January 24, 2016 · 3:57 pm

Libertad a Milagro Sala!!!

CWG is posting this defense call  from Liga Comunista de los Trabajadoresv (Núcleo marxista por un Partido Obrero Revolucionario).  We will attempt to provide an authorized translation as soon as possible:

Desde la LCT repudiamos la detención de Milagro Sala, dirigente de la organización de desocupados Tupac Amaru, llevada adelante por Gerardo Morales, gobernador de Jujuy y principal referente de la UCR y de la Alianza Cambiemos del presidente Macri.

Se la detiene -el día sábado 16 de enero, en plena feria judicial- bajo la carátula de “incitación a la violencia y desorden público” cuando no hizo más que movilizarse y reclamar el pago para las cooperativas que están ligadas a la Tupac-Amaru. Si hay alguien que insta a la violencia es el mismo gobernador Morales que ni bien asumió empezó a movilizar a los gendarmes. El desbarranque, hace un mes, de un ómnibus en la provincia de Salta lleno de gendarmes, con la muerte de 42 de ellos, era parte de un contingente mayor que iba a la provincia de Jujuy a reprimir a la Tupac Amaru.

Qué no nos engañen, más allá de que estemos en contra de los métodos y de los privilegios estatales de Sala, Morales no viene a terminar con la burocracia piquetera de Sala y de tantos otros, para que todos tengan trabajo sin clientelismo, ni para que haya viviendas para todos o más recursos para los más empobrecidos -¡el 70 por ciento de la población jujeña! después de 12 años del kirchnerismo-; Morales viene a recuperar el centro político institucional, o sea, el control de lo más rancio de la burguesía-oligárquica jujeña, y de sus representantes políticos y judiciales. Nada bueno se puede esperar de estos, más que ajuste, hambre y represión.

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December 26, 2015 · 8:17 pm

Class War Vol 2 no.5

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November 29, 2015 · 5:20 pm

2016 Elections: No support for social imperialists: build a fighting workers labor party

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November 22, 2015 · 4:35 pm

After the Paris attack: We are all Kenyans, Malians, Syrians and Afghans

The drone operators in air conditioned trailers in Missouri are killing civilians in Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria alike; therefore the Pentagon conception that so-called terror bombings constitute “asymmetrical warfare” is wrong; “limited war” the term used in the Eisenhower and Kennedy days leading up to Vietnam acknowledged that the U.S. military was fighting “irregular forces” overseas.   For all the victims on all the continents these distinctions are meaningless, they are victims of imperialist war and this is true in the metropolis as well as in the semi-colonies.   The bombings in Kenya and Mali are not different from the bombings of civilians in Paris and neither are they different from the victims of the U.S. drones or one ton French fragmentation bombs and Matra missiles. This is war, something imperialism makes continuously and non-stop and has done so since before the end of the Cold War, beginning with the Charlie Wilson/Brzezinski support policy for the anti-communist Mujahideen in 1979.

To end these wars that metastasize one into the next, pacifism will never work. A sentiment is no match for the powers of finance seeking resources and populations to exploit. Likewise the patriotic appeals of the Hollandes and Obamas to seriously make war and “finish terrorism off” are scams that only serve to keep the wars going.

The only way to put an end to “endless war” is socialist revolution. It is not just a question of disempowering those who always stand to benefit from murders and terror whether they be Wall St. banksters, members of the Paris Bourse or “radical” clerics seeking a piece of the oil profits.   The great democratic aspirations of the masses must be met and exceeded for humanity to achieve a higher social level of development, and, in fact, in the global warming era species survival requires the same solution. Only socialism can deliver for the masses democratic aspirations and only the delivery of political power into the hands of a dictatorship of the international working class can put an end to the plunder and war policies of the capitalist dictatorship. The victims in Mali/Kenya have all the same social characteristics as the victims in the metropolis. The list grows and will grow. The empires must go!

