The racism spewing forth from Arizona’s bosses and their politicians is not new. In order to drive down all workers’ wages and keep them fighting each other rather than uniting, capitalism has always singled out a section of the working class for greater oppression. With increasing fascism in Arizona and worldwide (see CHALLENGE, 8/4), it is helpful to review past history, during which every governor and president has been committed to enforcing capitalism and using racism to divide the working class. This emphasizes the working class’s one task: to unite and destroy capitalism and the racism on which it depends.

Copper Bosses Feared Miners
Militancy and Unity

In 1903, many strikes and other militant actions occurred in Arizona’s mines. Perhaps the most important was the Morenci strike, organized by three workers, two Mexican and one Italian. Armed workers seized company offices and shut the mine for three days. The three organizers were jailed, but the workers’ unity — as well as further strikes in Arizona and Mexico against U.S. copper companies) — scared the bosses. The latter began a campaign of intimidation and harassment.

One tactic was accusing Mexican union organizers of being “horse thieves,” a very serious crime then. On August 20, 1914, Mexican unionists so charged fought with a posse of anti-unionist and anti-Mexican forces. The LA Times reported that four white men and twelve Mexicans were killed. Infuriated at the death of posse members, white residents from the town of Ray invaded the Mexican section, driving men, women and children from their homes. Reports said that the racists “were searching the hills near Ray…bent upon killing every Mexican they meet.”
Agitation to exclude Mexicans continued throughout that decade.

Racism Follows the Flag

In 1914, the rulers passed the Arizona Anti-Alien Labor Law requiring 80% of a firm’s employees to be native-born. Arizona’s newspapers equated the law to patriotism, editorializing, “The Flag and Eighty Per Cent.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional, holding it would exclude immigrants from Arizona, saying immigrants had the right to work and that the law discriminated against lawful residents.

Then, as now, a section of the ruling class understood that U.S. capitalists need immigrant labor, both documented and undocumented, to exploit for super-profits. Currently, this Obama-led section wants to marginalize immigrants, to enforce lower wages and terrible living conditions, not deport them.
During that era, union organizing was increasing rapidly, but in the Arizona mines, the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) did little to support it. (Twenty years later this union became communist-led and organized fierce strikes against the copper barons.)

Racism towards miners from Mexico and fear of their militancy kept the UMMSW at bay, but the International Workers of the World (IWW) emerged, organizing 1,000 members into its Local 800.
On June 26, 1917, the local struck for improved working conditions, higher wages and an end to discrimination against union members. The copper bosses responded violently to this threat to their profits.

On July 5, about 2,000 vigilantes rounded up more than 1,000 workers and family members, loaded them into railroad cars (provided by the railroad bosses), and dumped them in the middle of New Mexico’s desert, 200 miles away. Very few ever returned to their Bisbee homes.

The copper bosses not only went after union members, but also immigrants from Mexico, who they feared were becoming more militant as unionization spread. In a campaign to rid the mines of Mexican workers, in April 1921, they shipped up to 1,800 Mexican men, women and children by train from Morenci Southern station to the U.S.-Mexico border. Simultaneously, tens of thousands were deported from the agricultural fields, and literally dumped across the border.

Bosses Still Using Racism
to Divide Workers

There are striking similarities between Arizona’s past and present. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently claimed “discovery” of “bodies in the desert” either “buried or beheaded,” linking the crime to “illegal” immigration. Even some of Arizona’s compliant press disputed her claim. Brewer also claimed that “illegal aliens” were “muling” — transporting drugs into the U.S.

Meanwhile, Jason Ready, a well-known neo-Nazi, has begun organizing armed vigilantes to patrol the border. Ready is a close associate of Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, the sponsor of Arizona’s current racist law, and of Maricopa fascist Sheriff Joe Arpaio. All have close ties with the Federation of American Immigration Reform.

Brewer, Arizona’s vile racist governor, and Barack Obama, whose Justice Department sued to nullify certain aspects of Arizona’s law, are more alike than different. They have different tactics and serve different bosses, but both are wholeheartedly committed to maintaining and defending the racist capitalist system.
Brewer’s repulsiveness is evident. But Obama continues to enjoy popular support while further militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border. He has ordered use of the same Predator drones that murder innocent Afghans and Pakistanis to monitor the border and recently dispatched 1,000 National Guard troops to stations in California, Arizona and Texas.

As CHALLENGE indicated (8/4), the Obama administration has increased deportations to a level exceeding the Bush years. Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, smiling while slaughtering workers at the border and worldwide.

