No. 64, July-September 2021  Table of Contents Selected articles linked Click on image to left for pdf version of complete issue.

All U.S. Troops, Military/Security Forces, Agencies and Mercenaries Out of the Middle East, Now! Afghanistan: Humiliating Defeat for Murderous U.S. Imperialism Puppet Government Collapses, U.S. Personnel Flee, the Taliban Take Over On August 15, the two-decade long U.S.-led imperialist occupation of Afghanistan came to an inglorious end. In the face of the rapid advance by the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, the deeply corrupt puppet government collapsed. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was billed as a war against terrorism, and reprisal for the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. In reality, it and the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 were part of a war for U.S. imperialist global domination. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International called immediately after 9/11 to defeat U.S. imperialism and to defend Afghanistan and Iraq. The exit of U.S./NATO forces is a major defeat for the imperialist overlords who imagine themselves masters of the world. It should be greeted by opponents of imperialism everywhere. But the victory of the reactionary Islamist Taliban is no win for the oppressed. The question of women’s oppression will be at the forefront of events in Afghanistan as the Taliban consolidate their rule. Yet when the Soviet Union intervened in 1980 to defend a reform government that enacted measures defending women, the opportunist left joined the imperialists in calling for Soviet troops out.  Trotskyists Said Hail Red Army in Afghanistan in 1980 – Defend Afghanistan, Defeat U.S. Imperialism in 2001. Afghanistan: Humiliating Defeat for Murderous U.S. Imperialism (26 August 2021) Afghanistan and the Left (26 August 2021)

Revolutionary Perspectives vs. Bourgeois Reaction “At Home” and Abroad Biden Escalates Anti-China War Plans The repercussions of the defeat of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan reverberate around the world. The myth of the military invincibility of U.S. imperialism exploded in front of everyone’s eyes. Now Biden is financing a fleet of nuclear submarines for Australia, gearing up for war with China, when his NATO “allies” want to have none of it. In the United States, the bourgeois political scene remains deeply polarized. State laws and regulations have been issued seeking to prevent any discussion in schools about the racism built into U.S. capitalism. Now Texas has passed a draconian law against abortion. Meanwhile, we are seeing spectacular scenes reflecting the decay of U.S. capitalism and the total submission of the left to the Democratic Party. Thousands of migrants are penned in terrible conditions under a bridge in Texas, and Biden’s response is to launch the biggest mass deportation in decades. But where are the protests against this? Amid a deadly pandemic, capitalism has shown it cannot provide even the basic needs of the population. The struggle for authentic Trotskyism is key. Biden Escalates Anti-China War Plans (24 September 2021)

Democrats, Republicans: Enemies of Immigrants Stop Racist Deportation of Haitians! A year ago, Democrat Joe Biden was running for president promising to replace Trump’s vicious attacks on immigrants with a supposed “fair and humane” U.S. immigration policy. Since taking office, the exact opposite has happened: the Biden administration has been deporting at an even faster rate than the Trump administration ever did. By mid-September, thousands of Haitians started appearing at the Texas border with Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol holding 9,000 migrants, mostly Haitian, corralled under the international bridge at Del Rio, Texas, in unsanitary conditions with no shelter against dust storms and extreme heat. The response of the administration was to deport thousands back to Haiti, even as the country is falling apart. The Internationalist Group protested, calling to stop the racist deportations (also from Mexico) and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Stop Racist Deportation of Haitians! (27 September 2021)

Expropriate the Ruling Class Through Socialist Revolution! “Tax the Rich” No Answer to Capitalist Inequality During the coronavirus pandemic, as low-paid essential workers bore the brunt of the deadly plague at the front lines with little protection from the virus, workers’ income from wages fell while some 660 U.S. billionaires received a windfall of $1,100,000,000,000 (that’s 1.1 trillion dollars in profits). The spectacle of the ruling class gouging megaprofits from disease and death, and being rewarded for doing so with free money in bailouts and tax cuts, has led to a resurgence of calls to “tax the rich.”  This slogan has become the calling card of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and groups that tail after and adapt to it. For pseudo-socialists and labor reformists, the appeal to “tax the rich” is yet another means to subordinate the working class to the Democratic Party, calling on people to pressure their “elected representatives.” Calls to “tax the rich” are just tinkering, and won’t affect the fundamentals of a system that produces fabulous wealth for the owners of capital and grinding poverty for millions, while the working class lives paycheck to paycheck. These calls also blur over the obvious fact that the government already has at its disposal more than enough funds to meet dire human needs. Meanwhile, Democratic president Joe Biden wants to “tax the rich” in order to prepare for war on China. Revolutionary Marxists are not in the business of advising the capitalist state on how to “fairly” finance its apparatus of war and repression, but call to expropriate the capitalist exploiters. “Tax the Rich” No Answer to Capitalist Inequality (15 June 2021) The Working Class Paid for the New Deal (15 June 2021)

Backlash Against Mass Protests of Racist Police Murder Mobilize to Fight Racist “Anti-CRT” Gag Laws! They Want to Force You to Stop Teaching About Racism By Class Struggle Education Workers As the 2020-21 school year drew to a close, there was an explosion of laws and regulations restricting how teachers could discuss racism, sexism and other controversial issues in class. Republican governors and state legislatures have declared that teachers who discuss these topics are practicing “critical race theory.” In fact, the anti-“CRT” campaign has nothing to do with that theory. Rather, it is a racist backlash on the cultural front against the massive nationwide protests sparked by the racist police murder of George Floyd last year. It is akin to the propaganda campaigns of the white citizens councils in the 1960s, raising the spectre of McCarthyite repression in the schools. The witch-hunting laws are aimed at banning any discussion in schools of the social roots of racial, sexual and other forms of social and class oppression, and are also avowedly anti-communist. These racist gag laws should be shredded by mass mobilization and broken by concerted action of the education unions – backed by anti-racist and class-conscious educators, students, parents and school staff – against the whitewashing of U.S. history.  Mobilize to Fight Racist “Anti-CRT” Gag Laws! (6 September 2021) Revolutionary Integrationism vs. “Critical Race Theory” (6 September 2021) (on CSEW site) The 1776 Report: Whitewashing U.S. History (6 September 2021) The 1619 Project: Misidentifying the Roots of Racism  (6 September 2021)