In fact, U.S. imperialism is the world’s leading terrorist. For those of us who live here, they are the main enemy. Daesh exists because the U.S. drove al-Qaeda in Iraq out of Iraq and into collision with the al-Zawahiri leadership resulting in separate organization, ISIS, which claims to be the real center of a new Caliphate, a reactionary world system based on a zealot’s interpretation of Sharia law.   Those who say that ISIS is the creation of the U.S are wrong in the literal sense, but ISIS could not exist except in the wake of a destroyed Iraq and a ruined Syria and these conditions must be laid squarely at the door of U.S. imperialism.

Social imperialists at home and abroad favor these wars. Bernie Sanders and François Hollande are not new phenomenon suddenly appearing on the historical stage. And it is important to know that the Max Schachtman brand of socialism supported the U.S. war in Vietnam just as the French Communist and Socialist parties supported France’s colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. They do so, and did so, because they represent the interests of the highest paid workers and the bureaucrats at the top of the labor federations who are beneficiaries of the little bit of real trickle down from imperialist super profits from the exploitation of our sisters and brothers in the semi-colonies. In this they identify with the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie and take their side against the workers of the world. Like the empires they support we must sweep them into the dust-bin of history.

Social imperialism starts at home under the guise of Bernie Sanders and is reflected in the moralistic pacifistic drivel when the left produces its obligatory “we oppose terroristic barbarism” qualifiers. Nowhere do we read in the reformist or pacifist press that passes for a left any call for an end to social imperialist misleadership, a social imperialist leadership that always favors wars against “terrorist barbarism” and in favor of “metropolitan civilization.”   Nowhere do we see the phony left calling on the labor movement to form its own party and channel the mighty force of labor to smash the capitalist state most presently in the imperialist centers. A layer of social imperialists stand in the way. They are doing their best to keep the workers internationalist consciousness from emerging. When blow back against the imperialist center occurs it is an extension of the wars of subjugation of the semi-colonial peoples but the social imperialists don’t want you to understand this. The social imperialist’s legitimacy, such as it is, in the eyes of the big bourgeoisie consists of sustaining nationalist mythology, the benevolence of U.S. world leadership and the rewards of private enterprise.

“In the absence of a popular secular leadership, including that of communists, both in the heartlands and the neo-colonies, leadership of resistance to imperialist oppression defaults to the radical clerics who mobilise their armies to negotiate with imperialism a share of the oil. In creating the history of colonial oppression, or benefiting from it, the Empire unites bosses and workers in a common fight to defend the basis of Empire, the extraction of wealth from the resources and labour of their client states”, – Dave Brownz, “Marx on Parisian Terror”

Under the combined thumb of intervention and state repression the imperialist’s historic interventions in the colonies and semi-colonies have severely stymied the emergence of a revolutionary and democratic workers movement, empowering every comprador bourgeoisie to crush the movements of the workers and peasants, making workers and peasant’s revolution less possible.

SMASH THE RACIST LIES! IMMEDIATE CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR ALL!

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1938, revolutionary Marxists called for the abolition of the racist U.S. immigration quotas so as to accept Jewish refugees from the Holocaust anyone with two eyes could see was coming. The reformist New Deal kept the doors shut tight. Today Syrian refugees face a similar obstacle in the U.S. Congress with sectors of the Democratic Party in coalition with the Tea Partiers in installing a process that will keep Syrian refugees out of the U.S.A. for two years or more, even in the cases where these applicants would ultimately be accepted. This is a death sentence; this is only acceptable in the eyes of the suckers whose own Caliphate is the white Anglo-Saxon protestant Ku Klux Klan Caliphate. The anti-immigrant war, like the war on terror itself is a propaganda plan to reinforce the public impression of capitalism’s phony economic recovery. The anti-refugee and anti-immigrant causes serve as political distractions from the true picture of mass unemployment and exploit the anxiety of the precariously employed and underpaid.

