Workers World Party continues support for Democrats

A WWP leader admits "....the two major bourgeois parties.... will do and say anything to occupy the White House, Congress and other capitalist institutions that administer class rule."

But, in the same article, she goes above and beyond in promoting:

....these four congresspeople [Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib] symbolically represent the global working class, despite their political affiliation and loyalty to the Democratic Party.  The fact that their respective nationalities — Somali, Puerto Rican, Black and Palestinian — represent millions of oppressed peoples globally is an inspiration to the movement for revolutionary change....

WWP and the US left in general may say they understand there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, but in the. breach they fall all over themselves for the Democrats as soon as a new brand of the party's snake oil is introduced.

....These congresspeople defend the rights of migrants, including calling for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and closing down the detention centers, uplifting the rights of the Palestinian people to return to their homeland, supporting Medicare for all, deploring Trump's attempts to cut over 3 million more people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and generally support Black Lives Matter and more.

Supporting or deploring different policies of the big business parties and promoting pipe-dreams like "abolishing" ICE in no way differentiates "the Squad" or WWP and their ilk on the middle class left from the mainstream of US bourgeois politics.

Jay

21 August 2020

When Workers World Party leader Sam Marcy called for forced collectivization of Polish agriculture in 1981

Poland: why alliance with farmers is vital for working class

A reply to Workers World Party

THE MILITANT FEBRUARY 6, 1981 

By Suzanne Haig

Inspired by the upsurge of millions of Polish workers, working farmers have established their own organization, Rural Solidarity: Reported to have 600,000 members, it is receiving aid from the workers movement.

Communist Party chairman Stanislaw Kania has attacked Rural Solidarity, which has not yet been recognized by the government. In an effort to prove the union is led by counterrevolutionaries, Kaniawas reduced to charging that "in some of these biographies, we find an ancestry traceable to the landed gentry" -a class which has not existed in Poland since the end of World War II.

Such attempts to drive a wedge between the farmers and the working class are not surprising. The overthrow of capitalism in Poland after World War II benefited most farmers. Landlordism, massive rural unemployment, and near starvation were eliminated. Electricity was brought to the countryside and major progress was made toward ending illiteracy. But the living standards of Polish farmers have not kept up with those of city workers. The parasitic caste that rules the country has placed a low priority on producing consumer goods and agricultural equipment. Mismanagement, privileges for government and Communist Party officials, a staggering debt to the imperialist banks, and the absence of democratic involvement of working people in planning have led to serious economic difficulties. The workers and farmers are challenging the oppression they suffer under this misrule.

Workers & farmers alliance

The emerging alliance between the Polish workers and the working farmers is key to advancing the struggle for democratic rights and equality. Without such an alliance, no workers state can advance toward socialism.

But to the Workers World Party, an ultraleft sectarian organization in the United States, the struggle of the oppressed classes in Poland is anathema.

The right to form a union and the other gains won after the August strikes have "set back the clock of socialism," party leader Sam Marcy wrote in the September 12 Workers World.

"….What the workers have gained economically and socially," he charged, "is at the cost of

legitimatizing a bourgeois opposition," in which he lumps together the reactionary Catholic Church hierarchy with union leaders, dissident intellectuals, and working farmers. Without resolute government action against the workers and farmers, Marcy believes that this "bourgeois opposition" will "seize the political initiative and urge the workers to move in a bourgeois restorationist direction. To the Workers World Party, the Polish workers are allying with their class enemy when they support the working farmers. The substance of Marcy's argument is that farmers have the Polish workers state by the throat and are choking it to death.

"Aside from the small state sector in agriculture," he wrote on September 12, "capitalist farming prevails throughout Poland. It has been getting steady, consistent, and ever-larger infusions of subsidies from the government, that is from the hides of the workers.

"This is true even though . . . small, private farming is inefficient and largely responsible for the poor state of food production in Poland."

Marcy never bothers to explain why Polish workers, who know a lot about the economy, don't join him in blaming the problems on the working farmers.

The solution, proposed in the November 14 Workers World, is for the Polish government to "launch a struggle to collectivize the countryside."

Capitalist threat?

Do Poland's working farmers represent a threat of capitalist restoration? Are they the enemy of the workers? 

There are today 3.5 million private farmers in Poland. Their farms are not capitalist enterprises with thousands of acres and dozens of workers. The average farm is 12.5 acres. Only one-sixth of all private farms are more than thirty acres, and most of these are cultivated by a single family.

Does the presence of so many small farms constitute an immediate threat to the workers state, as Marcy claims? Hardly.

Marcy makes the error of confusing the potentiality of small farmers to accumulate large tracts of land and hire wage workers-thus threatening the planned economy-with what is actually the situation in Poland today. In the 1920s Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky warned that the millions of small farmers constituted the "fundamental source of the capitalist tendencies in Russia. "At the time, the Soviet Union was still overwhelmingly agricultural. The industrial sector was very weak, still suffering from the devastation of the civil war. And a class of rich farmers hiring wage labor appeared, which demanded an end to the monopoly of foreign trade and was hostile to the working class.

