The question of slavery reparations requires a communist analysis of capitalism, slavery, racism, and imperialism.
Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates has shown that he remains committed to being a dishonest apologist for racism. Gates published an op-ed article in The New York Times (4/23/10) titled “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game.” He argued that African leaders entered into what he calls “complex business partnerships” with European slave traders.
Thus, Pres. Obama, “the child of an African and an American…is uniquely positioned to attribute responsibility and culpability…to white people and black people on both sides of the Atlantic,” so that the “divisive” issue of slavery reparations can be settled. What Gates is suggesting — without being honest enough to come right out and say it — is that President Obama should bring African and American leaders together at the White House — as Obama did with Gates and officer Crowley who arrested him — so they can put the question of slavery reparations behind them.
Both Gates and Obama have a history of blaming Africans for past slavery and present poverty and exploitation. Back in 1999, Gates produced a Public Television series, “Wonders of the African World.” He emphasized the role of Arabs in the
African slave trade, while glossing over the role of European and American slave traders. He avoided any serious discussion of the devastating nature and impact of colonialism and imperialism in Africa.
Similarly, Obama, speaking in Ghana in July 2009, lectured Africans to stop using slavery and colonialism as “excuses” for their lack of “good governance” today. Obama delivered this hypocritical message as his administration supports corrupt undemocratic governments, expands the U.S. military presence through Africom (the Pentagon military command for Africa), and escalates wars in Central Africa and the Horn of Africa.
Obama delivers similar lectures to African American workers, parents, and schoolchildren. He insists that they have no excuses for failing to get ahead, despite racist cuts in school budgets, massive unemployment, and mass incarceration.
What Gates is trying to do by writing about the complicity of African leaders in the slave trade is to exaggerate it and thereby imply that it is comparable to the role of European and American slave traders. This is an old lie that has been pushed for the obvious purpose of diverting attention from the main perpetrators onto the minor collaborators. Moreover, the fact that there were Jewish collaborators with the Nazis has not prevented large-scale reparations to Jewish groups.
Gates also dishonestly downplays the American responsibility for slavery. Columbia University historian Eric Foner, in a letter to the Times (4/25/10), pointed out that “the great growth of slavery in this country occurred after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808…It was Americans, not Africans, who created in the South the largest, most powerful slave system the modern world has known, a system whose profits accrued not only to slaveholders but also to factory owners and merchants in the North.
Africans had nothing to do with the slave trade within the United States, in which an estimated two million men, women and children were sold between 1820 and 1860. Identifying Africa’s part in the history of slavery does not negate Americans’ responsibility to confront the institution’s central role in our own history.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, in “The World and Africa,” (1940), noted “it was Karl Marx who made the great unanswerable charge of the sources of capitalism in African slavery.” Marx described how capitalism emerged through a bloody process of genocide, slavery, and colonial conquest which divided the world into a small class who possessed great wealth and a large class of proletarians robbed of everything they had except their own labor power. Capitalism arrived, Marx wrote, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
Communists understand that the crime of slavery was embedded in the larger crime of the rise of the global system of capitalism itself. Enslavement, conquest, and genocide carried out by European capitalists against the populations of Africa, Asia, and the Americas required the development and systematic establishment of a racist structure and ideology wherever capitalism spread. From chattel slavery capitalists developed colonial slavery and wage slavery and exploitation of the working class. Each kind of slavery requires intense racism.
Gates suggests that reparations would be a one-sided punishment on whites that overlooks the shared responsibility of blacks. But the actual problem with reparations is that they are a vastly inadequate punishment or remedy for the crimes of slavery and racism.
First, these crimes did not end either in the U.S. or in Africa with the abolition of chattel slavery. In the U.S. these crimes persisted for another century as racist super-exploitation under Jim Crow segregation. They persist in the present period as what Michelle Alexander — in a recent book — calls “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” There are more blacks in prison today than at any time under Jim Crow. It is now legal to discriminate against blacks who have a criminal record in jobs, housing, education, and any government assistance program.
A 2008 report by United for a Fair Economy estimated that from 1998 to 2006 (before the sub-prime crisis), blacks lost $71 billion to $93 billion in home-value wealth from sub-prime loans. That was before the worst of the housing crisis and wave of evictions disproportionately hit black homeowners. Similarly, in Africa, the slave trade was followed by colonialism and post-colonial imperialism, which have killed more African workers and yielded greater capitalist profits than slavery did.