The bourgeois media pound us with the ideas that workers are and should be outraged by the criminal attacks on civilians in France but they should know that these do not come about in abstraction from a series of similar suicide bombings committed across the Middle East and North Africa.   And the bombings come about in direct connection to the brutal subjugation of non-believers in areas under ISIL/ISIS/Daesh control. Our homes, community and travel are no longer safe. During the recounting of the civilian dead in Paris and those killed in the downing of the Russian plane, the corporate media hide the facts that thousands of innocent civilians have been killed by 14 years of indiscriminate and targeted bombings by the U.S./UK/French and now Russian air forces. Of course even less is revealed about the theocratic state of Israel which only last year slaughtered thousands in Gaza. As we write here, the war of terror waged by Israeli settlers against the Palestinians has escalated with many new victims. While the U.S. points to a paper disapproval of the expansion of these settlements, the U.S. Obama administration arms the Israeli military to the teeth and the very public ostensible disagreement with the policies of the arch racist Netanyahu has vanished from the press. At the same moment that police terror directed at black and brown communities result in record numbers of police victims, the bourgeoisie sponsors black anti-immigrant voices and anti-refugee hysteria always to the tune that the “foreigners” will take your job. A black vanguard has seen through this and has made a profound alliance with the Palestinian cause and we hope they will see their own interests in defending Syrian refugees from “the man’s” wars.

Imperialism’s military aggression and dominance stymies the forces of Permanent Revolution, the only forces that can hold back theocratic reaction, and as a result has thus brought that terrorist reaction to every worker’s doorstep from Fallujah to Paris and beyond. The ruling class will make use of this fear to rally workers into nationalist mobilizations; the fascists and racist forces will extend this sentiment to anti-Muslim violence.   The centrist and social-imperialist left, “progressives” and pacifists find their ways to rally to the flags of the imperialists.   Revolutionary workers must show another road forward, a road and program built upon internationalist solidarity to defeat imperialism as a system. The imperialists have brought the war on terror down upon us; we must defeat the rule of the capitalist class whose self interests dictate that they choose between smaller and larger and world wars.

Revolutionary workers must oppose the rallying of nationalist and patriotic sentiment used to prepare for expanded and future military interventions. To defeat the terrorist threat imperialism must be taken out of the equation. This means that to defeat ISIS the capitalist system in the imperialist centers must be overthrown and replaced by internationalist workers governments.

Once again we are watching as the bourgeoisie gets away with fomenting racist hysteria, exactly and only because of the paucity and crisis of working class leadership. But revolutionaries are here to tell you that life does not have to be this way and that life must be another way for species survival. Forward to a new world party of socialist revolution! Forward to the world socialist revolution!

Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)     11/21/2015

 

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November 20, 2015 · 12:47 pm

Free, Quality Public Education For All!

PDF: Free, Quality Public Education for All!

Missouri Football Players, Black Students Show the Way!

Abolish the Iowa Board of Regents! No to Cuts in Education!
No Downsizing and No Privatization of Public Services!

Organize Mass Worker/Student/Faculty Struggle
to Defend Public Education! Shut it Down!

Free, Quality Public Education For All!

Republican Iowa Governor Branstad hates public education and public sector workers, and particularly unionized workers. His latest political stunt is the appointment of J. Bruce Harreld as the new University of Iowa president through Branstad’s hand-picked Board of Regents. The search process was obviously a setup from day one, as the University search committee went through the motions and fast-tracked the appointment of Harreld, a career corporate executive who lacks credible academic experience. He fits the bill very well for Branstad, who is privatizing Medicaid in Iowa. What Harreld will do remains to be seen, but Harreld says explicitly that the University needs “to shift all of the practices, policies, procedures and culture.” This is business-speak for workers, faculty and students getting the shaft. In the context of an education funding shortage and for a University that has been cutting staff and privatizing since the 1990’s, Harreld’s appointment signals future intransigence. Workers will get it in the neck; and as the quality of education declines, students will discover they have new debts, as tuition and fees will continue to increase to counter the impending shortfall that Branstad is committed to imposing. Harreld’s installation comes in the wake of the Deloitte fiasco, which was a scheme to make cuts, as is the TIER project.

Harreld’s installation can be stopped. But this limited goal will not solve the generalized problem of state university systems operated as private profit machines. To achieve remedies that serve workers, faculties, students and communities, we must employ the general strike weapon in support of a class struggle political program. The nation-wide attacks on public education can only be stopped if we take up the method of the Missouri football players and shut it down in a general strike for open admissions and free tuition as part of a nation-wide campaign that unites Black Lives Matter, the struggle of the low-wage and precarious workers and the defense of immigrants and women. The historic international program of the student movement has been for free, quality public education for all, with a student stipend, for academic freedom and guaranteed work upon graduation.

