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No. 25,
January-February 2007
Table
of Contents
Selected
articles
linked\
Click on image to left for
pdf version of complete issue.
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Struggle to Forge a
Vanguard Is Key
A Revolution Is
Brewing In Mexico
As 2007 dawns, Mexico
is still reeling from ten months of sharp class
conflict. A new government has taken office
vowing to employ “the full weight of the state”
against those who defy it. Felipe Calderón, the
reactionary president imposed by the Federal
Elections Tribunal over massive protests, wants
above all to assure Wall Street and Washington
that he will “preserve economic stability.” The
appetites of the head of the right-wing National
Action Party (PAN) for a “strong state” are
evident, but he comes into office as the weakest
government of any in recent history. Not only
did protesters shut down the capital’s main
square and main thoroughfare for six weeks last
summer protesting electoral fraud, workers,
peasants and teachers repeatedly defeated police
and troops in a series of pitched battles over
the last year. Although a six-month mass strike
in the southern state of Oaxaca ended with an
eruption of cop violence and hundreds of
arrests, the tens of thousands of strikers are
unbowed. The dramatic clashes of 2006 have sown
the seeds of revolution, as the strikes of
1906-07 signaled the coming of the Mexican
Revolution of 1910. But the key element for a
victorious outcome is absent: a revolutionary
vanguard with the program and determination to
sweep away the inhuman exploitation and mass
poverty of capitalism and set out on the road of
international socialist revolution. A
Revolution Is Brewing In Mexico (10 January 2007)
State of Siege in Oaxaca,
Arbitrary Arrests in Mexico City
Break
Calderón’s “Firm Hand” With Workers Struggle
We
Demand
Immediate Release of the Prisoners and
Presentation of the Disappeared Alive
The new Mexican
government of Felipe Calderón is starting out
under the sign of mass repression. Following
the brutal crackdown of November 25, when
federal police attacked participants in a
peaceful mass march in Oaxaca, a state
of siege has been imposed on the state.
Currently the number of those arrested is
estimated at 500, of whom some 300 are still
behind bars. Another 100 were jailed in
previous weeks, some 60 disappeared and 21
opponents of the bloody Oaxaca governor Ulises
Ruiz killed. Now the manhunt has spread to the
capital with the arrest on December 4 of
Flavio Sosa Villavicencio, the most prominent
spokesman for the Popular Assembly of the
Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). Shortly after, the
murderers of the American journalist-activist
Bradley Will were released. The Grupo
Internacionalista is calling for a national
strike against repression and for workers
actions internationally to demand the
immediate release of all those arrested and
the presentation of the dozens of disappeared
alive.. Break
Calderón’s “Firm Hand” With Workers Struggle
(8 December
2006)
For a National Strike
Against Repression
State of Siege in Oaxaca,
Preparations in Mexico City
As Mexico prepares to hand over
power from President Vicente Fox, of the
right-wing clerical National Action Party
(PAN), to fellow PAN member Felipe Calderón,
the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca is under
a state of siege, while Mexico City will
awaken December 1 under a virtual police
state. In Oaxaca, a peaceful march of tens of
thousands of opponents of the bloody governor
Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and his Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) was brutally
repressed by the militarized Federal
Preventive Police (PFP) and PRI
paramilitaries. Combing the streets for anyone
suspected of being a sympathizer of the
Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca
(APPO), the police arrested more than 140
people in the long night of November 25. Since
then, cops are searching houses, public
transport and kidnapping people on the street.
