LOS ANGELES, November 5 — PL here helped plan a teach-in at Occupy LA titled “Building Working Class Unity – Racism and the Economic Crisis.” We discussed the racist nature of capitalism and argued that racism is the main ideological tool the U.S. ruling class uses to keep working-class people divided and unable to build enough power to fight back. If we are going to build a revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism, we are going to have to start by addressing racism.

We also provided examples of specific forms of racism, such as the recent rise of anti-immigrant policies like the Secure Communities program, which checks prison inmates’ legal status to increase deportation rates. Other examples included the media’s role in building anti-Arab racism and the historical nature of anti-black racism which was key to the birth of capitalism and continues to be critical to the survival of the system.

We held the teach-in at a space occupied by the People’s University Collective (PUC) which is organized by high school teachers in Los Angeles. Participation at the teach-in was good and led to sharp discussions over the racist nature of the system. The teach-in ended with many asking “What do we do next?” Several friends from our schools and workplaces attended the event, which impressed the PUC organizers who recently asked us to come back.

The teach-in on racism is a step forward in PL’s work at Occupy LA. The teach-in also took place a few days after PL helped initiate and lead a march against police brutality in solidarity with the students and workers in Oakland, California who have been under attack by the police (see CHALLENGE, 11/16). The next steps will be to figure out how we can better use our actions at Occupy LA to win students and workers to the idea that we need a Party organization like PL to lead our working-class sisters and brothers in the fight for communism.J

NEWARK, NJ — “Occupy Rutgers! Occupy Newark! Occupy the world!”  These words rang throughout the Rutgers University campus. This was the first rally as part of the Occupy movement that is sweeping across the U.S. and many parts of the globe. Students at this multiracial working-class campus have plenty of concerns. Tuition is high; student debt has skyrocketed; the financial aid office is poorly organized and abusive; graduating students face the worst job market in many years.

Some students just keep slogging on, not daring to think about the larger implications of the situation they face.  But the Occupy movement is attracting students who insist on seeing the big picture, and doing something about it.

The were a number of these new activist-students, a community organizer from the People’s Organization for Progress (POP), and a Marxist professor who described herself as an “unreconstructed 60s radical,” delighted to see students in motion once again.

There are real strengths of the Occupy movement that can be extended and deepened:

Occupy calls into question the sanctity of private property and the law. Why should Wall Street exist at all? Why should capitalist-run governments dictate where and when people express their political views?

The slogan of “we are the 99%” has the advantage of overcoming the divisions — between employed and unemployed, U.S.-born and “foreign-born,” as well as among different “races” — upon which capitalism thrives.

More occupiers recognize the great majority of workers in the United States designated as “middle class” are in fact working class.  As one speaker at the rally asserted, to cheers, “The notion that we are all ‘middle-class’ is bull****!”

While the level of energy at the rally was high, there needs to be sharp political analysis of the potential pitfalls of the Occupy movement.  These include:

An inadequate analysis of economic inequality that focuses on issues such as the under-taxation of corporations and very wealthy individuals.  While it is true that the bosses get away like bandits, contributing less than ever to the public, the fundamental basis of inequality is the exploitation of labor.

The need to understand that capitalism is a system of class rule, not just an “economic” system that can be corrected or controlled through a supposedly democratic “political” system.  Capitalism is, as Marx pointed out, the dictatorship of the owners of the means of production.

While the Occupy movement is fraught with peril, readily open to misleadership by the liberals in the ruling class using electoral politics, it has prompted many young people to think deeply about the real reasons for poverty, racism and war.

Bosses Aim to Pacify Occupy Wall Street

As Occupy Wall Street (OWS) helps to sow mass anger against the billionaires, the liberal wing of the United States ruling class is working full-tilt to make sure that it does not boil over and out of control.  On October 12, a group of about fifty protesters toured the Upper East Side of Manhattan, stopping to rally before the homes of some of the ruling class’s biggest billionaires: Rupert Murdoch, David Koch, Howard Milstein (chief executive of Emigrant Savings Bank),  and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. They made their final stop at hedge-funder John Paulson’s 86th Street townhouse, just east of Fifth Avenue.

The disciplined marchers chanted, “They got bailed out, we got sold out!” Led by Michael Kink, a veteran Democratic Party operative and shill, they brandished a dozen oversized foamboard checks in the amount of five billion dollars, “paid to the order of the top 1%” and drawn on “the 99%.” (The $5 billion, according to Kink’s Stronger Economy for All Coalition, will revert back to the rich if the New York State millionaire’s tax is allowed to lapse at the end of this year.)

