Did "Islamism" peak in 1979

The question of the social weight of "Islamism" has returned with the emergence of ISIS.

This article from 2005 will not be without interest.

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Why 'Islamism' peaked in 1979

(Reply to a Reader column)
 
BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
AND MAURICE WILLIAMS  

In a letter to the editor published in the December 14 issue, reader Geoff Mirelowitz asked for more explanation of a statement in the November 16 Militant that "Islamism" has peaked, that groups like Hamas and al-Qaeda are politically exhausted, and that the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca "was the high point of 'Islamism' while September 11 was its flare-out." How is that statement reconciled with the fact that Hamas arose much later and "appears to have won broad support"?

Big-business commentators, echoed by some middle-class radicals, often assert that "Islamic fundamentalists are on the rise." That is not accurate. Such groups, which are political—bourgeois—currents, not primarily religious ones, are generally on the decline and have been for some time. Their weakening is part of the broader political bankruptcy and exhaustion of bourgeois nationalist currents in the Mideast and elsewhere.

A number of such currents stood at the head of democratic and anti-imperialist struggles in the Mideast from the 1940s through the 1960s. The Free Officers movement founded by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, which led the fight against British colonial rule in Egypt, was one such example. These currents predominated because of the betrayal of the interests of workers and peasants by Communist Parties and other Stalinist forces, which maintained considerable influence in the Mideast through the 1980s.

The anti-imperialist advances won under these leaderships, like the nationalization of oil in the region and Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal, peaked by the 1960s. Subsequently, these gains led to further capitalist development and class differentiation in each of these countries. In "The Opening Guns of World War III," the lead article in New International no. 7, Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes describes this process as "the product of the consolidation of a national bourgeoisie and substantial middle class, of internal modern class development and class polarization. These bourgeois regimes use their state power—including naked violence and aggression—to advance their class interests against rival regimes, as well as against the workers and peasants at home."

Since the late 1960s, the growing failures and discrediting of secular bourgeois nationalists and Stalinists—what Barnes calls "the historical exhaustion of the nonproletarian currents" that had substituted for revolutionary leaderships there—fueled the temporary rise of Islamism. This variant of bourgeois nationalism peaked by the late 1970s.

The so-called Islamist currents, cloaking themselves in a religious mantle, won some mass support by adopting militant rhetoric. While at times in conflict with imperialism, they are not anti-imperialist, however. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) of Algeria, for example, in challenging the country's government in the early 1990s, promised to be less subservient to French imperialism. At the same time, it advocated "free market" economic policies and called for cooperation with imperialist governments to explore and expand Algeria's natural resources and export potential.

The high point of Islamism was in the late 1970s. It was marked by the November 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which rocked the Saudi kingdom for several years. Hundreds of rebels, led by Juhaiman al-Oteiby and with support among elements in the National Guard, seized the mosque. It took the regime two weeks to crush the revolt. The insurgents not only denounced the royal family for straying from the teachings of Islam. According to a report in the Jan. 21, 1980, issue of Intercontinental Press, they also accused the regime of "feeding the United States and Israel with our oil and more money" and demanded "the expulsion of the agents of the imperialist America." The rebels also called for a republic to replace the monarchy.

For 10 days, protests broke out in Qatif and other oil-field cities on the Arab-Persian Gulf. Demonstrators shouted slogans in support of the Iranian Revolution and for a republic. The government sent in 2,000 National Guardsmen. In the ensuing clashes, by one estimate, 10 demonstrators were killed and hundreds wounded. Badly shaken, the Saudi monarchy beheaded 63 rebels in public squares spread out over eight cities to have the maximum intimidating effect.

In Egypt the exhaustion of the Nasser-led current put wind in the sails of self-described Muslim organizations. In 1981, Egyptian army members belonging to such a group assassinated President Anwar Sadat, whose government was widely despised for its rapprochement with Washington and Tel Aviv. And in Afghanistan and Pakistan, bourgeois groups waving the banner of Islam were part of the reactionary forces that waged war against the unpopular invasion of Afghanistan by Moscow.

