https://socialistaction.org/2019/01/16/socialist-action-national-convention-registers-gains/
Socialist Action National Convention registers gains
/ 1 day ago
dec. 2018 marxBy THE EDITORS
Following a three-month pre-convention discussion period that saw
members submitting some 70 written contributions, Socialist Action’s
elected delegates, along with members, supporters, and international
guests, assembled in Minneapolis, Oct. 12-14, for the party’s 18th
national convention.
The convention opened with a critical evaluation of the Fourth
International (FI), in which Socialist Action fraternally participates
alongside a small minority of parties that have challenged the long-term
and ongoing political and organizational degeneration of this formerly
revolutionary world party that traced its origins to the politics of the
1917 Russian Revolution and the principles pioneered by Lenin and Trotsky.
Our delegation at the FI’s February 2018 World Congress aimed at
re-orienting the FI to its historic rejection of coalition capitalist
(“popular front”) politics and imperialist wars, unconditional support
to the right of oppressed nations and peoples to self-determination, and
the construction of disciplined revolutionary parties on the Leninist
model aimed at the construction of a world socialist order. Today, most
of these founding programmatic principles have been abandoned. FI
sections largely shun the construction of Leninist parties in favor of
participation in “more influential” reformist “broad parties” with an
electoralist orientation.
In opposition to this trend, Socialist Action has aligned with a small
number of opposition formations inside the FI while maintaining
relations with various expelled currents and others outside the FI that
are open to discussions and collaboration.
The major text adopted at the Minneapolis convention was the Draft
Political Resolution, aimed at analyzing and engaging Socialist Action
in the fightback challenges to the ever-deepening world capitalist
crisis and its effects on working-class life in the U.S. Here we present
a summary of this resolution.
Draft Political Resolution: A summary
In his analysis of President Donald Trump’s excoriating traditional U.S.
trading partners at the recent Group of Seven (G 7) meeting in Quebec,
Marxist economist Michael Roberts noted:
“What all these Trumpist antics [threats of trade tariffs, etc.]
revealed is that the period of the Great Moderation and globalization,
from the 1980s to 2007, when all major capitalist states worked together
to benefit capital in all countries (to varying degrees) is over. The
Great Recession of 2007-8 and the ensuing Long Depression since 2009 has
changed the economic picture. In a stagnating world capitalist economy,
where productivity growth is low, world trade growth has subsided and
the profitability of capital has not recovered, cooperation has been
replaced by increasingly vicious competition—the thieves have fallen out.”
Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement and from the nearly
worthless COP 21 Paris climate accords, his ultra-reactionary racist
immigration policies—separating detained and imprisoned parents from
their children—his praise for the Supreme Court’s approval of the
“constitutional” right of a baker to refuse to prepare a wedding cake
for an LGBTQI couple, his proposal to his National Security Council to
increase the U.S. nuclear weapons stock “100 fold,” and his most recent
order to establish a sixth arm of the Pentagon to militarily “defend”
U.S. “interests” in outer space—to mention a few of his crude
affirmations—combine to demonstrate that on virtually every front his
twisted politics have a rational core. They advance what he perceives as
policies to protect a weakened U.S. capitalism from its competitors
abroad, while advancing its interests against U.S. workers at home.
Global capitalist competition is a completely unavoidable aspect of the
system of private profit. As competition results in new innovation, and
automation temporarily increases the rate of profit for the innovator,
these gains are offset again by the rapid adoption of new technology by
competitors, resulting in the fall of profit rates.
In their desperate struggle to fight the falling rate of profit,
capitalists try to reduce costs by attacking trade unions and workers’
gains on the job and generally cutting social benefits such as
education, medical care, and pension allocations. Refusing to accept
responsibility for the massive environmental damage caused by cutthroat
capitalist competition and transferring production to low-wage,
unregulated areas both within and outside their own countries are
likewise inherent in the system.
Yes, Donald Trump is a “moron” in the “unsavvy” political sense only.