This school year marks the eighth anniversary of the generalized crisis of the capitalist system. This is what the kept bourgeois press calls the “Great Recession of 2008-2009.” But we notice that the cuts go on and the recovery does not include rehiring what are now long-term unemployed. The mushrooming growth of the precariat who exist at a subsistence or lower rate of pay is counted as a reduced unemployment statistic. College students graduate with overwhelming debt and few job prospects. The full-time working population has seen their wage package stagnate while their benefits and hours have been under continuous attack. Thus adjunct faculty finds they have greater workloads for less pay and many suddenly find themselves unemployed. This is the future in store for many university workers in Harreld’s promised program of changes.

Mass Outrage at Board of Regents over the Harreld Appointment

Harreld’s appointment has set off a series of protests as workers, faculty, students and the community have expressed outrage at this blatant attack on the University and public education.

The Harreld appointment even made national news. Both the Faculty Senate and Student Senate at the UI condemned the appointment. The UI Staff Council, which “represents” the unorganized workers and is little better than an appendage of the University administration and a company “union”, even chimed in their disappointment.

Iowans for Defending Our Universities (IDOU), has come into being as a coalition of “students, alumni, parents, faculty, staff, unions and citizens.” Which unions, they don’t say. But the teaching assistants union UE-COGS has taken a prominent organizing role for these rallies, while the AFL-CIO Central Labor Council, the Iowa City Federation of Labor (ICFL) has also shown support. The IDOU coalition has organized several protests, but if you “join” the coalition on their website, you are relegated to an email list. You are not invited to scheduled mass meetings of workers and students; instead, you are only called upon to carry signs that maintain the chains between the labor bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and leaderships you did not elect. This is exactly what democracy does NOT look like! Any successful workers movement demands workers democracy in order to flourish.

There should be mass, democratic worker/student/faculty assemblies organized on a regular basis that take exclusive decision-making power out of the hands of the Regents and Management and places it into the hands of the Assembly!

Abolish the Board of Regents! Examine the books and the contracts and publicize the identities of the beneficiaries of University and State largesse! A largesse based on increased public debt, fees and tuition hikes!

The Campus Community Assembly should establish Action Committees to meet and work daily to pursue the Assembly’s agenda.

The November 17th Campus Community Assembly to “learn more about the current crisis and share ideas for responding” is a first start as far as mobilizing workers, students and faculty.

The IDOU coalition has two major action demands:

  • to defend our universities against Board actions that undermine integrity.
  • to demand that Board President Bruce Rastetter and all members of the Board of Regents be removed or resign

If the resignation of the Board of Regents is achieved, it would temporarily restrain business interests for a time and would turn the tide against wanton attacks on our public services. However, it should be pointed out that “shared governance” is a myth under capitalism. Even at a public university.

Either the Regents rule for the interests of Big Capital rule and continue to fleece the public treasury and the tuition-payers, or, the workers, students, faculty and communities, i.e., the working class, establishes free education as a right!

We don’t need the Board of Regents to dictate! Those who work and study at the University should run the University! For worker/student/faculty control of the University through democratically elected committees!

 

The Labor Bureaucracy and the Democratic Party Graveyard of Struggle

The University of Iowa is the core of the organized public sector workers in Iowa, with three unions, AFSCME Local 12 that covers the “merit” blue collar and clerical, UE-COGS who represent the graduate student teaching assistants and SEIU 199 who represent the nurses. These three unions represent thousands of workers in a “right to work” wage-slave state. It is labor that has taken a prominent lead in the protests against Harreld, notably UE-COGS, and the AFL-CIO Central Labor Council, the Iowa City Federation of Labor (ICFL). The leadership of AFSCME Local 12 (and AFSCME Council 61) and SEIU 199 have issued no formal statements on the Harreld appointment or in protest of the Board of Regents. Governor Branstad has always hated unions, particularly AFSCME, and he has a long history of anti-union and anti-worker attacks. That AFSCME and SEIU are not trying to mass organize opposition to the board of Regents, trying to build a fighting labor movement, is to surrender the fight before it has even begun.

