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 No. 56, May-June 2019 Table
of Contents Click on image to left for pdf version of complete issue. |
Mobilize Worker/Immigrant Power to Shut Down
the Democrat/Republican Deportation Machine!
Trump Targets Millions of Immigrants for “Removal”
A wave of panic swept across the United States as Donald Trump tweeted in mid-June that “Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens.” Immigrant families were hit with the prospect of being picked up in their homes or on the street, parents separated from their U.S.-born children and packed off to detention centers for immediate deportation. As usual, Trump’s pronouncement was a political ploy, intended to whip up anti-immigrant and racist frenzy in conjunction with kicking off his reelection campaign for president. Currently, tens of thousands of migrants – mostly Central Americans fleeing violence and economic devastation caused by U.S. imperialism – are suffering in wretched concentration camps in the U.S., including thousands of children kept in brutal conditions in private prisons. The United States is a police state for immigrants. As Trump stokes xenophobia (fear and hatred of foreigners), the rights of all are threatened by this unbridled exercise of police power. Trump’s terror plans could backfire. But for that to happen, we must act. The Internationalist Group calls on all defenders of immigrants’ and democratic rights to mobilize to stop these raids, flooding the streets to block the unmarked vans and snatch squads. Raids and arrests must be met by mass protest, including labor/immigrant/student action to block the deportation cops. Above all, we fight to break with Democrats, Republicans and all capitalist parties, to build an internationalist workers party Trump Targets Millions of Immigrants for “Removal” (24 June 2019)
Concentration Camps U.S.A. (24 June 2019)Democrats, Republicans, Courts, Congress: Enemies of Full Right to Abortion
Defeat Racist Abortion Bans With Class-Struggle Action
For Free Abortion on Demand! Labor: Defend the Clinics!
In a frenzied move to roll back women’s rights by several decades, so far in 2019 nine states have passed new, draconian restrictions on abortion rights. Any restriction on a woman’s right to an abortion is an infringement on her basic right to control her own body. As Marxists and defenders of women’s rights, we say that the decision to give birth or not must be that of the woman alone, because it is her life and her future that will be irrevocably altered. The anti-abortion “god squads” who besiege the clinics really don’t give a damn about so-called “sanctity of life”. Rather, they are obsessed with putting women in their place. There is another important social underpinning to the anti-abortion drive. The Internationalist Group has called to defeat the racist abortion bans. The push to illegalize abortion is driven by racist fears that white women are not producing enough white babies. Today, the Democratic Party is seeking to use the abortion bans in order to win women’s votes in the 2020 elections. But, in fact, the Democrats are no defenders of women’s fundamental right to abortion. The Internationalist Group calls for free abortion on demand. We stand for militant defense of abortion clinics, including against “pro-life” terrorists who target the courageous doctors and nurses who perform this vital medical procedure. And we fight in the unions to defend this elemental right of women. Defeat Racist Abortion Bans With Class-Struggle Action (24 June 2019)
As DSA Grows, SAlt Splinters, ISO Implodes
“Left” Reformists In Existential Crisis
Buffeted by social and political crises, the United States is already neck-deep in the muck of the next presidential campaign. While most “progressives” would vote for anything, including maybe even an actual donkey, if it won the Democratic nomination to oppose Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has once again drawn the hopes and illusions of the majority of self-identified leftists. Sanders’ last campaign, together with revulsion at the election of Trump, led to the mushrooming of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a long-stagnant social-democratic pressure group on and in the Democratic Party. This posed an existential challenge to reformist socialist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt) which occupied political space a bit to the left of liberal Democrats. The ensuing period has been one of growing crisis for reformist groups nominally to the left of the DSA. SAlt, which unabashedly threw itself into the Sanders campaign, has lost a huge chunk of its membership and a whole series of locals. The International Socialist Organization hailed the bourgeois politicians Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as fellow socialists while hovering at the edge of formally endorsing them. Although the final act of the ISO’s demise was marked in particular by its embrace of #MeToo Democratic Party feminism, its collapse is fundamentally due to the predicament it found itself in as the burgeoning DSA occupied its hoped-for political space. The ISO and SAlt have been devoured by their own opportunism. “Left” Reformists In Existential Crisis (24 June 2019)
The ISO and “Socialism from Below” (24 June 2019)
France: “Yellow Vest” Revolt and the Struggle for Socialist Revolution
It is now more than six months since the first demonstrations of the “Gilets jaunes” (Yellow Vests) in France. Thousands of people are still demonstrating. Ferocious repression has reduced the demonstrations to a hard core, and an unrelenting media propaganda campaign has eroded initial high public support, but the guerrilla warfare is far from ended. The increased taxes on fuel, which especially hit working people, was the drop that made the glass overflow. Across Europe, social unrest following the financial crash in 2008 has taken the form of a variety of populist movements and parties, among them the Yellow Vests. Such multi-class movements – whether of the “left,” right or center – are bourgeois in character, and thus cannot lead a revolutionary struggle to bring down capitalism. To go forward it is necessary to mobilize the proletariat to overturn the class axis of the struggle. The situation cries out for a workers leadership that goes beyond simple trade-unionism, on a program to unite the entire working class and rally the pensioners, the youth, the unemployed and immigrants in hard class struggle. France: “Yellow Vest” Revolt and the Struggle for Socialist Revolution (6 June 2019)