The moron term was first coined by his former and fired Secretary of
State and former Exxon Mobile CEO, Ross Tillerson, when Trump proposed
to the National Security Council a hundred-fold increase of nuclear
weapons. Yes, Trump is a billionaire businessman—an overtly racist,
sexist, anti-immigrant, climate crisis denying, detention
center/concentration camp crusading, homophobic, Islamophobic,
warmongering, imperialist beast. But there were nearly zero objections
when a bipartisan Congress gifted $1.5 trillion in tax relief to the
corporations and banks of the ruling rich, a fact that in and of itself
enabled bourgeois economic analysts to post and predict some figures
that indicated a modest but one-time uptick in otherwise stagnant GDP
figures.
Similarly, there were few, if any, objections when Congress boosted
annual military spending by an unprecedented $80 billion, an amount
exceeding even Trump’s initial request. We note here in passing that the
$80 billion increase exceeds Russia’s total annual military budget of
$50 billion, as compared to the U.S.’s budgeted $1 trillion for overall
war purposes! On June 21, 2018, the U.S. Senate, by a vote of 85-15,
approved this military budget.
China: A new imperialist power
U.S. threats against China are a classic example of fundamental
imperialist contradictions and new rivalries. China’s entry into the
World Trade Organization in 2001 was conditioned on its respecting
foreign corporations’ intellectual property rights—that is, agreeing not
to compete by transforming its primitive factories via state-of-the-art
technologies, which the U.S. today insists are protected by U.S. patents
(“inviolable” intellectual property rights). As a result, for close to
two decades and until recently, the level of Chinese labor productivity
lagged far behind most capitalist nations. But this is rapidly changing.
With regard to an increasing number of key commodities traded on world
markets, China’s productivity levels are rapidly rising—closing the
technology gap and thus posing a threat to U.S. corporate interests.
Trump’s list of proposed tariffs on Chinese imports includes 1102
categories of goods—concentrated in high-tech industries like nuclear
reactors, aircraft engine parts, ball bearings, motorcycles, and
industrial and agricultural machinery. These are precisely the
categories in which China has employed the advanced robotics and
production technologies that Trump claims were “stolen” by Chinese
corporations.
In the minds of U.S. capitalists, China was to be permanently relegated
to using inferior technologies while providing the world’s cheapest and
largest labor pool. Further, U.S. corporations hoped to unilaterally
exploit the emerging mass Chinese market, where perhaps some 300 million
or more of China’s population of 1.4 billion people are able to purchase
U.S.-manufactured commodities. Needless to say, the Chinese ruling
class, as it introduced competitive technologies, had no intention of
being banned from the markets in its own country. Obviously, neither
China nor the European Union nations—nor any other “self-respecting” big
capitalist entrepreneurs—intend to remain permanent second-rate players.
Socialist Action’s convention approved a new text entitled “China: A New
Imperialist Power.” China, built on a foundation of monopoly capitalism,
is a major capital exporter that fundamentally exploits workers at home
and across the world. Its economy exhibits highly uneven development,
with advanced and highly productive regions alongside impoverished and
underdeveloped ones. Its military is increasingly advanced and is
deployed to support the interests of Chinese capitalism worldwide. China
is a major player in most theaters across the world today and is
continually seeking to expand its already significant influence globally.
Socialist Action also adopted the position that Russia is an imperialist
nation, but with considerably less weight than China in the world
economy and in many other respects.
Rise of reactionary currents worldwide
Today, we see a deepening worldwide political polarization, often with
the emergence of openly racist, anti-immigrant, right “populist,” or
neo-fascist movements—as in India, Japan, and Europe. Trump, Macron, and
May seek similar economic and social objectives, but with sometimes more
restrained rhetoric. All of these heinous developments have their
origins in a crisis-ridden world capitalism wherein sections of the
ruling elites aim to deflect blame for the overall systems’s failures
onto immigrants, oppressed nationalities, women, the LGBTQI community,
religious groups, or other sections of society or nations that they
choose to scapegoat and demonize for their own divide-and-rule objectives.
