No. 21, Summer 2005  Table of Contents Selected articles linked Click on image to left for pdf version of complete issue.

 

Drawing the Class Line – What Program to Defeat the War? Drive U.S. Imperialists Out of Iraq! United States imperialism has dug itself into a big hole in Iraq, and keeps digging deeper. Try as it might, the Pentagon has been unable to defeat the growing insurgency. Each new puppet government is as discredited and impotent as its predecessor. As the casualties mount, war weariness has been growing in the U.S. population. The Iraq war is clearly unpopular, but that hasn’t stopped it.The “strategy” of the overwhelming majority of the left is to build an ever-larger popular-front antiwar movement, to hook up with growing bourgeois defeatism. Liberal and reformist “peace” groups seek a different foreign policy for imperialism and different priorities “at home.” Revolutionaries seek to defeat the imperialist system that produces endless war, poverty and racism. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International warn that pacifist parades will not and cannot stop the imperialist war machine. The capitalist warmongers can be defeated, by mobilizing the power of the international working class.   Drive U.S. Imperialists Out of Iraq!  (15 July 2005)  SL Tail on “Out Now” Pop Front

Zionist Flack and “WMD” Fabricator Jailed in Government Witchhunt Free Judith Miller! On July 6, a federal district court sentenced New York Times reporter Judith Miller to jail for refusing to divulge her confidential sources to a grand jury investigation supposedly investigating the “leaking” of the identity of a CIA operative. Miller is notorious as a purveyor of official disinformation. She helped whip up war fever to justify the U.S. imperialist invasion of Iraq by reporting bogus “evidence” of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). She has served as a Near East “expert” for Zionist lobbies.  But the jailing of the Times’ Miller is an ominous attempt to throttle the press and get the mass media to march in ever-tighter lockstep with the mass murderers in the White House and the Pentagon.  Free Judith Miller!  (11 July 2005)

Coup Threats, Rightist Maneuvers vs. Calls for “Workers to Power” Bolivia Explodes in Sharp Class Battle Form Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Councils! Build the Nucleus of a Genuine Trotskyist Bolshevik Party! In weeks of massive mobilizations, tens of thousands of workers and peasants besieged Bolivia’s central plaza seeking to shut down the Congress. Tin miners, teachers and other sectors chant “Obreros al poder” (workers to power). In the largest and fiercest protests since the “gas war” of October 2003, protesters have demanded nationalization of the country’s oil and gas fields. Some peasant leaders have called for a constituent assembly, hoping to divert the mass unrest, while reformist union tops want a bourgeois populist “civilian-military” regime. The need of the hour is for genuinely revolutionary leadership.   Bolivia Explodes in Sharp Class Battle  (1 June 2005)

Eyewitness La Paz  (recent articles from the Bolivian capital) Bolivian Capital Shut Down by Mass Protest  (6 June 2005)  Pitched Battles in the Streets of La Paz  (7 June 2005)  Bolivian Workers Move Against Threatened “Constitutional Coup”  (9 June 2005)  Bolivia Was “On Brink of Civil War”  (10 June 2005)  El Alto and the “People’s Assembly”  (20 June 2005)

LRP, PLP: Which Side Are They On? Opportunists Straddle the Class Line Marx on the Sepoy Revolt Lenin on the “Boxer Rebellion”

Today They Want to Take Away Our Driver’s Licenses, And Tomorrow?  Mobilize the Working Class Now to Resist! “Real ID”: Sinister Anti-Immigrant Measure A Step Toward Police State Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants! On May 11, the Senate and House of Representatives in Washington approved a draconian immigration law, known as the “Real ID Act,” which purports to establish uniform norms for driver’s licenses issued by the 50 states.  Although it is presented as an “anti-terrorist” measure, in fact its target is the 11 (or more) million undocumented immigrants who live and work in the United States. With this step we are getting closer to a national identification card, a police-state measure. In the face of the threat represented by the Real ID Act, together with previous anti-immigrant laws such as the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the immigration “reform” of 1996, many immigrant rights organizations have placed their hopes in the capitalist courts and liberal bourgeois politicians. In reality, the whole “debate” over immigration is subordinate to the fundamental issue of the imperialist “war without end,” waged by both capitlaist parties, which like has intensified anti-immigrant hysteria. Internationalist revolutionaries fight to defeat the imperialist war and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.   “Real ID”: A Step Toward Police State  (20 May 2005)

Harsh Settling of Scores Among the Bourgeoisie Mexico: Pre-Election Battle Over Immunity As the 2006 Mexican electoral race gets off to an early start, a battle royal erupted over the lifting of immunity of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, head of the Mexico City government. The maneuver by the government of President Vicente Fox, his National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico for 70 years was transparent: they sought to prevent the popular López Obrador from running as candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) for president next year. For its part, the PRD is mounting a popular-front election campaign in the guise of opposing the lifting of immunity. Trotskyists defend the democratic right of all parties to present whatever candidates they wish in the bourgeois electoral farce, but we do not support the anti-democratic provision of executive immunity. While virtually the entire Mexican left has climbed aboard the López Obrador bandwagon, the Grupo Internacionalista swims against the stream, calling to break with the popular front and forge a revolutionary workers party.  Mexico: Pre-Election Battle Over Immunity (25 April 2005)

