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Vol. 7, No. 2 • March 23, 2015
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Toxic Fumes of ‘Sewer Socialism’
When ‘Socialist’ Reformists Act Like Reformists BACK PAGE
First Draft of History By KEVIN KEENE kkeene@workersadvocate.org his coming Tuesday, the officials of the United Auto Workers will hold its 2015 Bargaining Convention, the first step in their process of opening contract negotiations with the Big Three U.S. automakers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. It is expected that close to 1,000 officials from the local and regional level will gather at the organization’s headquarters to discuss how they will best and most efficiently steamroller the members of the UAW and impose yet another concessionary contract. However, this may be more difficult than in recent years. Years of resentment over givebacks and betrayals have large sections of the UAW membership growing increasingly angry, not only at the Big Three owners and managers, but also the corporatist “union” officials who enforce these deals and act as a police force on the shop floor. A full article on this convention and the opening of auto contract negotiations will appear in next week’s issue of Workers’ Advocate.
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HE WAS LYNCHED!
Murder of Mississippi Man Blows New Hole in ‘Post-Racial’ Propaganda By MARTIN SAYLES
editor@workersadvocate.org
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orkers and anti-austerity activists from across Europe gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, to protest the opening of the new headquarters of the European Central Bank during the annual “Blockupy” protests. The billion-dollar facility is seen as a slap in the face of the continent’s working class, which has had to endure years of barbaric austerity programs overseen, in part, by the ECB. Conservative estimates say overall attendance at the event was 20,000. The German government deployed more than 8,000 police to protect the ECB. The entire city was transformed into an armed camp, with the facility ringed with barbed wire and cops, who used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets to stop protesters from getting close to the building. More than 350 were arrested during the protests.
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team of three terrorists, supporters of Da’esh (ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State), stormed into the Bardo National Museum in the capital of Tunisia last Wednesday, taking hostages in a three-hour standoff that ended with 21 killed, most of whom were tourists from Europe, and about 50 others injured. Two of the Da’esh Islamists were killed by Tunis police; the third terrorist is currently still at large. This the deadliest attack in the country’s history. According to police and government officials, it is believed that the original target was the country’s parliament building, which is adjacent to the museum, but was considered too well defended to make the Islamists’ assault effective. The Bardo Museum, which has one of the largest collections of ancient Roman mosaics in the world, was apparently a choice made at the last minute.
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ore than 1,000 students and antiracist activists held a nighttime protest at the University of Virginia the day after an African-American honors student, Martese Johnson, was beaten and arrested by members of the state’s Alcohol Beverage Control police outside a pub on St. Patrick’s Day evening. Photos and video of the incident show Johnson bleeding from the forehead, with the cops’ knees in his back. The student is heard saying, “I go to UVA!... How did this happen? How did this happen?!” Johnson was later charged with “obstruction of justice” and “public swearing,” even though several eyewitnesses say he never raised his voice or acted, as the cops assert, “very agitated and belligerent.” Even the pub staff has contradicted the police story, saying Johnson “wasn’t being aggressive at all” and that the cops “instigated the whole thing.”
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The Game is Over Netanyahu’s Victory and the End of the Oslo Accords By CLARENCE FRANKLIN cfranklin@workersadvocate.org
TEL AVIV, Israel, March 21 — When it came right down to it, the margin wasn’t even close. The believed statistical tie, which prompted speculation about a “national unity” government and the end of right-wing rule, evaporated as more and more election returns were reported in the media. The victory of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party in the Israeli general election has to be seen as a watershed moment in the country’s relations with the rest of the world, most notably its Great Power benefactors, like the United States, Britain and Germany. Netanyahu’s Likud won 30 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, handily beating the Zionist Union, a bloc of the Labor Party and the smaller Hatunah group, led by former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, which won 24 seats. The United Arab List, a bloc of parties representing Arabs living in Israel, came in third with 14 seats.