And make no mistake about it. The University has been cutting staff for decades. Back in the 1990’s, there were demonstrations against cuts and the use of temp workers at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC) and Vending Services was privatized out to Coca-Cola, eliminating those union jobs. Branstad, “inspired” by Scott Walker, could very well be able to gut Chapter 20, the Iowa Collective Bargaining law. The time to organize to fight is now, not tomorrow! As was shown in Wisconsin, the strategy of class collaboration with the Democratic Party of the bosses, electoral politics and “fighting” right-wing Republicans with Democrats is not going to cut it.

The Iowa City Federation of Labor has taken a more active role in organizing demonstrations in recent years, but historically rather than an organization of workers struggle and solidarity, it has been and still is primarily a sandbox for the local Democratic Party political hacks within the labor movement to play in. This is the method of the pro-capitalist, Democratic Party labor bureaucracy. One of the first things they do in any and every struggle is prop up the Democratic Party and divert workers into the dead-end of lobbying, legislative and electoral politics, limiting struggles to what is acceptable to the Democrats. In Johnson County, the Fight for $15 was watered down from one poverty, sub-living wage to another $10.10 poverty sub-living wage promoted by the Iowa Democratic Party. NOT NOW, but in 2017! It was an SEIU 199 labor-faking bureaucrat who stated at a 2013 Fight for $15 minimum wage rally that “…$15 would be great. We’ll take $10. ”. He sure wasn’t kidding.

As the CWG wrote in Class War in 2013 about the Chicago Teachers’ strike:

“This is the bankrupt political methodology of the parasitic, pro-capitalist union bureaucracy that has dragged the labor movement to defeat after defeat. In virtually every labor struggle, the first thing these labor-fakers postulate are “talk shop” rallies with some kind of electoral strategy, which translates into “we don’t need working class struggle, let’s elect ‘labor-friendly’ politicians (mostly Democrats).” This was clearly the case in the Wisconsin Recall diversion, as well as in Michigan battle over “right to scab (work)”, where the AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federation tops caved in.”

Early American socialist Daniel De Leon’s characterized the labor bureaucracy as the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class”. This parasitic, privileged, pro-capitalist layer within the workers movement identifies its interests more with the class enemy than with the vast mass of unorganized, highly exploited workers as they push “labor-management” class collaboration and tie the labor movement to the Democratic Party (and sometimes the Republican) of the bosses.

The labor lieutenants’ dutifully endorsed attacks on public services is exemplified by the 2013 Johnson County disabled paratransit SEATS cuts at the hands of the Democratic Party County Supervisors, where the ICFL did not mobilize against the cuts to a vital unionized public service, but instead fed a free Chili supper to County Supervisor Rod Sullivan, the initiator of the cuts and point man at the county level. 24 hours after the news of the cuts hit the press, Sullivan was eating the workers’ beans at the annual ICFL Chili Supper mobilization of the Democratic Party politicians.

We need a class struggle leadership of the labor movement, a leadership who will push the struggle forward and not limit it, or divert it into impotent channels or outright surrender.

 

From Protest to Power

Scott Walker, the anti-union Governor of Wisconsin, in 2011 said he didn’t care how many protestors marched around the capitol and he really didn’t. Protests and demonstrations should be an opportunity to discuss, debate and build the struggle, not “moral suasion” rallies. What was needed in Wisconsin was mass strike action. Collective bargaining in Iowa was won for public sector workers, passed by a GOP Senate and signed by a GOP Governor, through what were illegal teachers’ strikes at the time. What is needed is to go from protest to actual power! In particular, working class power.   Organized workers have the ability to shut down the University, and especially the UIHC. Students by themselves wield little social power. The University can always end the semester early. It was the black Mizzou football players who by acting effectively as workers, went on strike to force the University President to resign over racist incidents.

The CWG points to the example of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike that was a signature event in not only building the Teamsters union, but the mass industrial unions. We bring this up as a model of organization, independent of the capitalist parties, and effective employment of self-organized working class power across a city, a state and a region leading to the organization of Teamsters in nine states. This struggle was run with military efficiency with a class struggle leadership decided upon by workers democratic strike committees. Every struggle should be organized to win!