Forced collectivization

Even under these circumstances, Trotsky opposed forced collectivization, as had Lenin from the beginning of the revolution. He believed the government should take measures that would win the poor farmers to support the workers state against the rich farmers. The Stalin leadership, however, went ahead with forced collectivization, which led to an economic and social catastrophe in the countryside. Poland in 1981 bears little resemblance to Russia in the 1920s. Poland is now a major industrial country-among the top fifteen largest producers of industrial goods in the world. Its working class has grown steadily, gaining enormous social weight, while the percentage of the population employed in farming has declined steadily.

More than one-third of the farms are cultivated by farmers over sixty years old without heirs intending to farm. The young are leaving for the city to working the factories.

Many of these farmers still use plow horses. Few have tractors.

The working farmers do not view themselves as capitalists or even consider it possible to accumulate much property. The demands of Rural Solidarity indicate this. A rich landowner, or an aspiring one, would not be demanding better medical and social benefits and a guaranteed income.

This is why they are fighting-not because they are producing large surpluses and want to be free form the fetters of the planned economy in order to amass huge profits. They are demanding a share of the benefits of a planned economy. And the workers recognize the justice of this demand.

The farmers' main demands assume the existence of a nationalized, planned economy.

The farmers make about 75 percent of the average wage of non-agricultural workers. They are demanding higher prices for their produce from the government and full compensation for crop failures that their living income will be equal to the average worker.

The farmers are asking that the unused land belonging to the state farms be distributed to those farmers whose possessions are too small to provide them with a decent standard of living.

Workers World claims that since 1956 the farmers have been increasingly subsidized. Are they getting lavish handouts?

Bartering for fertilizer

Three-fourths of the country's food is produced by the private farms. Yet the state farms-which make up 25 percent of the farmland-get 75 percent of the subsidies. Small farmers are forced to barter pigs and potatoes to get fertilizer or coal. They lack modem equipment.

They want a fairer distribution of subsidies, a fight they have been waging since the 1950s.Nor are they demanding that this come "from the hides of the workers," but from the bureaucrats 'hides. Among Rural Solidarity's demands is an end to corruption and the expropriation of the hunting lodges and villas owned by party officials. They are also demanding that wage workers on the state farms be allowed to join Rural Solidarity.

The attitude of the farmers toward the working class was summed up by Rural Solidarity organizer Jan Kulasz when asked by a New York Times reporter if the farmers would hold back produce to force recognition of their union.

Said Kulasz, "The workers' and peasants' alliance could not do this. We could not have the children in the cities without milk."

Marcy traces the source of the allegedly growing capitalist sector in the countryside to the "abandonment of collectivization as a result of the 1956 uprising." What actually happened?

From 1950 to 1954 the Polish Stalinist government implemented a series of ruthless collectivization drives, forcing the peasants to give up their land. Few consumer goods made their way to the countryside, and the standard of living did not rise.

The peasants engaged in slowdown strikes, consuming whatever they could produce themselves, and delivering little to the government. Food shortages became acute. Food for the urban population had to be imported. By 1954 six of the most important crops had lower yields than under capitalism in the 1930s.

Following the workers' uprising in 1956-a struggle for economic and democratic rights-the Gomulka regime was forced to drop the drive against the working farmers and decrease the gap in subsidies paid to private as opposed to state farms.

Even with a slight decline in the amount of subsidies received, 80 percent of the collective farms

collapsed.

Even prominent Polish government economists concede that the decline of agriculture can be attributed to the Stalinist policy of forced collectivization. In the Soviet Union, the forcible expropriation of millions of Russian peasants in the late 1920s and early 1930s led to a disaster from which Soviet agriculture has still not recovered. Millions died of starvation after burning crops, eating their seed supplies, slaughtering millions of livestock, and destroying farm implements in a rebellion against this inhumane policy.

Even though Cuba has made significant progress in establishing state farms, the government defends the farmers' right to own their own land and sell their goods on the market for prices determined jointly by the government and farmers.

"Aside from the Polish Communist Party and those sincere and devoted administrators, there is no

organized political force of a progressive character capable of taking the initiative and redirecting Polish society in a genuinely socialist direction." Workers World believes this policy could inspire workers and poor peasants today and end the food shortage. On the contrary, the bureaucracy would literally drive the farmers into the arms of reaction. To win working farmers to support the workers state and to participate in more advanced forms of agriculture, they must be shown that state farms are more efficient and will benefit farmers. Equally important, working farmers must be able to make their decision without coercion and must see that the government is on their side.

Petty fiefdoms 

This is not the case in Poland. Small farmers face economic discrimination. Because the state farms are better subsidized, farmers resent them and view them as competitors. The state farms, moreover, are highly inefficient, needing two and one-half times more fertilizer to produce the same amount of food as the small farms.

The farmers hate the state farms because they see that these are not organized to benefit both the workers and the farmers. The bureaucratic farm managers operate them as petty fiefdoms, with lifestyles resembling the despised landlords of the past.

Cuba's policy toward small farmers sharply contrasts with that of Poland. 

Even though Cuba has made significant progress in establishing state farms, the government defends the farmers' right to own their own land and sell their goods on the market for prices determined jointly by the government and farmers.

Nor has the government withheld social benefits from small farmers in order to force them to give up their land. Instead, better housing, social security, communications, and education have been brought to the countryside.

In a speech to the first congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1975, Fidel Castro summed this up, "The revolutionary policy of unfailing respect for the free will of the working peasant, of effectively assisting and supporting him, is the solid basis on which the peasant-worker alliance today develops, growing stronger and stronger."

