No. 52, May-June 2018  Table of Contents Selected articles linked Click on image to left for pdf version of complete issue.

Drive I.C.E. Out! Shut the Detention Centers! Return the Kids! Let Refugees In! Set Them Free, Let Them Stay! For Workers Action to Stop Deportations Democrats, Republicans – Enemies of Immigrants: Build a Revolutionary Workers Party! After a tidal wave of outrage, on June 20 Donald Trump was forced to make an about-face on his grotesque policy of stealing immigrant children from their parents. Instead, he issued an executive order to hold entire families in cages in abandoned warehouses and on army bases. This only served to intensify the protests. Five days later, the administration backed down again. There must be no illusions that the immigrant-bashing president and his child-snatching Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) have been stopped. Nor should anyone think that electing Democrats in November will bring relief to the more than 15 million undocumented immigrants living in fear in the United States, or to the desperate refugees camped out along the border. The monstrous deportation machine being used by Republican Trump was built for him by Democrat Obama, who threw a record 8+ million people out of the U.S. Both capitalist parties are enemies of immigrants. It is up to the working class together with black, Latino and other oppressed sectors to mobilize our power to wage a class war against the war on immigrants. The Internationalist Group calls for mass worker/immigrant mobilization in the streets to block deportations. We say: Stop the detentions! Return the children to their parents! Let the refugees in! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Set Them Free, Let Them Stay! (28 June 2018)

Defend Syria and Iran Against Imperialist Attack! Regional War Looms in the Middle East For an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian Workers State in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East! As illusions of “peace” spread over the Korean peninsula as a result of a vague agreement reached by U.S. president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a summit in Singapore, the stage is being set for regional war in the Middle East. On May 8, Donald Trump withdrew from the so-called Iran nuclear deal, cementing an alliance with the Zionist militarists and Saudi war hawks. Three weeks earlier, the U.S. and its NATO partners Britain and France launched a missile attack on Syria, based on phony allegations of chemical weapons use by the Assad regime. Then on May 14, the U.S. relocated its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a brazen provocation against the Palestinian people. Simultaneously, Israeli Army snipers were picking off peaceful protesters inside Gaza, killing at least 129 and leaving thousands wounded. And in Yemen a mass slaughter of civilians by the U.S.-backed Saudi/Gulf monarchist invaders looms. The League for the Fourth International calls to defend Syria and Iran against imperialist attack, upholding Iran’s right to develop nuclear power and obtain nuclear or any other kind of weapons to defend against the Israeli and U.S. warmongers with their massive nuclear arsenals. To break the death grip of imperialism, Zionism and Islamism, the League for the Fourth International calls workers revolution throughout the region. Regional War Looms in the Middle East (28 June 2018)

Class Struggle Education League Fuses with Internationalist Group On June 3, the Class Struggle Education League, based in southern New Hampshire, and the Internationalist Group joined together in a single organization, the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International. The fusion took place following a CSEL-IG panel on “Revolutionary Regroupment vs. ‘Sanders Socialism’” at the annual Left Forum in New York City. The panel focused on the issues that led the CSEL toward fusing with the IG and on what revolutionary regroupment means, from Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to today. The founders of the CSEL came out of Socialist Alternative (SAlt) where they had opposed its support for Sanders and any bourgeois politician. Further study, particularly of the writings of James P. Cannon, led them to reject as well the “sewer socialism” and Labourite reformism of SAlt's parent body, the Committee for a Workers International, which grew out of the Militant tendency in Britain. What’s needed, they concluded, is “not a ‘mass socialist party,’ not a ‘party of the 99%,’ not a ‘people’s party’,” but instead a Leninist revolutionary vanguard party built on the foundation of authentic Trotskyism. The regroupment with the CSEL follows earlier IG fusions with the Portland Trotskyist Study Group in 2012, and the Better-Late-Than-Never Faction, bureaucratically expelled by the Spartacist League/International Communist League, in 2016. As in those earlier instances, the fusion of the CSEL and IG was the result of a period of joint study and common work, notably on the strategy of black liberation through socialist revolution and in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The fused IG will now have a New England local along with those in NYC, Portland and L.A. Class Struggle Education League Fuses with Internationalist Group (June 2018) For a Revolutionary Party, Not the “Tagtail of Any Bourgeois Party” An Open Letter to Socialist Alternative Oppositionists, Past and Present By the Class Struggle Education League “Our politics must be working-class politics. The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party,” wrote Karl Marx in 1871. The Class Struggle Education League was founded in Fall 2017 by members of  Socialist Alternative (SAlt). Growing disagreements with the organization came to a head over its blatant tailing of the Bernie Sanders campaign and  the organization’s ever-increasing adaptation to the Democratic Party. “Our experience as members led us to conclusion that Socialist Alternative is a thoroughly reformist group that, for tactical reasons, internally pretends to be a revolutionary party that is just pretending to be reformist,“ the CSEL founders write in this open letter. Some of the former opposiiton have left SAlt for the Greens, or the DSA, or the Socialist Party; others have embraced Maoism, black nationalism, anarchism... But in their different ways, they (like SAlt) turn their backs on the principle of working-class political independence. An Open Letter to Socialist Alternative Oppositionists, Past and Present (31 May 2018)

