Baca PDF (OCR): News & Letters - Vol. 45 No. 8 October 2000

Vol. 45 OCTOBER 2000 missing person's report. A week later, a thousand students demonstrated outside the police, station, as did a

To take back our labor

by Gene Ford

Capitalist labor is forced labor, sweated labor, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The capitalists try to bury labor under the weight of the production process while extracting more and more profit. They say god took the seventh day to rest after six days of creating humanity and nature. The capitalists violate their own law, that labor needs rest in order to be creative.

In reality the capitalist law is wealth and power over labor. For example, 12 million Blacks built South African wealth under the whip of three million whites. The whites argued that they created this great nation of prosperity through their intellect and European superiority while dominating the majority Black population through their advanced ability to crush the mind and spirit of the Black laboring masses.

The white masters' attitude in South Africa under apartheid is an attitude which persists worldwide in relationship to labor. The boss gives the order to fix the machine or put the particular formula into practice, that is, "make it work." Once the job is done and prosperity is evident, the boss will claim the credit.

A Filipino co-worker in the plant where I work told me he spent eight years in South Africa training Black workers to rewind motors and repair machinery in the factories. He became a member of the African National Congress because of his kinship to the Black workers in their struggle.

He said there might be 100 workers in the plant and only one white to oversee them. That overseer would

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Black World

Mumia Abu-Jamal on a move!

Editor's note: This month I turn "Black World" over to the following taped statement by Pennsylvania Death Row prisoner and revolutionary Mumia AbuJamal to the Aug. 26 "Redeem the Dream" march against police brutality and racial profiling in Washington, D.C. The march commemorated the 37th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and the famous "I Have a Dream" speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. The latest developments in Mumia's ongoing legal struggle to get a new trial also make his remarks timely. The U.S. District Court judge now considering Mumia's appeal for a new trial, Judge William H. Yohn, has recently taken the unprecedented action of dismissing the amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs supporting Mumia's appeal. In his decision Judge Yohn acknowledged the "world-wide interest" in the case that he "feared" would inundate the court with an avalanche of appeals for a new trial for Mumia, pointing out what reasonable people have already recognized, namely, the overt racist injustice of these United States and its so-called "justice" system when it comes to Black life. For more information contact Pam Africa, International Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, PO Box 19709, Philadelphia, PA 19143; or [email protected]; www.mumia.org.

—Lou Turner

On a move! Long live John Africa! Thanks for your kind invitation for my participation in "Redeem the Dream 2000." I think it's more than appropriate that I participate, for it is perhaps the only voice you'll hear from the American gulag. There are over two million men, women, and children in prisons and jails across America. Think of it: two million! Did you know that there are over 400,000 more prisoners in the U.S. than there are in China? What is this saying about America? Now what does this have to do with "Redeem the Dream"? I'll tell you. They can't seriously discuss redeeming the dream without taking account of the dreamers. And when you examine the life of Black America today, what do you see? A dream or a nightmare? And if you do see a nightmare, how can you not ask, How? Why?

Let's look back briefly at the thoughts of the late

Presidential race in shadow of new revolts against capitalism

Republican Texas Governor George W. Bush's stopover in Chicago Sept. 19 to accept the political endorsement of Chicago's reactionary Fraternal Order of Police, after appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show, expressed in no uncertain terms the violent contradictions at the heart of this year's presidential race to replace Bill Clinton.

Bush's Texas death machine continues unabated to execute Black men, for which he gains the political support of corrupt big city police forces who daily carry out their brutal street justice in Black and Latino communities. All the while he gets to present a chatty smiling face to American middleclass voters willing to believe that there really is something "compassionate" about his anti-Black, anti-labor, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-youth political agenda.

INSULTING PARTY CONVENTIONS

The insulting hypocrisy of the Republican convention at the end of the summer in Philadelphia, whose opening featured more Black entertainers onstage than there were in the entire delegate body, continues. Attempting to project a "new Republican" sensitivity to the plight of Black America, the GOP, in addition to Black entertainment, enlisted that Black professional corporate shill, Colin Powell, to persuade the American people that the viciously racist GOP repented its past sins and was now embarked on a "truly" new redeeming course of "compassionate conservatism."

by Andy Phillips

The truth disclosed itself in the delegates' cool response to Powell's plea for ethnic inclusiveness. And whereas in his acceptance speech Bush had the gall to refer to a Black juvenile prisoner in his Texas prison who had little to hope for in life, the rest of his message reassured those who might have been temporarily confused that the old GOP remained firmly in control and would go to any length to win the White House. He promised them a laundry list of anything and everything to cure all social and economic ills and to provide the "good

Los Angeles transit workers on strike picket line. life" for all.

In Los Angeles, the Democrats followed suit, and while they were not as transparently vulgar in their hypocrisy as were the Republicans, Al Gore likewise submitted a list of proposals to preserve current "economic prosperity" and reform existing ills. The problems that both Gore and Bush enumerated included Social Secui% Medicare, education,

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Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, freedom fighter I

News and Letters mourns the death of Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, 35, Acehnese freedom fighter and human rights activist, who was disappeared in Medan, Indonesia, Aug. 5. His mutilated body was found along with four others about 40 miles away on Sept. 3 and could not be identified for several days.

Jafar lived in New York for the past three years, where he headed the International Forum for Aceh, working tirelessly to end government repression in his home province. He supported and advised the mass movement of students, women, farmers, and the whole population of Aceh that burst into protest against the Indonesian military's torture and killing of dissidents after the dictator Suharto was forced out of power two years ago. (See stories in N&L, December. 1999, January-February,

March and June 2000, all written with Jafar's generous assistance.)

Jafar recently helped found the first newspaper ever in the Acehnese language, Su Acheh. He returned to the Aceh area for a few months in June, in spite of death threats that came to him here in New York, in order to set up offices for the newspaper and for a new organization, Support Committee for Human Right in Acheh, and to investigate the complicity of Mobil Oil in government repression. A man of peace, he was a major voice attempting to unify the Acehnese freedom movements, including the guerrilla movement, GAM, whose violence he opposed.

Jafar was kidnapped in the third largest city in Indonesia on a busy street in the middle of the day. He was well-known in the international human rights community, and a massive campaign of calling, writing and emailing the Indonesian and U.S. governments began as soon as he disappeared. Demonstrations demanding he be found were held in New York and Washington. But the Indonesian military and police refused to search for him undoubtedly because he was kidnapped by one of them or a paramilitary group they sanction. At first the police refused even to take a

group of 400 lawyers. Then "investigators" came and harassed his friends and co-workers, some of whom have now received death threats as well.

ON THE INSIDE

Raised in what he described as a traditional rural Acehnese family and schooled in Islamic studies, Jafar

became a prominent human rights lawyer in Indonesia. He left the country four years ago due to intimidation and threats by the military. At the time of his murder, he was a graduate student in political science at the New School University and a permanent resident of the U.S.

Large groups of people flocked to his family's home near Lhokseumawe for his funeral Sept. 8. The International Forum for Aceh (IFA) will hold a memorial meeting for him in October.

Aceh is in northwest Indonesia, on the tip of Sumatra. After suffering for years under martial law—at least 5,000 people were killed during the 1990s—and from economic exploitation by the central government, the people want the military out and want a referendum to determine whether they will become independent. The demand for a referendum spread throughout the province after East Timor won independence via a referendum conducted by the U.N. last year. As the civil movements gained strength, however, killing and torture'intensified—more than 400 people have been killed so far this year, more than 100 disappeared, and thousands have been driven from their homes. The only Acehnese member of the Indonesian congress was (Continued on page 9)

NGOs: a new politics of organization? Women Worldwide

by Maya Jhansi

This past year has seen a resurgence of the spirit of anti-capitalist defiance. Whether we look at youth fighting against sweatshop labor, or anti-police brutality struggles, or the environmental justice movement, it's clear that women from the lowest and deepest sectors of society are at the front lines

of today's freedom movement.

There is a corresponding rethinking going on in feminist theory as

Woman as Reason

well, a growing sense of the need to reconnect theory to the creative struggles of women at the grassroots levels. I have seen lots of critiques of the way feminism has become "professionalized" and quiescent, lb me, the important point here is not "professionalization" per se, but the question of what exactly happened to the revolutionary potential of the movement that erupted out of and against the New Left in the late 1960s and 1970s when women demanded a total transformation of human relations, i.e., a revolution that would create a totally new woman, man, a new way of loving and living.

To Raya Dunayevskaya, this showed the philosophic depth of the Women's Liberation Movement, especially in the call for non-elitist, decentralized organization. Women demanded a transformation in human relations, not just after the revolution, but in the very organization that would help make the revolution. Now, 30 years later, a new form of organizing dominates the women's movement: Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). We have to at least ask each other why this is.

Actors on strike

Chicago—The strike only involves commercial actors in the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). There are four major union demands we are fighting for. Number one is "pay for play." This means that every time a commercial is aired, the actor is paid. The contract always had this, but the ad agencies want to leave it out of the new contract and pay us a flat fee instead. A commercial can air forever and ever without the actor getting any residuals.

The second point involves the internet. Right now, there are no guidelines for internet advertising that considers actors. Currently actors are not paid for visuals and voice-overs.

Number three is the problem with overexposure of an actor. It's like the man who plays Mr. Whipple in the toilet paper commercials. You know his face, and he will be forever known for that product. That means he can't be associated with other products, and he virtually can't work again. We don't want the agencies to have that control. For example, they shouldn't be allowed to demand an actor do four commercials. That could ruin the career of an actor.

The final demand deals with cable. In the pre-existing contract, there was no provision for pay-per-play for cable, but now we want it. This became an issue with the popularity of cable.

I've never been involved in television or advertising, or any camera work. I'm more of a stage performer. My father is in an electrical union in Milwaukee, but I didn't think much about union benefits until now. When this fight came up, I thought the demands were legitimate ones. An actor already in the union told me about the 80-hour program, and I got involved. People who are not union members can earn a union card by working 80 hours on strike-related projects in the union offices.

The union's actions consist of breaking up commercial shoots and going to casting agencies to prevent actors from crossing the line. Union and nonunion actors can work with companies that were never union affiliated. The actors who cross the lines feel that they are just working their way up and establishing a presence on camera, but they are essentially hurting themselves for the future.

We have had some success shutting down scab work. For every five actors who walk into the agencies, we can manage to talk to one actor about what the strike is about. The most success we have had is when everyone in the union comes out for a scab shoot. A lot of bonding happens there. For instance, there was a commercial shoot for a diet pill. The advertiser rented a large part of the Field Museum/Adler Planetarium campus including a grassy knoll and a tunnel. Many SAG/AFTRA members and the 80-hour people were there. We had large mirrors to spoil the lighting. Children of union members brought drums to interrupt audio recording. We managed to back the crew into an area under a bridge, so they had to put up black curtains. We had a big effect here because we prolonged the process of taping by five hours or so, and they probably had to do voice-over for taping the sound.

SAG/AFTRA members have turned out at rallies for other strikes like the janitors and the 5-Star Laundry workers. We get help too.

A lower level bargaining committee met with the advertisers on Sept. 13, and then the heads met on the 18th. This was the first time they met since June when the advertisers walked out of the first bargaining meeting since the strike began May 1.

One particular essay I read this summer offers some interesting insights. It is entitled, "The NGOization of Feminism: Institutionalization and Institution Building with the German Women's Movement" by Sabine Long (in Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in an International Polities (1997), eds Joan Scott, Cora Kaplan, Debra Keates). In this essay, Long

—"80-hour" member

critically examines the women's movement in Germany after 1989. "The creation," she writes, "of a more 'women-friendly' civil society was one of the myths associated

with the peaceful revolution of 1989 in East Germany." However, noting that not much improvement was made in women's lives or women's mobilization after 1989, Long focuses on the new "politics of organization," that emerged, writing, "Ultimately it seems as though sisterhood has converged in what I call the establishment of NGOs instead of political movements."

Long is very critical of the NGO form of organizing, arguing that on the whole NGOs channel women's efforts into small-scale, single-issue and predominantly pragmatic and state-oriented directions. Long connects this to the influence of postmodernism on the movement. "NGOization entails," she argues, "a shift away from experience-oriented movement politics toward goal and intervention-oriented strategies....In that sense it might be also interpreted as a reply and a statement about the 'grounding of feminist politics once the existence of women as women is put into ques^ tion.'"

It cannot be denied that many NGOs do indispensable work. While some NGOs are the right arm of global capital, others are clearly on the side of the forces of revolt. In Malaysia, for example, only NGOs have worked with women from the deepest layers—women lost in the informal sector of the workforce. Still, I think Long has raised some important critiques.

Most intriguing is Long's suggestion that the NGOization of feminism stems from the focus on "civil society." She herself does not raise the issue of whether the focus on "civil society" is a marker of the Left's abdication of Marxism; in fact, she calls state-capitalist societies state socialist, relegating socialism to the dustbin of history.

I think there is an objective reason why the focus on "civil society" has become so popular. And I think it's related to postmodernism, too. Marx gives us an insight in "On the Jewish Question." He writes: "None of these so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, as man separated from life in the community and withdrawn into himself, into his private interest and his private arbitrary will. These rights are far from conceiving man as a species-being. They see, rather, the life of the species itself, society, as a frame external to individuals, as a limitation of their original independence."

In civil society under capitalism, freedom is not based on the linking of human beings, but on their separation. The anti-humanism of postmodernism likewise negates the social bonds of humanity. When the Left, including the feminist Left, settles for "civil society" as a replacement for a real alternative to capitalism, it fails to address people's desire to end alienation, to have an "individualism that lets nothing interfere with its universalism."

The creative struggles of women and youth today demand more imagination on our parts. They demand a reconception of the socialist idea. Without such an idea, the politics of organizing will remain circumscribed by the given.

by Mary Jo Grey

Women from more than 157 countries are expected to participate in the World March of Women in New York City, Oct. 17. The demonstrators are demanding an end to poverty and violence against women throughout the world.

A report released in August by the French Centre of Population and Development revealed that women throughout Africa continue to die at alarming rates because of unsafe abortions. Among the 54 African countries, 26 allow abortion only to save the life of the mother and 23 only if the health of the mother is at risk. Lack of government support and aid for women seeking abortions has perpetuated both unskilled practitioners and unsanitary conditions.

More than 15,000 Brazilian women demonstrated in Brasilia, Aug. 10, protesting against poverty and violence in rural areas. More than half of the rural women in Brazil begin working before age 10, being forced to quit school and work as long as 18 hours a day, many without pay. The demonstrators called themselves the March of the "Margaridas" in honor of Margarida Alves, a union activist from the northern state of Parajba who was assassinated 17 years ago on the order of powerful local ranchers.