As American Trotskyist James Cannon wrote of the 1934 Teamsters strike:

“Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity. Consequently, they expected from the start that the union would have to fight for its right to exist; that the bosses would not yield any recognition to the union, would not yield any increase of wages or reduction of the scandalous hours without some pressure being brought to bear. Therefore they prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.

Proceeding from these general concepts, the Minneapolis Trotskyists, in the course of organizing the workers, planned a battle strategy. Something unique was seen in Minneapolis for the first time. That is, a strike that was thoroughly organized beforehand, a strike prepared with the meticulous detail which they used to attribute to the German army—down to the last button sewn on the uniform of the last individual soldier. When the hour of the deadline came, and the bosses thought they could still maneuver and bluff, our people were setting up a fortress for action….”

Lest you think that free education is only possible in another era in the distant past, consider that the city University system in New York was tuition-free until 1976 and consider the South African student union recent victory over the imposition of tuition and fees.

The way forward is through political program, leadership and action:

For free, quality public education for all with open admissions and a student stipend! Abolish all student debt!

Make the capitalists pay! Nationalize the private schools and charter schools without compensation! Seize their endowments! For worker, student, faculty and community control of public education!

Cops and campus security out of schools! No to racist Stop and Frisk! Organize labor, black and brown workers self-defense guards via the Campus Community Assembly against racist cop, fascist and vigilante terror!

Abolish the ROTC! NSA, CIA, FBI plants and military off campus! For academic and internet freedom! Expose all COINTELPRO-type programs! Hands off all whistleblowers! Free Chelsea Manning and drop the charges against Edward Snowden and Julian Assange!

Unite the struggle with the broader working class! None of these demands can be won without a united multi-racial working class struggle to defend all social gains, such as education, and extend them via jobs for all! For a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay to spread the work around! For a living wage at the prevailing union rate, including guaranteed pensions that can’t be taken away!

Free quality healthcare for all! For socialized medicine to include free abortion on demand and full reproductive services! Equal pay for equal work! Free quality 24-hour childcare! For fully paid maternity leave!

Defend immigrant rights! For mass labor, black and brown mobilizations to stop La Migra raids and deportations! For immediate full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No to English-only bigotry! Same work, same contract across borders! For joint Canadian, American, Mexican and Central American labor struggle!

Organize workers’ struggle to defeat Branstad and all attacks on public services! We need democratic rank and file action and union strike committees to coordinate daily struggle activity in pursuit of the program! Organize the University of Iowa Student, Temp, Faculty and Professional & Scientific workers!

Build for the indefinite general strike to implement these demands!   The only illegal strike is the one that loses! Smash all anti-labor laws through struggle! Spread the struggle to Iowa State, UNI and nation-wide!

Build a class struggle leadership of our unions! No collaborating with the Democrats! Break with all the capitalist parties! Build a fighting workers/labor party to fight for a workers government and a rational, centrally-planned socialist economy based on human needs!

For species survival, build a new revolutionary workers international that unites all workers against the imperialist powers! For world socialism!

Communist Workers Group – USA (CWG-US): 11/17/2105

Email: cwgclasswar@gmail.com

Website: https://cwgusa.wordpress.com/

Class War (Paper of the CWG-US)

 

 

 

 

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September 27, 2015 · 4:45 pm

Class Warrior #9 Fall 2015

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September 17, 2015 · 1:50 am

Greece: NO ELECTORAL SOLUTION!

The “Popular Unity” is a Greek Tragedy

There is no electoral solution because electing parliamentarians will not prevent the keys to banks, factories, ports and airports being turned over to the privatizers of the capitalist Troika or to Chinese imperialist firms. The decision to strip Greece of its assets was not made in a Greek parliament but was made by European central bankers and any decision to fight them and save these assets will not be made in any parliament but by the workers themselves armed and organized in the streets against both the Golden Dawn and NATO. This is the only way these assets can be saved when our social class is confronted by the fascists and threat of NATO military intervention combined. And what happens to Greeks today will happen to the other PIIGS nations (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and Spain) tomorrow.