In Iran, a gigantic popular revolution toppled the U.S.-backed monarchy in 1979. Because of the vacuum of working-class leadership, however, as the shah's regime was overthrown through the mass mobilizations of workers and peasants, bourgeois forces led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stepped in and took over the government. They falsely claimed the mantle of the revolution, using anti-imperialist rhetoric to win support.

Over the subsequent two decades, however, Islamist groups, like other bourgeois nationalist currents, have declined, increasingly incapable of offering leadership in anti-imperialist struggles. In Algeria the Islamic Salvation Front won the 1992 national elections but the results were annulled by the regime and a bloody civil war ensued, leading to more than 100,000 deaths. Today, however, the FIS appears to have lost steam; incumbent president Abdelaziz Bouteflika won a sweeping reelection last April. In Afghanistan the Taliban, which seized power in 1996, became politically isolated by its reactionary policies; Washington paid little price for its invasion of that country and overthrow of the Taliban-led regime.

Regarding Mirelowitz's question about Hamas, the rise of that organization in the Palestinian national movement is a slightly later development that takes place within the overall decline of Islamism. Through much of the 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), was still largely on a revolutionary nationalist course. But as the PLO became bourgeoisified and increasingly turned its eyes toward accommodation with Washington, groups like Hamas got some wind in their sails.

Although Hamas gained a mass following, especially in the Gaza Strip, it has never been able to win the leadership of Palestinian movement, which is still dominated by the PLO. Over time, Hamas has shown that it lacks a political perspective that can mobilize the masses of Palestinians and their supporters who are resisting Israel because it stole their land. The group's political course and methods of struggle, largely suicide bombings, have isolated its leadership, making it vulnerable to attack—politically and militarily—by the Israeli and U.S. governments. Tel Aviv has been systematically decimating the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other such groups, assassinating them with virtual impunity.

The flameout of al-Qaeda, which U.S. imperialism and its allies in the region have been progressively wiping out since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, is further evidence of the overall trend described here.

Washington and the other imperialist powers, however, cannot solve the economic and social crisis bred by their own system. Instead, the workings of that system generate permanent instability. That creates space that workers and farmers in the Mideast will use over the coming years to engage in struggles and, as they go through those experiences, forge the revolutionary leadership they deserve.  
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2005/6901/690136.html

The "Mothers of Ukraine" Fraud

This is an excerpt from a very useful article on the July and August 2014 Yalta conferences supporting Moscow's assaults on Ukraine.

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.... someone was present at the July Yalta conference from "Mothers of Ukraine". In his notes of the discussions at the conference which Brenner includes in his statement, he writes:

"Representative of the Co-ordination of the Movement 'Mothers of Ukraine': I would like to say to our international guests if you look at mothers who do not have food for their children you would make your draft statement not milder but more severe. Ukraine is destroyed."

We do not know for sure if the representative in question was Galina Zaporozhtseva, even though the latter is the sole public face of "Mothers of Ukraine" and pops up as its representative everywhere from the European Parliament in Brussels to Russian television studios in Moscow, dropping in on round-table discussions of the Izborsky Club while en route.

But it certainly is the case that the politics of "Mothers of Ukraine" are the politics of the former police officer and champion of the Berkut who set up the organization.

The first public appearance of Zaporozhtseva is to be found in an article published in Prokhanov's "Zavtra" in December 2013. The article quoted "colonel of the militia Galina Zaporozhtseva" in an article siding with the Berkut in its conflict with the Maidan protestors. (29)

Zaporozhtseva's television career began the following month, when "Novosti Novosty" channel interviewed "colonel of the militia Galina Zaporozhtseva" about the Maidan protests.