Cuban peasant given choice 

"The peasantry," he stressed, ''is the ally of the working class. The latter will never use coercive methods against its brothers in the struggle or depart from the use of persuasion, whether this is successful or not."

Cuba has held this position for the past twenty-two years despite the U.S. blockade and serious economic problems.

No wonder Cuban peasants are totally committed to the revolution- ready to fight and die for it. Workers World believes that the workers must look to the Stalinist rulers to end the crisis by crushing the working farmers. "It is, after all," Marcy says, "a socialist government." And he adds, 

"Aside from the Polish Communist Party and those sincere and devoted administrators, there is no organized political force of a progressive character capable of taking the initiative and redirecting Polish society in a genuinely socialist direction." 

This arrogant and patronizing tone reveals an utter contempt for the working people of Poland. The hatred of capitalism has been burned into the memory of the Polish workers and farmers, who suffered at least six million dead under Hitler's occupation.

They know the misery that capitalism brought them and would fight heroically to prevent its return.

Who defends socialism?

But to Marcy, it is not the workers who defend socialism, but the factory and farm managers, the generals, the cops, and the Communist Party bureaucrats-with their villas, swollen bank accounts, retinues of servants and prostitutes, fancy cars, and special stores.

But they are the most powerful reactionary forces within Poland today-the main obstacle to socialism. Workers World's support for these privileged bureaucrats says a lot about the kind of "socialism" it stands for.

Revolutionary socialists, on the contrary, have full confidence in the ability of the workers and working farmers in Poland to take control of their own destiny. They are the key to the socialist future.

U.S. middle class left in 1984 presidential elections: conciliation, cretinism, and collapse before bourgeois electoralism

How left responded to '84 elections

Socialist Workers Party called for break with capitalist politics

BY PETER THIERJUNG

A significant feature of the 1984 presidential elections was the fact that most organizations and publications that consider themselves socialist or communist backed capitalist candidate Walter Mondale. Some groups did so openly, while others did so under the slogan "defeat Reagan." 

The Socialist Workers Party ran the only campaign calling for independent working-class political action in the elections, putting forward the socialist perspective of struggle to replace the capitalist U.S. government with a workers and farmers government. A review of the positions put forward by some left groups on the elections is useful in highlighting a few key lessons of this campaign.

'Guardian'

The Guardian, a radical newsweekly published in New York, departed from past practice and for the first time in a presidential campaign openly urged a vote for the Democrats. In endorsing Mondale, the August 8 Guardian argued that, "A defeat for the reactionaries in November can offer" an important breathing space to the left and progressive forces in the U.S., and, perhaps more importantly, to the liberation movements and anti-imperialist countries around the world."

When Mondale came out just a few weeks later endorsing the U.S. invasion of Grenada and threatening to "quarantine" Nicaragua, the Guardian squirmed a bit, but didn't back down one inch from urging a big vote for Mondale .

Workers World Party

The Workers World Party campaigned vigorously for capitalist candidate Jesse Jackson. When Jackson lost the Democratic Party nomination to Mondale, Workers World decided to step up its own campaign of Larry Holmes for president and Gloria La Riva for vice-president, rather than endorse Mondale.

This represented no break from capitalist politics, however. The September 6 issue of the party's paper Workers World, reporting on Jackson's endorsement of Mondal,; insisted that it had been correct to support Jackson's Democratic Party campaign and that the task was now to "build an even stronger independent working class movement to carry on the legacy of the Rainbow Coalition." According to the paper, "The candidacy of Jesse Jackson, particularly during the Democratic primaries, was objectively an independent campaign that exposed and challenged the racist structure and rules of the anti-poor, anti-worker bourgeois Democratic Party."

Democratic Socialists

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has always supported Democratic candidates. This is in line with its outlook of accepting the framework of U.S. imperialism and seeking merely to reform it. Declaring that ''We are Americans and democratic socialists and Democrats," the DSA endorsed the Mondale-Ferraro ticket saying, "They . . . have the potential to create a liberal and humane administration infinitely superior to Ronald Reagan's one very count."

Advising the Democratic Party on how to win the election, Michael Harrington, a central leader of the DSA, pointed to the example of Harry Truman, who as Democratic president ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Writing in the May-June issue of Democratic Left, the DSA newsletter, Harrington said, "Think of Truman again. He is not my hero ... but we can sure learn from him. He talked tough facts in 1948. He talked to workers and blacks and farmers; he mobilized . . . . And he won. And we can win in 1984, but only if we are at least as much a bunch of hell raisers as he and his friends."

Communist Party

The Communist Party (CP) ran its own candidates, Gus Hall and Angela Davis, for president and vice-president. While not formally endorsing the Democratic ticket, the clear message of the Hall-Davis campaign was to defeat Reagan by electing Mondale. This is not a new position for the CP; it has backed liberal capitalist candidates for half a century.

"For the period of the 1984 elections," Gus Hall told a CP central committee meeting last June, "all our creative energies must be focused on defeating Reaganism."