The Trump presidency
Any significant explanation of Donald Trump’s election to the U.S.
presidency must include mention of the widespread rejection of the
Washington, D.C./Wall Street associations of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Many workers and sections of the middle class turned to Trump, who
postured in his electoral campaign as an anti-establishment “populist.”
His rallies aimed at mobilizing the racism and xenophobia deeply
promoted by U.S. capitalist institutions.
At the same time, wide discontent over the Democrats’ eight years of
broadly imposed austerity, multi-trillion-dollar bank and corporate
bailouts, unprecedented mortgage foreclosures, mass deportations,
endless wars, massive expansion of the racist prison-industrial complex,
police violence and murder, offshore drilling, pipeline extension,
fracking and other elements of environmental destruction—to name a few
of the measures implemented to advance overall capitalist
interests—helped to inflate support to Bernie Sanders’ candidacy in the
Democratic Party primaries, and later resulted in many abstentions in
the general election.
On the other side of the international equation, we see the emergence
of important working-class formations and mass mobilizations aimed at
resisting austerity and other encroachments, especially affecting young
people. Spain/Catalonia, France/against Macron’s new Labor Code,
Britain/Corbyn, South Africa/NUMSA, Haiti/rebellions against IMF
austerity, the U.S./anti-Trump post-election mobilizations for women,
immigrants, opposition to global warming, Poland and Ireland/mass
pro-abortion rights mobilization are but a few examples. In the absence
of clear alternatives led by deeply rooted socialist currents aiming at
a definitive break with capitalist austerity and politics, we are
witnessing the limited rise of initial efforts to find a path forward.
Statewide teacher strikes
The gap between the frustration and anger against austerity measures and
the still low level of fightback efforts could potentially close
rapidly. The eruption, seemingly out of the blue, of statewide teacher
strikes—the “Red State Rebellions” in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona,
Oklahoma, and North Carolina—may well have been the heat lightning to
spark qualitatively broader and effective examples of resistance,
portending a fundamental change in the present negative relationship of
forces.
The teachers’ strikes provide lessons to workers everywhere. They
include the critical importance of union democracy, defiance of
bureaucratic sellout union misleaders, solidarity with and fighting for
demands to advance the well-being of all public employees, exposure of
capitalist austerity measures that transferred public state funds to the
private sector, establishing organic connections with and championing
broad community class interests, lengthy and coordinated statewide
strikes, and more.
On the negative side of the balance sheet, the strike actions proved to
be significantly limited by the subsequent decision, encouraged by the
NEA and AFT tops, to run some 400 teachers as Democratic Party
candidates in the 2018 elections. This decision had the effect of
subordinating any further unleashing of teacher power to the reformist
electoral arena.
Rush to 2018 and 2020 elections
The absence of clear working-class or trade-union-based alternatives in
the electoral arena, coupled with the still low level of independent
organization of broad social movements in the context of the Trump
administration’s reactionary policies, will no doubt result in a
concerted rush of the reformists of every stripe to the Democratic
Party. We saw this in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential
elections—with the Sanders campaign, along with the Greens as well as
the diehard “lesser-evil” Clinton supporters, absorbing much of the
reformist left.
Socialist Action’s decision to run our own candidate for the presidency,
even as an extremely modest propaganda effort, stood us in good stead
with regard to the education of our ranks along with radicalizing layers
who were beginning to learn the lessons of independent working-class
politics in the electoral arena.
With regard to all the vital social movements that fight racism, sexism,
environmental catastrophe, and LGBTQI and gender discrimination, we
should fully expect a concerted ruling-class effort, led by the
Democratic Party, to channel them into a coordinated effort to
“re-capture the Senate and House from Donald Trump and the Republicans.”