It is expected that Netanyahu will be able to form a majority government composed of Likud and five other far-right Zionist organizations. In the weeks and days prior to the election, Netanyahu increasingly sought to court far-right voters, especially ultra-Zionist settlers occupying land in the West Bank and the recent waves of immigrants coming from Russia and Eastern Europe in order to bolster his own party’s showing. He repeatedly accused the Zionist Union and its leader, Isaac Herzog, of mobilizing Arabs in Israel to come to the polls en masse, of using the media to undermine him and the right, and of attempting to appeal to the Obama administration by criticizing his recent speech to a joint session of Congress. He capped off this appeal to the most genocidal and fascistic elements in Israeli society by declaring that, as long as he is prime minister, an independent Palestinian state will never be allowed to be established. CONTINUED ON BACK PAGE Ü
VICKSBURG, Miss., March 22 — Since the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the president, we have heard over and over about how the United States has now “overcome” racism, both institutionally and culturally, and we all now live in a “post-racial America,” fulfilling the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King that people be judged “by the content of their character.” (Of course, we hear less and less of this talk from its inventors, the liberal supporters of corporatist American capitalism. But the slack has been picked up by the conservatives and radical reactionaries, who have an interest in obscuring their own racial antagonisms and national chauvinism.) The multi-state serial killing spree that the armed enforcers of the ruling classes’ “law and order” have engaged in, and the subsequent legal maneuvers that have allowed the terrorists in blue to walk free, has done a lot to undermine the “post-racial” propaganda that was so common only a few years ago. But even in the midst of all this, both liberal and conservative media mouthpieces still thought they had the proverbial “ace in the hole.” “Well,” they’d say, “it’s not like Black people are still being lynched.” On March 19, the family of Otis Byrd arrived at his home in Port Gibson, Miss., to check up on him. No one had heard from Byrd, a riverboat worker, since a friend dropped him off at a casino in nearby Vicksburg more than two weeks before. As they walked around the house after he failed to answer the door, they discovered Byrd hanging from a tree by a bedsheet. Local officials were quick to try to cover up the fact that this was a lynching. The coroner released preliminary results of an autopsy, telling the media that Byrd committed suicide, in spite of the observations made by both police investigators and his family. For example, according to Byrd’s nephew, Lee, police told him that his uncle’s hands were initially bound, but he was able to get them loose and then tried to get free from the noose. As well, investigators and observers have noted that there was nothing nearby that Byrd could have used as a step to reach the branch in order to tie the noose to the tree or to kick out from under himself to commit the act. The result of this mounting evidence that Byrd was the victim of a racist lynching has been that the FBI, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the U.S. Attorney’s office for Mississippi and the state police are now proceeding with their investigation on the working hypothesis that Byrd was abducted and lynched — that this was a racially-motivated hate crime. If Byrd was indeed lynched, and there is currently no evidence that contradicts that conclusion, he will become the fifth person since the beginning of the year 2000 to be listed as a victim of this vile racist atrocity. A sixth person was attacked, beaten and run over by three white racists in 2011 as part of a long spree of assaults. The three were convicted and imprisoned. CONTINUED ON BACK PAGE Ü
Detroit Ruling Classes Begin Next Round of Shutoffs, Cuts By EDWARD BURGHARDT
eburghardt@workersadvocate.org
A contractor for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Dept. shuts off service to one of tens of thousands of residents unable to pay the rising rates being set by the dictatorship.
DETROIT, Mich., March 22 — Now that winter is ending, the corporate dictatorship that took control of Detroit through the state’s “Emergency Manager” law and process of bankruptcy has announced that the program of mass utility shutoffs will begin again in April. According to sources, more than 800 people per day will begin receiving notices of intent to shut off service from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department at the beginning of the month, with the first round of actual service interruption to begin a couple weeks later. It is believed that upwards of 100,000 residents — about 14 percent of the population — are being targeted. Last year’s wave of mass shutoffs affected more than 30,000 residents before cold weather set in. For those living in Detroit who are not under im-
mediate threat of losing water and sewer service, the new year will bring price hikes of 3.4 percent for water and 16.7 percent for sewerage. Those living outside of Detroit will see rates spike by an average of 12 percent. This new round of attacks on Detroit residents’ access to running water follows another part of the city’s brutal post-bankruptcy austerity plan being implemented: deep cuts in retired city workers’ pensions. At the beginning of this month, retirees saw a reduction of at least 4.5 percent in their pension checks, as well as a 90 percent reduction in the city’s contribution toward their health care plans. The state’s so-called “Income Stabilization Fund,” which is meant to ease the blow of the cuts, pays out so little (between $1 and $180) to so few (to those receiving a total of less than 140 percent of the federal poverty level: $1,373 a month) as to make them, at best, useless (and, at worst, insulting).
Moreover, since all cost-of-living adjustments were also wiped out as a result of the “Grand Bargain” struck between the different sections of the exploiting and oppressing classes on the backs of the city’s workers, the real fall in living standards will only become worse. The Workers Party actively opposed the sham “Grand Bargain” that was being imposed on the city by the ruling classes and advocated by the media, and called on our fellow workers to show their opposition to the whole scheme by spoiling their ballots and organizing for a general strike to shut down the city. (See “Grand Theft Water” and “Detroit Workers: Spoil Your Ballot!” Worker-Communist Vol. 2, No. 2, July 2014) From the moment these attacks began, starting with the city being forced into bankruptcy and under the control of an “Emergency Manager” (read: dictator), CONTINUED ON BACK PAGE Ü
Class against Class – Revolution against Order! H All Power to the Working Class! H Abolish the Wages System and Wage-Slavery!