The working class has nothing to gain from supporting either side in this battle. The fascists openly target our Latino brothers and sisters while the liberal politicians hide their racism behind the DREAM Act and Comprehensive Immigration Reform, both tactics to coerce young immigrants into the U.S. military (see CHALLENGE Supplement, 6/23) Neither group wants workers to understand that our class has no nations. We have a common international enemy, the bosses, and only by uniting across their borders can we defeat them. J

Sources:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion/124-124/2505-race-war-in-arizona
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation
Francisco Arturo Rosales: “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement,” (pages 113-116).

On July 29, people across the country were scheduled to travel to Arizona to protest that state’s racist anti-immigrant law (SBI070) which would require local cops to stop individuals they “suspect” of being undocumented immigrants and turn them over to immigration authorities.

Recently, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit to stop the law from taking effect. The Obama Administration’s stance against this law, and promotion of Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR), appears to oppose anti-immigrant racism. However, virtually simultaneously Obama also asked Congress for $500 million to add 1,000 agents to the Border Patrol and 160 to Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE). Additionally, two more aerial drones would be deployed to continue the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border. This expansion adds to the 1,200 National Guard troops Obama already plans to send to the border.

The Obama Administration has adopted this seemingly contradictory position because it is concerned with winning workers, especially Latino workers, to buy into U.S. patriotism and support U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, at the same time, U.S. capitalism needs to control and exploit these very same workers. That’s why Obama supports the DREAM Act — which essentially promises U.S. citizenship in exchange for military service. Yet, since the beginning of his presidency, deportation rates have climbed above those reached under the Bush Administration.

According to internal memos obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, ICE officials set deportation quotas and spelled out how agents could meet them. Thus, Arizona’s racist law hardly approaches the level of anti-immigrant racism the Obama administration already is enforcing.

Don’t Just ‘Boycott Arizona’ — Smash Capitalism!

Since the early 19th century, U.S. imperialism’s legacy in Latin America has been one of destroying workers’ lives on both sides of the border. Imperialist economic policy has pushed Latino workers around like pawns on a chessboard, exploiting their labor when needed and then unceremoniously deporting them. The last major deportations were in the late 1940s.and ‘50s. The U.S. has had a militarized border program since the 1980s, serving not to keep immigrants out but to keep them unable to fight low wages and abuse. This resurgence of deportations under Obama is partially aimed at using immigrants as scapegoats for capitalist-created unemployment, but most importantly it’s another racist measure aimed at further terrorizing those immigrant workers who remain.

It is capitalism that generates such apparent racist contradictions, resulting in attacks on workers, whether they’re on the streets, in Arizona’s ICE detention camps or on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Governor Jan Brewer is certainly a vile racist, but she is only one cog in a machine that is rotten to its core. Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, these politicians serve the interests of the capitalist class and U.S. imperialism.

The international working class must unite, not only in such protests but also for the long haul, to wipe out the capitalist system that makes Arizona’s SBI070, CIR and the DREAM Act possible and build a communist society that meets all workers’ needs and ends racism for good.

PLP’s Summer Project was joining this July 29 protest, not to beg Obama for mercy but to expose him as part of the growing racism and terror workers face, linking that to the need to destroy the capitalist system that perpetuates this violence. (Full story next issue) 

A widening split within the U.S. ruling class is intensifying between two groups of capitalists. The dominant wing is led by the Rockefeller interests — which includes such giant corporations as Exxon-Mobil and JP Morgan Chase — and which champions the long-range interests of U.S. capitalism. They promote imperialist wars internationally, attempting to maintain U.S. top-dog status in their drive to control the world’s resources (especially oil and gas), markets and the ability to exploit impoverished workers. They must, sooner or later, mobilize the nation to confront rivals Iran, China and Russia which are bent on expanding their own access to these resources. China has now become the world’s number one energy user.

To accomplish this they must impose wartime discipline on a challenging anti-Rockefeller faction, basically capitalists more focused on immediate, short-range profits — the quarterly bottom line — than on the long-term needs of U.S. imperialism. It is these domestically-oriented bosses who have been bankrolling and organizing a mass, anti-tax, predominantly Republican faction known as the Tea Party (“Taxed Enough Already”).

This fight between these two capitalist wings is nothing new. As PLP has been exposing for decades, the Rockefeller group, long identified as “old money” —  centered in the East and in the big Wall Street banks and investment houses — has dominated U.S. capitalism for much of the last century. The domestically-oriented group, identified as “new money,” emerged in the post-Kennedy era, backing Nixon, and has been centered in the South and West.