The upcoming election cycles will undoubtedly see the Democratic Party,
with their associated reformist allies from every quarter in tow, posing
the “Dump Trump” refrain as the only way to save the nation from
catastrophe. To accomplish this, the Democrats “big tent” strategy is to
politically present themselves not as a leftist alternative to the
Republicans but rather as “moderates” or “centrists” (in the capitalist
meaning of these terms) so as to win voters across the political
spectrum—that is, as close to the right as possible.
Our response to this moment of relative calm, this gap that is
punctuated by periodic huge protests against the myriad forms of social
injustice, requires patience and always wholehearted participation aimed
at meeting the best activists and introducing our independent methods of
struggle in preparation for the time when teacher/Red State-type actions
again become the order of the day, but this time around offering the
potential of more definitive breaks with previously sacred capitalist
institutions.
The Ocasio-Cortez primary victory
Here we note another important example of the receptivity to socialist
ideas. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional primary victory in the
Bronx and Queens boroughs of New York City temporarily shook the
Democratic Party hierarchy. They learned too late that their
machine-dominated apparatus and six-term Democratic Party incumbent were
insufficient to defeat a young Latina of 28 years who campaigned on a
broad-ranging platform of progressive and radical demands, coupled with
her open association with a Bernie Sanders’ version of democratic
socialism and open membership in the Democratic Socialists of America,
as well as a host of new Democratic Party front groups collecting funds
for “progressive” Democrats.
We need not review in detail our historic opposition to any capitalist
candidate or party. As we are fond of saying, “If Lenin ran on the
Bolshevik program as a Democrat, we would not support him!”
Sadly, much of the “left” today remains once again mired in “lesser
evil” illusions that capitalism’s historic “graveyard of social
movements,” the Democratic Party, can in any way be converted into an
instrument of working people.
Despite her misguided association with the Democratic Party, however, we
see Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign as confirmation that socialist ideas are
increasingly finding a receptive ear among broad layers of the population.
The plight of the youth
A Dec. 14, 2017, Huffington Post article describes the plight of the
estimated 75 million people in the United States who fall into the
category of millennials—those born between 1982 and 2004. “What is
different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is
minor,” the author, Michael Hobbes, states. “What is different about the
world around us is profound. Salaries have stagnated and entire sectors
have cratered. At the same time, the cost of every prerequisite of a
secure existence—education, housing, and health care—has inflated into
the stratosphere. From job security to the social safety net, all the
structures that insulate us from ruin are eroding. … Add it all up and
it’s no surprise that we’re the first generation in modern history to
end up poorer than our parents.”
Recent data from The New York Times demonstrates that “among Americans
under 30, unions’ approval rating is a stratospheric 76 percent.” The
Times asserts: “Gallup and the Pew polls show public support for unions
at its highest level in years: 61 percent at Gallup; 60 percent at Pew.”
This data begins to create an accurate gauge of the anger, frustration,
and hatred of the austerity measures imposed by capital against workers.
The past decline in support for unions, we have always asserted, could
be largely attributed to the class-collaborationist bureaucracy’s
polices and never to the efforts of working people to improve their
lives by collectively organizing.
Union power derives fundamentally from the will of workers to fight, and
never from the capacity of unions to fund their struggles from member
dues. In this context, the anti-union U.S. Supreme Court decision in the
case of Janus vs. AFSCME, in which the court ruled on June 28, 2018,
that union agreements to have employers deduct agency fees from employee
paychecks and forward the money to the unions are “unconstitutional” is
far from a definitive defeat.
The struggle for Black liberation
Two years after the promising rise of the Black Lives Matter movement,
the deep anger and hatred of the assaults launched by “the system”
continues, along with a concerted fightback. However, the struggle for
Black liberation exhibits a tilt to Democratic Party electoral politics
that is similar to what we have seen in a broad range of social movements.
In the face of ever-mounting attacks on every aspect of Black, Latinx,
and Native American lives, there are no clear currents that seek to
organize a break with capitalist politics. And this is in the face of
hard facts demonstrating that the horrors of state and police violence,
of the deepening imposition of degrading poverty and a generalized
deterioration in the quality of life continue unabated. At the same
time, the receptivity of Black and oppressed communities, especially
young people, to socialist and related radical ideas is undeniable, as
is the opportunity to win the best fighters to our party today.