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BACK PAGE HHH
LYNCHING
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“Sewer socialist” Kshama Sawant smiling and shaking hands with Seattle’s Democratic Mayor, Ed Murray. This is just one of many recent photo-ops with Democratic “friends.”
The Toxic Fumes of ‘Sewer Socialism’
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hroughout previous articles and columns, I’ve sought to warn my fellow workers about the hazards of inhaling the toxic and harmful fumes of a phenomenon called “sewer socialism,” and how it can damage the brain, causing a fundamental lapse in someone’s good judgment. For those unfamiliar, “sewer socialism,” a specific malady in the family of Reformist Disorders, is an ailment that strikes at both the heart and the brain of the honest class-conscious worker. It feeds off the stress and frustration many feel because of the ineffectiveness of the existing class movement and the obsolescence of its demands. It short-circuits those parts of the brain responsible for patience, principle and plain common sense. This illness first presents itself through a growing belief that the exploiting and oppressing classes’ “democracy” can work for working people as long as the right candidate is elected to office. This first phase is often referred to as Electoral Cretinism. Stage Two finds the victim’s judgment impaired to the point of believing that how elected officials vote in one of capitalism’s “democratic” legislative bodies represents either a “victory” or “defeat” for workers in the class struggle. Sadly, by the time the patient reaches Stage Three, a complete breakdown of sensibility grips our poor wretch. The damage to those centers of the brain that couple principle with practice — thought with action — is irreversible, causing the sufferer to forget virtually everything they ever learned through hard experience. The end result is that we find our stricken friend babbling about how public sanitation and the postal service are “socialism,” and that liberals are not only allies, but also partners in the fight for “social justice.” Throughout the 20th century, “sewer socialism” ravaged working-class communities across America. Outbreaks of types cp, sd (and its mutated successor, dsa) and sp caused tens of thousands of casualties, while lesser strains, such as swp, ncm and sds, affected specific demographic groups. Most of these strains were eradicated or contained during the late 1970s and early 1980s. But a recent outbreak in Seattle of the new strain, salt-2, has threatened to spread across the country due to a new generation of young radicals who have not been inoculated against the various Reformist Disorders. This new strain is particularly damaging, combining the standard effects of “sewer socialism” with a mutation that causes sufferers to drown in self-righteous arrogance. Preliminary reports say that the “Patient Zero” of this strain is Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant. Sawant has been known as a long-time patient with the salt-1 strain, an import from Britain, but since being elected in 2013, research has shown that it has become a very American offshoot, adapted to local conditions. For a time, it was believed that this variety of “sewer socialism” was stunted, with Stage Two being the farthest it developed. But new evidence has come to light showing that new Stage Three cases are growing at a dangerously rapid pace.
The area around where Byrd lived in Port Gibson is heavily wooded and is known as a hunting ground commonly used by local whites, many of whom are descended from the pre-Civil War planting and slaveholding class (plantation owners and their overseers) and are, as a reporter for the New York Times put it in a 2002 article on the region, “an entrenched population ..., many of whom are related and have some historical connection to cotton.” Historically, Mississippi, more than any other state, is known as a bastion of Jim Crow racism and Ku Klux Klan fascism. Philadelphia, Miss., is known as the town where three civil rights workers were murdered by the KKK in 1964 (a case that later became the subject of the film, Mississippi Burning). A year before, NAACP organizer Medger Evers was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith; it took more than 30 years for a jury in the state to actually convict De La Beckwith for the murder.
