example in the Near East itself is U.S. imperialist support to the Zionist rulers in their onslaught against the Palestinian people—many of them now being walled in and walled off from any kind of livelihood while Zionist stormtroopers raze whole towns in the Occupied Territories. If anyone in the Near East possesses weapons of mass destruction it is certainly Israel, courtesy of the imperialists.

Whether or not to raise the call for defense of the Palestinian people and for an end to the Israeli occupation has been a major topic of debate among the organizers of the March 20 protests against the occupation of Iraq. This issue has been divisive because the more right-wing elements in these coalitions fear alienating Democratic Party politicians, who are staunchly pro-Zionist. We call for the defense of the Palestinian people and demand the withdrawal of all Israeli troops and settlers from the Occupied Territories. For both the Palestinian and Hebrew-speaking peoples to equitably exercise their right to self-determination requires Arab/Hebrew workers revolutions to topple not only the Zionist rulers, but capitalist rule throughout the region.

Imperialism in the Post-Soviet World

A common view among many antiwar activists is that the Bush administration, which has well-known links to U.S. oil companies, simply wanted to get its hands on Iraqi oil. It is the beginning of wisdom to see that the U.S. imperialists had an economic motivation for going to war, but reducing it to that ignores the intent of U.S. imperialism, which was not merely to loot Iraq but to assert its unique right to do so against its main economic rivals, such as Germany and Japan.

The war was an assertion of U.S. military superiority and of its control over the Near East oil spigot on which both Japan and West Europe heavily rely. The intent was to "shock and awe" the U.S.'s imperialist rivals, who are militarily far weaker. In the absence of the destruction of imperialism through socialist revolutions, the economic conflicts between the imperialists can only lead to interimperialist wars, such as World Wars I and II, except this time fought by nuclear-armed powers. While at this time no single imperialist power has the ability to prevail militarily in a war against the U.S., things will not remain the same forever. The possibility of alliances between a combination of imperialist powers, down the road, represents a threat to U.S. hegemony.

There has been a lot of discussion, especially among anti-globalization activists, about a "new imperialism," which is not surprising given that the Iraq war and occupation empirically negate the ideology of "globalization"—the spoils are going to U.S. imperialism and no one else except on their say-so. Yet the false theory of globalization posits that capitalism has transcended the nation-state. So rather than big corporations being dependent on a particular state power to defend and further their interests, you have so-called multinational and transnational corporations. Supposedly, the world economy is actually controlled by international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization.

The fundamental workings of imperialism haven't changed since Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin described them in his 1916 work, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, where he stated that imperialism is "a struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world." This struggle is based on international competition for cheap labor, raw materials and spheres of influence. The world economy is defined by this competition between the larger, more advanced nation-states which seek to defend the economic interests of their respective capitalist classes. A capitalist has to be able to defend his property rights with bodies of armed men—if you default on your mortgage, it's not a bank officer who comes around to throw you out, it's the police. The same operates on a larger scale and internationally—the imperialist military exists to defend the economic interests of the capitalists of an imperialist nation against their competitors.

The U.S.'s unrivaled military dominance today is the result of the destruction of the Soviet Union through capitalist counterrevolution over a decade ago. In contrast to most liberals and organizations on the left, who joined the imperialist powers in hailing the destruction of the Soviet Union, we fought to mobilize the working class against counterrevolution and warned that the destruction of the world's first and most powerful workers state, albeit degenerated and betrayed by the Stalinist bureaucracy, would be a defeat for working people around the world. This was not least because we understood that the U.S. imperialists, the biggest purveyors of death and destruction on the planet, would see no challenge to their appetites for global domination. They are now emboldened enough to announce "pre-emptive" war as official doctrine. The rape of Iraq today is in fact one of the grim consequences of the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state.

Class Society and the State

Of all the lies working people are told by the government, the media and the education system, the biggest one is that they share any interest in common with the people who rule this country—and that doesn't just mean the Bush administration. It means the people who own the factories, mines, banks, industry—what Marxists call the means of production. It also means their representatives in the capitalist Republican and Democratic parties whose job is to administer the state so that nothing gets in the way of the capitalists' right to make and amass profit off the backs of working people here and around the world. The capitalists have cops, courts, prisons and an army—i.e., a state which exists to defend the capitalists and their property rights. The government of the United States is not "our" government, nor can it ever be so long as the system of capitalism remains in place.