"The reality," Hall was quoted as saying in the June 21 Daily World, the CP paper, "is that the electable candidate against Reagan is the lesser evil." He explained that the CP should only criticize Mondale if it would help strengthen the Democratic campaign. "Our party will express its differences and criticisms of the Democratic candidate when we think that will add to the struggle against Reaganism." As the polls began to more and more confirm that Reagan had a strong lead over Mondale, the CP campaign took on a shrill pitch. It argued that U.S. capitalism is rapidly moving toward fascism under Reagan and that unity of all "anti-Reagan" forces was desperately needed to prevent another Republican term in office.

An editorial titled "Fascist odor" in the October 6 issue of the People's World, the CP's West Coast weekly, conveyed this view: "We do not use the term 'fascism' lightly. It is not just the normal, oppressive, exploitative, and brutal rule of capital that has characterized this system since its advent 200 years ago. It is rule by a special sector of that capital, the very sector which put Ronald Reagan in the White House and in whose interests he presently serves. It can happen here. It is a clear and present danger, and good reason to make sure the Oval Office has a new resident after Nov.6."

The U.S. capitalist class will certainly prove capable of attempting to impose fascist rule, but that is not what is happening today.

The CP portrays Reagan as representing a "fascist" wing in order to cover up the fact that there is bipartisan support for the employers' policies of war, racism, and attacks on democratic rights. Mondale would have driven this anti-labor offensive forward had he been elected, just as Reagan has done. Both represent the same fundamental class interests -the opposite of the interests of workers and working farmers. The U.S. rulers will step up their assault on working people here and abroad. Big class battles are going to erupt. But the best way to prepare working people for these battles is to tell them the unvarnished truth about the Republican and Democratic parties. The CP candidates have done the opposite. Let's take a few examples.

Fight against imperialist war

Throughout the campaign, Hall and Davis argued that nuclear war could well be the result of another four years of Reagan, while the world would be safer with Mondale in office .

As part of prettifying the imperialist policies of the Democrats, the CP- endorsed their call for a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons production in the United States and the Soviet Union. This stance blurs the real source of war- U.S. imperialism and its twin parties - and implies the Soviet Union shares some responsibility for the nuclear arms buildup, for which Washington alone is to blame. The CP's support for Mondale led it to downplay the current war against Nicaragua and El Salvador being carried out with the support of Democrats and Republicans alike . It is precisely in such shooting wars that the danger of Washington using its nuclear arsenal is posed. But rather than expose the bipartisan character of the war drive, the CP told working people that voting Reagan out of office was the best way to guarantee peace. As Davis put it in an interview in the July 12 Daily World, "the most immediate priority of all in the peace movement, of all who are threatened by nuclear conflagration, is the defeat of Reagan and. his pathologically anti-Communist Administration. "Adaptation to the Democrats on the war question has led the CP to bend also to the patriotic, chauvinist propaganda campaigns of both capitalist parties.

For example, the October 24 Daily World gave favorable coverage to AFL-CIO Pres. Lane Kirkland's recent tour to garner votes for Mondale. The paper quoted uncritically Kirkland's anti-imports, patriotic line, reporting that the AFL-CIO bureaucrat attacked Reagan as "a man who appeals to patriotism for the benefit of those business and banking interests who would sell their own country out- people who don't care what flag flies over their plants or shops or ships."

- The CP has even gone so far as to print issues of the Daily World in red, white, and blue.

Abortion rights

Over the last few months, women's righto legal abortion has come under attack from right-wing groups, the Catholic Church hierarchy, and Democratic and Republican politicians; While claiming she will uphold legal abortion as long as it is the law of the land, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro has emphasized her personal and religious view that abortion is murder. Explaining why she has voted for some Medicaid funding for abortions, Ferraro said, "The cost of putting an unwanted child through the system far outweighs the cost of funding an abortion on demand." This is the line of the racist, population-control forces.

What has been the CP's response to Ferraro's reactionary views on abortion rights? A September 21 column in the Daily World rushed to defend her! "Ms. Ferraro's position on abortions is a principled, democratic position," it said.

SWP campaign

The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance approached the 1984 elections from a completely different standpoint than the other groups on the U.S. left.

The SWP ran 56 candidates for local office in 26 states. Its candidate for president was Mel Mason; for vice-president, Andrea Gonzalez.

The fight against imperialist war was at the center of the Mason-Gonzalez campaign as they visited plant gates, union halls, picket lines, farming areas, and working-class, Black, and Latino neighborhoods across the country. They talked to working people about the gains workers and peasants have won in Nicaragua and Cuba, and stressed the important role the labor movement must play in opposing· U.S. intervention in Central· America and the Caribbean.

The socialists called for international working-class solidarity with others fighting for their rights, from the striking British coal miners, to Puerto Ricans demanding independence, to Blacks struggling against South Africa's apartheid, to the workers and farmers of Vietnam and Kampuchea.

Mason and Gonzalez opposed the reactionary anti-imports, protectionist schemes used to falsely label workers in other countries as the source of unemployment in the United States, rather than the U.S, employers. The SWP ticket was the only one that consistently defended abortion rights. Mason and Gonzalez demanded repeal of all laws restricting the right to safe, legal abortion. They called for restoring- and expanding - government funds for women who want abortions and cannot afford them.

The socialists explained that the problems of war, attacks on Black and women's rights, farm foreclosures, and union-busting cannot be solved at the ballot box. They explained the need for working people to reject the Democratic and Republican parties- the twin parties of war, exploitation, racism, and sexism. What is needed, they said, is independent working-class political action that can organize and mobilize the victims of class exploitation to overturn capitalist rule and establish workers and farmers government.