As many as 250 mothers on welfare and their supporters from around the U.S. met in Los Angeles, Aug. 12, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, for a Mothers Convention on Welfare. Denouncing the positions on welfare of both the Democratic and Republican Parties, the women launched a campaign to impact Congressional reauthorization of the 1996 "welfare! reform" act which will take place in 2002. Their six demands include: no welfare time limits or sanctions; reduce poverty; decent wages; education and training, and no discrimination against immigrants.

—Information from Welfare Mothers Voice

Armed thugs from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan stormed the Independent Women's Organization office and women's protection center in Sulaymaniyah, in July, closing them down and confiscating their records. Twelve women, facing death at the hands of male relatives, and five children were thrown into the street. Women fighting against their action were arrested.

Put (^WW^fl®- back into the women's movement

, Rosa Luxemburg,

wbmens Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution FOREWORD BY ADRIENNE RICH K.I\.I [Junau\sk-i\<>

"The Women's Liberation Movement that burst onto the historic scene in the mid-1960s was like nothing seen before in all its many appearances throughout history. Its most unique feature was that, surprisingly, not only did it come out of the left but it was directed against it, and not from the right, but from within the left itself....Where until now women's oppression was directed against capitalism's patriarchal nature, this time the women directed the male-chauvinist epithet at the male left."

—Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, by Raya Dunayevskaya

Firestone avoids strike in Decatur FedEx turns on teenies

Decatur, III. —We thought we were going on strike over a new agreement, but Bridgestone/Firestone settled with our union, Steelworkers Local 713. I have mixed feelings about that. It's a great retirement contract, for about 200 people with 30 years or with a little time till they retire.

On the other hand, we didn't have any meetings for the bargaining committee to explain what they asked for, what, they got, and what they gave up until a week after they announced a settlement.

People are glad that the demand for mandatory overtime was taken off the table. In the past when we worked eight-hour shifts, if they needed somebody to work overtime, they would tell the lower seniority people to do it. When you work 12-hour shifts, it's hard. They would have to work on their days off too. Everyone, including the replacements from the '94-'95 strike, were willing to strike over this issue.

Firestone had to end rotating shifts, which was the biggest issue in the 1994 strike. At A. E. Staley, where the union got locked out for resisting, they had three days on and three days off, and rotated the start-up time. That kills you. Some of the older workers especially can't take it.

Still, no one wants to work 12 hours. As it is now, we get "half a year" off—in 14 days, we have seven off. In one week, we have four days off and the next week three days off, but not in a row.

Most curemen will tell you they don't like being curemen—mold changers, who are semiskilled, are paid more and the work is easier. A cureman is picking

Just-in-time care?

Oakland, Cal. —Under capitalism, where human relations are based on relations between things, workers are alienated by the process of labor itself. This is precisely the problem our current labor unions have been unable to overcome not just in activity but in thought. This inability is central to labor's frequent capitulation to the dictates of capital.

In the anti-WTO Seattle protests AFL-CIO leaders spewed out furious rhetoric about forcing capital to reform itself and become more democratically accountable. In practice, however, in the hospital where I work, it is official labor's own introduction of a labormanagement partnership that stifled strikes and rankand-file activity.

This partnership has allowed the company to reconfigure our labor and make it more undifferentiated and interchangeable as part of their ongoing restructuring in health care. As Marx originally put it, capital "is the expression of a specific social relation of labor....Capitalism reduces all concrete labor to its opposite— abstract undifferentiated labor."

Frontline nurses see their work as including feeding, cleaning, medicating, measuring vitals and, most important of all, comforting patients and making an overall assessment of their health. Management's measurement system called Patient Care Hours (PCH) is indifferent to the frontline nurse, or to the individual needs of the patient.

A patient's care needs become a resource drain, while a health worker's labor is a commodity whose first priority is to satisfy the hunger for profit from ever centralizing corporate capital. Opposition to this concept is precisely what animates frontline health workers in their support of recent mass strikes in the Bay Area. (See "Mass California hospital strike," August-September N&L and "Concrete vs. abstract labor in health care" by Htun Lin, October 1999 N&L.)

While patients are never sure when the nurse might have the time to answer their call, the health worker can never be sure if she might be sent home at the last minute because a manager calculates that a floor has reached its PCH limits. There is no room for contingencies which are part of the very nature of caring for sick people. The reverse situation often arises when a nurse is called to work at a moment's notice due to a sudden shortage of patient care time units on a floor.

A matrix system was originally promoted by nurses to have enough time to give each patient the unique level of care required. If nurses could make those judgments this might work, but the labor-management partnership has transformed it into a weapon, a club held over the worker's head, in order to hold down the cost of health care labor. We are all constantly doing the work of two to three people.

This issue over who controls a worker's labor power comes up over and over again. A Sutter health executive said workers in the recent strike are challenging management's prerogative to determine staffing: "Volume goes up, it goes down....if our census is really low, we might not need you to come to work..." Capital is adamant about the need for absolute flexibility to move anywhere and anytime it wants. Just-in-time production .doesn't necessarily have to go offshore.

In Seattle a lot of labor officials declared that the goal of the movement was to control capital's excesses and make capital accountable. The view from the workplace is that capital cannot be reformed or controlled to make it more accountable. It is already accountable to it own needs and this accountability is its very reason for existence. What we workers want is to regain control of our own daily labor and thereby abolish capital.

—Htun Lin

up and throwing tires for 12 hours. You see people getting so tired and disoriented that they start to walk down the wrong aisles while doing their job. It's the most difficult job, by far. You're constantly going around and putting tires into the curing presses.

All I know about the recall of bad tires for Ford SUVs is what Tread in the papers. I have heard stories that the bad tires were built in1994 to.1996 during the strike, or that they started coming out in 1992.

I don't understand how all those bad tires got through inspection. The check system is good if people can do their jobs. Management had me doing things in tire building that I didn't think were right, but using bad material should be caught by the check system.

I don't think the people interviewed in the Chicago Tribune in August know what happened to the tires involved in all those accidents, but I know what they were talking about got turned around. It's not unusual to poke holes in tires, not in cured tires, but in green tires before they're baked, and not poked all the way through.

Those men were disgruntled. Maybe they don't care if the plant is shut down, and I don't appreciate that, but I also want the truth to come out. I do believe if we had gone on strike and shut down the plant that way, it would have been for the right reasons, and I would have supported it.

Bridgestone/Firestone said they wanted a smaller workforce when we went on strike in 1994. There were 1,260 who went on strike then. Now there are 1,870. There's also more scrap and less tires coming out. Before '94, you had 25,000 tires built in a 24-hour period. Now we're seeing no more than 24,000 tires in 24 hours.

The problem is with the guys making decisions for the whole company. They're the same guys who in the struggle we had in 1994 caused people to lose their families, their house's, or their health.

—Mold changer

Earthgrains strike

Memphis, Tenn. —We're on strike at Earthgrains Bakery for ourselves and in support of workers at other plants producing Earthgrains and Colonial bread and buns. At the Memphis plant there are about 80 people out, from a little over 100. They have the bread lines shut down because they don't have enough people in there to run them.

About half the 65 or so bakeries in the U.S. are shut down, including plants in Oklahoma, California, Illinois, Kentucky and Texas. If the company isn't going to listen, we'll get strength from our other bakeries and start shutting them down one by one.

They're trying to bust the union. They recently bought several non-union bakeries and agreed to make them unionized (BCTGM), but it's been a couple of years and they're still not up to the union pay scales. At the Mobile, Ala. plant they're not even getting paid for overtime after eight hours, but only after 40 hours a week or 12 hours in a day.

They're also making the workers at Mobile co-pay for their health insurance. If you get a 30 cents an hour raise and you've got to pay $25 a week for your insurance, you're still losing. We're afraid it could happen here if we let it happen there.

It's a real high stress level job, because it's a continuous process. You can't stop in the middle because the dough starts rising and you've got to get it in the oven. If something breaks down we've really got to hustle to get it back on track. If the oven goes down for more than five minutes, the product's burnt up. The bread is coming at 120 loaves a minute, but they don't put safety guards on machines until someone gets hurt.

Earthgrains had $2 billion in sales, and their statement that was sent out to all the employees said they had "record-breaking sales last year." If they're doing good, we're the ones that are doing it for them, and we ought to get paid what we're worth.

Every year, during negotiations, they put out their final offer and say take it or leave it. But this year, we said, here's our final offer. You take it or leave it.

—Black and white striking workers

Editor's note: As we go to press, the BCTGM has declared victory. Ft. Payne, Ala. workers ratified a three-year contract that the union says protects jobs and acknowledges the right to honor picket lines, limits mandatory overtime and restores medical and dental insurance. Mobile workers got a separate first contract. The attack on the Alabama workers was, the spark for the solidarity strikes at Earthgrains plants nationwide, beginnings in Memphis.

Memphis, Tenn. —White-collar "information technology" workers at FedEx had a rude awakening in August. Some even started talking union, widely believed to be job suicide at rabidly anti-union FedEx.

Rob Carter, the top executive in the Information Technology Division, announced that all ITD employees—except, of course, executives and directors— would be "assessed" for their "contribution" to the company. Then 210 people were escorted off the premises.

Suddenly, the naive trust many employees had in FedEx and its vaunted "no layoffs" policy was shattered. An intranet forum that management had set up as a way to let workers blow off steam—instead of organizing—seethed with outrage. Some wrote that they had "rallied behind the company" when the pilots' union was fighting for a decent contract, but had now become "disaffected."

The messages on the forum were periodically erased when they started going in dangerous directions, such as when "joe hill" said: "This should be a lesson to all of those people who were fooled into fattening F. Smith's wallet by volunteering free labor as a way to defeat the pilots' union. You thought the company would repay your loyalty with loyalty, but now you are seeing the truth....most IT people...are brainwashed into thinking that they can trust management and so don't need a union. Think again!"

After the firings, we survivors were made to watch a videotape of Rob Carter say there were no plans to do this again—then he gave so many qualifications that we could only assume that it will happen again, soon. If we don't wake up and organize, we will go like lambs to the slaughter. —Still on the island, this week

(Continued from page 1)

attempt to force the workers to do the work a certain way, but when my Filipino comrade asked the white boss how do you repair this machine or carry out this form of work, the white boss had no idea how to do the job himself. He was just there to intimidate and force labor out of the workers.

Man/woman is not an animal, a donkey, a mule on which you throw the harness, tying him/her to the plow, cracking the whip, while in the end the man says he plowed the field, not the dumb animal.

Under capitalism the laborer is forced to labor like a dumb animal. The mind is separated from the hand, a division of labor which is an unnatural act. Men and women are determined to become fully human through rebellion. To take back one's labor—to sit down, to walk out, to go on strike—is an act of rebellion.

Marx's statement in Volume 3 of Capital, "Human power is its own end," is the clearest expression of taking back one's labor power. To take back the right to one's own labor, to control your labor power, is a movement of self. When our workday begins and ends, what kind of labor does man do, and "what kind of thought" is needed is reflected in the act. So when workers shake the cobwebs from our minds to take back our labor, human power will be our identity, and its own end will be our freedom to control our labor, which is our very being.

Black, white and brown labor is at a crossroads, divided more deeply than ever along race and class lines. The negative seems to outweigh the positive in relationship to a new labor movement within this country, even though strikes, pockets of rebellion, break out all over the country in relationship to fighting for wages, working conditions and benefits. The self-determination of labor is in eonstant revolt.

That rebellion in many cases has been met by union organizing or it has been controlled by already existing unions, while the real union is the workers themselves, who demand that their contract reflect their right to have a voice in the workplace. Workers' control of production becomes a kernel within any true labor union movement. Those who do the work on a daily basis should control production. The true concept of union is organized labor in thought and action that reflects a New Humanism, a break from capitalism.

I have worked all my life, from the textile industry of Alabama in the 1970s, to the Los Angeles service industry, to presently working in the hothouse industry of laundry, working to repair the monster machines of production. The only semi-comfort a worker has is through the "union" with fellow workers who feel that same frustration of capitalism's inhumanity, whether they call it capitalism or not.

This inhumanity feeds revolt as a "negation" which plants seeds for future new human relationships. A notion is planted in the mind.

The self-organization at the point of production is the greatest contradiction of capitalism. The capitalists' attempt to destroy this union can be seen through the demand for greater production and more, bigger and quicker machines and robots to eliminate workers. They will spend $500,000 on a new machine because it will eliminate a handful of workers and speed up production. They call this progress or a good investment.

The machine will pay for itself in a few years, but without the human being, the value of what is being produced is cut tenfold. Their attempt to discipline labor is creating capitalist gravediggers on the streets among the unemployed and the workers in the factories who look for a new day on the horizon when they control when their day begins and when it ends.

From the Writings of Ray a Dunayevskaya MARXIST-HUMANIST ARCHIVES

Editor's note

new century of anti-capitalist youth revolt opens A with the publication of a new edition of Marxism and Freedom, from 177b until Today by Ray a Dunayevskaya. Its today-ness is remarkable.

When it was first published in 1957. Marxism and Freedom marked a new direction tor liberalory movements seeking a genuine and independent socialism. Since then it has been published in total or in part in six English editions and in French. Spanish, Persian, and most recently Chinese.

The author's introduction to the first. 1957, printing presents a view of the book's original contribution to revolutionary social transformation. To introduce readers new to this contemporary classic and reacquaint those familiar with it, we publish it here, and invite you get a copy. A free subscription or renewal to News & Letter* comes with it. News and Letters Committees invites you also to join us for l; all classes that will discuss the relationship between today's struggles and Marxism and Freedom. See page 10 for the local committee closest to you.

oday, in the face of the constant struggle of man T for full freedom on both sides of the Iron Curtain, there is a veritable conspiracy to identify Marxism, a theory of liberation, with its opposite, Communism, the theory and practice of enslavement. This book aims to re-establish Marxism in its original form, which Marx called "a thoroughgoing Naturalism, or Humanism." 1

Hitherto, the American roots of Marxism have remained hidden. It is known, although not widely, that Marx aided the North during the Civil War in the United States. Less well-known is the fact that the paths of the Abolitionists and Marx crossed at that time. What is not known at all is that under the impact of the Civil War, and the subsequent struggles for the eight-hour day, Marx completely reorganized the structure of his greatest theoretical work, Capital. This is analyzed here for the first time.