Second, reparations are supposed to be an act of repair based on some genuine regret for previous harm done. Capitalists who continue to profit from racist exploitation, debt slavery, mass murder in imperialist wars, plunder of resources, and environmental destruction are incapable of repairing the world and incapable of meaningful regret. We should not spread the illusion that capitalists will ever be capable of making things right for their victims.
Reparations for slavery in the U.S. — in the unlikely event it ever happened — would be used to further consolidate the position of black capitalists, politicians, and administrators as members of the U.S. ruling class. It would produce more of the same results the Obama presidency has thus far produced. That is, it would confuse and pacify sections of the black working class, while continuing imperialist wars in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Reparations would continue mass incarceration of African Americans, racist detentions and deportations of immigrant workers, trillion dollar bailouts of bankers, insurance, and pharmaceutical, and hospital companies, massive loss of jobs, housing, education, and health care for workers, and environmental destruction that threatens the lives of billions of people all over the planet.
Third, it is not just capitalist individuals, companies, or countries that are responsible for slavery, genocide, super-exploitation, imperialist wars, and global warming. It is the global system of capitalism as a whole. Whatever bi-racial reparations formula Gates and Obama might try to sell as appropriate for the crimes of Western and African slave traders, workers must not allow the capitalist system to be let off so lightly. Capitalism deserves the death penalty. The working class must destroy the capitalist system. Only under communism will workers be able to repair the world for all the people who live in it.
PHOENIX, AZ, July 29 — On the day Arizona’s racist anti-immigrant law SB 1070 was scheduled to take effect, Progressive Labor Party participated in a march to the state capitol building carrying a banner that read “From Arizona to Afghanistan, fight racism and imperialism with communism!”
A federal judge placed an injunction on some of SB 1070’s provisions, which require local Arizona cops to check for immigration status. Protests were still ongoing in Los Angeles and Arizona, as the injunction changes very little on the ground.
In Los Angeles nearly 200 protesters blocked an intersection near the headquarters of a company that does business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, and in Arizona several dozen protestors were arrested in front of the racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s downtown Phoenix office. Arpaio denounced the injunction and vowed to carry on the raids that have terrorized the immigrant community in Arizona. The day of actions culminated in a march and rally in front of Arizona’s state capitol, continuing the more than 100-day vigil to protest SB1070.
In the bus caravan to Arizona organized by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, PLP put forward the connection between immigration reform and ruling-class efforts to build support for their imperialist wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
At a community forum organized in a local Phoenix church, PL’ers sat with a group of law students who participated as legal observers. We talked about how the DREAM Act was being supported by the Obama administration, the Pentagon, and Democrats to create the illusion that U.S. capitalism can meet the needs of working-class immigrant youth. One of the law students agreed, pointing out that only a very few undocumented immigrant youths are able to afford college, and since the DREAM Act does not make them eligible for financial aid , they will have to consider other options. Besides two years of college, the second option, or “pathway to citizenship” offered by the DREAM Act is joining the U.S. ruling class’s imperialist army. Their immigration reform is actually a call for workers and troops for imperialist war.
During the march to the Arizona state capitol, the PL contingent carried a red flag in contrast to the many U.S. flags distributed at the union-sponsored event. PL’ers led chants including, “queremos un mundo sin fronteras, tendremos un mundo sin fronteras! (“We want a world without borders, we will have a world without borders!”) and “working people have no nation, smash racist deportations!” One of the main organizers of the event became visibly upset with the PL contingent because it was leading anti-racist cop chants, twisting the vague chant of “no justice no peace,” and adding to it “no racist police!” Later, one of the same law students, now acting as a legal observer, approached a PL’er and expressed her approval for our leading militant anti-racist cop chants.
Injunction or not, during crisis time blatant racism is on the rise as capitalists need scapegoats. We can see this with the raids and traps conducted in Arizona: “jaywalking? Show me your papers.” Other examples include the recent ICE raid of a factory in Southern California, as well as the proposal to “ban” immigrants from a town in South Carolina. Every night Spanish-language media use these news items to make the case for “comprehensive immigration reform” and the DREAM Act, but as CHALLENGE has repeatedly pointed out, immigration reform is not the answer; communist revolution is.
PLP’s presence was important, placing the debate on immigration within the context of the needs of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. We called for workers to smash borders and build international, working-class solidarity in the struggle for a communist world. Finally, it gave PL’ers plenty to talk about in the near future with old and new friends who participated in these protests.