Stop the Repression of the Yellow Vests (June 2019)
When the Yellow Vests burst upon the scene, it was a godsend for the bulk of the demoralized French “far left.” The various pseudo-Trotskyist currents, in contrast, have schooled themselves in what Lenin’s Bolsheviks called khvostism, or tailism, the art of chasing after whatever “movement” is currently in vogue. While various opportunists seek to hitch their trailer to the Yellow Vests, Leninists seek to split this amorphous movement along class lines and win the toiling masses among them to a workers movement fighting to take power. The Opportunist Left Hitched to the Yellow Vests (June 2019)
The ICL Against Asylum for Refugees in Quebec
Quebec’s right-wing prime minister François Legault has announced his intention to reduce immigration by 20% this year, one way or another. Quebec has a veto on overall immigration, but not on the entry of refugees. So in addition to canceling 18,000 applications for immigration, Legault demanded that control over all aspects of immigration be handed over to the Quebec government. The French-language newspaper of the International Communist League in Quebec and Canada writes that since “the struggle for Quebec to have its independent state cannot be separated from the struggle to control its borders,” therefore “Legault’s current demand that immigration ... be brought back under the jurisdiction of Quebec is legitimate from this standpoint.” Thus the ICL openly supports the “legitimate” right of a bourgeois government to turn back refugees in order to control the borders of an independent state, which, moreover, does not even exist! Genuine Marxists assume no responsibility for the organization of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie when they support the call for independenceThis is a betrayal of the internationalist principles of communism. The ICL Against Asylum for Refugees in Quebec (6 June 2019)
Arrest of Algerian Workers Party Leader by Military Regime Threatens Entire Working Class
Free Louisa Hanoune!
On Thursday, May 9, Louisa Hanoune, General Secretary of the Algerian Workers Party (PT), was called before the military tribunal of Blida as a witness in the scope of an inquiry against the clan of the deposed President Bouteflika. However, she was then placed in preventive detention accused of being somehow involved in “attacks on the authority of the army” and “conspiracy against the authority of the state.” This arbitrary arrest is a direct attack on the rights of millions of people who have demonstrated in recent weeks and presages a hardening of the military power. The League for the Fourth International demands that Louisa Hanoune be immediately released. Free Louisa Hanoune! (12 May 2019)
Call for a Constituent Assembly? Constitutional Tinkering Will Not Put an End to Capitalist Misery – For a Workers and Peasants Government!
Algeria: For Workers Revolution Against the Military Regime!
Sweep Away All the Bourgeois Clans and Overthrow the Capitalist System!
Hundreds of thousands of Algerians have gone into the streets every Friday, at first to demand the departure of a silent and invisible president, and later to call for the end of “the system.” There is talk of a "February 22 Revolution." This is an illusion, in the same way that the uprisings that overthrew Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt (in 2011) were described as a revolution, only to be followed by the rise of the Islamists, and then the return of the military. People chant, “System get lost!” Yes, it’s a whole system, not just a president or a clan. Nor is it only the absence of (bourgeois) “democracy.” But whether it’s corrupt cronies or powerful generals, they will never leave power willingly – they must be overthrown. After the resignation of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on April 2, dictated by the generals under pressure from the street, the Algerian regime is regrouping. This system of massive unemployment and low wages, of all-encompassing repression, is called capitalism, and to sweep it away we need an internationalist, socialist workers revolution. Algeria: For Workers Revolution Against the Military Regime! (24 April 2019
Throw Off the UGTA’s Stranglehold on the Working Class!
Against State-Controlled “Trade Unionism,” Forge a Revolutionary Leadership (24 April 2019)Program Is Key: Fight for Permanent Revolution
South Africa: Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party Challenge to ANC Neo-Apartheid Regime
Critical Support to the SRWP in May 8 Elections!
From April 4 to 6, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) of South Africa held its inaugural congress with a thousand delegates and guests outside Johannesburg. The party, which defines itself as communist and “Marxist-Leninist,” was initiated by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the largest and most militant trade union in the country. This is a major development in the South African class struggle, reflecting the continuing unrest and protest against the neo-apartheid regime following the horrendous 2012 police massacre of 34 striking miners at Marikana. It is a direct challenge to the Tripartite Alliance – consisting of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – which has governed the country since the end of formal white minority rule in 1994. What replaced the rigidly segregated apartheid system was a black bourgeois government presiding over a capitalist economy still based on the superexploitation of black labor. After a quarter century of this “democratic” capitalist regime, South African poor and working people are fed up. The appearance of an explicitly communist party based on militant sections of the South African proletariat has tremendous potential, which could shake the entire continent. But that requires the leadership of a Leninist party based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. South Africa: Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party Challenge to ANC Neo-Apartheid Regime (7 May 2019)
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