Forging a Trotskyist Nucleus in Philippines Over a Dozen Hacienda Luisita Strikers and Children Killed Massacre of Sugar Plantation Workers in the Philippines In the afternoon of November 16, Filipino police and army units carried out a brutal massacre of striking sugar plantation workers at Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac province north of Manila. Some 14 people were reported killed, over 200 injured and 133 arrested. It was the worst slaughter of Filipino workers in recent years. The reformist Stalinists and social democrats with their competing popular fronts call on the Philippine Congress, that capitalist den of corruption, for an “independent and impartial investigation” of the imperialists. In contrast, Trotskyists call to mobilize the Filipino working class in solidarity strike action, from the sugar plantations of Negros to Metro Manila.  Massacre of Sugar Plantation Workers in the Philippines (7 December 2004)   (Pilipino) Matapos ang Hacienda Luisita Masaker  (5 Disyembro 2004)  WORKERS: STRIKE AGAINST THE WAR! When Filipino worker Angelo dela Cruz was kidnapped in Iraq and held hostage, there were numerous demonstrations in the Philippines demanding that the government withdraw its troops from Iraq. When President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo agreed to pull out the Philippines contingent, securing the release of dela Cruz, the government launched a flood of media propaganda claiming to defend the interests of Filipino workers. What was needed was for workers to undertake strike action against the Iraq war, the Arroyo regime’s anti-worker economic policies and the joint U.S.-AFP (Armed Forces of Philippines) offensive against rebels in the south.  Workers: Strike Against the War! (26 July 2004) (Pilipino) Mga manggagawa: Mag-strike laban sa digmaan! (5 Disyembro 2004)

Mobilize to Defeat the Witchhunt! Basic Democratic Rights Under Attack Lynne Stewart Conviction Is Legal Terror The conviction of radical civil liberties lawyer Lynne Stewart along with court interpreter Mohammed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Sattar is a major blow against fundamental democratic rights in the United States. Stewart, who is 65, could spend the rest of her life behind bars, facing up to 30 years in jail for this bogus conviction. The day after she was indicted, the New York Post headlined “TRAITOR” and labeled her a “terror lawyer.” Stewart was convicted of “conspiracy” to violate “Special Administrative Measures” imposed by the government to silence certain prisoners. Such arbitrary measures and frame-up convictions are part of the imperialist imperialist war “at home,” symbolized by the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, by a government that practices torture, sexual assault and murder of prisoners, from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, Iraq. The fight against the frame-up conviction of Lynne Stewart and her co-defendants must be part of a working-class fight against imperialist war and domestic repression. Lynne Stewart Conviction Is Legal Terror (February 2005)

Other articles in The Internationalist No. 20

Persecution of Miguel Malo Continues From Iraq to Brazil: Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution

Mexico: Pre-Election Battle Over Immunity

Ecuador: The “Rebellion of the Outlaws”  –  A Marxist Analysis

Bronx Community College Students Drive Out Military Recruiters Opposition to military recruiters at Bronx Community College is building, and over the space of a month, students led by the Revolutionary Reconstruction Club were able to drive them of campus.  Bronx Community College Students Drive Out Military Recruiters (25 March 2005)  Police-State Repression at City College Students, Faculty, Workers: Mobilize to Shut Down CCNY – Military Recruiters Out of CUNY! On the eve of the second anniversary of the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq, the administration of the City University of New York is waging war on the “home front.” On Wednesday, March 9, three City College students were brutally arrested during a peaceful protest against the presence of military recruiters on campus. Two days later, an administrative assistant in the theater department, was seized by police at her workplace. The Internationalist Clubs at Hunter College and Hostos Community College and the Revolutionary Reconstruction Club at Bronx Community College fight to drive military recruiters off campus, for the defeat of U.S. imperialism and to defend those victimized for protesting the increasing militarization of the campuses. Mobilize to Shut Down CCNY – Military Recruiters Out of CUNY! (17 March 2005)

Militant Protest Sinks BMCC “Homeland Security” Program A firestorm of protest by students and faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College defeated an ominous Homeland Security program that campus administrators sought to sneak in. Planned courses included “interrogation techniques” and “technology for surveillance.” The sinister program was dropped because of the campaign of protest and exposure initiated by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs last fall.  Militant Protest Sinks BMCC “Homeland Security” Program  (25 March 2005)

Abu Ghraib 101 at BMCC? “Fatherland Security” Hits CUNY Updated version of the article that originally appeared in Revolution No. 2 (October 2004).  “Fatherland Security” Hits CUNY  (January  2005)