Our epoch has been characterized by "a struggle for the minds of men." Unless this struggle begins with a concept of totally new relations of men to labor and man to man, it is hollow. The today-ness of Marxism flows from this: no philosopher has ever had a grander concept of humanity than did Marx, and yet no philosophic conception was ever rooted more deeply in the first necessity of human society—labor and production. The fact that the H-bomb has put a question mark over the very survival of civilization does not change this. The answer to that problem is not in today's headlines. It is in production. That is what makes Marx so contemporary. The problems he posed 100 years ago are battled out today as concrete matters in the factory and in society as a whole.

ntil the development of the totalitarian state U the philosophic foundation of Marxism was not fully understood. Only today is it possible to comprehend that Marx's rejection of the Communism of his day was not a nineteenth century humanitarian adjunct to his scientific economic theories. Far from being a vulgar materialist, Marx based his perspectives, of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the

rise of a new human order, on a realization that work1. The first edition of Marxism and Freedom contained the News & Letters is printed in a union shop.

first translations of Marx's "humanist" 1844 manuscripts as well as Lenin's notebooks on Hegel's Science of Logic. Owing to publications of new translations by others, subsequent editions did have have these, but they are available from News & Letters. See ad on this page.

Can humanity be free? The new Marxism and Freedom

ers would seek universality and completeness in their actual social lives as producers. Because Communism was a mere rejection of private property, Communism to Marx was "not the goal of human development, the form of human society."

Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing. Whereas Marx was concerned with the freedom of humanity, and with the inevitable waste of human life which is the absolute general law of capitalist development, Russian Communism rests on the mainspring of

capitalism —paying the worker the minimum and extracting from him the maximum. They dub this "the Plan." Marx called it the law of value and surplus value. He predicted that its unhindered development would lead to the concentration of capital "in the hands of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation."

Marx foresaw the present trend toward state capitalism not because he was a prophet but because of his dialectical method of tracing

itself, followed within a few weeks. Thus, in the wilds of Siberia as well as in the heart of Europe the tocsin had sounded for the beginning of the end of Russian totalitarianism.

From the philosopher in the ivory tower to the man on the street, the world is preoccupied with this question: Can man be free in this age of totalitarianism? We leaped generations ahead to the affirmative answer with the 1953 Revolts and again with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The road to a new society was no

Seattle anti-World Trade Organization protest in November.

through to the end all trends of social development. It is impossible to understand Marx's major theoretical works if one begins by thinking that the particular method, Hegelian dialectics, is an absurdity. The absurdity would be if the method were the proof. The proof can only be in practice, in the actual development of society itself. This book therefore covers the modern machine age from its birth in the Industrial Revolution to its present-day development in Automation.

hree leading strands of thought are developed T here: (1) The evolution of English political economy, French revolutionary doctrines, and German idealist (Hegelian) philosophy, in relation to the actual social development of the period of 1776 to 1831. (2) The development of Marxism in Marx's day and since, in relation to the actual class struggles in the epoch of the Civil War in the United States and the Paris Commune, as well as World War I and the Russian Revolution. (3) The methodology of Marxism applied to the problems that arise from the trend towards state capitalism, on the one hand, and a movement for total freedom, on the other. The unity of theory and practice, which characterized the forty years of Marx's maturity (1843-1883), is the compelling need of our own epoch as well.

The impulse for writing this book came from two sources: (1) the American workers, and (2) the East German workers. It was the period of 1950-1953, the period of the Korean War and of Stalin's death. During those years, the American workers, specifically the miners and auto workers began to come to grips with the realities of Automation by moving the question of productivity from one dealing with the fruits of labor— wages—to one dealing with the conditions of labor and the need for a totally new way of life. It was the period when the East German workers challenged the Communist regime in their Revolt of June 17,1953. A revolt in the slave labor camps of Vorkuta, inside Russia

"Raya Dunayevskaya's bookshows not only that Marxian economics and politics are throughout philosophy, but that the latter is from the beginning economics and politics." —Herbert Marcnse

u ln Marxismand Freedom, Dunayevskaya grapples, in the face of the Stalinist legacy, with the question: •What happens after? What happens when the old repression has been successfully resisted and overthrown? How do we make the 'continuing revolution,' the revolution in permanence' in which this cannot happen? She is passionate about 'the movement from

theory to practice and from practice to theory1 as living process and about he necessity for new voices speaking for their own freedom to be

~o theoretician, today more JL ^11 than ever before, can write out of his own head. Theory requires a constant shaping and reshaping of ideas on the

heard and listened to, if a movement is to keep on moving." —Adrienne Rich

less illumined by the Mf.ji^im .IWHIIWIJIIU "" • u 4 Negro struggles of 1956-57. At the same time, the "little war" over Suez brought us close to the brink of World War III. Nevertheless, out of the totality of the world crisis there emerged a search for a new philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Abstract of Hegel's Science of Logic.

"The first edition of Marxism and Freedom represented one banner-raising event of world importance by including the first English translations of Karl Marx's 1844 Humanist Essays and of Lenin's

These original translations were dropped in subsequent editions because they had appeared in other translations elsewhere. These historic translations

by Dunayevskaya are available to all our readers for only $5 (plus $1 postage). See literature on page 7 for mailing information.

Special price for News & Letters readers $20 (Regularly $24.95)

basis of what the workers themselves are doing and thinking. The research for this book, for example, on the transformation of Russia from a workers' state into its opposite, a state capitalist society, began at the outbreak of World War II. Scholars, some who did, and some who did not, agree with my conclusions, took part. In its beginning, this work was a Marxist analysis of state capitalism. But it did not take its present form of Marxism and Freedom until the new stage of production and of revolts was reached in 1950-53. Because we live in an age of absolutes—on the threshold of absolute freedom out of the struggle against absolute tyranny—the compelling need for a new unity of theory and practice dictates a new method of writing. At least, it dictated the method by which this book was written.

A tour was undertaken to present orally the ideas of the book to groups of auto workers, miners, steelworkers and student youth. In their own words and out of their own lives they contributed a new understanding. A West Virginia miner, for example, modest about his own understanding of "Marxism," took freedom out of its abstraction and gave it concrete meaning.

"I've listened to you discussing that fellow Marx," he said. "I can't word it like him but I know exactly what he means. I lay there this morning about a quarter of six. I looked out the window. I said to myself, 'You just got to get up there and go down, whether you feel like it or not.' I didn't even speak it to my wife. I just said to myself, 'Now you call that a free man?'"

After these discussions, the first draft of the book was written. The manuscript was then submitted to some of these groups for study and, over a period of three months, their discussions were taped. Again, the author studied the discussions carefully, revised the first draft, and undertook a second tour for extensive personal discussions some of which are reproduced in the text; Only after these extensive discussions was the book in its present form finally written.

This work is therefore dedicated to the auto workers, miners, steel workers and student youth who have participated so fully in the writing of this book. They are its co-authors.

R. D.

Raya Dunayevskaya Detroit, Michigan May, 1957

Postscript: In reading the galley proofs, the author took the liberty of adding a few footnotes on events (such as Mao Tse-Tung's speech "On Contradiction") that happened between this book's going to press and its actual publication.

NEW S & Vol. 45, No. 8 OCTOBER 2000

September, 1957

literature

News & Letters (ISSN 0028-8969) is published 10 times a year, monthly, except bj-monthly January-February and August-September for $5.00 a year (bulk order or 5 or more, 25C each) by News & Letters, 36 S. Wabashi Room 1440, Chicago, IL 60603. Telephone (312) 236-0799. Fax (312) 236-0725. Second Class postage paid at Chicago, Illinois. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to News & Letters, 36 S. Wabash, Room 1440, Chicago, IL 60603. Articles may be reprinted verbatim if credited to "News & Letters."

Raya Dunayevskaya Chairwoman, National Editorial Board (1955-1987) Charles Denby Editor (1955-1983)

Olga Domanski, Peter Wermuth, Co-National Organizers, News and Letters Committees. Lou Turner, Managing Editor. Felix Martin, Labor Editor (1983-1999).

>759-C

Philosophic Dialogue

by Gerard Emmett

I want to say something in response to Cyril Smith's "Philosophic Dialogue" in the July 2000 issue of News & Letters. If this is an example of the kind of rethinking that might be going on today, then it is real cause for optimism. I hope therefore that this will be accepted in a spirit of dialogue.

Smith's article interests me as an example of the drive to separate philosophy and organization that seems to really inhere in all of post-Marx Marxism. In this particular case—and there are many other ways of making this separation—Smith bases himself on Marx's 1844 "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic."

As Smith says, "Here Marx shows that Hegel stays within the confines of philosophy, and thus remains at home within what he called 'estrangement.' He also attacks Hegel because he 'posited man as equivalent to self-consciousness.'"

Smith continues, "[Dunayevskaya] quotes quite correctly Hegel's statement that 'the truths of philosophy are valueless apart from their interdependence and organic union.' But that implies that we can't pick out those bits of Hegel's work which appear to fit in with our own revolutionary ideas. We must take him as a whole. Remember that Hegel clearly situates his massive body of thought within the historical context of his own time and place, in the aftermath of the French revolution, in backward Germany. 'Applying' it to the 21st century, it seems to me, is to do it injury and to blunt Marx's critique.

"I believe that Dunayevskaya's refusal to attend to Hegel's Philosophy of Right illustrates this mistaken attitude. Marx actually made this book the starting point for his life long struggle with Hegel, when he wrote his 1843 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State.'"

DUNAYEVSKAYA AND HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT

Cyril Smith isn't the only one who has seen the Philosophy of Right as an issue for Dunayevskaya's Marxist-Humanism. There is also her correspondence from 1986 with non-Marxist Hegel scholar Louis Dupre on the Idea of Cognition, part of her work on the dialectics of philosophy and organization. In a "Random Thoughts" of Jan. 5, 1987 {The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, 10846) she quotes from Dupre's response to her own letter:

"...he agrees with me...that 'the eternal idea is ceaseless motion, the movement itself,' whereupon he begins disagreeing: 'But I no longer follow you when you call the eternal idea "revolution in permanence." Your social interpretation is, in my opinion, not supported by Hegel's text. The entire concept of social revolution belongs to the practical order which itself is never absolute. I suspect that the real answer to your question lies in the Philosophy of Right...'

"At that point he rejects my interpretation with par. 577 as being any sort of 'entrance into the new society. I would rather read it as an entrance into philosophy.'"

So both Smith and Dupre see a stumbling block for Marxist-Humanism in the Philosophy of Right; for Smith, philosophy can't be made to comprehend revolutionary, "practical-critical" activity; and for Dupre, the "practical" can't be made to carry the weight of the philosophic "absolute." It is really this deep background in Dunayevskaya's unfinished work on the dialectics of philosophy and organization that ultimately makes Cyril Smith's "Philosophic Dialogue" so challenging.

In response, I would just like to look at a few key points in the copious body of ideas that is represented by the works of Hegel, Marx and Dunayevskaya.

COPIOUS BODY OF IDEAS

To begin with Hegel, and to return to his own "philosophic moment" in the Phenomenology of Mind: he follows the forms of Spirit that have presented themselves in thought and history up to the final stage of the Phenomenology, "Absolute Knowing." What comes to the forefront here for Hegel is "organization":

"The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, finds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom. Their conservation, looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears" (A. V. Miller, trans., p. 493).

In the activity of Absolute Spirit in the final paragraph (577) ofPhilosophy of Mind, you do indeed seem to see this organization there: "...it is the nature of the fact, the notion, which causes the movement and development, yet this same movement is equally the action of cognition. The eternal idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind" (William Wallace, trans, p. 314-15).

We often ask why it is that the "logical" pattern of the final three syllogisms in this work isn't followed out. You have par. 575, Logic—Nature—Mind, the form of Hegel's Encyclopedia; and par. 576, Nature—MindLogic, "where Mind reflects on itself in the Idea" and "philosophy appears as a subjective cognition, of which

ward" to Logic, but rather you are faced with Nature, Mind, and the Idea in a new unity of philosophy and the organization of its existence. Coming at the end of the Encyclopedia, as well as at a late date in Hegel's own mortal life, can this be seen as an expression of the way in which he hoped that his philosophy would exist in the world?

In any event, if we do now trace a path backward in the Philosophy of Mind we see how this philosophic unity is a judgment already contained in and upon other sections of the work, a principle that measures them—for example, at the end of the section "Mind Subjective" (par. 482), where Hegel states "If to be aware of the Idea—to be aware, that is, that men are aware of freedom as their essence, aim, and object—is

matter of speculation, still this very Idea itself is the actuality of men—not something which they have, as men, but which they are." (Think of par. 577's "process of the objectively and implicitly existing Idea.")

Hegel further states that in the form of religion, this state of affairs "...must appear" and "become an influence to oppress liberty of spirit and to deprave political life." This is a powerful and principled critique of reality, not at all what one associates with the false image of Hegel as an apologist for Prussian absolutism or nationalism. But it may also be true here, as Cyril Smith points out, that there can be found seeds of the kind of accommodation to reality that many of Hegel's followers have objected to in the Philosophy of Right. This was not an objection that began with Marx, but was present from the time this work was first published.

In regard to Marx's critique—by far the most profound—it might help to look at Hegel's analysis of the

Anti-IMF/World Bank demonstrator in Prague at the end of September prepares for police assault.

commodity form in the Philosophy of Mind. This is in the section "Mind Objective," under the heading of liberty is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it." With par. 577, you don't go (in a sense) "backConcept of revolutionary organization "Law" and "Contract." In par. 494 Hegel takes up the commodity and gets as far with it as the concept of usevalue and exchange-value:

"...there is put into the thing or performance a distinction between its immediate specific quality and its substantial being or value, meaning by value the quantitative terms into which that qualitative feature has been translated. One piece of property is thus made comparable with another, and may be made equivalent to a thing which is (in quality) wholly heterogeneous. It is thus treated in general as an abstract, universal thing or commodity."

The commodity form here continues to exist in the framework of law as Hegel develops it. This helps you to see why chapter 1 of Capital is where Marx both recreates Hegel's dialectic of freedom most fully and yet concretely goes much farther than Hegel ever could have.

ORGANIZATION AND MARX'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL

Chapter 10 of Dunayevskaya's Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution is profound on the relation between Marx and Hegel, and the "Great Divide" with Marx's re-creation of Hegel's dialectic in chapter 1 of Capital. But (as Smith has suggested) I want to go back now and look at Marx's critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. The first and longer version of Marx's critique—of which the more compact, well-known and brilliant essay of 1843 is a kind of summation—doesn't in any way throw over Hegel's concept of the Idea of freedom as the measure of reality, in this case as the measure of the German reality to which Marx sees Hegel accommodating himself.