Mason and Gonzalez called for a labor party based on a fighting, democratic trade union movement that will champion the interests of workers, farmers, Blacks, Latinos, women, and other ' victims of capitalism. They also called for the formation of an independent Black political party, which would not only be an advance for Blacks, but also help inspire and hasten the development of a labor party.

The goal of the labor party, they explained, will be to lead the struggle for workers and farmers government in the United States that will use the vast resources and technology of this country to aid in eliminating hunger, poverty and disease all over the globe. This government will abolish capitalism in the United State sand join the worldwide struggle for .socialism.

Peter Thierjung is national secretary of the Young Socialist Alliance and was a youth coordinator of the Mason/Gonzalez campaign .

November 16, 1984 The Militant

https://themilitant.com/1984/4842/MIL4842.pdf

1991 USSR coup attempt rocked world of U.S. Stalinists

Was Soviet coup an attempt to halt 'slide toward capitalist restoration'?

The Militant September 27, 1991

BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS 

Tens of thousands of working people toppled the August 19 coup in the Soviet Union. But some organizations in the United States that call themselves socialist or communist gave outright support to the coup as it unfolded.

Leaders of the Workers World Party and the Communist Party (CPUSA) argue that the coup was an attempt to slow down steps by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that are leading to the restoration of capitalism, a fate now sharply posed with the coup's failure. Soviet workers in fact did not oppose the coup, the Workers World Party claimed. Despite mistakes by the coup leaders "the masses on the whole accepted the coup," stated Sam Marcy, Workers World Party chairperson, in the September 5 Workers World weekly. He claimed the coup was "completely bloodless," dismissing the killings of three people in Moscow as accidents. Bourgeois commentators have also dismissed the resistance put up by Soviet workers to the coup. Events as they unfolded in the Soviet Union "call into question the popular picture in the U.S. of an outpouring of Russians and other Soviet citizens resisting autocratic government and demanding democracy," wrote liberal commentator Tom Wicker, in the New York Times. "Only perhaps 1 percent of Moscow's population turned out for what appeared on U.S. television to be a massive demonstration," Wicker added. 

Each of these analyses has a common starting point: they all attempt to conceal the nature of the class struggle in the USSR and try and keep workers around the world from seeing fellow toilers there as the only social force capable of resolving the deepening economic and social crisis into which the bureaucratic regime has led the country. A careful examination of the facts easily refutes these arguments. 

Workers in Soviet Union resist coup 

Masses of working people recognized that the coup's main goal was to close down the political elbow-room and democratic rights won in recent years. Refusing to return to the decades of complete suppression of these rights, workers and others held mass protests in defiance of the coup leaders' attempts to impose curfews and ban demonstrations. In Moscow a crowd of 5,000 surrounded the Russian parliament August 19, erecting barricades and maintaining an around-the-clock vigil. By the next day the protest swelled to 50,000. Demonstrators fraternized with troops, some of whom turned their tanks around to help defend the parliament building. 

Two hundred thousand demonstrated in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, and 400,000 in Kishinev, capital of the Moldavian republic. "To see how people were awakening, beginning to respect themselves, almost made me cry," said Aleksander Kondrashov, a 46-year-old machinist who joined the march in Leningrad with thousands of his coworkers from the Kirov tractor factory. The Kirov plant became an important center of resistance to the coup. 

Coal miners went on strike in several regions. After returning to work following the coup's failure, miners at Siberia's Kuzbass field, the country's largest, refused to load coal for delivery until all the coup leaders were arrested. 

These mobilizations also gave an impulse to actions against government officials in Soviet republics identified with the authoritarian rule of the central regime. 

Georgians opposed to the autocratic government of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia organized daily mass rallies outside the Georgian Parliament. In the Chechen-Ingush ethnic region, demonstrators who had been blockading the Parliament for 15 days demanding the resignation of parliamentary leaders for their support to the coup finally stormed the building, forcing the chairman to resign. 

Through their actions on the barricades and in the streets working people have widened the political space open to them and gained greater confidence for the struggles to come. 

Was coup attempt to avert capitalism? 

"The fact of the matter is that the Emergency Committee was attempting to return to the course of socialist construction and to abolish, to the extent possible, the ruinous and chaotic consequences of Gorbachev's introduction of capitalist relations," wrote Sam Marcy in the September 5 Workers World. 

"These eight men," he added, referring to the members of the short-lived State Committee for the State of Emergency set up during the coup, "knowledgeable and fearful of the consequences of bourgeois restoration, decided it was the only course to take." Gus Hall, chairman of the CPUSA, said after Gorbachev was returned to power that the coup "was an attempt to deal with real problems, but in a wrong way." In the wake of the coup Russia's President Boris Yeltsin "becomes the biggest danger," Hall added. These statements fly in the face of the fact that the coup leaders pledged to continue Gorbachev and Yeltsin's economic and social course, based on the vain hope of integrating the Soviet Union into the world capitalist market through introducing progressively greater use of market mechanisms in the economy. [My emphasis- JR].