One of the most fundamental aspects of capitalist society which is obscured by everyone from George Bush to liberals and especially anti-globalization ideologues is that this society is divided into two fundamental classes with irreconcilable interests. The interests of those who own the means of production cannot be reconciled with those of the working class—the people whose labor creates the wealth in this society. The fact that the working class creates this wealth through its labor means that it has the social power to shut down production.

Workers actions against the war, especially in the U.S., would have had a qualitatively greater impact than the millions of people marching in all the cities of the world. Why? Because if the people who load the ships with armaments and supplies for the war were to go on strike, and defend such a strike with mass picket lines, the ships wouldn't get loaded. There were several such actions by transportation workers in Scotland and Italy who refused to drive trains loaded with supplies headed for Iraq during the war. These were a model of what needed to happen more broadly.

Our class-struggle perspective was in direct counterposition to the politics of the antiwar coalitions, which were built in essence to provide a platform for capitalist politicians. The lie promoted by these groups was that if the demands of the antiwar movement were kept to the lowest common denominator that would draw in the greatest number of people, and the rulers would have to take heed of the outrage of the masses. Obviously this didn't work. Some activists might retort that if our alternative of working-class struggle against the war was so great in contrast, then why didn't it happen in the U.S.?

The capitalists understand what a huge threat the social power of the working class is to them, and that's why they not only have cops and anti-union legislation to break up strikes, but also the ideological means such as promoting patriotism, nationalism and racism to keep the workers from using that power. The bloody and militant history of the American labor movement is replete with examples of workers organizing, often under the leadership of reds, to take on the capitalists and succeeding in turning their anti-union laws into worthless pieces of paper. However, especially since the reds were purged from the unions during the McCarthy-era Cold War witchhunts, the leadership of the union movement in the U.S. has been staunchly pro-capitalist and anti-communist.

Part of our task as revolutionaries is to unmask all the false ideas promoted by the capitalists and much of the current leadership of the trade unions so that the social power of the working class can be unlocked and mobilized in the interests of all the exploited and oppressed. We seek to organize workers on the basis of a class-struggle policy rather than the current AFL-CIO politics of exercising pressure on the capitalist politicians through the ballot box and lobbying. No right or reform in favor of the working people and oppressed has ever been won through an election or lobbying—it took class and social struggle to win these things, and that is what is needed to defend them when the capitalists inevitably try to take them away.

That the gap between U.S. rhetoric about "liberating" Iraq and the reality at home is especially palpable for many blacks and minorities in the U.S. was captured by black author Walter Mosley in an interview published in the New York Times Magazine last month, where he noted that black people in the U.S. weren't surprised by the criminal September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. Because of their own experiences with racial oppression at home, black people more readily perceive the widespread hatred of racist U.S. imperialism around the world and this is one of the Achilles' heels of U.S. imperialism.

The racial oppression of black people has always been integral to American capitalism, and despite the abolition of slavery through the Civil War and despite the civil rights movement, which won an end to formal Jim Crow segregation, blacks remain forcibly segregated at the bottom of this society. A reflection of this is their disproportionate representation in the military—for many black youth the only chance of going to school or getting a job is to enlist. This, along with the important black component of the American working class, means that black people and the fight for black liberation will be central to ending racist American capitalism.

Break with the Democratic Party of Racism and War!

A whole range of bourgeois supporters of the Iraq war are now wailing that they were cruelly misled by the Bush administration—such is the case of the Democrats who in their majority voted in favor of the March 2003 resolution in support of the war and who retailed the Bush administration's lying pretext for it. In its defense, the Bush administration is now correctly pointing out that a lot of the intelligence on Iraq dates back to the Democratic Clinton administration which also had a policy of "regime change" in Iraq. To the extent that Democrats have opposed the war, including growing numbers in retrospect, it was based on accepting the premise of the war as justified but quibbling over how the Bush administration went about this.

There were also those politicians, such as those on the platform at antiwar demonstrations, who understood that because many black, minority and working-class people stood in opposition to the war, some Democrats had better position themselves against the war to make sure all these people didn't lose faith in the Democratic Party. This is why many of the spokesmen at the antiwar demonstrations were black Democrats such as Al Sharpton, Cynthia McKinney and Barbara Lee.

We are opposed to any kind of vote or support to the Democrats, not because of this or that bad policy they might pursue, but because their purpose is to administer capitalism and defend the interests of the capitalists, which necessarily means against the working class and the oppressed.