Reformists always promise their next new model government power formula will be ‘different this time.’ As the world crisis of capitalism stumbles into its eighth year facing collapsed European Central Bank (ECB) world growth forecasts through all of 2017, SYRIZA has at last split, with 25 deputies breaking from the Tsipras group and forming the new “Popular Unity Party,” the LAE. Twenty five delegates makes LAE the 3rd largest party and forces Tsipras to call Parliamentary elections. Soon many of these delegates will be out of work, of course, and they deserve this. Fate works that way in politics as well as in drama.

We think this split was very late and it was only coincidentally a split from the popular front SYRIZA had made last January with the ANEL party nationalists. Late and a lame split too. To think that a ‘last year’s SYRIZA’ political re-configuration, consciously sold as such even in the aftermath of the OXI (“NO!”) referendum vote, will answer the needs of the oppressed and desperate Greek masses is for Marxists a tragic failure of imagination. It was last year’s SYRIZA that put the masses up to staking everything on parliamentary elections and closed up shop on the Popular Assemblies. This is the essence of Kautskyism. It sees parliamentarism as the highest expression of democracy and suppresses the criticism of this view made by Marx and Engels themselves. These ‘vanguard representatives’ turned out to be as useless as they were helpless when called upon to act and stop the parliamentary betrayal that utterly contradicted the OXI referendum.

The whole conduct of the “left” players around former government Minister Lafazanis and the very name they have taken, sometimes styled as the Popular Unity Front (!), suggests that they are seeking another popular front in spite of recent history and the history of all popular fronts including Allende’s, from whom they have learned the wrong lesson, i.e., that this time will be different and they will find the ‘peaceful road to socialism.’ And in fact they have called for a popular front, the ‘OXI front’, to the international cheers of every Kautskyite and otherwise rotten group on the left!

Promises, promises, from both sides of the mouth!

Some, such as the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), were already buried in SYRIZA and will automatically continue as entrists in the LAE. Others, like the RCIT, who must seem like our favorite whipping boys, see the LAE’s intention to form a popular front and advocate revolutionists do entry work in it anyway! They say struggle to “…make LAE an activists’ party.” Just now (9/15) LAE is polling between 2 and 3%. The RCIT calls for a critical support vote for the new-last-year’s-SYRIZA, as if the masses experience with these very delegates does not exist, or matter if it does.

Greece is facing the crisis brought to it by the EU and the imperialists. The EU and German imperialism are in trouble and they will impose a diktat of this kind in each of the PIIGS. The pressure of history will be felt directly by the workers to take the struggle outside parliament because they voted NO and it made no difference. We are not the sectarians who reject electoral politics out of hand. But a revolutionary party in Greece would stand as tribunes of the people on a transitional program beginning with an action program; not entry in the LAE, but organizing the masses into workers councils.

Those who want to give critical support to a handful of LAE MP’s abandon the Leninist method of using critical support to expose the reformists in front of their electoral base. The LAE has no more of an electoral base than ANTARSYA and will undoubtedly seek out popular front partners and has said as much.

The RCIT would have you believe that yesterday’s SYRIZA party bureaucrats, reformists to the core, were the OXI movement vanguard of the working class, and because these workers still have illusions in the parliament this justifies calling for critical support and entry too! But the mass support turns out not to exist because the masses have seen through their act.

In the RCIT prescription there is no accounting for the masses’ experience in the last year. None of these ex-SYRIZA parliamentary delegates are guilty of bringing the masses to this impasse apparently and none of them will be held accountable.

They are projecting a ‘vanguard’ which never rejected the popular front idea and only belatedly broke with SYRIZA. And then only when it was too late. The third memorandum was passed over their essentially toothless objections.

We call for revolutionists to accompany the workers to the polls to make plain that no electoral solution can exist. And that there is not a moment too lose for the building of workers councils and workers militias to prepare to defeat the fascist danger.

Transitional Program or 21st Century Socialism?

We say the hallmark of 21st Century Socialism is when the workers take over the factory the 21st Century Socialist police come in and give it back to the boss. Variously, it can be defined as an ANC popular front government massacring striking miners at Marikana and not a few farm workers in the strike waves that followed, the PT in Brazil breaking up land occupations and the PSUV serving the Bolivarian-Bourgeoisie in Venezuela by protecting capitalist firms from expropriation by the masses. Anyone who is not a World Social Forum sycophant knows these things happen and we warn that the Greek workers are going to find out soon.