Counterrevolutionary Instigators Exploit Frustration Over Economic Crisis The Truth About Cuba Protests Defend the Revolution Against U.S. Imperialism and Its Frontmen Fight for International Socialist Revolution The protests that took place in several dozen cities and towns of Cuba and locations in and around the capital on July 11 were the biggest anti-government mobilizations since the dawn of the Revolution. While fueled by desperation over food shortages, lack of medicine and blackouts that have beset the island in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the marches were instigated, manipulated and exploited by forces seeking to overthrow the Cuban Revolution. With its exemplary public health system, Cuba has been able to contain the virus far better than almost anywhere else on the planet outside of China. Yet U.S. rulers are seeking to capitalize on the economic toll of the pandemic, and weariness from 60 years of imperialist blockade. In this difficult situation, the first duty of revolutionary communists, in Cuba and worldwide, is to actively combat the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. The Truth About Cuba Protests – Defend the Revolution (23 July 2021) U.S. Blockade of Cuba: “Bring About Hunger, Desperation, Overthrow” (23 July 2021) “Cuba Is Being Accused of Many Things – Let’s Fact Check Them” (23 July 2021) Cuba: A Bureaucratically Deformed Workers State (Internationalist pamphlet

Revolutionary Trotskyism vs. Gramscism: The Programmatic Clash For some decades the thought of Antonio Gramsci has enjoyed all-sided popularity on the international left. Groups and supporters of Stalinist, Eurocommunist, social-democratic, populist, even bourgeois liberal currents, lay claim to the legacy of the Italian Communist leader. Gramsci's concept of hegemony was attractive to leftist academics, who looked to break the “political-intellectual” hegemony of the bourgeoisie as a stage preliminary to the revolution. This, and the “praxis” of post-68 Gramscians, is counterposed to Marx’s thesis, in The German Ideology (1847), holding that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Most astonishing are groups claiming to represent Trotskyism who try to appropriate Gramsci, or to combine the contents of these very different traditions. His main political theses, such as the struggle for hegemony and to cohere a “new historical bloc,” to prioritize a “war of positions” in the West rather than Bolsheviks’ “war of movement or frontal attack,” flatly contradict the policies of the Trotskyists, and moreover were devised and formulated explicitly against Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Revolutionary Trotskyism vs. Gramscism: The Programmatic Clash (August 2021)

Nothing In It for Working People and the Oppressed Germany: Coalition Dance in the 2021 Election Farce Berlin’s “Red-Red-Green” Senate: Enemy of Workers and Immigrants No Vote for the Left Party – For a Revolutionary Internationalist Workers Party! The last year and a half have been hellish for working people, the poor and oppressed throughout the capitalist world. A deadly plague, COVID-19, that in Germany alone has infected over 4 million people and caused almost 100,000 deaths (out of 230 million cases and almost 5 million dead globally). Stop-and-go lockdowns, millions of workers on short workweeks, hundreds of thousands laid off in the worst recession since 1949. Yet the campaign for the September 26 federal elections to replace federal chancellor Angela Merkel after almost 16 years in office is the same old coalition dance as usual. In this election, there is no choice for the workers. With the Left Party losing any kind of credibility as an opposition party, pseudo-“socialists” buried inside it or buzzing around it are hard-put to find any convincing arguments for voting for it, yet with their differing tactical recipes they are all entwined with this reformist party.  The Internationalistische Gruppe, in contrast, insists that a socialist revolution that establishes proletarian power will not come from endless electioneering for the bourgeois parliament, but by fighting for a revolutionary program through our own working-class organizations. Germany: Coalition Dance in the 2021 Election Farce (September 2021) Berlin Housing Referendum Expropriate Real Estate Corporations Without Compensation – But Only Socialist Revolution Can Provide Housing for All Berlin 2021: Skyrocketing rent, students can’t find housing, people forced out of the city because they can’t afford to live there. Some 8,000-10,000 homeless living on the street, while 100,000-plus apartments stand empty. This is a real housing crisis. Behind it are the real estate corporations that are making a killing from speculation. In the September 26 Berlin referendum , voting “yes” in favor of the expropriation of real estate corporations will be a protest against these parasites. But as Friedrich Engels wrote in 1873: “As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question.... The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production.” Berlin Housing Referendum (September 2021)

Class Battle in Alabama: Victory to the UMWA Warrior Met Coal Strike! For four months, some 1,100 coal miners organized in four United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) locals have waged a bitter strike against the Warrior Met Coal company in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. Miners are striking to reverse the vicious terms of a 2016 contract. With contract negotiations stalled, on July 28, hundreds of miners rallied outside the Midtown Manhattan headquarters of Black Rock, the biggest shareholder in Warrior Met mines and by far the largest investment management company in the world. What has been missing from the strike is sustained mass, militant labor action to shut down the mines and the processing facilities. What’s desperately needed to win is a mobilization of Alabama workers and supporters of labor and black rights to build mass, militant picket lines that scabs can’t cross and that keep the cops at bay. We need to revive the traditions that built the unions in the first place. Victory to the UMWA Warrior Met Coal Strike! (31 July 2021)