Far from rejecting Hegel's dialectic in his brilliant 1843 essay, Marx uses Hegel's concept of the "inverted world" from the "Culture" section of the Phenomenology to rip to shreds the whole of the backward German reality. As well, Marx extends that critique of backward Germany to that which is unconsciously retrograde in the whole of modern reality, including the supposedly more economically and politically advanced nations of France and Britain. Further, Marx here puts to the "practical party," who would "abolish philosophy without realizing it," the necessity for a philosophic confrontation with reality.

Place the "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic," which points to the "positive moments of Hegel's dialectic" and then immediately looks at the communist movement in that light, beside "Private Property and Communism," where Marx re-creates the concept of "selfconsciousness" that he has been critiquing in Hegel: "Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution."

The criticism Marx makes of social relations, "the human world, the state, society," gets deepened and extended—including as the unmasking of commodity fetishism, bringing that overriding form of social unconsciousness into the light of reason—over a lifetime of Marx's theory and practice. But the most immediate fruit of Marx's critique of Hegel appears in 1844 in Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, specifically his "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic."

The very next sentence of "Private Property and Communism" in fact seems to echo the final paragraph of Hegel's Phenomenology on "Absolute Knowing," with "the whole historical development—the real genesis of communism (the birth of its empirical existence) and its thinking consciousness, is its comprehended and conscious process of becoming...." (T. B. Bottomore, trans.).

Again, what I think you are seeing with this appropriation of "self-consciousness" is the birth of the "party," or the birth of Marx's concept of organization as the responsibility for the idea of revolution in permanence. Here, I want to look at some of the most important organizational documents that came from the pen of Marx. In these are what might be called "appearances" of Marx's philosophy of revolution in permanence. For instance, in the Communist Manifesto the vision and principle of the new, human society is expressed as, "The free

development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

In Capital itself there is the vision of "freely-associated labor" stripping away the fetishism of the commodity form. And in the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program we have Marx's fullest projection of the role of freely creative labor in a new human society. As Dunayevskaya summarizes the meaning of this document, in which Marx measures the reality of the existing "Marxist" movement by his own body of thought, "What must tower above all struggles against exploitation, nationally and internationally, is the perspective of a totally classless society; the vision of its ground would be 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.'" And she adds, "The revolution that would overthrow capitalism would have to be a great deal more total in its uprooting of the old than just fighting against what is. Thus Marx says that to reach the communist stage, there would have to be an end to the 'enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor...'" (Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution, p. 156-157).

It would be impossible to imagine this profound level of "economy," of the living human being's interaction with his/her environment, without as well the highest level of "philosophic consciousness," or profound grasp of its meaning. In short, what you are brought back to here is the unity of organization and what Marx called "principle"—and what remains for us today the ground for taking up the dialectics of philosophy and organization. What I am reminded of here also, to return from the future to Hegel once more, is par. 577 of the Philosophy of Mind: "...in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind," as compared to Marx's "labor from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life..." from the Critique of the Gotha

Program. If I can jump ahead now to 1953, just to ask one question. Based upon the work of Marx and Hegel, did Dunayevskaya have the right to translate Hegel's final paragraph in the Philosophy of Mind as "We have entered the new society" in her letter of May 20,1953? It seems to me that what Dunayevskaya accomplished there was to strip away the last fetishism from the concept of revolutionary organization in a way that could potentially allow the revolutionary movement to come into a deeper unity with itself—what Marx was doing in re-creating the self-consciousness that he criticized in Hegel. In other words, then and later she was re-creating for organization the whole philosophic development by which Marx created his own body of ideas— the role of philosophy and revolution in the coming-tobe of a new form of spirit, a new way of being free in the world, a new society but, first of all, the power to project such a thing.

FINDING AN ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM

The idea that the "good" creative force of science can be exploited by capital to "bad" ends is naive since most of what science investigates is directed by capital. Sure, Einstein stayed up late at night developing his theory of relative time while working a day job at the patent office, but most of what gets investigated is what the system wants investigated—and thinks will "work" before it gets funded. It's not just that scientific discoveries are put to bad use but that the whole process has been put under the guidelines of return-on-investment. All the emphasis on genetic engineering is driven by capital for the goals of capital.

Oceanographer Hawaii

I participated in the R2K actions in Philly against the Republican convention. It gives me hope to see young folks taking to the streets against the system but more needs to be done to increase diversity and involve union workers in such actions.

I'm hoping that the momentum against global capital will continue, but I think we also need to bring that struggle home to the U.S. in such areas as prisons and temp agencies. Perhaps now is a time to pause and take stock about where this new energized movement against globalization is headed.

Hospital worker Pennsylvania

We are fighting the idea that revolution cannot work and therefore there is no alternative to capitalism. A variant of this is the idea that the worst excesses can be eliminated through reforms, which assumes the continued existence of capitalism. But is the opposite to this just a matter of proving that the economic laws of capitalism are inherently destructive towards humanity and

nature and that they foster the human forces of opposition that will overthrow the system? It seems to me that the Archives column by Raya Dunayevskaya on "Marx's Unchaining of the Dialectic" (August-September N&L) implies that this is not the absolute opposite. She says Marx's concept of revolution "changed everything, including economic laws" and that dialectic and economics are not fully integrated until we articulate that socialism signifies "the absolute movement of becoming," where "individual self-development and social, revolutionary, historical development" are not separated. Anything less than that today would sell the anti-globalization movement short.

F.D. E.G. • ** *

Memphis

Polly Toynbee, a regular columnist for the BBC's magazine "Radio Times," recently asserted that money is what makes the world go round and that human life scarcely rose above the animal level, with no scope for thought or creativity before money. Evidently she has never seen any Native American or Australian aboriginal art, wonderful cultural creations from societies without money.

EDUCATION AND MONEY

As to the future, she told us that human nature is too fallible for us to match our production to human need without money to mediate the process. Yet even in today's capitalist society most people feel certain things are too important to be bought and sold—sexual relations, for instance, and human organs for transplant. I want to suggest that in the future people may come to feel that selling our time, skill and effort to an employer for a wage or salary is an unacceptable loss of our freedom and humanity.

I just learned that the vocational high schools and community colleges in Detroit can't spend much of the federal money they anticipated this fall until a dispute between the federal government and the State of Michigan is settled. I don't know the details but I do know that this is one more blow struck against disadvantaged students, and no one is talking about it. I am on the advisory board of the floral design and greenhouse program here; we had to raise money so some students could attend summer school or have funds for their college application fees.

R. Bunting Oxford

Angry Detroit

NAMIBIA'S ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

The military alliance between the governments of Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe on the side of Laurent Kabila in the Congolese war has nothing to do with principles or the liberation of the oppressed African people. The wars in Angola and the eastern Congo are a scramble for control over the vast mineral riches of these countries and to hold down the demands of the oppressed African people.

Given the logic of the military alliance, the Namibian government has allowed the MPLA forces to launch attacks against UNITA from the northeast of Namibia. The repercussions are massive because now these communities are being brutalized by the UNITA rebels who cross over at night to retaliate. The war spreads and its effects are felt everywhere.

In response to the situation, several hundred students gathered in Windhoek at the beginning of August and marched to State House to hand in a petition demanding an end to the war in the northeast, Caprivi and Kavango regions. When the riot squad prevented them from marching they organized a bigger demonstration a week later. After hours in the sun they gathered at the local park and discussed an anti-war campaign in an open and spontaneously democratic assembly. We are working to bring together some of the forces from the region and internationally to a conference in December.

Ten years ago when we spoke about capitalism and the need to change the system, people would say we were unrealistic. But now the need for an alternative sounds much more realistic.

Jade Unite Africa Coordinating Committee Namibia

LABOR STRUGGLES TODAY

It was disappointing to see how few gold ribbons were displayed in the audience at the Emmy awards, given the fact that ribbons had been distributed to everyone they could reach by the Screen Actors Guild. Unfortunately, ABC was reluctant to help, so that while some actors received ribbons along with their tickets, a lot of others didn't know where to get one or didn't even know about the symbolic action. It's good to know that the cast of "Frasier" had urged all attendees to wear the ribbons and that both Martin Sheen and Stockard Channing of "West Wing" had been enthusiastic supporters, while Dennis Franz used a SAG button to pin the ribbon on his tuxedo. Jay Leno contributed $10,000 to the strike fund and Richard Dreyfuss used an appearance on the "Rosie O'Donnell" show to appeal to all viewers to support the strikers, naming the corporations who are the biggest attackers of SAG/AFTRA, including McDonald's, AT&T and GM among others. The audience gave him a huge round of applause at the end of his speech!

TV viewer Chicago

At the top of the list of the problems letter carriers now face is the DPS mail reader. Management put this machine in to automatically sort mail, something that carriers normally do for their own routes. Not only do these machines send mail to people who may have been dead for years, but they have put 500 people

READERS'VIEWS

out of work in the Chicago main post office alone. That's at the top of the list of issues the Letter Carriers union leadership has to deal with.

Letter carrier Chicago

I differ with N&L politically. Marxism is a critical method, but you are uncritical of apparently spontaneous move* ments. Reports of strikes (such as the one by Local 250 SEIU in the AugustSeptember issue) are uncritical of the "progressive trade union bureaucracy." Nonetheless, here is my sub renewal for another two years.

San Francisco

Editor's note: We must point out that the rank-and-file author of the article ill question reminded readers that what had been crucial to winning the earlier landmark contract with Kaiser was the CNA's "steadfast refusal to participate in the top down 'strategic partnership' with management initiated by the AFL-CIO" and then asked: "Will the unfolding workers' movement in health care realize workers' aspirations to control their own work?"

RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA'S MARXIST-HUMANISM

I have just read Marxism and Freedom and Philosophy and Revolution by Raya Dunayevskaya, whose life and thought are still unknown to Chinese Marxists. It is an astonishingly greaVt achievement that her interpretation of the essence of Marxist philosophy was born in the 1950s and 1960s. I highly appreciate Dunayevskaya's attempt to rescue Marx from the distortions made in the name of revolution, but disagree with what she considered Marx's relation to Hegel's Logic. However, I want to understand her thought completely and introduce it to other Chinese Marxists.

Philosophy student China

Editor's note: Chinese editions of both Marxism and Freedom and Philosophy and Revolution are available from N&L for $10 each.

Thank you for sending the three issues of N&L that reproduced Raya Dunayevskaya's 1961 "Notes on Hegel's Logic'' which I had requested. You asked me to tell you what they mean to me as I read them today. That's easy. They meant Insight, Education, and History. I believe that those who don't know history are subject to repeat it over and over. I also believe that an insightful and educated mind will make insightful and educated choices and decisions. Thank you for your help in that direction.

Prisoner. Texas

Marxism and Freedom has been good reading. As a writer, I enjoy reading something by a person who writes with such understanding of the different levels of readership that may pick up the book and knows the importance of making it interesting to all of those readers,

regardless of who they are. Packing a lot into a sentence without seeming to do so is the sign of a great writer.

Robert Taliaferro

Tennessee

FIGHTING WOMEN'S OPPRESSION

Readers will want to know what is happening with the case against the Berkeley businessman Lakireddy Bali Reddy. N&L reported on the case last January when he was charged with buying young Indian women and bringing them to Berkeley to serve as janitors, restaurant help, construction workers and his personal sex slaves. His lawyers have just attempted to have two of the nine'felony charges against him dropped, arguing that aiding and abetting the importation of Indian girls for "immoral purposes" is too vague, but that was denied by Judge Sandra Armstrong. The next hearing will be Oct. 10. An organization called Alliance of South Asians taking Action is determined to keep the focus on all the issues the case raises and is disturbed by the media coverage which they say is ignoring the larger issue of labor exploitation and focusing on the issue as a "sex scandal." Activists will continue to be at the hearings to keep the pressure on.

Activist Berkeley, Cal.

As a U.S. citizen who has just moved Here to teach English, there is a lot I don't know about Japan. But from what I see there appears to be growing discontent as fewer jobs are available for women and girls. Women are also speaking out, especially when it comes to such a dirty secret as the Japanese military's "comfort women." The Violence Against Women in War-Network Japan is calling for a tribunal Dec. 8-12 in Tokyo. The organization is holding the government accountable for the enforcement of comfort women, sexual violence at the U.S. military bases, and violence against women in armed conflicts today. These women, along with many from other Asian countries, will be at the tribunal to make the Japanese government pay for its cruel actions. For more information, contact: [email protected] or fax 813-5337-4088.

Kindlady Japan

As governor of Texas, George W. leads the country in carrying out the death penalty, yet is so opposed to abortion that he recently promised to oppose the execution of any pregnant women. One assumes that as soon as such a woman has given birth, he will not hesitate to execute her, given his recent execution of. an elderly woman who killed her abusive husband. And if you think Gore is any better, he answered the same hypothetical question about pregnant women on Death Row by saying he would not delay her execution!

Women's liberationist New York

I FOR HAGAR ROUBLEV OF WOMEN IN BLACK I

I have the sad news to report that Hagar Roublev, one of the most brilliant and charismatic figures the Israeli peace movement has ever known, died at the end of August of heart failure at the age of 46. She was 34 when the vigils by Jerusalem Women in Black first began and was the closest we had to an unofficial leader, even though her views were in the minority and almost never carried the day in our decision-making.

Having quit school in 11th grade, Hagar got her education reading Communist literature under the tutelage of her radical left father and then did her internship on the streets. She refused to serve in the Israeli army. An avowed Marxist, she left Israel and spent a dozen years organizing workers abroad. After

her return to Israel she continued her political activism in small radical circles, supporting herself with a series of odd jobs. Working as a waitress in a coffee house, she told a soldier to remove the bullet cartridge from his gun resting beneath his chair. She was fired on the spot. It also didn't help her cause or ours that she would periodically make anticonsensual declarations directly to the media, such as "Write down that in the opinion of Hagar Roublev, the police are enemy number one of the people."

Hagar lived her life with so much passion, so much political vehemence and conviction, perhaps her heart could not keep up with her.

GilaSvirsky Jerusalem

ERICH FROMM'S MARXISM

I fondly remember Erich Fromm as a rare beacon of sanity for the alienated world inherited by the baby boomers. Kevin Anderson's tribute to Fromm (August-September N&L) was exemplary; however, he made one intriguing point without fully exploring it. It would be most helpful for us to read Dunayevskaya's letter to Fromm of Oct. 11, 1961 to gain a more detailed explanation of how Fromm's discussion of Marx's humanist essays lacked the concreteness "of what Marx called the 'abolition' of philosophy through its 'realization,' tha t is to say by putting an end to the division between life and philosophy, work and life." Perhaps you could publish this letter?

Ralp h Dumai n Washington, D.C.