Zapozhtseva explained the 'real' causes of the unrest: "A massive number of terrorists from Syria and the Near East" had arrived in Ukraine, and it was their activities, carried out "behind the backs of students, youth, women and old men" which had resulted in the mayhem of the Maidan. (30)

Speaking for the first time on behalf of "Mothers of Ukraine" in a television interview in April of this year, Zaporozhtseva again defended the Berkut:

"Today scandalous practices are underway in relation to the colleagues of the Berkut who honorably fulfilled their professional duty. As a jurist I can categorically confirm that all actions of the Berkut, from 24th November onwards, were within the framework of the law concerning the militia.

"We also know, and have information about this, that the Berkut did not possess any weapons. All accusations which are now being fabricated against them – and I will insist on this – are intended to cover up the real criminals who opened fire on people." (31)

That is to say: The "Mothers of Ukraine" began life not as the mothers of Ukrainian soldiers but as the mothers of members of the Berkut who had shot and killed demonstrators during the Maidan protests. (Assuming that "Mothers of Ukraine" actually has any existence apart from Zaporozhtseva's media profile.)

The same month an appeal issued in the name of Zaporozhtseva and "Mothers of Ukraine" to "everyone who cares about the fate of our country" condemned the "state putsch" which had overthrown Yanukovich and the "bandits" who had seized control of Parliament.

"Armed thugs" were terrorizing "towns and villages throughout the country". A "foreign intervention" had taken place in the guise of a "western-Ukrainian nationalist movement" and its aim was "the genocide of the Slavs." (32)

The day after the 2nd May attack on anti-Maidan protestors in the Trade Union Building in Odessa Zaporozhtseva, now introduced as a "retired colonel of the militia", was interviewed at length on Russian television:

"I saw the true face of fascism. … There is no law, there is no state, it is pure fascism. There is an information blockade about what is happening in Ukraine. But Russia broadcasts information. What Russia says is true, pure truth. … In Ukraine fascism has risen again." (33)

In a subsequent television interview about events in Odessa Zaporozhtseva claimed that acts of cannibalism had taken place in the Trade Union Building:

"We are busy gathering information to hand over to international organisations. There are facts of cannibalism in the Trade Union Building in Odessa. … They were eating human flesh there, they were wandering around with napkins." (34)

In July Zaporozhtseva was again interviewed on Russian television. She took it as an opportunity to thank Russia for its role in helping refugees: "Let us call things by their names. This is a war. A war is underway. Thank you, Great Russia. This is the only country which is today accepting citizens of Ukraine." (35)....

Please enjoy the full article here:

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/23934

Borotba: a force for Moscow aggression and Russian chauvinism in Ukraine

Pictures and reports of a Moscow rally held in mid-June, which demanded that Putin send Russian troops into Ukraine and which was given full and favourable coverage by "Zavtra", confirm Borotba's involvement in the event – along with Russian nationalists such as Limonov's "Another Russia".

"Zavtra" reported:

"All speakers at the rally were unanimous in their demands on the President of Russia, Vladmimir Putin, to immediately take the most decisive steps to defend the inhabitants of the Donbas from genocide by the Kiev junta.

One of the speakers informed the meeting about the broad anti-fascist underground activity which had unfolded on the entire territory of Ukraine and existed in all the major cities.

The underground activity was conducted under rally but at the very centre of the stage. Information about the activity of Borotba in Lviv and Kiev in particular was provided." (49)

Anyone relying on Borotba's output as a source of information about Ukrainian politics would certainly end up with a very skewered view of reality.

They would know nothing of Russia's annexation of the Crimea. They would know nothing of the weaponry, munitions and fighters shipped into Ukraine from Russia. And they would believe that the Ukrainian military shot down the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 and then drove the BUK missile launcher away to hide the evidence. (50)

In the same vein, Borotba's "Chronicle of the Junta's War Against Its Own People" consists in large part of uncritical reproductions of even the most bizarre of statements issued by separatist military figures such as Strelkov-Girkin, Fedor Berezin and 'Abver', and of clips taken from Russian news programmes.

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2014/07/23/popular-front-russian-nationalism

Hong Kong, some background (b)

From a 1992 speech by Jack Barnes:

.... Today, more and more toilers in China are being drawn out of the countryside and into factories, mines, and mills owned by the state and increasingly also by foreign and domestic capital. As this process unfolds, the breakdown of Stalinist apparatuses that we have seen in Europe and the former USSR will inevitably shake the deformed Chinese workers state as well.