That is not to say that there aren't differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. In essence these boil down to the Democrats being better at masking imperialist plunder and capitalist exploitation with a facade of human rights and democracy, while the Republicans are just in your face about it—they don't feel the need to hide their cronyism or throw a few more crumbs at the poor. The capitalists can make use of either of these faces for a capitalist government—it doesn't fundamentally change the system.

There is no better proof of the Democrats' fundamental commitment to defending the interests of U.S. imperialism against working people at home and abroad than their wholehearted support for the so-called "war on terror." The criminal attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 was a huge gift to the American rulers. Under the rubric of the "war on terror," civil liberties have been shredded, thousands of immigrants in the U.S. have been detained and deported, and unknown numbers of foreign nationals as well as U.S. citizens have been declared "enemy combatants" with no rights and spirited off to U.S. military prison camps.

Such a person is U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, on behalf of whom the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social defense organization in accordance with the views of the Spartacist League, have submitted a "friend of the court" brief. In this brief we describe the "war on terror" as follows:

"It is a ‘war' without a defined enemy, a war without end. There is no war by any military definition. There is no shooting war and no battle between state powers. The ‘war against terrorism' is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil. It is no more a ‘war' in a military sense than ‘war against cancer,' ‘war against obesity' or a ‘war against immorality.' Like the ‘war against communism' and the ‘war against drugs,' this ‘war' is a pretext to increase the state's police powers and repressive apparatus, constricting the democratic rights of the population."

The "war on terror" is a political construct which justifies not only the U.S. government's right to disappear anyone they claim is a terrorist but to assassinate them as well.

Last November the New York Times reported that the FBI issued a memorandum ten days before last October's demonstrations against the occupation of Iraq advising local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activities at demonstrations to the FBI's counter-terrorism squads and warning of potential "threats" ranging from "homemade bombs" to the "formation of human chains"!

The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center helped plan a premeditated cop attack on an April 7 antiwar protest last year at the Port of Oakland where riot-equipped officers fired potentially lethal wooden bullets, pellet-firing "sting bags" and concussion grenades on antiwar activists and longshoremen. In Iowa, federal prosecutors went after participants in an antiwar conference, issuing subpoenas which were fortunately withdrawn after widespread publicity. Under the watchwords of "fighting terrorism," trade unionists, black people, immigrants and all opponents of this oppressive system are targeted. But as we have pointed out from the beginning, what this government can get away with in applying their laws depends on class and social struggle.

Liberal Left Pushes Reformist Schemes

There is a veritable hysteria among liberals and many leftists over the 2004 presidential elections as the most important in the history of the world. In a statement urging West Coast longshoremen to campaign for the Democratic Party against Bush, International Longshore and Warehouse Union president James Spinosa stated, "The fate of all American working people…of working people around the world, of human and civil rights and of the global environment hang in the balance." Another example of this hysteria is the panicked liberal/Democratic reaction to Ralph Nader's presidential campaign.

In 2000, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Socialist Alternative called for a vote to Nader. While the ISO has not (yet?) declared its support to Nader's 2004 campaign, Socialist Alternative has. We opposed a vote to Nader in the 2000 elections, as we do today, on principle. Nader is a capitalist politician who ran on the ticket of a small capitalist party, the Greens. Far from being a real working-class alternative, Nader's campaign was intended by his own admission to pressure the Democrats somewhat more in the direction of liberalism, and actually served to draw youth disgusted with the Republicans and Democrats back into the fold of bourgeois electoral politics.

Supposed "anarchist" and virulent anti-communist Noam Chomsky (see page 9) has also been bitten by the anybody-but-Bush bug. He has signed on to a document called "Bush Can Be Stopped: A Letter to the Left," which states that "Traditional debates on the left about the value of electoral politics and the lesser evil pale in light of the need to defeat Bush and his congressional accomplices." Funnily enough, the words Democratic Party don't actually appear anywhere in the letter, but the conclusion one should draw is clear.

The Progressive (January 2004) published a speech liberal academic Howard Zinn wrote for whoever ends up being the Democratic presidential candidate, which already tells you who Zinn will be voting for. The speech promises a whole range of reforms and pledges to change U.S. foreign policy to that of a "peaceful nation, always ready to defend ourselves, but not sending our troops and planes all over the world for the benefit of the oil interests and the other great corporations that profit from war."