- Information
U.S. Rulers Use Wikileaks Media Circus to Plan Wider War
- Information
- 05 August 2010 98 hits
When U.S. rulers hype old news from Afghanistan, one has to wonder what’s really happening. The NY Times, a leading ruling-class mouthpiece, treated the recent Wikileaking of old Afghan war documents from the Bush, Jr. era as a blockbuster exposé. In June 2010, the Pentagon re-released a 2007 geological study identifying a trillion-dollar Afghan treasure trove of minerals. Hardly breaking news, these sudden front-page “revelations” reflect major policy disputes within the capitalist class.
Phony Peacenik Wikileaks Aids War-Makers’ Planning
Wikileaks is by no means anti-war (see box). Rather it focuses ruling-class and public attention on the unresolved question of what form of murder best serves U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan. The rulers have two main choices, counterinsurgency or counterterrorism:
• Counter-insurgency amounts to full-scale, vastly expensive colonial occupation that subjugates the entire population, largely through the deadly seizure of cities;
• Counter-terrorism, less costly and perhaps less effective for U.S. invaders, targets suspected al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and allies for assassination in hopes that the rank and file will see the pro-U.S. light.
Wikileaks’ 92,000 dumped memos disclose long-known facts bearing on this debate: U.S. and allied forces have killed thousands of Afghan civilians, thus unintentionally swelling pro-Taliban sentiment; since 2001, the U.S. has employed Special Operations death squads; U.S. “ally” Pakistan aids the Afghan Taliban; and U.S. puppet Afghan ruler Karzai is crooked and unreliable.
Obama & Co. waver on Afghan tactics. Obama at first stressed counter-insurgency with his 30,000-soldier surge. Now with U.S. forces stretched close to the breaking point, counter-terrorism seems to reign in the White House. Richard Haass, president of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the leading U.S. imperialist think-tank, wrote in Newsweek (7/18/10): “The military price [for counter-insurgency in Afghanistan] is also great, not just in lives and material but also in distraction, at a time when the United States could well face crises with Iran and North Korea.”
Wikileaks, emphasizing obstacles to nation-building, justifies the rulers’ current shift away from old-style colonialism towards assassination. The Times (8/1/10) reports, “Eight months later, that counterinsurgency strategy has shown little success, as demonstrated by the flagging military and civilian operations in Marja and Kandahar and the spread of Taliban influence in other areas of the country. Instead, what has turned out to work well is an approach American officials have talked much less about: counterterrorism, military-speak for the targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
Naked U.S. War-makers Feel A Draft
But there’s an even bigger war story the bosses can’t put on the front page or in prime time because they haven’t yet won the working class, or their own class, to the unity and sacrifice needed for wider conflict. It concerns the rulers’ covert plans to restore the draft and militarize industry, if fighting extends beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. The recently-issued “Final Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel,” ordered by Congress, has buried it on page 64:
“[T]he Panel is concerned that an expansion of the [military] force might be necessary in response to an unexpected attack; to support a longer term, more intensive combat circumstance than Iraq and Afghanistan; or perhaps operations on a third front. While the nation has a Selective Service System, we don‘t see that it has a matching plan even in concept to train and equip an expansion of either conscripts or volunteers and recommend that such a concept plan be prepared. The industrial base has long been a concern and while we should not prop up businesses that cannot survive on their own, neither should we be without the ability to ramp up production in response to crisis.”
Military Focus on Afghan Pipeline?
Or on Minerals?
Afghanistan’s newly-trumpeted mineral wealth underscores another policy quandary for U.S. rulers. Should the main economic goal of U.S.-led military efforts be to secure the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, or should it be to secure access to Afghan iron, copper and lithium?
Geography plays a role as crucial as politics here. If absolute U.S. control of TAPI is paramount, Obama must lead the U.S. war machine in counter-insurgency to forcibly seize the southern, Taliban-dominated Afghan provinces of Kandahar and Helmand through which TAPI will run. TAPI has important ramifications in the sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry. “India has recently reaffirmed its interest in progressing with the TAPI pipeline project. Considerations other than commercial may be contributing to this [such as] countering the expanding presence of China in Central Asia.” (“Journal of Energy Security,” 7/26/10)
Minerals, however, lie in abundance in Afghanistan’s northern, western and eastern regions, according to a 2004-2007 study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) publicized this June by the Defense Department. These findings alter U.S. imperialism’s troop-basing requirements.
CFR’s Haass suggests (Newsweek article) a “de facto partition of Afghanistan. Under this approach, the United States would accept Taliban control of the Pashtun-dominated south so long as the Taliban did not welcome back Al Qaeda and did not seek to undermine stability in non-Pashtun areas of the country. If the Taliban violated these rules, the United States would attack them with bombers, drones, and Special Forces. U.S. economic and military support would continue to flow to non-Pashtun Afghans in the north and west of the country.” Haass needn’t mention the east, the border with Pakistan, Osama bin Laden’s hideaway, which gets permanent U.S. attention.