The coup leaders also promised to hold a "nationwide discussion" on the treaty Gorbachev had negotiated with top officials of most republics of the Soviet Union. They claimed they would solve problems of food and housing through an immediate return to "labor discipline and order," thinly disguised code words for the intensification of labor under the threat of the whip. 

Advertising one or another wing of the ruling layer in the Soviet Union as the "real" defenders of socialism is the stock-in-trade of Stalinism and its adherents around the world. The "eight men," Gorbachev, and Yeltsin represent different wings of a petty-bourgeois social layer - best described as a caste -that through force and violence usurped power from the working class allied with the peasantry. This counterrevolution as led by Joseph Stalin beginning in the early 1920s. By the mid-1930s the rising bureaucratic layer had consolidated its hold on power, reversed many of the social gains of the October 1917 Russian revolution, and driven working people out of political life. By presenting the accomplishments of the working people as its own and draping itself with the mantle of the first victorious socialist revolution, the bureaucratic regime convinced many fighters around the world that it was a progressive force. But, as the legacy of Stalinist rule comes to the light of day, the fact that it is 100 percent counterrevolutionary is clearer to millions. 

Arguing that a "socialist course" can be advanced by the methods of the coup leaders negates the fact that socialism can only be achieved by a politically conscious and mobilized working class progressively taking on more and more of the decision making and administration of all aspects of economic and social life. 

Because this would mark the death knell of the bureaucratic regime, the caste organizes to prevent any motion in that direction. 

Is capitalism on the agenda? 

A September 5 editorial in the Workers World says capitalism has already been reintroduced in Eastern Europe. "Look at the destruction left in Eastern Europe. The introduction of capitalism has been a tyranny as bad as any terror." 

The statement released by the CPUSA following the coup's failure said: "Developments have quickly moved to a new stage. Processes are now in motion that inflame anti-Semitism and nationalism, seriously threaten the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of socialism, and push the country in the direction of capitalism and wholesale plunder of the USSR." But nationalized property relations- the central conquest of the Russian revolution - remain in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 

Top officials in the Eastern European and Soviet workers states, many with overtly procapitalist and proimperialist views, have repeatedly announced ambitious "market re-form programs" and their intentions to sell off basic industry to private capital. But each has backed off when faced with deep-going opposition from working people to each concrete step needed to reintroduce private ownership of industry and banking. 

Resistance by working people has proved to be the major stumbling block to any "peaceful" transition to capitalism. The Wall Street Journal reported that Gorbachev, in a September 11 meeting with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, "stressed that he hoped to press ahead with making the ruble a convertible currency in order to attract foreign investment." The exchange rate of the ruble today is 3.6 cents. Many workers earn about 300 rubles, or about $10.80, a month. Since the ruble is not a convertible currency this does not translate into comparable prices for goods purchased by workers. 

But it does give a picture of the implications of any attempt to make the ruble convertible for workers' standard of living. Clearly such a move would provoke colossal social explosions. 

A section of the leadership of the U.S. Communist Party that aligns itself with the Gorbachev wing of the bureaucracy took the position that the Soviet coup should have been clearly condemned. 

"Some in the leadership of our party reacted to this coup differently than the Soviet public," said an article in the September 7 issue of the People's Weekly World, the news-paper published by the Communist Party. The article was signed by James Jackson, Charlene Mitchell, and Danny Rubin. "Having identified Gorbachev as the source of all of the crisis developments in the Soviet Union, they tended to welcome his removal" the CP leaders wrote. This "led to the CPUSA National Board vote to 'neither condemn nor condone'" the coup. The authors said the coup "dealt a body blow to perestroika." 

Public rift in CPUSA 

A similar line marking the growing public rift in the CP, was carried in an article by Mark Solomon in the same issue of the People's Weekly World. Solomon argued that Gorbachev's policies have resulted in "giant strides for peace" and "began to put an end to the stifling identification of socialism with totalitarianism." 

That Gorbachev's course, rather than that of the coup leaders, represents some progressive thrust forward for working people is also the position of others on the "left". "The delicate, evolutionary process, painstakingly put together by President Mikhail Gorbachev, was beginning to bear fruit," wrote Fred Weir in the Guardian, a weekly newspaper. "The coup attempt blasted it all out of the arena," he added. But there is nothing progressive about Gorbachev or Yeltsin's pragmatic policy decisions. Both are today responsible for organizing the defense of the privileges and prerogatives of the caste, a task that places them as point men in the assault on the rights and standard of living of working people. Working people can and should oppose the coup and identify with those in the streets without having to extend one iota of political support to Yeltsin or Gorbachev. 

In hopes of ameliorating its deep-going economic and social crisis, the regime in Moscow has staked its fortunes in the last few years on earning expanding investments and massive loans, trading privileges, and entry into imperialist financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund. It has attempted to accomplish this through political concessions to Washington and other imperialist powers. 

In craven pursuit of this, Gorbachev's regime threw its support behind the U.S.-led onslaught against the Iraqi people. So much for "strides for peace." 

The same economic and political considerations lie behind other foreign policy moves by Moscow such as growing diplomatic relations with Israel and trade with the apartheid regime in South Africa; its open endorsement of the "two Koreas" policy long advocated by the capitalist regime in Seoul and its masters in Washington to block the aspirations of the Korean people for national reunification; and its steps towards rapidly implementing trade relations with Cuba at world market prices paid for in scarce hard currencies. 