The Grupo Internacionalista warns that this is
class repression by a capitalist regime which
fears an uprising of the exploited and
oppressed. The GI calls for a national strike
against repression, the formation of workers
defense committees, a break with all the
capitalist parties and forging a revolutionary
workers party. State
of Siege in Oaxaca, Preparations in Mexico
City (30 November 2006)
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The
Lynching of Saddam Hussein
U.S. Rips Apart Iraq
The
execution of former Iraqi strong man
Saddam Hussein on December 30, ordered
by a puppet court orchestrated by the
U.S. occupiers, was a hideous display
of imperialist barbarism reminiscent
of the Middle Ages. It was unadorned
state murder carried out on the orders
of the conquerors who have subjugated
the oil-rich and strategically
important Near Eastern country. It may
also be a watershed in the history of
Iraq, marking the “tipping point”
after which it spirals irrevocably
downward into a vortex of sectarian
and communal strife.
Who Gave Butchers of My Lai,
Torturers of Abu Ghraib License to
Kill?
What an Obscenity! U.S.
Imperialist
Mass Murderers
Execute Capitalist
Dictator Hussein
The
imperialist press reports that the execution
of Saddam Hussein is imminent. Saddam was a
capitalist butcher and brutal dictator. While
U.S. rulers use this as a battle cry for their
imperialist invasion and colonial occupation
of Iraq, many of Hussein's most heinous crimes
were carried at the behest of, and sometimes
on direct orders from, Washington. What an
obscenity – the world’s biggest war criminals,
the torturers of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo,
claiming the “right” to hang Hussein after a
sham trial that even the imperialist “human
rights” groups denounced as a travesty! Imperialist
Mass
Murderers Execute Capitalist Dictator
Hussein (29 December 2006)
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Working-Class Opposition as Prodi
Continues Berlusconi Policies
Italy: Popular Front of Imperialist War
and Anti-Labor Attacks
Ever since the “Unione” –
Italy’s governing coalition of assorted
ex-Christian Democrats, ex-Stalinists and Greens
– came into office last April, it has
relentlessly pursued two goals: slashing labor
costs at home to make Italian industry
“competitive” and militarily occupying foreign
countries according to the dictates of U.S.
imperialism (and its Israeli allies). Prime
minister Romano Prodi depends heavily on the
Rifondazione Comunista (PRC –
Party of Communist Refounding) led by Fausto
Bertinotti to carry through these plans. The
reformist PRC leaders desperately want to please
their capitalist masters, but there has been
growing working-class opposition to their
program of cutbacks, attacks on pensions, privatizations
and war. Immigrant workers are
particularly targeted. Despite the numerous
radical leftists and syndicalist labor
militants, Italian capitalism is intact. Workers
have shown their willingness to fight. What is
lacking is above all a Leninist-Trotskyist
workers party to lead the struggle for socialist
revolution. Italy:
Popular
Front of Imperialist War and Anti-Labor
Attacks (31 December 2006)
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Sean
Bell Gunned Down on His Wedding Day –
Mobilize Workers’ Power Against Police
State Repression!
50
Bullets: Racist NYPD Cop Execution, Again
In the
early morning hours of November 25, a squad of
New York City police surrounded a car of three
unarmed black and Latino men, and unleashed a
hail of 50 bullets. The killer cops murdered the
driver, Sean Bell, on the day he was to marry
his fiancée and badly wounded Joseph Guzman and
Trent Benefield. As the New York Police
Department desperately tries to find someone to
frame for the bloody crime their cops
perpetrated, angry demonstrators recalled the
1999 murder of Amadou Diallo in the doorway of
his home by a police death squad that fired off
41 shots. Democratic politicians rushed to line
up behind Republican mayor Bloomberg to head off
mass protests and keep a lid on New York. What’s
needed is to mobilize power – the power of the
multiracial working class along with black,
immigrant and other oppressed “minority”
populations who together are the overwhelming
majority of New York – to put a stop to police
brutality. And that will take nothing less than
socialist revolution. 50
Bullets:
Racist NYPD Cop Execution, Again (5 December 2006)
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Statement
of the Internationalist Group to Sept. 15
Oakland Rally
Mobilize
Workers Power to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Mumia
Abu-Jamal is the foremost class-war prisoner in
the United States today. He was framed and
sentenced to death for his calls for revolution.