Editor's Note: This letter is included in the correspondence between Fromm and Dunayevskaya on deposit in The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection at Wayne State University's Walter Reuther library in Detroit, available on microfilm at many libraries around the world.

A Michigan reader writes in the August-September issue: "Capitalism has made psychotherapy an industry of smoke and mirrors which finds fault with the suffering individual and not with the system." I offer a significant qualification of this true but too-sweeping statement: There is an ever-growing "cadre" of "radical therapists" who, in their work, writings and public activities, are desirous of transforming the system and are critical of its role in creating the "suffering individuals," Erich Fromm is a leading representative, originally trained as a psychoanalyst. In Sane Society, one of his numerous books, he wrote: "We trea t ourselves like we are commodities and our powers are alienated from us."

License d clinica l socia l worke r N e w York

Kevin Anderson's article on Erich Fromm shows the objectivity of Marx's Humanism. At the same time, Anderson

helps address the problem in the antiglobalization movement of viewing Marx as only an economist rather than a philosopher of "revolution in permanence" and does battle with those who deny tha t Marx is grounded in the Hegelian dialectic.

Women's liberationist Tennesse e

The essay on Erich Fromm and the article on the opposite page by Raya Dunayevskaya on Marx's unchaining of the dialectic were especially important to me. If only we could he exposed to these concepts in our earlier years. Public education is mostly junk as I look back on mine. Its purpose seems to be to turn out obedient, patriotic, capitalist-worshipping "children." How much ha s been and will continue to be deUberately kept from us because it is deemed dangerous stuff?

Supporte r Wisconsin

UNREST IN MEXICO

Mary Holmes was right (August-September N&L) to single out Mexican feminist Marta Lamas' warning about the danger rightist Vicente Fox poses for women's freedom. No sooner did he get into office than his home state of Guanajuato banned all abortions including even if the woman's life was in danger, with a jail sentence of eight years for any woman who tried to interrupt her pregnancy! After a huge outcry, led by Mexican feminists, the measure was vetoed, showing Fox will not have a free hand to do whatever he wants. Estimates are tha t well over 1,500 women die each year in Mexico from illegal abortions.

Terr y Moo n Memphis

It is my opinion tha t the political maneuvering in Mexico's recent elections process is a direct reflection of the same maneuvering and manipulation by the so-called elected officials in this country. What better model could be found for political process abuse than tha t in the "world leader" of "democracy"? As long

as the majority in any country are not truly represented, there will be continued abuse of human rights on a global scale.

Prisone r Texas

VOICES FROM WITHIN

Mumia Abu-Jamal sees tha t people have to stay focused on the fight. They can't quit. The question lifers are posing to death penalty opponents is what happens after a moratorium is finally reached on the death penalty. Will the fight continue to find how many people who are innocent are doing life sentences? Will it continue to find the level of corruption in the system? The death penalty issue is just the tip of the iceberg. People are sitting in prison sentenced to severe penalties based on the testimony of jailhouse informants given all kinds of incentives to testify against another person regardless of the truth.

Continu e th e struggl e Tennesse e

N&L is very informative and I can identify with other people's struggles. However, since I am incarcerated I focus on those like me. We can do nothing but sympathize and weep at the atrocities taking place in society outside. Until we can figure out how to get unionized inside these institutions, we are as weak as if we did not represent the numbers we do. All the world knows these penal institutions are nothing but the exploitation of free labor and legalized slavery. In Texas we are not paid a dime. We are putting companies in the free world out of business. I would like more articles on what we can do to change our conditions. Prisone r Texas

Prison systems are starting to use the word "offender," and prisoners and convicts take issue with tha t because it lumps us all together with inmates. In the pecking order of prison parlance, prisoners and convicts are a t the top of the chain, and inmates are often synonymous with snitches a t the bottom of the chain. Grouping everyone as an "offender" is the system's way to depersonalize the prison culture so it is easier to think of us in less than human terms. The terms "convict" and "prisoner" define a class system within the prison environment. The term "offender" is one of the psych-war attempts to lessen those concepts.

Prisone r Sout h USA

I hope you can find a donor to let me continue to get your paper. I love it because it's in your face.

Prisone r Michiga n

Editor's note: Readers, can you pay for one or more donor subscriptions for those who want N&L but cannot pay for it?

KUWAIT'S 'LIBERATION'

Richard Cheney's nomination by the Republican Party to be their vice presidential candidate helps mark the tenth anniversary of the Gulf War, since Cheney was the architect of the carnage of Iraqi citizens and soldiers alike and the preservation of the bloody rule of Saddam Hussein. In two days of burning and stone-throwing in Kuwait last year, thousands of Egyptian immigrant workers released long-simmering anger against what ha s followed for them in "liberated" Kuwait. Spontaneous protests have also erupted in other Gulf states, notably Bahrain and the UAE. The uprising in Kuwait happened in a country which allows trade unions and has signed all UN covenants on civil rights. If an uprising like the one last year can happen in Kuwait, the fid will blow even higher elsewhere in the Gulf region.

J.O. • Voices from within the Prison Walls • Marxist-Humanist Literature Catalog for 2000 Q Bosnia-Herzegovina; Achilles Heel of Western 'Civi- Dunayevskaya Collection: Marxist-Humanism: A Half • Marx's Capital and Today's Global Crisis A 15,000-page microfilm collection on 8 reels available from ,_,_.• . „ .-,_• . i International, 300 Zeeb Rd„ Ann Arbor, MI 48106. N&L as well • Frantz Fanon, Soweto, and American Black Thought Enclosed find $ for the literature checked. Please by Lou Turner and John Alan... $3 add $1 for each item for postage. Illinois residents add 7% sales 1 0 ume s by Raya Dunayevskaya $2 N&L is also available on microfilm from University Microfilms ' ' ' • „ as other Marxist-Humanist literature is available on audio tape.

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• The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism: Selected Writings by Raya Dunayevskaya $8.50

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~ ~ By CHARLES DENBY ~~"

Q Indignant Heart. A Black Worker's Journal 1989 edition includes Afterword by Raya Dunayevskaya $14.95

By KEVIN ANDERSON

Q Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study First full-length treatment of Lenin's studies of Hegel.$15.95

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During this presidential election year both the Republican and the Democratic parties have claimed that they are "ethnically inclusive and diverse." The Republican Party had on the stage of its convention hall an unusual number of African Americans, and Colin Powell, a retired African-American general, opened its convention with an inspiring speech. The Democratic Party, with its large number of AfricanAmerican delegates, gave Jesse Jackson prime time to extol the liberalism of the Democratic Party and denounce the conservatism of the Republican Party.

Now, what does all the apparent racial integration of those two capitalist parties actually mean for the masses of African Americans and other people of color, like Latinos? Very little. To imply that the racial and ethnic composition of a capitalist political party will resolve today's dire economic and social problems and the practices Of racism is deceptive and false.

It is false, because the essential reason for the existence of today's political parties is to preserve and to protect the interests of capitalism, that is, the accumulation of capital, which creates at the same time wealth and its opposite, poverty, classism and racism. American capitalism has cultivated racism since its very beginnings, when the early settlers claimed lifelong slavery for those indentured servants who were Black.

Black/Red View Racism in politics Mississippi injustice

Memphis, Tenn., to tell African-American religious leaders that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would not like the way African-American youth were killing each other and having babies out of wedlock. He went on to say: "We will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and neighborhoods and the communities."

We know this kind of political evangelism is a sham. What African-American youth got during the eight years of Clinton's administration was welfare "reform," new prisons and longer prison terms. According to recent reports there are over two million Americans in federal and state prisons and local jails in this country. More than half are African-American men and women. Thus, one out of every 35 African Americans is behind bars, representing the racial segregation of capitalism's permanently unemployed Black so-called underclass.

AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

The post-Civil Rights Movement era is an ongoing era of an unfinished revolution. The social conditions created by racism and poverty are still deep in this American civilization. Thirty-seven years ago Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial in

DETERMINING HISTORIC DIRECTION

Thus, racism has long played a role in American politics, and at times that role has been crucial in determining the direction of American history. We need not go very far back in American history to find the connection between American politics and racism. Many contentious social issues, such as welfare "reform," building larger and tougher prisons, mandatory minimum prison sentences, "three strikes" laws, prosecuting youth as adults and putting them in adult prisons, and the extension of the death penalty to more offenses are all motivated by an ideology of racism.

Beginning with President Ronald Reagan, every administration, including the administration of William Jefferson Clinton, has

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL: Black Masses as Vanguard

published first in 1963, expanded with a 1983 introduction by Raya Dunayevskaya-

"Though cotton is king no longer, the politics based on racism reigns supreme in the South and fills the Halls of Congress with the abnormal might that comes from despotic social relations, quasi-totalitarian politics that would topple easily enough if the Negro got his freedom. But thereby

would also be exposed the truth of American democracy: that the racism which is the basis of the political rule of the South is acceptable to the North, and has been so not only since it withdrew the Federal troops from the South at the end of Reconstruction in 1877, but ever since the ambivalent Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776."

acted politically to roll back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and to destroy the very idea of such a movement. Clinton, the "new Democrat," attempted only morally to separate himself from reactionaries like Reagan and Bush.

See page 7 to order.

Clinton went to an African-American church in

Washington, D.C. and addressed one quarter of a million people. He told them that 100 years after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation African Americans were still not free. He said, "The Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation and chains of discrimination, [he still lives] on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

Martin Luther King III recently stood on the same spot and said, "The day my father had dreamed about has not yet been realized." Clearly, African-American freedom cannot be gained through bourgeois politics. A new wave of struggle will have to break through this barrier, not by avoiding politics, but by transcending political alienation through full confidence in the masssocial power. es own

New leaders cannot be mere politicians, but have to enhance this social power and help it coalesce with others in the fight against globalized capital. Only through this social power can we reach a humanism that transcends capitalism and the racism it continually re-creates.

spurs protest

Editor's note: A rally was held Aug. 12 to protest the racism of the criminal justice system in Marshall County, Miss., and specifically the false arrests of Robert Glass and of Sweetie Scott, who was held incommunicado and threatened by police for four days. The following is an interview with Zelma Glass, mother of Robert Glass.

Holly Springs, Miss.— The police picked up my son, Robert Glass, one Saturday night almost two years ago. When they told him that he was charged with capital murder, he said he didn't know why they were picking him up because he hadn't killed anyone. The man who was killed was my son's cousin. He had let Robert use his car. Robert told the police that if he had committed the murder, he wouldn't be driving around the community in his cousin's car. He didn't even know bis cousin was dead.

They had Robert in jail, questioning him. His rights were plain—he was supposed to have a lawyer—but they told him he was going to have to talk to them. The investigators had their guns on him and were waving the guns around. In February we tried to have that confession suppressed. Deputies stated clearly in front of a judge that they didn't bring my son in until 4 a.m., but the investigator stated that he got the confession at 3:15 that same morning!

Robert has been in the Marshall County jail for 22 months, and the grand jury just left Holly Springs a few weeks ago saying they still don't have all the evidence. Whenever the public defender talks with him, they'll tell him one thing and not do what they say. That has got Robert so upset. They just sent the murder weapon to be tested around the last of June. At the end of September they didn't have the results. They fingerprinted him three times since he's been in jail, the last time in July. I can't understand that.

Since Robert has been in jail, he's developed high blood pressure. He doesn't get any medical attention, and he almost had a stroke. They had to take him to the hospital by ambulance because his pressure was so high it knocked him out. The doctor at the hospital changed bis medicine, but they didn't have his prescriptions filled. The high blood pressure hurt his head, and he sat in that jail for weeks in pain. I had to talk to the jailer and the deputies. I let them know that if anything happened to my son it would be on them.

There's a lot of racialism in Holly Springs. One white man committed capital murder and they gave him two years. He'll be out and my son hasn't even gone to trial. George Hunsucker, who is white, dragged a Black man, Willie Roy Foster, and damaged his brain. Hunsucker pled guilty, but when they had his hearing, the judge let Hunsucker withdraw his guilty plea. The judge said there wasn't enough evidence to prove he was guilty.

Even before he went to that hearing the sheriff let him out 0f jail on a pass to go home and visit his family. They let him out on a Wednesday and the following Monday. So many people appeared at the courthouse that the judge said it was too crowded to have the trial.

Now Hunsucker is out, and the news reported that he will probably never see the inside of a jail cell again. He got out with no bond, but the citizens got to complaining, so they finally put him under a $1,000 bond. My son has been up there all this time with no evidence against him, but still they can't give him a trial and they won't give him a bond. —Zelma Glass

(Continued from page 1)

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Now, I won't quote from his famous Aug. 26, 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. Others will no doubt do it far better than I. I refer to a speech given by Dr. King some four years later, a few months before his assassination in April of 1968. Here, King spoke to his colleagues of the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] and not to the nation as a whole. Here, he spoke not of his dreams, but of his growing insights into reality. He said, I quote:

Black World Mumia Abu-Jamal on a move!

We've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are Called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace, but one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. Who owns the oil? Who owns the'iron ore? Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is twothirds water?

Are these the sounds of a man dreaming? Or the thoughts of a man coming to grips with social and economic injustice at the heart of America?

What Dr. King was questioning was the economic infrastructure and the political superstructure of capitalist America, which in his words, "produces beggars." So what does that mean now? If you truly want to redeem the dream, then follow his example: ask questions about the whole society. Why are there billions of dollars to build prisons, but not a nickel to build a school? Why does the government pay a prison guard more than a college professor? Why do parents need to work two jobs or more to feed and house their families? Why do you support politicians who support repression against you and your people? Why do We call cops who

beat, maim, and kill us "public servants"? Who do they serve? Why vote for conservatives even if they wear the label of Democrat? When will Blacks demand respect from a party that treats them like stepchildren? When will African Americans learn that the two major parties are both parties of white supremacy and corporate control? Hey, look at the tickets! Ask questions.

Here's another one: how can you truly consider yourself free when you can't walk down a city street, hail a taxi, or drive anywhere in America without the threat of a humiliating search or, as Amadou Diallo demonstrated, an execution while standing in your own doorway? How can you be free while judges in black robes rival klansmen in white robes in their contempt for Black life and liberty?

I know that many of you may not appreciate what I'm saying about Democrats, but I must. When you're being pulled out of your car for the unwritten effects of DWB, or driving while Black, why not flash your voter's registration card to the cops? When your son or daughter goes in front of some racist or sellout judge, why not send him or her a xerox copy of your voter's registration card? When you're about to get evicted from your home because you're broke, whip out your voter's registration card, okay? Does your political party affiliation protect your property, your liberty, your life? Okay, tell them that you voted for Bill Clinton, okay? Tell them that you plan to vote for GoreLieberman, alright? Your politics is but an illusion, isn't it?