Environmental destruction and climate crisis
The United Nations climate data in October 2018 put the onset of
permanent, irreversible, and catastrophic damage at some 12 years away!
This data is reported against the background of a U.S. government
administration of climate deniers. “Environmental Protection Agency” top
officials systematically gut regulations that place some limits on
corporate environmental degradation projects that threaten human health
and safety—if not the viability of life on earth as we know it.
In that context, the vast panoply of environmental organizations are
turning to the elections, presenting a limited set of demands that are
consciously designed to complement, not oppose, the nearly worthless
positions of the Democratic Party. We will continue our participation in
the environmental movement, regardless of its reformist leadership,
looking for every opportunity to advance a program that challenges the
private for-profit core of the fossil-fuel energy complex, with the
objective of winning the most serious forces, and, in time, the broad
movement, to an independent mass-action orientation.
At present, the movement against climate change lacks focus and
direction. But as we have seen with regard to the massive national
mobilizations against the Dakota Access Pipeline project and the
inspiring solidarity with Standing Rock Native American fighters who
paved the way in this struggle, the potential for qualitatively broader
struggles on ever-increasing fronts is not far off. We note with
enthusiasm the fact that leading groups like 350.org have increasingly
incorporated a strong defense of immigrants and opposition to
environmental racism as key planks in their platforms. We must also take
advantage of the sophisticated discussion about the unfolding of
disaster capitalism in Puerto Rico to drive home the need for
eco-socialist solutions.
We will continue to press for making “Nationalize the energy industry,
under workers’ and community control!” a central organizing,
transitional demand. With this demand, the climate change movement can
be strengthened in multiple ways—by identifying the key obstacles in its
path, by embracing its natural allies and unmasking its adversaries, by
providing a strategy around which a fighting movement can coalesce, and
by focusing its collective strength to strike a real blow at the very
heart of the problem.
This, along with critical demands for a just transition at top union
wages for all displaced workers, will help the movement close the gap
between the union bureaucracy’s view of jobs at any cost and the goal of
a clear fight for a sustainable fossil-fuel-free energy system that all
workers can see as a viable and necessary alternative to the present
disastrous course.
Women’s liberation
Immediately following Trump’s inauguration, five million women and their
allies mobilized in Washington, D.C., and in cities across the country
in perhaps the largest such mobilization ever. They mobilized to make
clear to everyone that they rejected every aspect of Trump’s sexist
rants and broad-ranging attacks on women’s rights.
In the very act of mobilizing, the essentially self-appointed and
largely media-approved handful of middle-class leaders saw that in order
to bring out the maximum numbers possible they had to broaden their
appeal to include demands for the LGBTQI community, immigrants, and
oppressed national minorities. All the issues were fused in a way that
all understood that to seriously defend women’s rights any serious
effort also had to defend everyone’s rights.
While the numbers were astounding, the turnout was in large part
promoted by the Democratic Party and the corporate media with the
early-on objective of turning all social movements into mainstream and
electoral reformism—that is, bourgeois channels.
The January 2017 mobilizations were followed by huge mobilizations
everywhere on a wide range of issues, most encouraged by the corporate
media and facilitated by local police departments and city governments.
Most featured as speakers a range of Democratic Party officials or
others who sought future office by catching the wave of anti-Trump
sentiment.
In a matter of a few months, however, the corporate media spigot was
shut down tight and the mobilizations were largely brought to a halt as
preparations began to refurbish the credibility of tarnished Democratic
Party institutions and align its components to electoral “Dump Trump”
perspectives and actions.
The emergence of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment is
likewise an expression of a growing understanding that like racism,
sexism, and sexual abuse are ingrained in capitalist culture and
society, which marks women as inferior. When the hundreds of celebrity
signers of a recent New York Times full-page advertisement acknowledged
that they took inspiration from a communication they received from
farmworker women representing thousands of agricultural workers who had
experienced the same sexual violence, degradation, and abuse, no one
dared to respond that these were “rare and exceptional” instances of
sexual harassment.