These facts help to answer Gus Hall's argument that "the USSR has also been a strong force for the rights of third world countries and against racism." 

Class-collaborationism 

Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union have followed a class-collaborationist course with imperialism for decades. This has led to the betrayal of many revolutionary opportunities the world over. 

Following the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939 the Soviet regime cynically carved Poland in half in a deal with German imperialism and turned over thousands of revolutionaries to the Nazis. Following World War II the Kremlin and its supporters in Stalinist parties organized the betrayal of revolutionary opportunities in Greece, France, and Italy, and joined with French imperialism in bloodily suppressing anticolonial rebellions in Indo-china and Algeria. The Soviet bureaucracy has always been the agent of imperialism inside the workers state. 

This is the opposite of the internationalism of the Bolshevik party that sought to aid workers' struggles in other countries and extend the revolution. 

As a result of the weakening of the bureaucratic apparatus in the Soviet Union the Stalinist misleaders are less able than ever before to disorient and betray revolutionary workers who look to them under the illusion that their policies point the road out of oppression and exploitation and towards socialism. 

The CPUSA's claim that the Communist Party in the Soviet Union has been an instrument in the fight of socialism is also utterly false. 

The Bolshevik Party, renamed the Communist Party after the October 1917 Russian revolution, was destroyed by Stalin's counterrevolution and turned into an instrument of brutal repression. 

The party's internal democracy was abolished and tens of thousands of communist workers in the party were killed, jailed, or exiled. By the rnid-1930s all those who led the party in the early years of the revolution had become victims of or capitulated to Stalin's terror. 

Since then the CP, along with the secret police (the KGB), has for many decades been an integral part of maintaining the rule of the bureaucracy. 

Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who both back the recent measures banning the CP, are simply registering the fact it is no longer a useful tool for maintaining the caste's rule over working people. 

Gorbachev and Yeltsin, though, are acting against what they consider to be a political party. Any moves against current or former members of the CP by the central government in Moscow or the various regimes in the republics that restrict the right to form political parties should be protested by working people. 

Working people in the Soviet Union are now taking the initial steps back into political life. Out of their struggles, over time, they will develop class consciousness and an internationalist outlook. Out of these fighters and revolutionaries will come a communist party capable of leading the toilers in a political revolution that will sweep the bureaucratic caste from power.

Source: http://themilitant.com/1991/5534/MIL5534.pdf

Workers World Party Jew-hatred on the rise as capitalist crisis deepens

Any discussion of the nation-state law narrowly approved by the Israeli Knesset must begin with reading the law, not the commentaries on it. Final text here.

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The U.S. Workers World Party, a staunch supporter of the BDS movement and all forms of armed and unarmed action against Israel (both in Israel and worldwide), posted a comment on the new law shorty after passage. Titled "Israeli 'nation state' legislation parallels Nazi Nuremberg Laws," it was written by Susan Abulhawa.

Workers World's policy is to use any object at hand to beat the Jews. It is part of their unprincipled rainbow of political "whateverism," which includes calling for votes for Democrats, supporting the capitalist regimes of Tehran, Moscow, Caracas, and Managua, and a host of other opportunist activities.

In the last few years they have praised as progressive and correct the "knife intifada" and Hamas' cynical use of Gaza's workers and farmers as cannon fodder in confrontations staged with the IDF.

Abulhawa's article chimes nicely with this editorial policy.

I posted the article on Facebook this week.

A very knowledgeable comrade read it and noted:

"Among other idiocies, article claims there are antimiscegenation laws in Israel. There aren't, and the new law doesn't change that. Yes, there is no civil marriage, only religious marriage, something shared with many Middle Eastern countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Mauritania, as well as in Indonesia, Iran, and Lebanon (as per Wikipedia). This has been a problem for Jews themselves (men deemed to be of the Cohen priestly class cannot marry divorcees or widows, for example, and there's the issue of childless widows unable to remarry unless their late husband's unmarried brother releases them from the obligation to marry him). But couples married in other countries (many go to Cyprus for that) do have their marriage officially recognized."

(It is useful to recall a news item from a few years ago about a Muslim-Jewish couple that  got married. She had to convert to Islam, which was easier than him converting to Judaism. There were threats by ultranationalist Jewish groups to disrupt the wedding. Rivlin, the Israeli president, condemned the bigots, congratulated the couple and invited them to his house.)

(The wiki on marriage laws is here. I cite it to counterbalance the typically shrieking hysteria that taints any left/radical discussion about Israel.)

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Abulhawa, judging from her article, is not the typical Jew-hating petty-bourgeois Stalinist to whom Workers World newspaper opens its pages. She seems completely free of any acquaintance with Marxism and proletarian politics.

She does have a passion for historically inaccurate (to be kind) equations of Israel and Jews today with Nazis, as does Workers World. (Talk about intersectionality!)

There is nothing WWP likes better than a little Holocaust inversion to get the blood pumping: few capitalist states in the Middle East meet with their disapproval, and only one is exceptionally Hunnish enough to warrant Nazi/Hitler comparisons. (Hint: it's the state filled with Jews and founded two years after the end of the Holocaust.)