We agree with the dock workers of Piraeus who say Greece is the experiment and that the ECB and German imperialism are set to strip all the assets and swipe all the treasuries of the countries on the European periphery.

In Jacobin of August 21st Stathis Kouvelakis former member of the central committee of SYRIZA and Left Platform founding member of LAE stated, “…The front will also struggle for an unitary internationalist struggle around common objectives at the European and international level and will support exiting NATO, breaking the existing agreements between Greece and Israel, and radically opposing imperialist wars and interventions. This transitional program is situated in a perspective of a socialism of the 21st century.” It is a novelty unsupportable by history to make any equation between any known transitional program and the project of “21st Century Socialism.” These are known quantities to Marxists and are based on wholly different methods.

The first task of a transitional program is to stop the privatizations and to do this with workplace occupations and armed pickets to prevent the turning over of the keys and the deeds to the imperialist bankers and firms. Out of these workplace occupations the immediate task will be to reorganize the Popular Assemblies nationwide and to organize them to take on ever increasing self-government tasks.   What LAE opposes is any transitional program worthy of the name as it would call for workers to power and a planned economy, whereas this LAE program calls for a decentralized economy. And is the LAE preparing the working class for the conquest of power? Do these parliamentarists even contemplate the seizure of power by the working class per se? We think the answer is no.

What are LAE deputies likely to do in a new parliament? Already it is evident that it is not just German imperialism but also China and Russia (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, {SCO}) are competing to strip Greece’s assets. While the LAE and the KKE want to break from German imperialism and the EU, they are opening a road to the Russia/China bloc. Their historical links to the 21st Century Socialism movement predisposes them to seeing Russia and China as “progressive nations,” not as imperialist rivals to the U.S.-led imperialist bloc. Sowing illusions in this bloc as saviors from rapine European banks is conning the workers with the program of 21st Century Socialism, which will turn out to be just as fatal as it is in Venezuela or South Africa. A different group of capitalists will be stealing everything the Greek workers make for generations to come. Already it is obvious that the record of the Chinese SCO/BRICS partners has been to insist upon the fulfillment of promises made by the previous Greek government to give them ownership and control of the port of Piraeus, and this is proceeding and meeting resistance from the workers self-activity alone.

We will march with the Greek workers on the 19th in their mobilizations with the demand that the workers’ organizations initiate workers councils that defend themselves and fight for a workers’ government. Revolutionists must stop by the polls on the 20th as proof positive that we march into every battle with our class, if only to warn the masses of their lemming-like march over the precipice.

We make no endorsement, nor do we call for any critical support vote; this election is the work of and the result of acquiescence to the Troika’s agenda. This election is held for the bourgeoisie to dispense with SYRIZA and LAE alike. This is no time for electoral politics and indeed there is no electoral solution! We go to the polls and say to the supporters of the LAE that there is no time to delay the building of the workers councils and workers militia because the lemmings are going to parliament while the fascists are preparing the abyss.

The LAE’s economic program is essentially Keynesian. State capitalist interventions, albeit presented with allusions to ‘workers’ control,’ and limited nationalizations and plans to renegotiate part of Greece’s debt altogether are nothing more than another parliamentarian trap. For the workers the only road to socialism is through their own action committees, their own councils and defense guards embracing the refugees, crushing the fascists and breaking with NATO. Internationalist anti-fascist unity, anti-imperialist mobilization and solidarity with immigrants and the revolutionary upsurge across MENA, and in particular the Palestinian cause, create an opening for permanent revolution to unite the workers of MENA and Europe and turn the tide against the proliferation of proxy wars between the two imperialist blocs, against the theocrats, Islamists, Zionists and the overarching military domination of the US imperialist bourgeoisie. There is no anti-imperialist united front possible with any national bourgeoisie. We must show the masses that their victory requires a break from their own national bourgeoisie both in program and in organization.

Victory is only possible when the workers build their own revolutionary party and international based on the method of the 1938 Transitional Program.

Liaison Committee of Communists (LCC)           09/15/2015

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