Now don't give me that old chestnut that Dr. King died to give Blacks the right to vote. Nonsense. People don't fight for a vote. A vote is but a means to an end. What end? Power. The power to protect and enhance one's life, liberty, and property. The power to protect

one's person from official oppression. The power to be let alone.

What politician is speaking about this power, and why not? The legendary revolutionary teacher, John Africa, said:

It is insane not to resist something that gives nothing but sickness to you, your mothers, your fathers, your babies, your family. Are you getting power from this political system? Or sickness?

Ask yourselves: are you, your babies, or your families better off today than they were eight years ago? Or worse off? If this system gives you sickness, well, why support it?

No doubt, you'll hear many climb to the rostrum and preach to you of the value of voting. You may even have some politicians come to you today promising the moon. But look at history. Bill Clinton, what some have called the nation's first Black president, savaged habeas corpus for the first time since the Civil War. Socalled "welfare reform," his idea, has been a war on the poor. From Lani Guinier to Joycelyn Elders, what you saw was an example of the politics of betrayal.

The last eight years have brought us an explosion in the prison-industrial complex. And who in all of America is most likely to be cast into those steel and brick hells? You know the answer. Why vote for your own oppression? Why vote for Death Row? Why vote for DWB? Why vote for the prison-industrial complex? As Martin Luther King Jr. said, ask questions. These have been some for you to consider.

I thank you. On amove! Long live John Africa! Free the MOVE 9! From Death Row, this is Mumia AbuJamal.

Presidential race in shadow of revolts against capitalism

(Continued from page 1)

health care, income inequity, employment, tax relief, campaign finance reform, poverty, crime, prescription drugs, abortion rights, racism, the environment, national defense, trade and international policies.

Gore's "class struggle" rhetoric against the insurance and drug industries, and supposedly against corporate union-busting, is designed to shore up his left flank exposed by the challenge of consumer advocate Ralph Nader running for the Green Party. ClintonGore's championing of the

North American Free Trade Act and their support for Senate passage, Sept. 19, of permanent normal trade relations with China legislation should disabuse anyone of Gore's so-called "class struggle" advocacy.

This is not to say there is no difference in the platforms of Gore and Bush. However, Gore's selection of Joseph Lieberman as his running mate and Bush's choice of Dick Cheney confirmed their allegiance to their corporate masters. Lieberman has been

the Senate errand boy for the defense, insurance and drug industries, while Cheney parlayed his former position as Defense Secretary under former President George Bush into a position with the Haliburton Corporation that resulted in obtaining government contracts that netted billions of dollars in profits for Haliburton and millions for Cheney himself.

Lieberman's blatant injection of religion into the campaign is so offensive that even the Jewish AntiDefamation League pleaded with him to tone down his Bible thumping, aware of the dangers involved, especially to Jews, in efforts by some, especially the fundamentalist Right, to combine church and state. And while Gore and Lieberman support abortion rights for women, which Bush and Cheney oppose, Gore as a professed born-again Christian and Lieberman as a strict Orthodox Jew brought up in a tradition demanding the subservience of women do not inspire ease of mind on these matters, including future Supreme Court nominees. Moreover, the ties that bind both Gore and Bush to the oil industry create additional fears and concerns.

CAPITAL RULES OPENLY

The simple fact is that today everyone knows that money rules politics. In the past, politicians tried to hide the huge sums of money contributed to their election campaigns because they knew it exposed their obligations to corporations whose dictates they followed, or were replaced. The post-Watergate campaign finance reforms have been so watered down that today huge corporate campaign contributions are not only openly solicited, they are worn like badges of triumph and success. Capital rules openly, and today's rulers are so confident of their control and power that they feel they no longer need to hide behind past subterfuges. That power, both covert and open, is evident in every sphere of life:

• It is seen in the increasingly ominous developments in surveillance—the FBI's "Carnivore" internet surveillance program can monitor every email message ever sent; surveillance cameras are a pervasive intrusion, evident in virtually every store and building, and now even appear at street intersections; sophisticated listening devices can overhear virtually any conversation anywhere.

ing majority are Blacks and Latinos convicted of minor infractions or wrongfully convicted and sentenced to long prison terms because of the inherent racism of the system. This was highlighted recently by the report of the Justice Department revealing that 75% of those facing death sentences for federal crimes are minorities.

• It is seen in the increasing brutality of the police against demonstrators protesting the globalization of capital in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Detroit, as well as those protesting both the Republican and Democratic conventions. All of these actions of democratic dissent have been criminalized, resulting in huge bail bonds— up to $1 million for a demonstration leader—and preventive detention, a police state practice protected by political and judicial leaders.

• It is seen in the criminal injustice system, which has incarcerated over two million prisoners, the highest number of any industrial nation. The overwhelm-

• It is seen in the increasing use of prison labor in the production of many market commodities that both exploits the prisoners and drives down the wages of

workers who can't compete with low-wage prison labor. This same effect was felt in the "workfare programs" adopted by many cities and states who moved welfare recipients off their rolls, forcing them into low-paying jobs that often competed against higher paid workers.

• It is seen in the ability of drug companies to protect their huge profits through legislation to delay the production of less expensive generic equivalents, while charging exorbitant prices for drugs that are increasing at the rate of 15% a year. The elderly are

then forced to choose food and warmth over vital medication.

• It is seen in the gutting of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration by reduction of its budget, making needed inspections of workplaces impossible. Add to this the transformation of the National Labor Relations Board, which is packed with pro-business advocates whose rulings have changed the Board from an agency to protect the rights of workers into an arm of the corporations opposed to unionization and workers' grievances.

Meanwhile, some 44 million Americans have no medical insurance despite today's so-called prosperity. Since 1973, the wages of workers have declined sharply. In the 25 years prior to that, that is, from 1948 to 1973, incomes rose by 50% to 100%. In half of all families, both parents must work to be able to make ends meet. For families mired in poverty, twelve million children went hungry last year, the highest percentages being among Black and Latino children.

This shows something of the magnitude of the problems that neither the Republicans nor Democrats are serious about solving, which further exposes the hypocrisy of both the candidates and their parties. What they are serious about is maintaining the world supremacy of the U.S. Both Gore and Bush support the implementation of the missile defense system, despite growing opposition by world leaders who fear a new, wider nuclear arms race, as well as violation of existing nuclear ban treaties.

FIGHTING THE POWERS THAT BE

As for presidential candidates Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party, both are increasingly marginalized. Nader's attacks against corporate power, environmental pollution, worker exploitation, health care fraud and neglect, and political corruption gained him considerable popular support, especially in California and Michigan. This began to erode when he failed to aggressively support Black aspirations, even though his causes affect Blacks more than any other group. He has also sought coalitions with virtually any group—liberal or reactionary—that would support his candidacy, casting doubt on his own principles. Buchanan's rabid rightwing demagoguery laced with racism, sexism, jingoistic nationalism and gay-bashing had to be put on hold as the Reform Party degenerated into two brawling wings that spelled doom as each faction jockeyed to claim the $12.6 million in federal campaign funds earmarked for the party. As soon as the courts ruled Buchanan the winner, he launched his campaign with a speech at Bob Jones University—the openly racist Southern institution where Bush spoke and unleashed a storm of national outrage that forced him to apologize for appearing there.

Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, freedom fighter

(Continued from page 1)

murdered a few months ago, and a prominent Islamic university rector was killed on Sept. 16.

Aug. 16 and 17, for Indonesia's independence day, 5,000 protesters rallied at a university campus near the capital of Banda Aceh to demand a referendum. According to a report, "UN flags sprouted on the campus and in most parts of Banda Aceh overnight, after Aceh police had warned they would not tolerate the flying of any flags other than the Indonesian national red and white flag on August 17." Last year, people were threatened by the authorities if they didn't fly the Indonesian flag and threatened by GAM if they did. Now Aceh may be subjected to a new "civil emergency" law that would give the authorities even more power to search and seize anyone and anything, including the ' computers that are vital to getting out the news.

Jafar was an internationalist to the core. Su Acheh is to have a section in English so it can be read around the world. As many meetings as we attended with him

over the last year on the subjects of Aceh, East Timor, and Indonesia, we saw him at nearly as many concerning U.S. movements, especially the Seattle youth movement. He was happy and grateful that people here were interested in the struggles in Aceh, shared the latest news and always flashed a wonderful smile.

Jafar's knowledge of the histories of Aceh and Indonesia made him skeptical of appeals to nationalism and keenly aware that freedom can only be measured by the lives of ordinary people.

We who knew him in New York are determined to continue his work through the International Forum for Aceh (IFA) and the Student Coalition for Aceh, which people can join from anywhere in the world. Write IFA, Box 13, 511 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10011, or email [email protected] or [email protected]. You can also send donations for his family and to continue the newspaper Su Acheh. Much information about Jafar and Aceh is available on the IFA and East Timor Action Network websites, www.aceh.org/ifa and www.etan.org. —Anne Jaclard

The massive financial power of the Democrats and Republicans does not go unchallenged. Revolt remains a growing everyday occurrence. Some of these are small but nevertheless exist in every grievance a worker files against an unsafe workplace, forced overtime, job harassment, or inhuman work speedup; in the fear, anger and frustrations of workers and their families when plants close or when they can't get adequate health care, housing or education for their children; in the rage at the huge differences between the rich and the poor; in the revulsion and disgust with political corruption and betrayals; in the opposition of minorities, especially Blacks, who are daily victimized and brutalized by a racist society; in the passion of women confronting this sexist, patriarchal society; in the aspirations of youth fighting the obstacles to their selfdevelopment.

At other times, the revolt is clear, powerful and involves many people. The Black and Latino rebellion in 1992 in Los Angeles, for instance, gave new life to the idea of transforming society. The recent strikes of janitors in Los Angeles and Chicago, of pilots, flight attendants and mechanics at several airlines, of the Boeing engineers and the Verizon communication workers, the bus and transit workers' strike in Los Angeles, the unreported struggles of Black women workers in the South seeking not only union protection but fundamental change of the racist South, the movement by college youth to eliminate sweatshop working conditions in Third World countries producing goods for American markets, the strike by GM auto workers last year that closed down the largest corporation in the world—all constitute a mass rebellion against existing conditions and the instinctive striving to transform society. It is a striving always thwarted by an entrenched union bureaucracy that is also tied to the ruling political parties. The AFL-CIO this year threw its support to Gore, betraying the real interests of the rank-and-file workers.

Most significant of the recent rebellions is the coalition of workers, youth, gays and environmentalists who have joined together to battle the globalization of capital and the destruction it leaves in its wake. The movement is international in scope, with large demonstrations staged wherever economic conferences are held. What is new in this movement is that capitalism is directly charged with being the enemy of human beings everywhere. These are the human forcesworkers, youth, women, Blacks and other minorities— that have the real power to challenge and defeat the power of capital and in the process transform society to serve the true needs of human beings.

Khatami's 'Persian soul1

President Khatami's charm offensive at the September Summit of World Leaders in New York has been seen as a dramatic new moment in diplomatic relations between Iran and the rest of the world. The president's speech amounted to no more than some warmed over glorification of the "Persian soul" and its alleged "integrative" power a la Shah Pahlavi, and a few half-baked phrases about a supposedly "new" multicultural logic of "dialogue between civilizations."

Nevertheless it is a significant moment. Most Iranians reject the anti-foreigner prejudices of the conservatives and would like to see a normalization of international relations. Iranian rulers, however, see normalization of relations as a way to take their "rightful" place in shaping international politics. The focus is especially on oil, its exploration and distribution in the northern Caspian Sea and in the southwestern border with Iraq.

After singing praises to the "Persian soul" Khatami rushed back to Iran to face some severe crises especially in Kurdish and Azeri-Turkish areas of Iran that are seething with discontent.

Before his trip to New York Khatami's wings had been clipped by Ayatollah Khamenei who humiliated the popularly elected Majlis by ordering it to remove legislation on press freedoms from its agenda. President Khatami quietly acquiesced to the order, telling Iranians and U.S. reporters that his hands are tied and that "constitutionally" he has no power to challenge the edicts of the Supreme Leader.

Many Iranians are now seriously challenging the arrogant policies that brought ruin to so many lives and devastated the Iranian economy. In addition to student protests, workers who are not being paid their wages have been holding strikes and protests throughout the country. More than 1,500 producing facilities have not received wages in the last few months. Protests have exposed continuing beatings of students arrested last year during the demonstrations for press freedoms.

Last month in Khorramabad pro-conservative groups attacked a reformist student organization's national assembly. They tried to prevent two prominent outspoken dissident Islamic intellectuals, Sorush and Kadivar, from speaking. They even attacked the local governor and assistant governor who are proKhatami. It was the first time that reformist government officials openly called on the masses to defend them in the streets against the conservatives.

As this movement grows and deepens it is going to also confront its own contradictions. Despite terrible hardships and struggles, these are heady days in Iran.

—Cyrus Noveen

Inhuman nature of global capitalism immigrant raiiy

The disaster which took the lives of 118 sailors on a Russian nuclear submarine in August reveals more than the decrepit state of the Russian military, the lies told by its political leaders, and the total disregard for human life on the part of both. The sinking of the Kursk was the kind of human tragedy that puts the spotlight on the very nature of the global capitalist system.

Though Putin has come under intense criticism for his handling of one of the worst submarine disasters

of Putin's ill-fated effort to restructure and build up the Russian military.

At the time the Kursk went down, the U.S. was conducting its own naval "training" exercises—at Vieques. The three weeks of live-fire exercises took place despite heated protests. Clearly, Russia is not the only power working to "modernize" its military.

Editorial

in Russian history, relatively little has been said in the U.S. so far about what actually led to the catastrophe. It was reported that the Kursk was on a training mission when it went under. But this was no normal training mission. The naval exercises which began Aug. 10 were the largest held by Russia in years and were largely prompted by Putin's effort to play catch-up with the West.

Putin has been trying to reorganize and build up the military since he took office. First, he ordered the genocidal invasion of Chechnya, which led to tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of over 300,000. Then, in response to anxiety over the U.S.'s near-total military hegemony, shown clearly by the war in Kosova, he declared that Russia must again become a world-class naval power.

RUSSIAN MILITARY BUILDUP

Just a week before the ill-fated naval maneuvers in the Barents Sea, Putin held an emergency meeting with his national security council to outline the most significant restructuring of the Russian military in two decades. The centerpiece of the plan calls for the navy, with its missile-equipped submarines, to play the main role in Russia's nuclear strike force. The Kursk was rushed off to sea to show that the navy was up to the challenge.