The threat of execution continues to hang over
his head 25 years later because the racist
rulers are determined to silence the eloquent
“voice of the voiceless.” The Internationalist
Group, section of the League for the Fourth
International, has fought since its inception
for workers action to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Our
comrades of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do
Brasil in April 1999 initiated the first labor
action for Mumia’s freedom. Mumia’s conviction
was no aberration but the normal working of the
legal system designed by the slave masters to
keep black slaves in the chains of perpetual
bondage. We call not for a “new trial” by this
bourgeois injustice system which has condemned
thousands of innocents to die, while U.S.
imperialism lays waste to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rather, we appeal to the working class to
mobilize its tremendous class power to free
Mumia and defeat the imperialist war abroad and
the bosses’ war against the poor, minorities,
working people and immigrants here. Mobilize
Workers
Power to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! (15 September
2006)
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UFCW
Should Shut Down Meatpackers Nationwide!
Full Citizenship Rights for All
Immigrants!
Migra
Arrests Over 1,200 in Packing Plant Raids
On December
12, federal immigration (migra) cops
swooped down on Swift & Co. meat packing
plants in six states, arresting almost 1,300.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICEE)
division of the Homeland Security Department
bragged that they were the largest workplace
raids ever in U.S. history. Around the Midwest
anger and anguish boiled over as workers and
family members cried out, “What about the kids?”
Five of the six plants are unionized, and the
United Food and Commercial Workers Union has
gone to court asking for an injunction. But much
more is needed: the UFCW should shut down every
unionized packing plant in the country, and all
of labor should mobilize in defense of immigrant
workers under racist government attack. Migra
Arrests
Over 1,200 in Packing Plant Raids (13 December
2006)
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Walkout
at Smithfield Packing Beats Back Attack
on Immigrant Workers
North Carolina Labor
Revolt
On November
16, the workers at Smithfield Packing Company in
Tar Heel, North Carolina scored a victory as
over 1,000 black and Latino workers went on
strike to defend immigrant workers fired because
of problems with their documents. The successful
walkout at the non-union plant was fueled by
mounting frustration over the harassment,
degradation and horrendous working conditions
all workers at the plant endure. Conditions at
the plant come right out of the pages of Upton
Sinclair’s novel The Jungle about the Chicago
meatpacking industry a century ago. By winning
the jobs back for 75 immigrant workers, the
two-day strike showed that it is possible to
resist the federal government’s anti-immigrant
witch-hunt. It also overcame management “divide
and conquer” tactics of setting one
ethnic group against another. Smithfield workers
have shown great willingness to struggle. To win
the battle for unionization and defend workers’ rights,
what’s needed is a class-struggle leadership
that doesn’t play by the bosses’ rules. Labor’s
gotta play hardball to win. North
Carolina
Labor Revolt (December 2006) |
For a National Strike to
Demand: Police and Armed Forces Out!
Oaxaca
Is
Burning: Showdown in Mexico
Down
with the PRI, PAN and PRD! Break with López
Obrador
And His Popular Front! Form Workers Defense
Committees!
The militant strike and mass
rebellion that has convulsed Oaxaca and is now
shaking all of Mexico has entered its decisive
phase. The invasion of the state by the
federal police and armed forces has unleashed
a wave of opposition throughout the country
and is reverberating internationally. It is
clear to everyone that the military deployment
has not had, at all, the intended effect of
intimidating the population. The Grupo
Internacionalista has called for key sections
of the working class to launch a national
strike against the repression. What is
standing in the way of the necessary
mobilization is above all the popular front
around the PRD (Party of the
Democratic Revolution) and its standard bearer
Manuel López Obrador. This bourgeois party
seeks to contain the struggle in order to
defend the interests of capital. Then comes
the massacre. The key for Oaxacan teachers and
their allies in opening the road to a
revolutionary uprising of the workers,
peasants and all the exploited and oppressed
is to struggle for proletarian independence from all
bourgeois parties and politicians. Oaxaca Is
Burning (10 November 2006)
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“Comrade President” Capitalizes on
the Confidence of Washington and Wall Street
Brazil:
Lula vs. Alckmin, Candidates of Capital
Against the Workers
On October 1, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva
fell short of a majority of the votes on the
first round of Brazil’s presidential election.