It will take time, but class tensions and conflicts are already growing in China's cities and workplaces, as well as in the countryside. And when the day comes that a young and rapidly growing working class enters into combat in larger battalions, the Stalinists will find that their bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square youth rebellion in 1989 cannot be endlessly repeated. The struggles that are coming, whatever their tempo and exact forms, will be larger and more explosive than anything in China since the revolution itself.

Many of you have probably read newspaper reports about the so-called Special Economic Zones in southern China, where much of the imperialist investment is concentrated. These zones are located in huge, and growing, population centers. The Shenzen and other Special Economic Zones in Guangdong [Canton] Province and the Pearl River Delta, around Hong Kong, are in an area with about 80 million people. Companies based in Hong Kong are estimated already to employ as many as 3 million factory workers in this region.

Among Deng Xiaoping's pithy sayings of late was one this past January, during a visit to Guangdong. In another twenty years, Deng said, the province would become the "Fifth Small Dragon" of Asia, joining Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong itself. Think of the depth of the political bankruptcy! The main spokesperson of a supposedly socialist country says the goal they are pursuing--and are well along the road to achieving--is to become more like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong.

But that is the goal of the dominant wing of the bourgeois-minded bureaucratic caste in China. Desperately poor peasants are being drawn from the countryside and into the cities, where to survive they are forced to work long hours, under extreme speedup, for minimal wages in both state- and capitalist-owned factories. In the medium term, these conditions will permit a relatively rapid economic expansion.

The Japanese, U.S., and other capitalists investing in China think they have died and gone to heaven. They have most of the rights of capitalists, but the state "handles" the workers for them. The state, including the Communist Party and its functionaries, makes sure the workers do not get out of line on the job, do not strike--do not do much except work very hard, for very long hours, for very little pay. It seems like a dream!

Explosive conditions in China

Of course, the dream will not last. As capitalist exploitation increases throughout China, so do strikes, peasant protests, and attacks on bosses. A few weeks ago, for example, the New York Times ran an article headlined, "Capitalist-Style Layoffs Ignite Sabotage and Strikes in China." The home of a Chinese bank director, a "reformer," had been firebombed after he had fired numerous workers. In another case, a factory boss known for "Western-style management" had been run over by a truck, and workers at the plant rejected the government's proposal to honor him as a "martyr" for reform.

The article cited spreading wildcat strikes, sabotage, and smashing of machinery across China. The Times reporter noted that these "incidents suggest that opposition to fundamental changes is increasingly coming not only from octogenarian Communist hard-liners but also from many ordinary blue-collar workers."

Ignore the correspondent's imaginary bloc between angry workers and senile Stalinists. The resistance reported in the article is real, however. Workers in China will conduct more fights like these, and they will eventually link up with dissatisfied peasants and also win support from young people attracted to the working class as the force that can revitalize society. That will be the real bloc. It will be forged through enormous class battles, and as that happens growing numbers of fighters will be open to the ideas of the communist movement.

Preparing for what is coming in Asia

In preparing for what is coming in Asia, we should remember that there is a big difference between the position of United States imperialism in that part of the world and its position in Europe. In the wake of the U.S. victory in World War II, U.S. imperialism engineered the NATO alliance as the codification of its permanent European presence. Ever since the war, Washington has been the dominant "European" power.

As interimperialist conflict and class struggles intensify across capitalist Europe, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe, those battles take place with the reality of the U.S.-dominated NATO existing cheek and jowl with the European Community and various military alliances among the European ruling classes themselves. According to the interests of each national ruling class, there will be both shifting alliances with Washington and growing conflicts with it, as the U.S. rulers tenaciously hold on to their military foothold in Europe as part of maintaining their dominance in the world imperialist system.