Today's slow-burning crisis of capitalism and increasing boss attacks around the world are already generating an uptick in Jew-hatred. Unlike the 1930s, today's Jew-hatred is spearheaded by the middle class left and uses terms like "Zionist" instead of "bloodsucker" or "Rothschild." This makes it more socially acceptable for leftist and radical chums to rationalize pogromist politics (and later pogromist practice.)

UK Communist League leader Jonathan Silberman noted one of the immediate consequences of the kind of Jew-hating politics promoted by Workers World and Abulhawa:

Anti-Semitism under the pretext of support to the Palestinian struggle undermines the Palestinian fight for national rights, including the fight for a viable and contiguous Palestine.

Silberman went on to note:

Jew hatred is a product of capitalism in decay. Its ultimate purpose is to divert workers from a united militant struggle by promoting the poisonous lie that the problem is not capitalism, but evil Jewish capitalists. And it goes hand in hand with fascism, which proclaims that the solution is not internationalism and workers taking power and replacing the dictatorship of capital through revolutionary struggle, but "national socialism," the polar opposite of the course fought for by communists since the time of Marx and Engels.

As the worldwide capitalist crisis deepens, Jew-hatred will continue to erupt. Class-conscious workers must oppose it everywhere it rears its head.  

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Whatever law the capitalist ruling class of Israel passes and attempts to enforce will have to face the judgment, strength, solidarity and mobilization of the multinational Israeli working class.

Whatever advances Palestinians make toward their own nation will ultimately be based on the same proletarian class forces, not the current bourgeois misleaderships with which they are saddled, and which only succeed today in getting them pointlessly killed.

I'll leave the broader summation of these questions to a 2017 article by Emma Johnson and John Studer:

.... The key question here is the Jewish question, the right of Israel to exist as a homeland for Jews, and the right to return to Israel for Jews everywhere in a world where Jew-hatred is on the rise. As the crisis of capitalism and the class struggle deepen, history teaches, the capitalists lose confidence that "normal" methods will defend their rule, and they turn to fascist terror against the working class. Key to this is fanning Jew-hatred and pogroms to divert the toilers from fighting for power.

The need for a refuge for the Jews was etched in the consciousness of workers around the world during the second imperialist world slaughter when the Nazis marched across Europe, annihilating 6 million Jews — two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe. The capitalist rulers in Washington and across Europe closed their borders to Jews who tried to flee the Holocaust.

Out of this catastrophe Israel was established. The world Jewish population has still not reached its prewar level. In 1939 there were almost 17 million Jews worldwide, largely in Europe. Today the number is just over 14 million.

"Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms," Fidel Castro, the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, said of the Jewish people in 2010. "I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation."

The fight between Israeli authorities and the lame-duck Obama administration takes place as political alliances among capitalist regimes in the Middle East are undergoing tectonic shifts. Tehran has increased its military presence and political influence from Afghanistan to Lebanon. Shiite and Sunni-led regimes are lining up against each other. As Washington's influence declines, Moscow attempts to move in.

Israel is a Mideast nation. Today Tel Aviv is forced to take another look at who are its allies and its enemies. While most governments in the Mideast do not recognize Israel, many Sunni-led regimes, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are looking to work with Tel Aviv, sharing common interests in blocking Tehran.

Last year the Israeli government resumed diplomatic relations with Turkey after a six-year freeze following a deadly Israeli raid on a Turkish ship delivering aid to Gaza.

Tel Aviv is warming up to Moscow and looking to closer relations with the incoming U.S. administration of Donald Trump.

Jew-hatred on the rise

Jew-hatred and anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in many parts of the world. That's why the right of Israel to exist and of Jews anywhere to live there is even more important today. And such a view is the only road to rebuild a movement capable of winning recognition of a Palestinian state today, opening the door to fight for a contiguous, viable homeland for the Palestinian people.

The U.N. resolution encourages the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which has growing support in U.S. and European liberal, academic and governmental milieus. BDS supporters seek to make an international pariah of Israel, treating its Jewish population as one reactionary mass and labeling it an "apartheid state." They demand boycotting Israeli goods and shutting down artistic, musical and academic exchanges with Israel.

But Israel today bears no resemblance to apartheid South Africa, and the position of Jews there and worldwide has no comparison to the murderous Boer overlords who ruled Pretoria before Nelson Mandela.

Hamas and Palestinian Authority leaders welcomed the U.N. resolution and Kerry's speech. This is in line with the course they have followed for decades, including using terror attacks to try to get the attention of Washington and other imperialist powers to pressure Tel Aviv. This course relies on turning the Palestinian masses into passive bystanders.

To defend Jews both in Israel and worldwide, and the only road that can open the door to mobilizing Palestinian workers and farmers to fight for their rights, requires recognition of the state of Israel.





Jay
28 July 2018

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Postscript: Workers World Party, the story thus far:


Workers World Party silent on Sarcelles synagogue attack


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Workers world party endorses knife attacks against Jews in Israel as royal road to Palestinian liberation


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From anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism: Workers World Party and the political degeneration of Caleb Maupin


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Caleb Maupin's synthesis of Jew-hatred and anti-communism


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Workers World Party opportunist whateverism and the LGBT milieu


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Sam Marcy's "utter contempt for the working people of Poland"


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Workers World Party: Workers who voted for Trump have "crossed the line"


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Workers World Party: tailist whateverism


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Workers World Party: If you voted for Trump, you are no smarter than a third grader


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