Vol. 7, No. 2 • March 23, 2015 Mississippi was also the home of the infamous White Citizen’s Councils, a political front for the KKK (today called the Council of Conservative Citizens), and the Sovereignty Commission, which was created by the state legislature in 1956 to spy on and disrupt the growing Civil Rights Movement. This barbaric history continues today. The late Solomon C. Osborne Jr., a well-known AfricanAmerican civil rights attorney and former county judge in the state, chronicled it thus: “[B]etween 1987 and 1993, 22 black men were found hanging in Mississippi jails. All of their deaths were declared to be suicides. All of us are aware of the history of blacks being lynched in Mississippi. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 539 blacks lynched in Mississippi. Their murders were not solved because law enforcement officials made no effort to bring their murderers to justice. In many cases law enforcement officials were complicit in the murders.” There is little doubt that the media mouthpieces of the exploiting and oppressing classes, when they learn that this incident was indeed a lynching, do everything they can to sweep the incident under
DETROIT
THE MONDAY MORNING ARMCHAIR COLUMNIST
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Miles
Maclane On February 21, Sawant attended a fundraiser for local Democratic politician Larry Gossett, a member of the King County Council. Gossett, a former Black Panther turned liberal “community leader,” has praised Sawant’s work on the City Council and has even endorsed her over three Democratic stalwarts for re-election. At Gossett’s shindig, Sawant made her presence felt by defending her “friend” and his recent vote in favor of a brand new “juvenile detention facility” (read: children’s prison). This, just weeks after publicly criticizing the proposal at a MLK Day rally. Since then, both Sawant and her followers have doubled down on their defense of Gossett, even going so far as to declare that it was “humane” to build a new prison for children! Somewhat surprisingly, this seemingly rapid deterioration of Sawant sparked some fears by those who travel in the same sick circles. Since it came to light that “Patient Zero” had slipped into Stage Three, there have been a few rumblings among her comrades and periphery, a small handful of resignations from Socialist Alternative, and a blogosphere filled with half-hearted (and halfassed) mutual recriminations and apologies. Things, however, are not looking any better for Sawant and Socialist Alternative. A recent internal circular by the organization’s leadership makes it clear that the outbreak of Stage Three has spread more rapidly than previously thought. “[S]ocialists should welcome Gosset’s [sic] endorsement of Kshama as it strengthens [her] credibility and support among progressive Democrats in Seattle,” reads the letter, demonstrating the extent of the progression of the disease. “It’s these people [“progressive” Dems like Gossett and those who attended his fundraiser] — along with those looking toward these activists and representatives — we need to work closely with.” The next thing you know, they’ll be babbling about how an electoral victory for a “progressive” Democrat will be some kind of victory for the working class as a whole. Oh, wait a moment! “If [Democratic State Senator Joseph ‘Chuy’ Garcia] is able [to] send [Chicago Mayor] Rahm [Emanuel] down in an ignominious defeat [in the election] with this message it would represent a serious defeat for the pro-corporate right wing of the national Democratic party.... Such a fighting strategy [taking on ‘big business and the Machine legacy’] will be crucial if a left Chuy Garcia mayoralty hopes to actually enact real progressive change on behalf of the working majority of Chicago.” As you can see, the effects of “sewer socialism” have only one outcome. As we have seen in the past, all strains of this Reformist Disorder end with the patient in the Democratic graveyard. H
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the rug, just like they have continued to portray the seemingly endless string of incidents of police terrorism as the actions of “rotten apples” who are otherwise tarnishing the image of “mostly good” cops. But the twisted and decomposing face of Otis Byrd is the real face of racist American capitalism, not the strictly-managed, media-fueled propaganda about the U.S. being a “post-racial” country led by an African-American president. This vile lynching opens a window into the reality faced by Black workers every day in a society that was built on the bloody and broken backs of Africans taken as slaves, enriched itself on their superexploited labor throughout Jim Crow and the 20th-century industrial boom, and now casts off large groups of African-Americans as “surplus population,” while integrating Black managers and business owners into the lie of a “color blind” corporatist capitalism. Justice for Otis Byrd and all those who have been victims of this system of superexploitation and superoppression can only come about through a united struggle to overthrow the ruling classes who use racism to crudely divide and profit. H
Arab Bedouins waving Palestinian and Fatah party flags are confronted by Israeli security forces on a road going through a recently-established Zionist settlement in the West Bank.