In Asia, on the other hand, Washington still has to bring its power to bear under conditions more comparable to the 1920s and 1930s. U.S. forces intervene militarily in the region, of course, and some 100,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Japan, Korea, and aboard warships afloat in the Pacific. But U.S. imperialism is not integrated as the dominant force in any Asian military alliance with other powers. That makes U.S. armed intervention in Asia less "legitimate" and thus more explosive, and the reactions to such aggression across the region will be explosive as well.

The United States ruling class is armed to the teeth and will not back off being the world's top cop--with the world's mightiest conventional and strategic nuclear arsenal in its holster. Washington is and will remain both an Atlantic and a Pacific power, and it will react to defend U.S. capitalist interests wherever, and by whomever, those interests are endangered. But it will pay the consequences.

http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6418/641870.html

Hong Kong: some background

Useful 1997 article from The Militant:

Hong Kong Is China! Millions celebrate end of British colonial rule  

BY BRIAN TAYLOR

For weeks, hundreds of millions of people across China - at the beginning of the school day, on the radio, through the television set, and in the workplace - have counted down the days to July 1. That is the day Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty after more than 150 years of British colonial rule.

"Recovering Hong Kong is a time for our nation to rejoice," said Wang Xiuxhen, a 60-year-old Shanghai resident. "Chinese people will be ruled by Chinese people, not foreigners... We can't allow colonialism anymore."

"Everyone I know cares about it because it's a moment in history when China can be proud" for "taking back something that was forcefully stolen from us," remarked Wang Zhining, a student in China.

Lin Ruimin, a 45-year-old electrician in Shanghai said, "Now we can go see Hong Kong. I want to go. I certainly want my children to go. After July 1 it will be much easier to go."

Even businesses people in Hong Kong are awaiting the transition. Ong Chin Huat, the society editor for Hong Kong Tatler magazine said, "Everyone I know is doing a party of some sort."

Hong Kong is a small island-city of 6.3 million people. At the end of June its last British governor, Christopher Patten, will be leaving for good. Ten thousand Chinese troops will move into Hong Kong to secure the transition. The region is to be granted a high degree of autonomy, but with Beijing in charge of defense and foreign affairs. Tung Chee-hwa, from one of Hong Kong's richest shipping families, is slated to head the Hong Kong government for the next five years.

British prime minister Anthony Blair and U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, both of whom will be in Hong Kong June 30, say they will boycott the midnight swearing in ceremony for the new government.

Meanwhile, U.S. president William Clinton's decision to renew China's "most-favored nation" (MFN) trade status - essentially normal trade relations - sparked another round in what has become an annual debate about what approach to take to Beijing.

In 1949, Chinese workers and peasants overthrew the imperialist-backed regime of Chiang Kai-shek, wrested control from the landlords and capitalists, and opened the door to the establishment of a workers state in the world's most populous country. The U.S. rulers are divided on how to best go about penetrating the Chinese market and attempting to restore capitalist domination.

House minority leader Richard Gephardt, a Democrat from Missouri, was in the forefront of opposing Clinton's proposal. He said U.S. policy under the Clinton administration has been "far too weak when it comes to China." He and others argue for a harsher stance toward Beijing, on the pretext of human rights concerns.

In a 259-173 vote, the House of Representatives turned down a motion to not grant Beijing the MFN status on June 24. The White House had pushed for this vote to take place before the Hong Kong transition.

At the same time, Washington has stepped up its propaganda depicting China as a military threat. There are 100,000 U.S. troops currently stationed in Asia, and now Washington is pushing Tokyo to join in a project called the Theater Missile Defense Project (TMD). This would be a joint U.S./Japanese government operation to develop an anti-missile system using spy satellites, advanced land or sea-based anti-missile systems, and an array of other arms upgrades, capable of being deployed to limited areas or "theaters."

Tokyo has been hesitant to sign on, however. The project would be considered a provocation by Beijing, which is a nuclear power, and by Pyongyang.