The abortion referendum victory in Ireland and the vote to decriminalize
abortion in the lower house in Argentina, both won with unprecedented
mass mobilizations and mass campaigning, reflect an incredible step
forward for the global women’s movement. Both struggles were built on
the pioneering fight to defend abortion rights in Poland. All are
powerful examples of women’s and their allies’ ongoing capacity to
extract critical gains even from nations where right-wing governments
and parties or otherwise reactionary forces like the Catholic Church
exercise major influence.
In the U.S. the ongoing attacks at every level on abortion rights
continue to erode previous gains. Once again, we point to the tactics
that have proven their effectiveness in winning the most essential of
women’s rights. United-front-type mass mobilizations of increasing
magnitude and breadth make clear to all that women’s lives will not be
subjected to the reactionary views of religious bigots and the state
powers that they often influence or control.
(The Socialist Action convention approved the formation of a women’s
fraction to prepare a comprehensive resolution on women’s liberation,
inclusive of trans women, which will provide the basis for an internal
literary discussion open to all members.)
Rise of LGBTQI movement
The past several years have witnessed important gains for the still
persecuted LGBTQI community, especially in the beginnings of a cultural
shift that has won recognition of the fact that human beings’ gender
identity is expressed in a variety of forms. The increasing inclusion of
LGBTQI leaders and the issue of gender equality more generally into the
overall movement for women’s’ equality, as we saw in the January 2017
national mobilizations, is an indication of the growing strength of this
important movement, as is the still-limited but important gains
regarding gender identity, choice access to public bathrooms, and a
range of legislative gains barring discrimination.
But despite these gains, 2016 was the deadliest year for physical
attacks against lesbians, gay men, and transgender women, according to
the U.S. Justice Department—while granting that data for hate crimes
against LGBTQI persons remain the most underreported of any category.
Out of 6121 hate crime cases reported, 1076 were based on violence
against lesbians and gay men, and 124 were based on gender identity.
This represents an 11 percent increase.
Fight for $15 and a union now!
We have previously noted and enthusiastically supported the important
mobilizations for increasing minimum wages to $15 per hour and the often
associated demand for a union now. “Living wage” figures in cities
across the country estimate that a worker earning between $15 and $23
hourly can barely make ends meet, depending on the cost of living.
Increases in the minimum hourly wage have been registered in several
cities, usually as a result of city or state legislation or ballot
referenda. In most cases, the top-level wage of $15 per hour is to be
phased in over the course of several years.
Unfortunately, the union bureaucracy has often conspired with city
governments to limit minimum wage struggles, and worse still, to refrain
nationally from any coordinated and united strike actions that take
workers’ struggles into the streets to forcibly extract living wage
scales. Strikes, for these hidebound bureaucrats, are “no longer effective.”
Fascism and how to fight it
Socialist Action’s new pamphlet, “How to Defeat Neo-Fascists, Racists
and the Extreme Right,” authored by SA comrades who have been involved
in the significant mobilizations when neo-fascists announced that they
were coming to town, expresses our basic political and organization
orientation. In Berkeley and Boston, a handful of these heinous types
were met by 7000 and as many as 40,000 counter-demonstrators
respectively. The mobilization was organized by united-front-type
coalitions whose effectiveness was in direct proportion to their massive
numbers.
Here’s what we wrote in our new pamphlet: “Virulent racist and
neo-fascist groups feed off the misery and economic uncertainty of the
99 percent that are the hallmarks of capitalism in crisis.
“Militarists, chauvinists, racists, and neo-fascists blame all of
societies’ ills on ‘the other’—some presumed ‘inferior’ country,
culture, race, or ethnic minority that threatens the rest of us. The
rightists carry water for the [wealthy] one percent by obfuscating the
real source of the problems we face, by undermining solidarity, and by
sowing divisions among the victims of the current economic and political
onslaught amidst attacks raining down on us from our common oppressors.