Haass’s redeployment scheme is consistent with both Wikileaks and the Pentagon/USGS. Minerals may, in fact, hold greater importance for U.S. bosses. The report calls Afghanistan the Saudi Arabia of lithium, an essential ingredient in batteries from cell phones to electric cars. And the exploding economy of U.S. competitor China needs iron and copper.
Workers shouldn’t fall for the Wikileakers’ fake pacifism. To effectively oppose U.S. wars with Iraqi, Afghan, Iranian and Chinese or other bosses, we must destroy the profit system which creates this deadly imperialist rivalry. Smashing capitalism will take a communist revolution, which is why we strive to bring this understanding to the rank and file in the shops and unions, in the schools and military, churches and other mass organizations. Such is our Party’s ultimate goal. J
Wikileaks: Another Liberal Rulers’ Mouthpiece
Wikileaks didn’t fall from the sky. Its mastermind Julian Assange sports a lengthening liberal imperialist pedigree. In June, a profile in the ultra-liberal, Establishment New Yorker magazine canonized him as a quirky but supremely well intentioned truth seeker. Assange and pals were front-runners for a $500,000 grant from the Knight Foundation whose president, Alberto Ibarguen, sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the top U.S. imperialist think tank. Knight eventually turned Assange down, but only when dealing with the Times proved far more lucrative to liberal rulers in terms of public opinion. The Rockefeller-led liberal cabal of National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting System, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting have become, through their grantees Radio Pacifica and its “Democracy Now” program, the main media defenders of Assange and his Army intelligence mole Private Bradley Manning.
- Information
Must Destroy Capitalism to Get It: D.C. Workers Seize Gov’t Land, Demand Affordable Housing
- Information
- 05 August 2010 88 hits
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 10 — Over 100 workers occupied a vacant parcel of government-owned land and erected a tent city, demanding that the government keep its promise to build affordable housing there and throughout the city instead of catering to the needs of the rich. This action was led by a community-based organization Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE DC) and included members and friends of PLP who understand that the demands will not be met without a revolution.
Capitalism is a racist system, with the riches of the bosses coming from increasing the poverty of the workers. This is clear in the housing conditions faced by the world’s working class. In the U.S., millions are ill-housed and hundreds of thousands are actually homeless, including many workers whose jobs pay so little that they can’t afford housing at all!
The History of Parcel 42
As in every arena of exploitation, the working class fights back and resists its dehumanization by the bosses. The battle against gentrification and for decent affordable housing shows this resistance, both overt and subterranean.
For 15 years, D.C. has seen the steady erosion of affordable housing and the encroachment of high-priced condominiums in many historically black working-class neighborhoods. The city has housing waiting lists for 26,000 households and 700 people living with AIDS. Rich developers working with their politicians have created this racist, anti-working class process. The previous mayor, Anthony Williams, declared that he wanted to bring in 100,000 new residents to the District, with the clear message that these would be well-to-do professionals who would increase the tax base.
Meanwhile affordable housing eroded and was replaced by housing for the rich. This was nowhere as evident as in the Shaw and U Street neighborhoods, where hundreds of condos costing $400,000-$800,000 each have been erected overlooking the historic U Street’s “Black Broadway,” the center of black entertainment during the period of Jim Crow and racial segregation. The current mayor, Adrian Fenty, intensified this gentrification process while paying lip service to expanding affordable housing. He occasionally endorsed “community benefits agreements” that require developers to include a certain percentage of affordable units in new residential construction to gain city support.
One example was the mayor’s negotiation with ONE DC over Parcel 42, a now-vacant piece of land that previously housed a city-run community health clinic. ONE DC argued that residential development on that parcel should include affordable housing, with some rents or mortgages low enough so that very low-income households (earning less than $25,000 annually) could live there. Then the Mayor changed his mind. All units would be priced for people making about $50,000, with no provision for the housing needs of lower-income workers.
Workers Seize the Parcel
So ONE DC and its allies decided that direct action was needed to mobilize opposition to what they saw as a betrayal by the Mayor. At the end of its annual block party, ONE DC led workers to Parcel 42, surrounded it and then seized it! This was a bold act of working-class resistance to the deepening crisis of capitalism. At the seizure rally, several local residents declared that they had lost their homes due to rent increases and job loss and could no longer live in the community they grew up in.