A former Legal Aid attorney, Kink currently works as a chief policy adviser and senior counsel to Democrats in the New York State Legislature. The bosses can trust him to lead a demonstration through the heart of a prime residential district, knowing that he would confine any protest within the legal limits. Kink did not let them down. He called the suffocating police presence along the march route “very positive,” less than a week after hundreds were netted and dragged away on the Brooklyn Bridge amid indiscriminate beatings and pepper-spray attacks.  Kink is the liberal bosses’ stooge.

At each fat cat’s home on Kink the Fink’s harmless tour, the demonstrators laid their symbolic checks on the front doorsteps of this or that billionaire.  Revolutionary justice would have dragged those billionaires out of their plush apartments and put them before workers’ tribunals for their crimes: engineering an economy based on racist unemployment; waging imperialist war; wrecking the global environment for profit.  In mass uprisings as old as class society itself, rulers have been eliminated without mercy; in the 20th century, workers under communist leadership in Russia and China disposed of their ruling classes. Eventually, however, these socialist revolutions degraded into state capitalism because of their failure to eliminate the profit system, the system still in place worldwide today. 

Wars to carve the world into spheres of interest are, as the Russian communist leader Lenin said, the ultimate expression of capitalists’ drive for wealth and power. The billionaires’ imperialist wars are primarily paid for by taxes on the working class; that’s the way Presidents Kennedy and Johnson funded the genocide in Vietnam, and how the Bushes bankrolled their invasions of Iraq. The profit system cannot be reformed. Only its eradication through communist revolution will put an end to the bosses’ sickening slaughters.

OWS is far from reaching this understanding, but the ruling class is growing nervous over mass anger against their rigged system.  They want to control this new political phenomenon and keep it within the tight bounds of the electoral politics.  Meanwhile, the New York Times highlights dead-end debates between OWS reformists and Latino nationalists. Its narrow reportage shows how hard the bosses are working to build racism and undermine worker unity.  Mainstream reporters are finks, too.

Nothing is more threatening to the bosses than multi-racial unity against racist super-exploitation. To the extent that black, Latino and immigrant workers do not join OWS protests across the country, the movement will be less dangerous to capitalism.  The OWS manifesto begins with the words, “As one people, formerly divided by the color of our skin, we acknowledge the reality: there is only one race, the human race.”  This is an important and positive statement, but OWS leaders have failed to take it far enough. Michael Fink and his reformist cronies own a vested interest in the status quo. They target the excesses and corruption of capitalism, but stop short of indicting the system itself. They lack something fundamental: a class analysis of racism and inequality.

History demonstrates that racism is essential to capitalism’s very existence.  The wealth of the U.S. ruling class was rooted in the genocide of Native Americans and the holocaust of the Atlantic slave trade, followed by lynch law segregation. It industrialized by employing massive state violence and child labor against a workforce of new immigrants. It consolidated its global dominance in World War II, culminating in the racist incineration of Japanese workers and children with firebombs and nuclear weapons.

But the bosses’ power is not absolute. Under anti-racist, communist leadership, workers have waged epic struggles against racism and fascism, from the Scottsboro campaign to defend nine black youths framed for rape in the Jim Crow South to the Soviet communists’ annihilation of the Nazi Germany war machine. Since its beginning 50 years ago, PL has waged its own successful struggles against the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis.

Kink’s Stronger Economy For All has three demands: extension of the state’s millionaire’s tax; “real job growth” through infrastructure projects, and the restoration of funding cuts to education and other social services.  These reforms will likely become central planks in the Democratic Party push to retain the White House and shore up U.S. interests in a period of sharpening international rivalries.

As imperialist war inevitably widens across the Middle East and beyond (see editorial page 2), a shaky U.S. empire will need enthusiastic citizens to support a military draft and to kill and die for the bosses. Only a sharp class analysis of the true nature of “the 1%” will lead the masses to the one conclusion that the bosses’ can’t hijack or repackage: that “the 99%” needs communism

Barack Obama, desperate to serve U.S. imperialists for four more years, is spinning their worsening predicaments as his personal triumphs.  “As promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year....After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” Obama boasted on October 21.

But there’s no way U.S. rulers will not protect Exxon Mobil’s $50 billion investment in Iraq’s oil fields. Thirty-nine bases there still remain in U.S. hands. Furthermore, “The U.S. embassy in Baghdad already houses thousands of…officials and troops and contains 21 buildings in a space over 100 acres….The State Department is looking to spend upwards of $30 billion on Iraq over the next five years — around one-fourth of the Department’s…global operations budget” (Huffington Post, 9/26).