One wonders how anyone can think that Russia— with a Gross Domestic Product equal to that of The Netherlands and which contributes as much to world trade as tiny Denmark—is in the position to re-establish a "world-class navy." How could anyone think Russia can compete with the West, when it spends $5 billion a year on its military compared with $300 billion by the U.S.?

The only way even the pretense can be maintained is by sending men out in poorly equipped and maintained vessels lacking the most basic safety features. In a word, the disaster involving the Kursk is a direct result

U.S. forces are now engaged in hot spots ranging from Kosova (where, as in Bosnia, it has not managed to arrest any of the war criminals responsible

for the genocide) to Iraq. The city of Samawa was bombed by U.S. and British planes on Aug. 15.

U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA

The passing of the Cold War has not changed the fact that U.S. imperialism still views Latin America as its "backyard." Nor has the end of the Cold War halted the most threatening form of militarization—nuclear proliferation. This underlines the U.S.'s push for a nuclear missile defense system. A "highly classified" U.S. intelligence report leaked on Aug. 10 said the deployment of a U.S. missile defense system will lead China to increase its nuclear arsenal tenfold—which, it added, will prompt India and Pakistan to greatly increase their nuclear forces. It concluded that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan is a growing possibility.

U.S. rulers may not suffer from quite the same illusion as Putin when it comes to their drive for ever more militarization—after all, unlike Russia, the U.S. controls the world economy and so is in a far better position to modernize its military.

This does not mean that the creation of a missile defense system is a preordained conclusion. In early September Clinton decided to postpone a decision on whether to go ahead with it, in light of the many technical and political problems associated with it. Yet the direction in which U.S. politics is moving clearly favors the development of new military hardware at the expense of anything that can aid the development of the American people.

As the expression of the domination of means of production over means of consumption, of dead labor over living labor, capital's tendency for destruction has always been as real as its drive for self-expansion. Today's "globalized" capitalism has not changed that one bit.

A look at the criminal injustice system

Actual Innocence—Five days to execution and other dispatches from the wrongly convicted, by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer, Doubleday.

• "By 1977,. Georgia had executed 62 men for rape since the federal government began compiling statistics in 1930," wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1987. "Of these men, 58 were black and four were white."

• Mistaken eyewitness identifications contributed to 84% of the convictions which were later overturned.

• Twenty-seven percent of those wrongfully convicted had subpar or incompetent legal help, including a Kentucky capital case defendant whose attorney gave his business address as Kelly's Keg, a local tavern.

• A forensic pathologist in Texas routinely used his 13-year-old son as his Second Assistant Medical Examiner.

Authors Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer expose these and other horrors in Actual

Innocence, a catalog of true stories drawn from more than 60 men who were wrongfully imprisoned. The authors combine compelling statistics, scholarly studies, anecdotal evidence, historical information, and legal-precedent to call into question a system which unfeelingly sentences innocent people to prison and, all too often, condemns them to death.

Horror is the typical reaction to these factual accounts of tragic and sometimes evil miscarriages of justice. The reader cannot escape the conclusion that countless innocent people are in prison and, quite likely, some innocent people have been executed. The horror is compounded by the fact that even after clear and convincing evidence of innocence has been preferred, the system refuses to admit it made an error and will not release those who have been unjustly convicted.

In 1991, Scheck and Neufeld founded the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York City. The project provides pro bono assistance to prisoners who can convince Scheck and his students that they are innocent.

The Innocence Project relies on relentless investigating, skilled lawyering, biological evidence, and DNA in particular to obtain the release of those who were wrongfully imprisoned. Scheck and Neufeld have used DNA evidence to free more than 60 innocent men. Those who were wrongly convicted served an average of more than nine years before they were exonerated.

In their discussion of fraudulent police work, the authors show that in upstate New York state troopers planted fingerprints on evidence in tough cases. The

practice was discovered when one of the troopers applied for a job with the CIA and bragged about his craftiness. The information was passed on to the FBI, which sat on it for almost a year before notifying state authorities. While the FBI procrastinated, more people were framed.

The authors recount bits of the history of police misconduct beginning with Thomas Byrnes, Chief of

Detectives in New York City. Byrnes excelled at extracting confessions where others failed. His techniques involved beatings, questioning, then more beatings until the suspect gave the desired admissions.

Trent Holland, a Boston police officer, has been accused of misconduct 18 times. One judge accused Holland of committing perjury. On another occasion, he was accused of planting drugs on a witness to coerce false testimony. The police department's internal investigation failed to substantiate any of the charges. Holland

was never disciplined.

Actual Innocence concludes with a short list of recommended reforms to protect the innocent. At the top of the list, not surprisingly, is the need for state and federal statutes to allow postconviction DNA testing. Presently, only Illinois and New York have such laws.

To reduce eyewitness identification errors, the authors urge that all lineups and photospreads are videotaped. An independent examiner who does not know the identity of the suspect should run all lineups and photospreads.

All snitch interrogations and negotiations should be videotaped. Trial judges should presume that all snitch and informant testimony is unreliable and require the prosecutor to overcome that presumption before a jury can hear the evidence.

Forensic scientists should formally agree that crime laboratories function as an independent third force within the criminal justice system, unbeholden to prosecutors or defense lawyers. Crime laboratory budgets should be independent from the police and police officials should not be able to exercise supervisory control over the staff of any crime lab.

Fees for court-appointed lawyers must be raised to a level that will attract competent lawyers to take cases. Public defenders' salaries should be the same as prosecutors in each jurisdiction.

Each state should pass no-fault compensation statutes to provide relief to those persons who can prove they were wrongly convicted.

—Roger Hummel

Chicago—Some 10,000 marched in the rain Sept. 23 for amnesty for immigrants. The majority of Latin Americans were joined by Chinese, Indian, Polish immigrants and others—including a huge contingent of Black women homemakers from SEIU Local 880.

Stop bombing Iraq!

Washington, D.C.— It's Aug. 6, 5 p.m., 55 years to the day when Hiroshima became the scene of an unforgettable war crime, when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb sacrificing some 150,000 lives in one nuclear flash. Earlier, I imagined U.S. warplanes raining bombs on Iraq, as they would Aug. 12, 13, and 14. Dennis Kucinich, U. S. congressman from Ohio, identified U.S.; Sanctions against Iraq as "infanticide masquerading as foreign policy." George Galloway, British Member of Parliament, said before hundreds, "As mothers in Iraq sit in hospitals and watch their children die, the curses on their lips are the names of your country and mine."

UNICEF reportschildren under five killed by sanctions exceed 500,000; the total civilian death toll from Desert Storm to today is between 1.2 and 1.5 million; roughly half the population of Iraq does not have access to drinkable water. Starvation is biological warfare; disease is the U.S. weapon of mass destruction. Who needs a gas chamber when cholera, cancer, and typhoid will do the trick? Because of U.S./UN sanctions the common cold kills, and, according to the U.S. government, this mass murder is legal.

On Aug. 7, about 250 activists gathered in Lafayette Park, then marched to the Treasury Department. As we cried "Arrest them!" and "Enforce your own laws!" 25 offered ourselves to the Treasury Department for arrest. Though violating UN sanctions is a federal crime punishable by 12 years imprisonment and one million dollars in fines, D.C. police in riot gear barred the doors of the Treasury Annex and refused to arrest these enemies of the state for such heinous crimes as bringing toys and medicine to Iraqis.

Th«n we marched to the scene of the crime—the White House—to publicly accuse this administration of waging war on children, of dropping bombs on civilians, of denying a country food, water and medicine. Over & hundred people sat down on the sidewalk, demanding the government be held accountable for mass murder. Protesters displayed pictures of Clinton's victims dying of starvation on hospital beds. Refusing to leave, refusing to obey a law which restricts free speech to protect Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright from public scrutiny, 104 protesters were arrested for "demonstrating without a permit."

As you read this, the holocaust continues. This past year, the U.S. spent $2 billion to erode life from 22 million victims in an oven known as Iraq. At $1 million per tomahawk missile, we foot the bill, but the children of Iraq pay the price.

—Ceylon

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Youth

A Student's radical voice Polish anti-racist

I grew up in a conservative Northwest suburb of Chicago. When I entered high school, I was full of questions. I was 14 years old and rejecting religion in an extremely Catholic household. When I questioned my parents and my religious education instructors for proof of the existence of god, I was told that questioning was wrong and that I should rely on faith. I attempted to read religious material to increase my faith, but none of the books I read could give me valid justification for belief. I found it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify to myself not only the existence of god, but also the structure of our society. I was left with no other option but to reject faith in god and capitalism alike.

I was pushing away everything I had been taught, but I had nothing to fill the void. Consequently, I became angry and resentful of everyone until a concerned history teacher pointed me in the direction of Marx and explained how Marxism makes sense. Marxism provided the justification for my conclusions on religion and society that I had long been searching for. Although my early introduction to Marx came in the form of open dialogue, I had the fundamental understanding I needed to reassure myself that questioning was good and that I had, for the most part, been right: something is wrong.

After I learned about Marxism, I felt as though I should share my views with other students in my high school who were questioning the way things work. For one semester in my junior year, I wrote a Marxist political column for my school newspaper. At the time, the column was widely unpopular and resulted in name calling in the hallways, harassment in my classes from students and teachers alike, as well as letters being written to the editor directing me to "go back to Cuba" where I belonged. Eventually, the harassment

became too much to handle. I felt as though I had framed for murder wasted my time and that my goal to encourage the radical youth had failed. When Mrs. Smith, the faculty advisor, asked me to take a position as editor-inchief, I accepted on the condition that I would no longer have to write.

It wasn't until a full year later, my senior year of high school, that I realized the impact I had on my fellow students. People began approaching me to say how much they had enjoyed my column and to ask legitimate questions about Marxism. I began to speak with people who were so much like me that I could hardly believe it. We had been pushed into dark corners and isolated by the future Young Republicans who took control of our school.

In an effort to subvert the power structure, I organized a prom queen campaign to show how many radical students there were and that we were tired of being told that questioning was wrong. Our victory when I became prom queen was about more than simply ruining cheerleaders' dreams. It was about finally saving to the students and faculty that our voices cannot be silenced.

Since high school I have continued my activism in college. I joined my university's Marxist-Humanist Forum and finally feel as though I have found my niche. I realize that my high school experience was different, but in no way do I feel that my situation was terribly unique. The radical youth are out there, questioning and searching for a place where their voices can be heard. I am grateful that I have found my outlet, and I am even more grateful that I have helped other young people like me to find their voices. I can only hope that we have the courage to keep using them to help lead the revolution.

—Sandra Monserrate

Revolutionary educators contrasted

Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution, by Peter McLaren (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)

This book by one of the leading figures in critical pedagogy and the sociology of education seeks to counter the ideological dominance of neoliberalism by bringing together two figures who are often counterposed—Che Guevara, the martyred revolutionary guerrilla leader, and Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed helped inaugurate the movement for radicalized forms of education.

McLaren's concern is that at the moment when the inequities of global capital have never been more glaring, Freire's ideas are being so watered down that they pose no real challenge to existing society. He writes, "Where Freire was implacably prosocialist, critical pedagogy—his stepchild—has become (at least in classrooms through the U.S.) little more than liberalism refurbished with some lexical help from Freire (as in words like 'praxis' and 'dialogue') and basically is used to camouflage existing capitalist social relations under a plethora of eirenic proclamations and classroom strategies. Real socialist alternatives are nowhere to be found" (p. xxv).

While some "critical" educators who separate Freire's educational methods from a vision of radical social change may consider McLaren's effort to connect him with a revolutionary like Che to be somewhat scandalous, the real scandal, he rightly notes, is the way in which the original mission of critical pedagogy has been derailed. ^

McLaren seeks to counter this by recapturing both the radical vision of Freire and Che's advocacy of "revolutionary education from below."

McLaren does not ignore differences between the two figures. "Freire's pedagogy was fertilized more in the domain of critical dialogism than was Che's, and his vision of the new society was decidedly more open ended" (p. 189). And whereas Che grasped the importance of movements like the Black struggle in the U.S., Freire "rarely addressed the ways that oppression on the basis of ethnicity, class and sexual orientation are intermingled" (p. 166).

What connects these two figures, McLaren shows, is that, "For Che, as for Freire, education needs to take on an extra-ivory tower, public sphere role in contemporary revolutionary movements and in politics in general" (p. 187). Moreover, "For both Che and Freire, the dialectic must be disencumbered by metaphysics I and grounded in the concrete materiality of human I struggle. In the process of becoming fully human, I everyday life must be informed by a theory and pracItice relationship that truly alters ideas and expediences within a larger revolutionary dialectic" (p. 202).

|THE LEGACY OF CHE GUEVARA

The bulk of McLaren's book recounts Che's developient, but from a new angle—the way his conduct as a Revolutionary embodied an alternative form of critical Education.

The Che presented by McLaren is a man deeply conlerned with theory, insistent on ensuring that his com- |ades grasp its importance, and concerned about endig the division of theory and practice which is the lallmark of class society. He does not mention Che's pndency to downplay theory, as seen in his famous

can succeed if historical reality is interpreted correctly and if the forces involved are utilized correctly."

This does not mean McLaren is uncritical of Che. He notes that Che did not fully understand the indigenous peasantry in Bolivia in 1967, which helps explain his failure to generate support from it in his ill-fated guerrilla campaign. He also takes up, in a fascinating section, the differences between Che's concept of guerrilla focos and the Zapatistas in Chiapas: "Clearly, the Zapatistas have broken with much in the Leninist, Guevarist, and Maoist traditions in order to follow the indigenous concept of'command obeying"' (p. 65).

Nevertheless, he finds Che's uncompromising revolutionary spirit and insistence on learning as an integral part of the revolutionary process to be a vital contribution to any effort to reorganize society.

Less satisfying is McLaren's discussion of Che's attitude toward Stalinism. While he notes that in the early years of the Cuban revolution Che enthusiastically supported Russia, he says Che later completely broke with the "Soviet model": "Che did not view Soviet society as qualitatively different from capitalist society—Che recognized that Soviet style self-management, which treated individual enterprises and economic sectors as independent entities, would likely reinforce uneven development. Che's model, on the other hand, would allow the state to plan for the economy as a whole and promote more balanced development" (p. 76).