The destruction of the Nixon presidency in the early 1970s marked the victory of “old money” over “new money.” But the fight continues.

Now along comes Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, writing in “International Security” (Summer, 2010) to confirm what PLP has been saying: “[P]olitical polarization has been shaking the domestic foundations of U.S. grand strategy, sorely testing bipartisan support for liberal internationalism — the grand strategy that guided the United States from World War II through the end of the Cold War….” There, in a nutshell, lies one of the gravest challenges facing Obama and the U.S. imperialists he serves.

Kupchan-Trubowitz “define the liberal internationalist compact as the combination of heavy investment in military force with a commitment to international institutions.” Kupchan and Trubovitz’s remarks appeared in a Harvard publication. The Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) circulated them. Harvard and the CFR are top policy factories for the Rockefeller wing.

Big Bosses Need Ever Wider Wars

The only road for the biggest U.S. capitalists to maintain their international domination is through ever wider wars. But imposing wartime discipline on the entire U.S. capitalist class, a necessity for its Rockefeller imperialist faction, is proving difficult for Obama amid an economic crisis. Wars require taxes, while a bitter fight seethes over ending or extending massive Bush, Jr.-era tax cuts, set to expire on January 1. November’s Congressional elections revolve largely around this question. And this is the reason that anti-Rockefeller capitalists have been organizing and financing the mass, anti-tax Tea Party.

Its chief intellectual and organizational assistance comes from Americans for Prosperity, funded by Koch Industries and FreedomWorks, headed by Koch-protégé Dick Armey. Koch Industries is a huge, family-held, domestically-oriented energy and timber company. The Kochs have long railed against money-burning U.S. overseas wars that gain them nothing. Recent articles on the Koch-funded Cato Institute website include: “Time to Leave Iraq,”; “The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan”; and “U.S. Out of South Korea.”

Armey — after retiring from Congress, where he antagonized the Clinton regime — joined the Koch’s anti-tax Citizens for a Sound Economy as co-chairman. He then toiled for the Washington lobbying firm DLA Piper, seeking to neutralize Iran “on the cheap,” without the costly U.S.-led attack/embargo/invasion the imperialist wing foresees. From 2005 to 2009 at DLA Piper, Armey promoted the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, a group (labeled terrorist by the State Department) that was supposed to overthrow the anti-U.S. ayatollahs in Teheran.

Tea Partyism makes U.S. imperialists very afraid. Kupchan and Trubowitz fear that “the partisan gap that widened during George W. Bush’s administration has continued during the presidency of Barack Obama, confirming that a structural change has taken place in the domestic bases of U.S. foreign policy.” From the imperialists’ viewpoint, that gap has spelled frustration and disaster: half-baked invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan followed by undermanned occupations that can’t get oil pumped or pipelines built.

Troops, Public Don’t Back Liberals’ War Plans 

Leslie Gelb, ex-CFR chairman, noted a more ominous partisan gap among the troops U.S. rulers must rely on. He boiled General McChrystal’s attack on the Obama gang to a plain, simple fact: “The U.S. military, officers and enlisted ranks don’t like and don’t trust Democrats and liberals. The bad feelings are mainly about values, style and constancy more than policy.” (“Daily Beast,” 6/22) Gelb feared an ensuing “firestorm of criticism [within the armed forces] about the White House, perhaps reaching Tea Party proportions.”

In addition to questionable loyalty to the liberal war agenda amid the military, there is the general population’s waning support for armed intervention. A December 2009 Pew poll revealed that 49% of the public believed that the United States “should mind its own business” — the highest response to that question ever recorded, far surpassing the 32% in 1972, at the height of opposition to the U.S. imperialist invasion of Vietnam.

Tea Partiers Open Racists; Liberal Imperialists Genocidal and Racist Butchers

So, to steer opinion their way, liberals, such as the NAACP, attack Tea Partiers (TP) as racist for their overwhelmingly-white composition and anti-immigrant stance. The TP movement is indeed racist. But its liberal imperialist opponents stand guilty of racist genocide.

For over two decades they have slaughtered over a million Iraqis for oil and regularly kill Afghan civilians over a gas pipeline. Over decades of war after war — Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, not to mention the CIA-trained death squads in Latin America and the deaths due to U.S. corporate exploitation of the world’s oil and minerals — U.S. “liberal internationalists” have murdered more workers than Hitler’s sadists could ever have dreamed of.  Atrocities like the quarter-million slaughtered by atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the tortures and killings at My Lai, and Abu Ghraib, punctuate their unceasing deadly search for profits through military conquest.