“Typically, the ruling rich keep the fascist threat on the back burner
so long as the democratic charade they use to control the majority
proves effective. At present, racists and neo-fascists are able to
mobilize only small groups of adherents. However, we know from history
that as a last resort, when the veneer of democracy can no longer hold
opposition to their system in check, the robber barons will throw their
weight behind the fascist movement in order to obliterate unions, left
political parties, and other fighting organizations of the working class.
“To defeat the right, a two-pronged strategy is required: We must
harness the power of working people, in massive numbers, to stand up to
the racist and neo-fascist threats. We must offer a comprehensive,
convincing counter narrative that explains the current crisis and how to
extricate ourselves from it.”
Immigration rights
Since the unprecedented massive immigrant rights mobilizations of 2006,
effectively a nationwide strike against the proposed passage of the
reactionary Republican-sponsored Sensenbrenner Bill, the movement for
immigrant rights has expanded its scope and power. The historic 2006
strike mobilization was overwhelmingly supported by the vast majority of
the nation’s 12 million undocumented workers.
Today, the struggle encompasses mobilizations for DACA (the Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals), TPS (Temporary Protected Status),
immigration rights for Muslims, and now, for the elementary right of
immigrant children to not be brutally separated from their parents when
they enter the U.S.
A portion of a Dec. 18, 2017, article in Working Class Perspectives
outlines the stakes involved in this critical struggle: Created by
Congress in the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS was meant for people from
countries going through environmental disaster and other extraordinary
and temporary conditions or confronting armed conflict. Currently, the
program is administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“In the past two months, TPS has come under attack from the Trump
Administration. In November 2017, DHS terminated the program for Haiti,
and four months later it extended that terrible decision to
TPS-protected immigrants from Nicaragua and Honduras. Starting January
2019, an estimated 50,000 Haitians, 57,000 Hondurans, and 2,550
Nicaraguans with TPS status will become undocumented.”
Following in the footsteps of the “great deporter,” Barack Obama, with
some 2.5 million deportees to his credit, the Trump administration seeks
to impose the next wave of punitive deportations in the name of saving
jobs for U.S. workers, as well as other lies and racist
rationalizations. From our viewpoint we begin and end with the
perspective of championing the interests of all workers and uniting them
in common struggle against the boss class.
Amnesty Now for All of the 12 Million Workers Without Papers! No Human
Being Is Illegal! Abolish ICE! Abajo Con Las Fronteras! No to the
Monstrous Separation of Parents and Children! [Editor’s note: This was
written before the commencement of the Honduran caravan and Trump’s
military threat to stop those thousands of migrants from legally
entering the U.S. to seek asylum.]
North Korea: “Denuclearization” negotiations
President Trump’s grandstanding negotiations with North Korea should not
put anyone fearful of nuclear war at ease. For Socialist Action the
starting point in explaining our views is our historic demand for the
total and unconditional disarmament of the imperialist military U.S.
nuclear behemoth.
The U.S. boasts a nuclear arsenal of some 5000 weapons capable of
delivery from virtually anywhere in the world. Its 1100 military bases
in some 100 nations fuel a domestic arms market unprecedented in world
history. In contrast, no other nation has more than a handful of
military bases outside its borders. North Korea, with perhaps 5-10
nuclear weapons, has none. It is not far-fetched to predict that if
North Korea discarded its nuclear weapons and related missile delivery
systems, it would be invaded by the imperialist U.S., no matter what
treaties might be negotiated at a particular time.
Socialist Action rejects the decades-long demonization of the leaders of
North Korea. As with all such corporate media promoted efforts, the
demonization serves the imperialist purpose of justifying U.S.
intervention and war. We say this regardless of our views on the
capitalist leaders of North Korea or any other capitalist
state—regardless of our view that any and all such leaders can only be
effectively removed as a product of the organization and mass
mobilization of the working masses themselves in the course of socialist
revolution.