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In spite of his apparent backtracking on this declaration when confronted by international media, it is clear that Netanyahu’s rejection of a “twostate solution” for the region was neither electoral bluster nor some kind of recent change of heart. On the contrary, throughout the entire campaign, he and his Likud supporters repeatedly demonstrated opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu was the first leader of any Israeli party to ever actively campaign in the Zionist settlements. He has also approved the largest expansion of these communities (in defiance of international law and near-universal condemnation) in their history, as well as openly repudiated the criticism and pressure exerted by Washington, London and Berlin. It is not for nothing that Netanyahu’s success is seen as the end of the Oslo Accords. The accords were originally signed in 1993 as a result of secret negotiations between Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the U.S. The goal of the agreement was the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state existing alongside Israel, and both countries recognizing each other’s right to exist. The framework agreed to in Oslo has been the basis for 22 years of ongoing talks aimed at ending the ongoing conflicts and attaining its goal. Since the Oslo Accords were signed, Israeli prime ministers from both Likud and Labor mouthed the words of supporting a “two-state solution,” even while supporting the expansion of
Zionist settlements and laws that further marginalize and segregate the country’s Arab population. But ever since Netanyahu came to power, the latter policies have given way to calls for the outright ethnic cleansing (and even genocide!) of all non-Jewish residents living in Israel (and Palestinian areas). The end of the Oslo Accords is certainly nothing to cry about. The proposed Palestinian state, as created under the agreement, would have been little more than an Arab ghetto or bantustan that was policed and controlled in every way other than formal by Tel Aviv. Everything from water and food to machinery and technology would have to pass through Israeli ports or security barricades to reach the people. Moreover, Oslo effectively ended any chance of giving Palestinian refugees scattered around the world the opportunity to return. In the final analysis, the “choice” between being a dependent colony or risking the systematic forced relocation and ethnic cleansing — the “choice” of either a “two-state” or “one-state” solution under capitalism — is nothing of the sort. As long as the capitalist system dominates the world, this is the reality facing Palestinians and Israeli. This understanding of the material conditions and how they will really impact those on both sides of the divide reveals the total bankruptcy behind the slogans and sound bytes that have come to dominate the conversation. Communists understand that the only way to resolve the outstanding issues in the region is through the unity of Arab and Jewish workers in the fight to overthrow the nationalists, Zionists, Islamists and their paymasters, and work together to build a binational federal workers’ republic. H
we warned that Detroit was a “proving ground” for these kinds of attacks on working people. The basis for that warning is now being brutally confirmed. According to a recent article in the New York Times, given the obscene triumphalist title, “Cracks Starting to Appear,” cash-strapped cities across the country are beginning to look to Detroit’s example of destroying workers’ pensions. “First in Detroit, then in Stockton, Calif., and now in New Jersey, judges and other top officials are challenging the widespread belief that public pensions are untouchable,” writes the Times. Closer to home, many of the suburban cities in the metro Detroit area are looking to apply similar measures against municipal workers’ pensions. In Lincoln Park, the local “Emergency Manager,” Brad Coulter, has begun to implement a plan to rob the city’s pension system. The media mouthpieces of the exploiting and oppressing classes present workers’ pensions and benefits programs as if it is a gift to those who produce and create wealth. The reality is that every penny in a pension fund is there because of workers’ collective labor. However, the owners and managers often use pension accounts as a kind of slush fund to underwrite loans or credit, and finance the building or upgrading of facilities and machinery. The restarting of mass utility shutoffs and the robbing of pension funds are both a key part of attacking the rights and living standards of working people. When federal Judge Steven Rhodes declared last October that there was no “fundamental enforceable right to free or affordable water,… just as there is no such affordable right to other necessities of life such as shelter, food and medical care,” he was speaking as the voice of a partnership of exploitation that has no concern about the lives of workers as long as there are still enough “hands” — as long as there are still enough people who have only their ability to work to sell to survive — to make profits. All those who are no longer needed for production are no more than a “surplus” to be eliminated. It should also remembered that these attacks are carried out by both Republicans and Democrats, the political representatives of the ruling classes. Attempting to reform their system is like trying to turn back the hands of time: even if they succeed, it is only temporary. It will take a workers’ revolution and workers’ republic to secure human dignity. H
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WHETHER THE VANDALISM OF IMMANUEL KANT’S HOUSE PREFIGURES THE RISE OF FASCISM IN RUSSIA, ACCORDING TO ADORNO’S THEORIES ON THE ETHICS OF FORCE AND COERCION IN SOCIETY.
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EDITORIAL BOARD: Martin Sayles (Editor); Robin Wakipajan; Edward Burghardt CONTRIBUTORS: Anna Dawes; Clarence Franklin; Kevin Keene; Miles Maclane CLOSING DATE: March 22, 2015 • NEXT DEADLINE: March 29, 2015 The Workers’ Advocate (ISSN 2428-2022) is published weekly (with bulletins in between issues as needed) as the voice and Organ of the Central Committee of the Workers Party in America, the worker-communist party in the United States. The Workers Party in America is part of the international worker-communist movement. To contact us, submit an article or letter, or ask a question, write to: WA, c/o WPA, P.O. Box 96503, PMB 59359, Washington, D.C. 20090-6503; phone: (800) 569-0747; e-mail: editor@worker-communist.org. To contact the Workers Party directly, e-mail: party@workers-party. com; web: www.workers-party.com. Signed articles and letters to the editor do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the Central Committee or the majority of the membership of the Workers Party in America. Those are expressed in editorials and signed statements.
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