Meanwhile, French companies recently closed a $2 billion deal with the Chinese government for 30 Airbus planes. Paris and Beijing signed a joint declaration shortly after stating, "The time has come for France and China to [build] a long- term global partnership aimed at moving French-Chinese relations to a new phase of development."

British capitalists are looking to remain in Hong Kong. Among them is Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd. This 165-year- old company has maintained a low profile in recent months, as its roots lie in the British empire's military forcing of illegal opium sales into China. The Opium Wars - two trade wars in the mid-1800s launched in the interests of British capital - forced the legalization of opium in China, through the military defeat of China and seizure of the territory known as Hong Kong from the Chinese regime.

With the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese colony of Macao following suit in 1999, the next question posed is when Beijing will set a date for reunification with Taiwan.

A large island province off the coast of mainland China, Taiwan was seized by the forces of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, as they fled the victorious Chinese revolution.  
 

http://www.themilitant.com/1997/6125/6125_1.html

Democrats: anti-working class to the core

The excerpt below is from a 2004 election postmortem article by Argiris Malapanis in The Militant: "Middle class contempt for workers fuels liberal panic over election results."

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.... Working people are deeply fearful of what the future has in store for them, and rightly so. They know they are working longer and harder and earning less than they did 10 years ago. The problem is that they have never lived through the kind of depression conditions that are developing in the world. Most think they'll be better off managing their own savings than trusting the government to give them a pension some time in the future. And on the second part of that they are correct.

Failure of liberalism

This reaction has a lot to do with the failure of liberalism, which uses demagogy to convince working people they are better off with the Democratic Party.

The majority of working people know what happened during the eight years of the Clinton administration. Health care grew more expensive. The number of people without any medical coverage was 40 million by the end of Clinton's second term, 2 million more than when he took office. And that happened during the longest post-World War II upturn of the business cycle. Even though the number of the uninsured increased to 45 million and medical costs continued to rise under Bush's watch, Kerry's promises to improve health care by pointing to the Clinton legacy rang hollow.

Above all, it was Clinton's Democratic administration that took the first real step toward gutting the social wage, something that even Ronald Reagan wouldn't touch in the 1980s: it carried out Clinton's campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it."

Leading the bipartisan assault against half a century of social gains by working people, in 1996 Clinton signed the "welfare reform" bill adopted by Congress. The legislation eliminated federally guaranteed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and cut off food stamps and Medicaid to many working people. In doing so, Clinton opened the battle by the ruling class to take back concessions codified in the Social Security Act, which was pushed through Congress in 1935 under the pressure of rising labor struggles.

AFDC meant that aid would be given as a right to families with dependent children, that is, to families without parents who were breadwinners. Organizations of widows of miners who had died on the job because of lack of safety resulting from the bosses' profit drive were among those who demanded it. AFDC also came to cover the families of soldiers who went to war and were killed or came back maimed and unable to work.

Working people won the concessions included in the Social Security Act—which encompassed guaranteed pension, disability, and unemployment benefit floors, as well as AFDC—through hard-fought battles in the 1930s. In the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, these gains were consolidated and extended with the addition of Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and cost-of-living protections. Workers fought for such minimal lifetime security to keep their class from being torn apart by the ravages of capitalism. The working class struggled to entrench these measures as universal social rights, with automatic funding not reviewed in annual budgets, and without any degrading "means testing." Far from being the "dole," these entitlements represent a small part of the social wealth that workers and farmers produce through their labor. These benefits are a social wage that, together with the hourly wages paid directly by employers, make up the basic living standards of working people. Very broad sections of the middle classes depend on them as well.

The late senator Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat who voted against the 1996 bill, warned of its consequences at the time of its passage. The law was "the first step in dismantling the social contract that has been in place in the United States since at least the 1930s," Moynihan said. "Do not doubt that Social Security itself, which is to say insured retired benefits, will be next."

This step by the Clinton administration undermined working-class solidarity by reinforcing the dog-eat-dog reality of capitalism and the notion that those without may be taken care of by charity.

Republicans now play on this record of liberalism. Bush is poised to build on the Clinton legacy by pushing for "reform" of Social Security pensions....