This indicates that Che did not break decisively from a state-capitalist model of development but instead opposed the failure of the Soviets to successfully implement one. This is further confirmed by the atement in Notes for A Study of the Cuban Revolution, "Even if the theory is not known, the revolution fact (acknowledged by McLaren) that "It was no secret that Che admired [Mao's] China over the Soviet Union" (p. 127). There is little evidence that Che held that production must be directly controlled by the workers in order for any regime to be considered "transitional" to a new society. *

CHALLENGING CAPITALS DOMINANCE

McLaren makes a powerful argument that Che and Freire's contributions offer vital ground for a critical, anti-capitalist pedagogy. Yet today's emerging generation of revolutionaries is reaching to begin from even higher ground—one that projects the transcendence not just of capitalism but also of what Marx called "vulgar communism." This is clearly what McLaren is reaching for as well.

He writes, "The challenge is to work toward the expropriation of the capitalists but also to ensure the abolition of capital itself. The abolition of capital, it should be noted, is intractably linked to the struggle against racism" (p. 101).

He concludes, "The struggle, as I see it, from the standpoint of revolutionary pedagogy, is to constaict sites—provisional sites—in which new structured mobilities and tendential lines offerees can be made to suture identity to the larger problematic of social justice—This requires breaking the imaginary power of commodified identities within capitalism as well as the forces and relations that both produce and are products of capitalism" (p. 187).

McLaren has written a penetrating and inviting study which will do much to aid those trying to develop a comprehensive theoretic and practical alternative to global capitalism.

—Peter Hudis

At the end of February 1997 the District Court in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland sentenced Tomek Wilkoszewski to 15 years in prison. He was found guilty of the assassination of a 17-year-old man from Radomsko, Daniel Switon.

In March of 1996, Tomek was a 21-year-old student of Technical School in Czestochowa, simultaneously working in his home-town of Radomsko. Radomsko, is a small town of 50,000 with high unemployment and a local branch of the right extremist party, Poland's National Revival. Graffiti like "Poland for Poles," "Jews into gas," etc., appeared on the walls of Radomsko and yqung nationalists started to "clean" the streets in town of "undesirable elements."

Tomek and his friends looked different than the skinheads. They didn't want to submit, so they faced their aggression. Tomek needed to pay particular attention when he was returning back to his home from the bus station, because skins always "waited" for him. He frequently missed the last bus home because of beatings.

When the anti-racist youths complained to the police, the policeman only looked at his colored hair and asked: "They did not kill you yet?" When they showed the marks of beating, police did not react: "It is too small, there is nothing to record."

Nazi attacks grew stronger until fear and desperation inspired a will to fight back. Tomek and his friends decided to come together to frighten their oppressors. In a group of 17, they ambushed the nazis in their meeting place. The fight was very short but ended tragically. In the fight Daniel Switon was killed with a knife.

Police didn't take measures to protect the evidence and until this day it's not clear which knife was used to kill Daniel. The court could not reconstruct the fight; the sentence was based on suppositions and circumstantial evidence. The court did not admit into evidence facts that aggressive reaction of Tomek and his friends was caused by long oppression and lack of interest by the police, which were extenuating circumstances.

The sentence for Tomek Wilkoszewski is unjust. In many smaH towns in Poland, the situation is very similar to Radomsko. Neoliberal transformations imposed by the Polish government have caused high unemployment and fear about the future, which leads many young people to the right extremist organizations.

Please send words of protest against the unjust sentence and demand a just trial for Tomek. Contact the Chairman of the Supreme Court of Poland: Chairman of Supreme Court Lech Gardocki PL Krasinskich 2/4/6 00-951 Warszawa 41. Fax. ++48 22 5309100. E-mail: [email protected]

Protest denounces Chicago cops

Chicago—Members of Comite Exijimos Justicia, an organization of friends and family members of victims of police brutality based in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood, held a rally and march here on Sept. 9. The demonstration was prompted by recent acts of injustice on the part of Chicago police, including the false arrest of Joseph Lopez on murder charges and the fatal shooting of Kevin Morales.

Carmen Santiago, the mother of Joseph Lopez, described how her son was arrested after a fatal driveby shooting incident despite eyewitness descriptions of the real shooter which did not match Joseph's appearance. Prosecutors stated that they would seek the death penalty before community outcry resulted in Joseph's release.

The father of Kevin Morales, an unarmed youth shot dead by police after a brief chase, told the crowd that,"no one from the city has come to apologize to our family. The only ones who supported us were ordinary people like those here today."

Other activists described additional cases of police injustice. Members of SEIU Local 46 collected signatures demanding the overturning of the conviction of Mario Flores, a union member framed and sentenced to death for a 1984 murder. Activists from the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network described the case of Frederick Mason, a gay Black man brutalized while in police custody in July.

After hearing speakers, demonstrators marched from Humboldt Park to the 14th District police station, home base to many of the officers involved in the recent cases.

—Kevin Michaels

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Bill Clinton's brief trip to Colombia Aug. 30, in the waning days of his presidency, was meant to show that whether Gore or Bush followed, either one would pursue the same new and ominous interventionist policy. The trip was also intended to show U.S. backing for Colombian president Pastrana and the $7.5 billion "Plan Colombia," towards which the U.S. is pitching in $1.3 billion, primarily for the Colombian military. This is to be expended for 60 U.S.-supplied helicopters and training for three 1,000-man battalions.

The aircraft and men are supposed to be used to hunt down drug traders, but no one has illusions on this score: the Colombian army and their death-squad paramilitary allies are at war with the two guerrilla forces (FARC and ELN) and those civilians it deems supporters, not drug traders.

Upon arriving, Clinton declared for the U.S. audience that the proposed intervention is "not Vietnam," and for Latin Americans, not "Yankee imperialism." Despite these professed benign intentions, several thousand students, trade unionists, human rights activists and others marched on the U.S. embassy in Bogota.

The Clinton administration is throwing its support behind an increasingly unpopular government. There have been at least six strikes against Pastrana's

German racists jailed

Three racist skinheads who had beaten to death Alberto Adriano, an African man, received long prison terms, Aug. 31. Two of the killers, who were only 16, were sentenced to nine years in prison, while the third, a 24-year-old, received a life sentence. None showed any remorse. Human rights groups estimate that racist ~ murders have averaged ten per year over the past decade. They also accuse police of being "blind on the right," overlooking rightist violence while cracking down on leftists and immigrants.

Dessau, where the three skinheads killed Adriano last June, is in a region of the former East Germany where unemployment stands at over 20%. The neoNazi National Democratic Party fans the flames of racism, telling people that a Jewish-dominated globalized capitalism favors immigrants over "real" Germans.

Chinese oppose taxes

Upwards of 20,000 peasants staged protests in Yuahdu and surrounding towns in Jiangxi province in mid-August. They were demanding an end to the exorbitant taxes and administrative fees levied on everything from the number of livestock they raise, to the charges imposed for allowing children to attend school. The protesters attacked government offices and houses belonging to the rich before armed riot police were sent in to squash the demonstrators.

While taxes have risen sharply over the past decade, the price of grain and other agricultural products has remained stagnant or declined. When China enters the World Trade Organization, prices are expected to fall even further. According to global market standards, farm production costs are higher in China than on the agribusiness farms of the industrialized West. In September, the Chinese statistics office published a survey of peasant incomes which indicated that only one-fifth of their average income comes from selling crops, while one-third is generated by migrant labor.

U.S. military ties to Colombia

neoliberal austerity policies since he took office, the latest at the beginning of August. Pastrana's finance minister promised a budget of "sweat and tears" for 2001, while Colombia's poor suffer from Latin America's highest unemployment rate—20.4%.

Pastrana has also been criticized by human rights organizations who oppose any aid going to the military since it, along with right-wing paramilitary forces, is responsible for most atrocities committed against civilians. Only two weeks before Clinton's visit, the army was implicated in the murder of six children in a coffee field. Hundreds of thousands of Colombians, mostly peasants, have been forcibly turned into refugees due to armed conflict, massacres and violent intimidation. This did not deter Clinton from using executive power a week before his trip to waive several human rights provisions put on the U.S. aid program, declaring instead that Colombia is a national security priority.

Australian protests

The opening of the Olympics in Sydney in September coincided with significant labor and anti-racist actions. Thousands of people, from workers to striking high school students, demonstrated outside the World Economic Forum, a gathering of bankers and corporate

A chain of protesters blockades the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne.

heads held in Melbourne on the eve of the Olympics. Despite a massive police clampdown, demonstrators blocked the entrances, preventing many of the delegates from attending on the first day.

In addition to the street blockades, a march of over 10,000 chanted "Stop Global Sweatshops," targeting Nike in particular. Their rally had a strongly internationalist flavor, with Indonesian unionist Romawaty Sinaga prominent on the speakers' platform. She told the cheering crowd: "We all, workers in Australia and workers in Indonesia, have common interests in stopping these people."

In Sydney, a smaller rally protested anti-Aborigine racism on the day the Olympics opened. In recent months, despite a march last May that drew over 250,000, conservative Prime Minister John Howard has refused to meet the demands of Aborigine leaders for a full apology for 200 years of racism and genocide. In addition, Howard has angrily repudiated a report by the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination that castigated government policies. These include disproportionately harsh prison sentences for Aborigine youth, as well as the harassment and unjust deportation of immigrants and asylum seekers.

One feature of "Plan Colombia" to sever the financial link between drug traders and guerrilla forces involves the massive chemical-based eradication of coca plants. The Colombian government has already done "test" sprayings in the southern state of Putumayo, a FARC stronghold. Besides destroying coca plants, the chemicals also killed maize and other subsistence crops, and contaminated the soil and drinking water. After the aerial spraying, local residents streamed into health care facilities with skin rashes, eye infections and severe breathing problems. It is not clear how long the chemicals being used retain their toxicity in the soil.

A free trade meeting by Latin American state rulers was held in Brazil the day after Clinton's visit to Colombia. While declaring support for Pastrana to come to a peace agreement with the FARC and ELN, the rulers did not as a group endorse "Plan Colombia." The states bordering Colombia are particularly under pressure. Brazil, Peru and Venezuela are increasing militarization at their borders with Colombia.

Within Colombia, more than 30 human rights groups Risked Clinton to withhold aid because of the Colombian military's bloody record. Other groups scheduled to receive part of the U.S. $300 million in nonmilitary aid have rejected their portion, since they do not want to become caught between the military and the guerrilla forces.

On Sjept. 10, tens of thousands of people marched in Bogota and other cities for an end of armed conflict by the military and guerrillas. The march followed a week of actions by over 200 labor, human rights and other groups.

West Timor massacre

Three UN aid workers and at least 11 others were killed in a massacre in West Timor, Sept. 6, a year after the slaughter that followed East Timor's vote for independence. At that time, military-sponsored militias who wanted to keep East Timor within Indonesia killed thousands of East Timorese and forcibly relocated tens of thousands more to camps in West Timor, which is part of Indonesia. Some 120,000 have yet to be allowed to return home. The refugees have been terrorized and killed By the militias, and now the UN aid office is closed. Like last year, Indonesian police and soldiers stood by while the killers went from house to house, threatening and killing people.

Renewed killing by military and paramilitary groups throughout Indonesia, especially in areas where there are Separatist movements, underscores the army's continued control of every aspect of government. In spite of the end of the Suharto dictatorship over two years ago and proclamations of democracy by President Abdurrahman Wahid, the military has not loosened its grip. Incredibly, the government recently voted to allow the military to keep a large block of seats in congress for seven more years. The military blames the killing around the country on "emotional" soldiers who take matters into their own hands.

The killings of the UN aid workers came on the eve of the president's appearance at the UN, apparently in order to embarrass him and to stop anticipated trials of military officers responsible for last year's slaughter. East Timor demands that Indonesia dismantle its terrorist training camps in West Timor, disarm and arrest the terrorist leaders, and resume the repatriation of refugees, and that the UN establish an international war crimes tribunal in East Timor.

In the U.S., the East Timor Action Network successfully lobbied to reinstate a suspension of U.S. military assistance to Indonesia.

—Supporter

NEWS AND LETTERS COMMITTEES

Who We Are And What We Stand For

News and Letters Committees is an organization of Marxist-Humanists that since its birth has stood for the abolition of capitalism, both in its private property form as in the U.S., and its state property form, as it has historically appeared in state-capitalist regimes calling themselves Communist as in Russia and China. We stand for the development of new human relations, what Marx first called a new Humanism.

News & Letters was founded in 1955, the year of the Detroit wildcat strikes against Automation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott against segregation—activities which signaled a new movement from practice that was itself a form of theory. News & Letters was created so that the voices of revolt from below could be heard unseparated from the articulation of a philosophy of liberation.

Raya Dunayevskaya (1910-1987), founder of the body of ideas of MarxistHumanism, became Chairwoman of the

National Editorial Board and National Chairwoman of the Committees from its founding to 1987. Charles Denby (1907-83), a Black production worker, author of Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal, became editor of the paper from 1955 to 1983. Dunayevskaya's works, Marxism and Freedom, from 1776 until Today (1958), Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (1973), and Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution (1982) spell out the philosophic ground of Marx's Humanism internationally, as American Civilization on Trial concretizes it on the American scene and shows the two-way road between the U.S. and Africa.

This body of ideas challenges all those desiring freedom to transcend the limitations of post-Marx Marxism, beginning with Engels. In light of the crises of our nuclearly armed world, it becomes imperative not only to reject

what is, but to reveal and further develop the revolutionary Humanist future inherent in the present. The new visions of the future which Dunayevskaya left us in her work from the 1940s to the 1980s are rooted in her discovery of Marx's Marxism in its original form as a new Humanism and in her re-creation of that philosophy for our age as Marxist-Humanism. This is recorded in the documents on microfilm and open to all under the title The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection— Marxist-Humanism: A Half-Century of Its World Development.

Dunayevskaya's philosophic comprehension of her creation and development of Marxist-Humanism, especially as expressed in her 1980s writings, presents the vantage point for re-creating her ideas anew. Seeking to grasp that vantage point for ourselves and make it available to all who struggle for freedom, we have published Dunayevskaya's original 1953 philosophic breakthrough and her final 1987

Presentation on the Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy in The Philosophic Moment of Marxist-Humanism (1989), and. donated new supplementary volumes to The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection. News and Letters Committees aims at developing and concretizing this body of ideas for our time.

In opposing this capitalistic, racist, sexist, heterosexist, class-ridden society, we have organized ourselves into a committee form of organization rather than any elitist party "to lead." We participate in all class and freedom struggles, nationally and internationally. As I our Constitution states: "It is our I aim... to promote the firmest unityl among workers, Blacks and otherl minorities, women, youth and those! intellectuals who have broken with the| ruling bureaucracy of both capital and labor." We do not separate mass activi-| ties from the activity of thinking. Send for a copy of the Constitution of New^ and Letters Committees.