In that small sentence Zinn obliterates any real understanding of imperialism, and perpetuates the myth, as does the whole speech, that capitalism can be reformed to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed rather than those of the rapacious capitalist class. Imperialism is not a policy that the capitalists can choose to employ one day, and not the other—it is a system that will only end with the uprooting of capitalism, and its replacement with a planned and collectivized economy of production for human need and want, rather than profit.

Anti-globalization ideologue Naomi Klein looks to international law to rein in U.S. imperialism's "economic colonization" of Iraq. How? In an article titled "Bring Halliburton Home" (Nation, 24 November 2003), she wrote: "Easy: by showing that Bremer's reforms were illegal to begin with." She says, "It's too late to stop the war, but it's not too late to deny Iraq's invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect in the first place." All the exposure of lies leading into the war and outrage by millions around the world couldn't stop the war, yet Klein believes that through the pressure of international law the U.S. is not going to pillage its new colony!

In a statement author and activist Arundhati Roy made to the World Social Forum in Mumbai in January, reprinted in the Nation, she calls for the anti-globalization movement to focus on the struggle to end the occupation of Iraq and become the global resistance to it by "acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons."

While Arundhati Roy stands out in calling for working-class struggle, she also promotes a "corporate campaign" along the lines of some of the actions already carried out by groups such as Direct Action Against the War. Shortly after the war, Roy began calling for imposing "a regime of Peoples' Sanctions on every corporate house that has been awarded with a contract in postwar Iraq.... Each one of them should be named, exposed, and boycotted. Forced out of business." Roy is falsely positing that consumers, rather than workers, can shut down these companies. Furthermore, with a goal of driving these companies out of business, what makes the others that would take their place any better? A humane or fair capitalist is a fiction.

The view underlying these various campaigns against the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel is that poverty and war don't stem from the capitalist system itself, but from malfeasant, out of control corporations and "undemocratic" rulers such as the Bush administration who fail to listen to the will of the people. This is what leads many to believe that if only we could just shut down the IMF or WTO, or if we could get the UN to enforce international law consistently, then we could have "peace and justice." Fundamentally, this is the illusion that imperialism is a policy rather than a system that needs to be destroyed.

Another premise of such campaigns to "disrupt business as usual" is that through acts of civil disobedience you can force the capitalist rulers to listen to the people and thereby have effective democracy. This wrongly assumes that the ruling class, or a section of it, would do the right thing if only we grab their attention and show the way. Meanwhile, these activists largely ignore the people who really do have the power to shut these companies down and bring production to a grinding halt—the workers. At best, they might view the struggles of the working class as actions by just another of the many sectors of the oppressed. They don't see the working class as the force uniquely capable of shutting the capitalist system down.

The Left Tails on the Left Tails of the Democrats

The main ostensibly revolutionary or Marxist organizations that participated heavily in building antiwar coalitions were the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), International Socialist Organization and Workers World Party. All these organizations are now writing lengthy articles arguing against voting for the Democrats. Yet these words stand in stark contrast to their deeds. In an article arguing against support to supposed "antiwar" candidate Howard Dean, the RCP concludes with the following question: "What would it mean…if the energies and resources of antiwar forces get subordinated to a Democratic electoral program that is so fundamentally pro-war and pro-imperialist?" (Revolutionary Worker, 18 January).

Here's a news flash for the RCP: the antiwar forces were subordinated to a pro-imperialist Democratic electoral program from Day One, thanks to organizations like theirs. These three organizations which are now bemoaning that the antiwar movement has been derailed into an electoral campaign for the Democratic Party are reaping exactly what they sowed. They were the main left-wing proponents of building an antiwar movement designed to boost the electoral fortunes of the Democrats—that is why all these so-called revolutionaries not only couldn't bring themselves to forthrightly call for the defense of Iraq, but didn't dare get on the antiwar demonstration platforms and denounce the Democratic Party for being a party of racism and war, especially if Al Sharpton or Barbara Lee were within earshot. These organizations wanted Democrats on their platforms and did all they could to get them there, and now they tell working people to beware! What chutzpah!

We intervened in antiwar demonstrations and events on the basis of the need for working-class struggle against the war and in opposition to the Democratic Party. Imperialist war is an inevitable outgrowth of the capitalist system itself, therefore you cannot fight to end it by joining with representatives of the very system that breeds war. The ISO, RCP and Workers World, including through their Not In Our Name and ANSWER coalitions, did all they could to convince people to unite with a wing of the capitalist class enemy. We are called sectarian for rejecting such "unity," but our business is speaking the truth to working people and youth based on the lessons of the hard-fought struggles of the past.