The accumulation of scandals cut into his
support from the middle class of São Paulo. For
the second round, Lula fell back on his base
among the poor of the Northeast, which had
benefitted from government welfare programs. But
the key was support from Wall Street and top
Brazilian capitalists, who made bundles of money
hand under the government led by Lula’s
Workers Party (PT). Now that he has been
re-elected it will be war on the gains of the
working class. The Liga Quarta-Internacionalista
declared that there was no choice for the
workers between Lula’s
bourgeois popular front and the rightist
candidate Geraldo Alckmin, or the candidate of
the “Left Front,”
Heloísa Helena. The “Catholic
socialist”
and pseudo-Trotskyist often attacked Lula from
the right, opposing women’s
right to abortion and denouncing peasants for
invading Congress to demand agrarian reform.
Unlike the rest of the Brazilian left, the LQB
has consistently opposed voting for any
candidates of a popular front. Brazil: Lula
vs. Alckmin, Candidates of Capital Against the
Workers (October 2006)
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“Fight the
Right” Rhetoric and Apologies for “Labor”
Death Squads
GEM: Caboose of the Mexican Popular
Front
For
the
past six months, the Mexican working class has
been the target of a series of murderous
assaults by the forces of “law and order,” in
each case carried out by police under the
orders of all three of the major capitalist
parties, the PAN, PRI and PRD. By railing
against “The Attacks of the PAN,” the Grupo
Espartaquista de México is trying to sidle up
to supporters of the bourgeois populist Party
of the Democratic Revolution and its
presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López
Obrador (AMLO). Last year the GEM gave
backhanded support to AMLO by opposing the
lifting of his executive immunity (which didn’t
stop him from running for president). The GEM
and its mentors in the Spartacist League/U.S.
have been moving to the right for some time,
but in the heat of the convulsive class
battles that have shaken Mexico this year,
their torturous formulas have led them to
imitate classical popular-front politics, and
worse. In attempting to force an American
framework on semi-colonial Mexico, pretending
that the corporatist labor bosses appointed by
the capitalist state are just a bunch of
sellout union bureaucrats, they end up
apologizing for “labor” death squads that are
literally killing strikers in Oaxaca.
GEM:
Caboose
of the Mexican Popular Front (7 October 2006)
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Spirited Solidarity Picket in New
York
“Oaxaca Teachers, We
Are With You!”
On September 21, some 150 teachers,
professors, trade-unionists, students, leftists
and community activists joined in an energetic
picket outside Mexico’s Consulate General in New
York to “Protest Repression in Oaxaca, Mexico –
Defend the Striking Teachers.” The picketers
were demonstrating militant solidarity with the
70,000 teachers in the southern Mexican state on
strike since last May 22, who have braved
massive police repression and death squads that
have killed at least five strike supporters in
the last month. “Maestros oaxaqueños, estamos con
ustedes” (Oaxaca teachers, we are with
you), the NYC demonstrators chanted. The chant
was so loud, in fact, that it was heard all the
way to Oaxaca, via a live broadcast from the
picket line to the strikers’ station, Radio
Plantón (Sit-In Radio). Over several weeks,
union activists from the Professional Staff
Congress and the United Federation of Teachers
gathered support for the protest in support of
the Oaxaca teachers. The Internationalist Group
and the Internationalist Clubs at CUNY played an
important role in initiating and building the
picket along with activists in the PSC and UFT. “Oaxaca
Teachers,
We Are With You!” (21 September
2006)
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