PROTEST TORTURE ATTACK ON LABOR ACTIVISTS’ FAMILY IN MEXICO On midday May 7, the teenage son of Dr. Arturo Villalobos and his wife, Patricia Méndez, was tortured and beaten unconscious by thugs who broke into the families' home. We hold the Mexican government and its imperialist overlords in Washington and Wall Street responsible for this vile attack on oppositional labor activists, which is a threat to the left and to all opponents of state control of labor.  Protests have been called outside Mexican consulates in Boston, New York and Portland, Oregon and in Los Angeles. We urge defenders of workers’ and democratic rights to join us. Protest Torture Attack on Labor Activists’ Family in Mexico (9 May 2018) URGENT CALL FOR SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN Brutal Torture of Son of Grupo Internacionalista Leader in Oaxaca On Monday, May 7, thugs entered the house of comrade Dr. Arturo Villalobos and his wife, Patricia Méndez in Oaxaca, Mexico. Both are prominent oppositional activists in the movement of health workers against government “reforms” that are gutting Mexico’s public health system. Not finding our comrade there, the attackers brutally tortured and beat the couple’s adolescent son, Nizván. After ransack the house, as the thugs left, they slashed the teenager and struck his head, leaving him unconscious. Arturo Villalobos is a well-known spokesman in Oaxaca for the Grupo Internacionalista, Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International. In addition, the attackers asked the whereabouts of two other family members who are also members of the GI. In 2016, Dr. Villalobos organized and led the courageous action by Oaxaca doctors in defying a police blockade to provide medical assistance to the surviving victims of the police massacre in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca on 19 June 2016 that left eleven dead during the militant three-month teachers strike. Not long after, the threats of legal action against him by the state attorney general began. We do not know at this time who perpetrated this heinous assault, but everything points to one conclusion: fue el estado (it was the state), as protesters chanted over the 2014 disappearance of 43 teachers college students from Ayotzinapa. Brutal Torture of Son of Grupo Internacionalista Leader in Oaxaca (8 May 2018)  Grupo Internacionalista Press Bulletin: Against Bourgeois Repression, Class Mobilization (7 May 2018)

May Day in New York City and Los Angeles On May Day 2018, the international workers day, the Internationalist Group together with comrades of the Class Struggle Education League (CSEL) from New Hampshire, Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY), the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) and Tabajadores Internacionales Clasistas (TIC) organized a contingent of more than 50 demonstrators in the annual May Day march from Union Square in New York City. Chants for the demonstration included “Defend Syria, Defeat U.S. imperialism,” “Asian, Latin, black and white, Workers of the world, unite,”  “Luchar, vencer, Obreros al poder” (Fight to win, workers to power) and, referring to the recent teachers strikes, “West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, How about New York? Smash the Taylor Law!” Also “Not Trump, Not Democrats, Build a workers party!” Underscoring the struggle against police murder, marchers chanted “Stephon Clark, Saheed Vassell, Michael Brown, Shut the whole system down!”  In Los Angeles, a group of students from Pasadena City College joined in marching with transport workers, whose banners called (in English and Spanish) for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to unionize immigrant workers. Most of the workers wore bright red union-printed shirts with “Transport Workers Against Deportations” on the front and “La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras” on the back. May Day in New York City and Los Angeles (May 2018)

Organizing Workers Strikes Against War and Repression Lessons of the 2008 Longshore Strike Against U.S. Imperialist War By Jack Heyman May Day 2018 is the 10th anniversary of the longshore strike against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which shut down all West Coast ports from the Canadian to the Mexican border to demand the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. The shutdown and protest by members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was a stunning show of labor’s power and a call to action addressed to other unions. It was the first strike action by U.S. workers against a U.S. imperialist war in 90 years. At the same time as the 2008 May Day strike and march against the war, an economic crisis was brewing across the U.S. Yet, there has been virtually no labor fight-back because the trade-union bureaucracy and, in Europe, the social democracy have collapsed in the face of this neoliberal capitalist attack. Worse yet, they’ve become the cheerleaders and enforcers of these new social contracts. Until a fighting leadership can be forged with the program and guts to fight for the interests of working people and all oppressed sectors through to the end, the promise contained in the 2008 May Day West Coast port shutdown cannot be realized. That means ousting the “labor fakers” who tried to prevent, then undercut and then divert this signal example of militant class-conscious workers action.  Lessons of the 2008 Longshore Strike Against U.S. Imperialist War (1 May 2018)