The Tea Party and its capitalist backers deserve the wrath of the working class. We must continue to attack both the racist Tea Party and the far more murderous liberal killers that Obama represents. They remain our class’s greatest enemy because they have the ability to deceive many by posing as a lesser evil.

It is the task of a mass, working-class party to organize in every area of the world in which our Party fights — in every factory, union, barracks, school, church, community and mass organization — to turn all working-class struggles into “schools for communism,” and build the only force than can destroy the capitalist beasts. Such is the goal of the revolutionary communist PLP. Join us! 

OAKLAND, CA, JULY 18 — Hundreds of East Bay Area transit workers streamed into the union hall yesterday for a special meeting amid a buzz of righteous anger over an unprecedented company attack: imposing a new contract and work schedules. Many arrived seeking a plan of action, but the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) leadership offered nothing. One driver declared, “Man, we walked in here mad…strong like some dark coffee, but they just kept watering it down until it was like some weak herbal tea…and they got us drinking it!”

Union Pushes for Arbitration; Sign-up Boycott Successful

AC Transit carries about 230,000 people daily in the East Bay. Our contract expired June 30. Though for months the union president mouthed the possibility of a strike and members took a unanimous strike vote, nothing was organized. Then, a newspaper told us our union was asking for binding arbitration, ignoring a strike. Our international dispatched a representative to convince us this was the right course, promising that during arbitration, we’d continue under our old contract.

Meanwhile, the company threatened to impose their contract on July 18, demanding we “sign up” (choose our work assignments) on runs that completely violate our contract. The union asked drivers to boycott the sign-up. In a great show of solidarity, everyone boycotted. We all believed there was no way we would work these runs.

But on July 16, when the union asked the court for arbitration, they “forgot” to ask to remain under the old contract. The judge used this technicality to order the new contract be in force until a Tuesday, July 20 hearing.

Union Bets on Court System, Not Drivers’ Action

As yesterday’s meeting began, drivers expected an action plan. As one young driver texted: “I think we should strike…. By doing this [signing up] they mess up a lot of people…. Hey, I think we should do like New York transit did — strike even if the court still said no!....” Another said: “People ain’t gonna work these runs…. My wife works here too and we always work different schedules so we can pick up the kids. We can’t let them do this to us. I’m staying off work until Tuesday.”

One dispatcher and several drivers suggested we all show up to work Sunday but demand to work on the runs WE had chosen, not those the company chose for us. The union president and her “smart” lawyers said no. We now see that the union is relying on courts, lawyers and arbitrators, not on the kind of workers’ solidarity we saw on the day of the sign-up. The International wants to put out fires, not start them!

Another young driver declared, “When the verdict was announced for the cop that killed Oscar Grant [see letter, page 6), his uncle said the family felt they’d been slapped in the face by the system. Well, right now, we’re getting slapped in the face, and our union seems to be telling us to turn the other cheek. As long as we rely on their court system, this will keep happening. We’re being disrespected, spit on, stepped on. There’s no way we should work these runs!”

President Talks ‘Faith’ to Avoid Talking Business

Then the union president said, “I’m a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and the bible does say you must obey the law of the land....These laws were originally established by God, but man messed them up.”

But not everyone agrees with her use of “faith.” As one driver said later, “She’s using that ‘faith’ stuff as a smokescreen, to get people on her side. If you want to testify, go to church. We come here to deal with our business…. I remember what you said last time, this is like a war, and we’re the front-line soldiers. We’re supposed to have a battle plan.”

The union’s real “faith” is faith in the capitalist legal system. We communists point out that the legal system is stacked for the rich capitalists. As one driver put it, “They [the courts] always tend to side with the big corporation.” Instead of relying on the bosses’ legal system, communists try to build workers’ power through education, solidarity, action, building PLP and eventually revolution.

As things got watered down, some drivers were drinking the “weak herbal tea,” but others were ready for action. So many drivers didn’t show up for work that 25 runs were cancelled at one division and 10-15 at another.

In the Class War, Communists Fight To Win

Nationwide, transit workers are under attack. This is war. While the International keeps playing softball, communists believe we need hardball. Through this struggle, we want to win more workers to consider fighting this war to the finish: a revolution to destroy capitalism.