ONE DC established a tent city on the site in a matter of minutes and placed large signs on the fence around it, declaring that the parcel now belonged to the community and that affordable housing was needed throughout the city. Police threatened to tear down the tents and arrest the “trespassers,” but ultimately backed down due to the politically sensitive nature of such an action in the run-up to the election.
Management illegally threatened nearby low-income residents in subsidized housing with eviction if they joined the occupation. But as we go to press, the occupation continues and the bold signs remain in place.
Where will this struggle go from here? Some activists are calling for more seizures of city land and establishing sustainable “intentional communities.” Others are calling for putting more pressure on the local politicians to support affordable housing. PLP’ers argue that, while bold actions are good, we should have no illusions about the lying politicians of all stripes or about the limits of this direct action struggle. The bosses will order the police to smash this effort if they feel threatened, so we must use this experience to become steeled for the long haul of communist revolution. As Engels noted in 1872 (see box), the housing crisis of the working class can only be solved by workers smashing the state, seizing the leadership of society and re-organizing it to meet workers’ needs.
PLP’s work in the housing struggles was on display with several members and friends participating in the block party and the rally. These students have been active in the struggle for housing for patients with HIV/AIDS and several have been involved in PLP study groups. The next step is for friends of the PLP in the housing struggle to become anti-racist, communist members of the PLP to strengthen the long-range ability of the working class to seize power through revolution. J
‘Every City Has One or More Slums...’
In 1844, Friedrich Engels, the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, wrote of the despicable housing conditions that early capitalism foisted on the young proletariat: “Every great city has one or more slums, where the working class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can (The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844.)
In 1872, in a debate with German socialists who believed that capitalism could be reformed to improve housing, Engels forcefully argued that, “[Only by] the abolition of the capitalist mode of production is the solution of the housing question made possible.” (The Housing Question). The same analysis applies today!
- Information
Jewish, Palestinian Daycare Workers Unite vs. Israeli Bosses
- Information
- 05 August 2010 89 hits
JERUSALEM, JULY 21 — Over 700 striking daycare workers — who have recently unionized in the “Workers’ Power” union federation — demonstrated in front of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. The workers, Jewish and Palestinian women from all parts of Israel/Palestine, fought for workers’ control over regulations, a living wage and normal working conditions.
The “family” daycare system, first created in the 1980’s, was an attempt by the Israeli government to provide subsidized daycare facilities for children up to the age of 3, using small groups hosted at the workers’ homes rather than in an ordinary kindergarten. This service is especially valuable for impoverished families where both parents work but cannot pay the steep prices of private daycare.
However, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, which operates this system, has essentially privatized it, transferring its funds to the hands of local operators instead of paying the workers directly. The Ministry, as well as the local operators, have found a way to super-exploit these daycare workers: instead of being employed directly by either the Ministry or the operators, and thus entitled to a full wage and benefits, they are technically treated as “freelance contractors” and paid a flat monthly sum.
Capitalist Sexist Exploitation
These women work up to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, yet earn less than 4,000 NIS (about $1,000) a month! And even that low wage is subject to payment delays. Additionally, these workers have to pay their operational costs out of their own pockets, and are constantly harassed by new regulations by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, regulations that often require them to spend more of their meager income on various safety features.
Faced with such brutal exploitation, the daycare workers decided to unionize in 2008 as part of the “Workers’ Power” union federation. Today, after two years of organizing, the union includes approximately 1,000 out of the 2,400 “family” daycare workers in Israel/Palestine. The workers, both Jewish and Palestinian women, are fighting for direct employment by the Ministry rather than the exploitative “freelancer” scam, for a living wage and benefits, for the payment of operation costs by the Ministry, and for workers’ control over the various regulations.
The Ministry and the local bosses first tried to ignore the union, and then moved to more aggressive methods against it, including the delaying of pay and the firing of several workers. Additionally, in the town of Elad, some women who were religious Jews were threatened with excommunication unless they leave the union; this has led several workers to withdraw from the union. This is a classic example of the role of religion as one of the bosses’ weapons against the working class.
Faced with these repressive steps, workers are fighting back nonetheless, demonstrating and striking against the bosses, and are trying to expand their union.
However, even if this reform struggle is won by the workers, the capitalist Israeli government will undoubtedly try to erode its achievements and rob the workers once again. Only a workers’ communist revolution and the seizure of state power by the working class will ensure good working conditions for all workers as well as free, high-quality daycare and education for all children. PLP is spreading our ideas among these workers, as well as building a base for our Party.