Resentment for ‘cognitive elite’ 

The liberal panic over the outcome of November 2 also showed the utter contempt for the working class by middle-class liberals.

An article in the November 4 New York Times was one of many shedding light on the attitudes of many liberals toward the results of the election. It was titled, “Blue City (Disconsolate, Even) Bewildered by a Red America.” The headline was referring to the colors used to designate areas where the Democrats won (blue), and those where the Republicans prevailed (red). The reporter interviewed New Yorkers he ran into at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, mostly professionals or business people.

“I am saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country—the heartland,” Zito Joseph, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist, told the Times. “This kind of redneck shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country.”

His fellow dog walker Roberta Kimmel Cohn chimed in that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Bush’s statements as other Americans might be. “New Yorkers are savvy,” she said. “We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say.”

“Do you know how I described New York to my European friends?” Beverly Camhe, a film producer, told the Times. “New York is an island off the coast of Europe.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, liberals and social democrats had similar reactions, showing a hardening of bourgeois anti-Americanism after the U.S. elections. The British tabloid Daily Mirror, for example, ran a photo of Bush on the entire front page of its November 4 issue with the headline, “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”

“Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states,” said novelist Jane Smiley, in a post-election essay. “The history of the last four years shows that red state types…prefer to be ignorant…. They are virtually unteachable.”

The middle-class left had a similar stance. “Bush won the election by triumphing in areas in the South where racism, political reaction and the legacy of slavery are the strongest,” said an article in the November 11 issue of Workers World, the weekly newspaper of the Workers World Party. This is a Stalinist group that ran its own feeble presidential campaign, gaining ballot status for its candidates in three states (Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington State). Bush “won the states in the Southwest and Great Plains area dominated by mine owners, millionaire land owners, agribusiness, cattle barons and oil monopolies,” the article said. “But in the large and middle-sized cities…in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast—Bush’s reactionary agenda was rejected across the board.”

Most professionals, Hollywood entertainers and producers, newspaper columnists, novelists and other writers, television newscasters, and university professors in the United States today are liberals. These are among the social layers that Kerry appealed to. They include former radicals who three or four decades ago were Maoists, or belonged to the Weather Underground or other groups on the “left.” Many of these people today live in apartment buildings or housing complexes with security guards. As capitalism’s economic crisis marches on, they become more fearful of losing their privileges and their contempt for workers increases. This “Bell Curve” bias of aging radicals and middle-class liberals is resented more and more by working people.

The Bell Curve is a book by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein that was released in 1994. Its publication caused a scandal in the bourgeoisie. The reason for the scandal? In the debate around the book, both supporters and critics, liberals and conservatives alike, were forced to acknowledge that capitalist society necessitates maintaining a class hierarchy—which is a product of social relations, not a biological fact—that permanently denies equality to the majority of human beings, those who work for living.

The book’s purpose was to provide a rationalization for better-off layers of professionals and the middle class—those the authors call “the cognitive elite”—as to why they deserve to be richer and more comfortable than the great majority of humanity; it’s because they are supposedly smarter. It was aimed at middle-class liberals, in particular. “Quit denying it!” was the message of the authors. “You deserve to be better off. It’s necessary, especially in this computerized and hi-tech world we’re living in.”

The book was also a warning sign that even if layers of workers would be taken in by such ideological rationalizations for a while, deepening social polarization and impoverishment was leading to inevitable class battles. Ultimately The Bell Curve sounded the trumpet of these coming class confrontations, of a future civil war. It was written to give courage to those who are determined to defend their better living standards against those who produce all the wealth, along with nature—the toiling masses of humanity.

It is these attitudes of the “cognitive elite” that a majority of working people resent. Most workers do get the signals right. They know what’s being said when Kerry implies he is smarter than Bush....

http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6843/684302.html

Is there an industrial proletariat in the U.S. today?

Are industrial workers becoming irrelevant?