Latin America’s “pink revolutions”
With the coming to political power of the governments of Lula/Brazil,
Morales/Bolivia, Kirchner/Argentina, Ortega/Nicaragua, Correa/Ecuador
and Chavez-Maduro/Venezuela, none of these reformist or social
democratic leaders and regimes, their rhetoric notwithstanding,
contemplated a revolutionary break with capitalism. Whatever differences
distinguished one from the others regarding the implementation of
sometimes substantial reforms were subordinate to the fact that in all
cases the essential social structures and institutions of the capitalist
state remained largely intact.
Unlike the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which culminated in 1961 when the
Fidel Castro leadership nationalized bourgeois property “down to the
nails in the heels of their boots,” none of these “revolutions”
challenged capitalist property rights. Thus, whatever measures were
implemented to temporarily alleviate the terrible conditions endured by
the masses for many decades were incapable of securing permanent
advances, as compared to Cuba’s revolution that ended capitalist rule.
Our analysis of the inherent limitations of the “pink tide” capitalist
governments and our advocacy of the absolute necessity for the
construction of a working-class opposition led by a revolutionary
socialist party have been a major Socialist Action contribution to the
education of vanguard forces in the U.S. and abroad.
In Nicaragua, where tens of thousands have mobilized against the pension
and related austerity measures proposed by the Daniel Ortega-led
capitalist government, the lessons of the failed “pink tide revolutions”
are painfully relevant. (For background, see Socialist Action’s three
books: “Nicaragua: Dynamics of an Unfinished Revolution,” “Dynamics of
the Nicaraguan Revolution,” and “Nicaragua: The Untold Story of the U.S.
Secret War.”)
Despite our criticisms of the “pink tide” governments, Socialist Action
remains resolutely opposed to U.S. imperialism’s interventions in Latin
America. We adhere to the principle of unconditional support to the
right of self-determination of poor and oppressed nations. In the U.S.
this has always been best expressed in the demands, “U.S. Hands Off!” or
“U.S. Out Now!”
The U.S. antiwar movement
Socialist Action advances the need for an independent, democratic, mass
action, united antiwar movement. Our work in the United National Antiwar
Coalition (UNAC), the leading antiwar coalition in the U.S., has focused
on united-front principles.
Our recent effort has been to join in initiating and helping to lead the
April 14-15, 2018, weekend of coordinated national mobilizations
centered on the demand to “End All U.S. Wars at Home and Abroad.” The
call for actions was aimed at measuring the movement’s capacity to
galvanize the broad opposition to the deepening U.S. government wars at
home against working people and the inseparable U.S. wars abroad—from
the Middle East to Africa, Latin America, and beyond.
While April 15 was a valiant effort to re-ignite the antiwar movement,
the modest turnout, with no citywide protests exceeding 1000
participants, informed us that the antiwar movement, despite massive
sentiment against all U.S. wars, as with most social movements, remains
relatively dormant.
The convention approved general goals for Socialist Action’s national
fund and subscription drives and established work fractions to
facilitate the party’s participation in the trade unions and the
antiwar, women’s liberation, LGBTQI, transgender, climate, and immigrant
rights movements.
A session was devoted to a debate on Syria and related issues. At its
conclusion, delegates voted to reaffirm Socialist Action’s previously
adopted views (see articles on this site).
Notwithstanding our small forces, Socialist Action’s contributions to
the building and strengthening of a broad range of social and political
struggles are impressive. It is clear that the present period of
intensifying attacks on working people has produced growing numbers who
are more open to socialist ideas than in a long while. Our close
attention to winning significant numbers of the most conscious of these
activists to our socialist banner will prove invaluable as new
opportunities emerge to engage working people in effective actions to
improve their lives and advance the interests of all humanity.
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January 16, 2019 in Marxist Politics and Philosophy.
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Jules Verne
“ Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add
nothing to them. ”
― Jules Verne