For New October Revolutions!

The core issue distinguishing us in practice as well as theory from pretty much all those groups and individuals claiming to have a program for changing the world for the better is the defense of those states where capitalism was overturned. The Soviet Union was born in October 1917 during the interimperialist slaughter of the First World War. After three years of war the Russian workers, peasants and soldiers rose up and overthrew the tsarist rulers, and months later the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky led a workers revolution against a weak capitalist coalition government of bourgeois and socialist elements. This was the first time ever that the working class took political power on the basis of its own institutions; the soviets, or workers and peasants councils, served as the basis for the new government. The capitalists and landowners were expropriated and the economic resources of society were reorganized in the interests of workers and the oppressed, establishing a centrally planned and collectivized economy. The revolution had an enormously liberating effect on all aspects of social and cultural life. The Bolsheviks saw the revolution as the beginning of spreading socialist revolution worldwide, and it inspired millions of workers and the oppressed around the world.

But capitalism was not overthrown in any other country in the wake of the October Revolution—the main reason being the absence of revolutionary vanguard parties such as that built by Lenin in Russia. After a brutal civil war and invasions by imperialist armies seeking to overturn the October Revolution, the Soviet Union was economically and socially devastated and faced international isolation. It appeared that the gap between the liberating goals of the revolution and the grim realities of life in the Soviet Union could not be bridged. Under such conditions the working class tended to become demoralized. Many of the administrators and officials of the ruling Communist Party lost faith in the prospect of socialist revolution internationally and became increasingly concerned with maintaining and advancing their own privileges. These tendencies led to what Trotsky described later as a political counterrevolution in 1924 in which a bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin took political power out of the hands of the working class and proceeded to consolidate his regime.

Trotsky's attitude to these developments was not to wash his hands of the Soviet Union. He understood that while the political regime was no longer one of working-class democracy, the overturn of capitalist property relations was not reversed. He urged workers around the world to defend the Soviet Union in the same way that workers must defend a trade union in any battle against the capitalists and their state, even if the union has a bureaucratic, sellout leadership. Trotsky understood that there were only two ways in which this contradiction could be resolved: either the Stalinist bureaucracy, becoming more and more the tool of bourgeois forces in the workers state, would open the door to overturning the planned and collectivized economy, bringing back capitalism; or the workers would crush the bureaucracy through a proletarian political revolution and open the road to socialism through the struggle for workers revolution internationally.

Unfortunately, the former took place in the USSR and throughout the East European deformed workers states in the early 1990s. The toll of human devastation for the working masses in these countries as the result of the restoration of capitalism is testament to the superiority of the collectivized economies of the workers states and underscores why defending these was so important. The social gains won through struggle by workers in the countries of West Europe are being shredded in large part because the capitalist classes there no longer feel threatened by the spectre of communism, and interimperialist rivalries have been unleashed as the imperialist powers have dispensed with their former alliance against the Soviet Union.

It is against this scary and brutal post-Soviet world that we fought, not just in words, but in deeds, most notably in East Germany and Russia. We stood up to the Cold War drive to destroy the Soviet Union, being unique in hailing the Soviet Red Army when it entered Afghanistan on the side of social progress and women's rights against the Islamic fundamentalist cutthroats. These Islamists were cultivated by U.S. imperialism as a bulwark against the spread of communism in Central Asia and the Near East, and it was thousands of innocent working people in the World Trade Center who died when this Frankenstein's monster turned on its U.S. imperialist masters.

Today we apply the same program of unconditional military defense, including the right to possess nuclear weapons, to the remaining deformed workers states: China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. These are states where capitalism was overturned, but which were built on the Stalinist model, meaning that the working class never held political power. It is elementary that an organization which cannot defend the gains won in the past is incapable of fighting for new victories. That is true of all those who refuse to defend the workers states, including the anarchists, ISO and RCP. It is not coincidental that those who refuse to defend the workers states are the same ones who have a program of reforming capitalism.

As the American section of the International Communist League, we are trying to build a revolutionary party, based on the multiracial working class and the black, Latino and other oppressed sections of American society. The goal of such a party is to shatter U.S. imperialism from within, and in so doing open the road to communism around the world.