Meanwhile, Iraq’s Maliki regime is revoking the U.S. license to kill there. “The issue of immunity for U.S. troops appears to have been the key factor in the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw…. Iraqis...did not want to grant it because of high-profile killings of civilians....The U.S. said for any troops to remain in Iraq, they’d have to be granted full immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts” (National Public Radio, 10/24/11).

Guarding Exxon’s Oil Wells Means Boots on the Ground

But not all the GIs will be home for the holidays. Many will be part of  the Obama administration’s plans “to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf,” including “new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran” (NY Times, 10/30; see box this page). Obama’s threat to reinvade Iraq contradicts his peace pronouncement.

The U.S.-led war for the Middle East’s vast energy resources remains far from settled. When they invaded in 2003, U.S. rulers envisioned six million barrels of crude gushing daily from Iraqi wells by 2006. Last year, they upped the potential bonanza to 12 million barrels per day. But persistent violence keeps actual flow around 2.9 million; on October 27, bombs killed 32 people in Baghdad. Exxon Mobil just invested $50 billion to boost production from Iraq’s massive West Qurna field. Expect a quick return of U.S. forces if violence menaces that project.

Meanwhile, oil bosses from the U.S. and other NATO countries are flocking like vultures to post-Qaddafi Libya. More than 40,000 U.S.-directed NATO bombing and strafing runs wiped out at least 25,000 Libyan civilians. The self-congratulating liar Obama, eyeing re-election, touted his dreams of more such lucrative, “bloodless” victories on the Tonight Show: “Not a single U.S. troop was killed or injured, and that, I think, is a recipe for success in the future.”

But Obama’s imperialist handlers, including the Pentagon and Exxon, don’t buy what he’s peddling to the public. In mid-October, the top-level Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank that enlists dozens of serving military officers, released a report titled “U.S. Ground Force Capabilities through 2020.” The piece undercut Obama’s vote-seeking falsehood by noting that “every post-Cold War president has come into office vowing to avoid large, costly foreign interventions requiring tens of thousands of ‘boots on the ground,’ only to have their hand forced by unforeseen events.”

The Fall of “Arab Spring”

CSIS indicates how close the Arab Spring came to necessitating an outright U.S. invasion — and still could. “If Egypt’s uprising had threatened to disrupt the Suez Canal and key oil networks...only ground forces would have been capable of seizing and protecting the 300-plus miles of critical infrastructure.” In other all-too-plausible, near-term scenarios, “Precarious governments in nuclear North Korea or Pakistan, should they falter or break down, would similarly create immediate, large-scale crises to which ground forces would be highly relevant.” In either of these cases, the potential U.S. battlefield foe could employ both nuclear weapons and more than one million soldiers.

In short, as the October 30 New York Times article indicates, Obama’s “exit” from Iraq is actually an expansion of the U.S. military in the energy-rich Middle East, with the build-up to “secure” Iraq lasting at least another ten years (see box). As long as imperialism fuels its profit-driven rivalry for the world’s resources and exploited labor, war is inevitable. Only communist revolution that destroys capitalism, profits and bosses — and erects a society in which workers share all the value that they, and only they, produce — can free the international working class from the horrors of endless wars.J

Obama’s Iraq ‘Exit’ Expands U.S. War Machine

Obama’s “exit” from Iraq is more a game of musical chairs. Far from scaling down its war machine in the region, U.S. imperialism will be expanding it. According to the NY Times (10/30), “The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws…troops from Iraq….[which] could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.”

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta noted that the United States had 40,000 troops in the region, including 23,000 in Kuwait” (NYT). None of this includes the tens of thousands of CIA and U.S. contract mercenaries now flooding Iraq. In addition the Pentagon “is considering sending more naval warships through international waters in the region.”

The Obama White House “is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qater, the United Arab Emirates and Oman….trying to foster a new ‘security architecture’ for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense” (NYT).

None of this is exactly new. From 1991 up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the “U.S. Army kept…a full combat brigade in Kuwait year-round, along with an enormous arsenal ready to be unpacked” should even more troops be called to the region.

How long will this military build-up last? “The U.S. will have to come to terms with an Iraq that is unable to defend itself for at least a decade,” wrote Adam Mausner and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

No, U.S. imperialists are in no way “exiting” this energy-rich area. They will be aiming to preserve their dominance over Gulf oil supplies and pipelines until communist revolutionaries throw them out.