(Reply to a Reader column)
 
BY MAURICE WILLIAMS  

Is it true that the working class in Europe and the United States is getting smaller, as bourgeois economists and professors often claim? What's the difference between "productive" and "unproductive" workers? asks Ernesto Oleinik from Stockholm in a letter to the editor that appeared in the October 26 Militant. "Are only those workers that produce surplus value 'productive'?"

The questions are welcome.

The working class is made up of those of us who are basically propertyless and who sell our labor power to a boss in exchange for wages—an income that on average equals our means of subsistence. In the United States, Sweden, and other imperialist countries the working class is the overwhelming majority of the population—from meat packers to farm laborers to casino workers (like the 10,000 who are on strike today in Atlantic City, New Jersey).

In contrast, the capitalist class is the tiny handful of billionaire families who own the factories, mines, most of the land, and other means of production. The middle classes are made up mostly of professionals and small and medium businesspeople. Working farmers are small property owners, but are exploited producers and an ally of workers.

Despite the self-serving "theories" of bourgeois "experts," it's not true that the working class is dwindling. To the contrary, as Jack Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, explains in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, since World War II there has been "a massive increase in the size of the American working class, both in absolute terms and in relation to other classes." Our ranks continue to be swelled by the workings of capitalism and imperialism, which drive farmers off the land—especially in semicolonial countries—and into the cities. This process has fueled immigration into all the imperialist countries.

"Productive" is not a scientific term. Most workers, not just factory workers, have socially useful jobs. The one truly unproductive class is the bourgeoisie.

Industrial workers include factory workers, miners, transportation workers, and others involved in industrial production. Through our labor, we add value to raw materials and unfinished goods. The capitalist pays us a portion of that value in wages. The rest of the wealth that we produce is surplus value—which the boss pockets as profit, as Karl Marx, one of the founders of scientific socialism, explains in Wage Labor and Capital. Workers not directly involved in production receive wages, paid by the capitalist from the pool of surplus value produced by our class.

Industrial workers have always been a minority of the working class. In the imperialist countries, the number of service and clerical workers has sharply increased since World War II, and the relative size of the industrial working class has declined. At the end of the 1960s almost 29 percent of U.S. workers had factory jobs; today, 18 percent.

Since 1969, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has fallen by 2 million—in large part because of speedup and automation. But the overall number of workers in the labor force has increased by 46 million. According to a September report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. labor force is 147.5 million—one of the largest working classes in the world.

The labor power in industries producing raw materials and manufacturing semifinished products or goods ready for the market—as well as in transportation, construction, and agriculture—is the main source of surplus value. Without these industries the entire economy stops, Barnes notes. In fact, the labor power of industrial workers and the surplus value we create is the source of the international power of the U.S. economy, the source of the American capitalists' exports of goods and capital.

This is why "the industrial workers who are a minority of the American working class, have such fundamental strength, such potential power" well beyond their relative numerical size, Barnes explains. "This also demonstrates the fakery of numerous academic theories about the 'post-industrial society' and the 'service-based economy.'" These "theories" that industrial workers and even the working class are disappearing—and thus becoming irrelevant—are simply rationalizations for accepting the capitalist status quo. And for refusing to join workers on the production line who are resisting the bosses' offensive and are offering hope for humanity in doing so.

Because industrial workers are the source of most of the rulers' surplus value, they are "the ultimate enemy that the rulers must defeat if the entire economic and social crisis of their system is to be turned around," Barnes points out. Today, one aspect of the bosses' assault is their use of bankruptcies to undermine the unions and squeeze more out of the hides of workers at coal mines, the largest U.S. airlines, and other industries.

Nonetheless, the social character of the industrial workplace, the large concentration of workers, and the extremely high division of labor are factors that give workers in industry an awareness of their collective power. Union-organizing battles like the one by the Co-Op miners in Utah, the farm workers' fight for a union contract in North Carolina, and others are examples of the resistance bubbling throughout the country. To reverse their declining profit rates, the rulers will have to take on and defeat the industrial workers. The decisive battles, however, lie ahead.  
 
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6842/684236.html